GUY PEARCE PHONES UP MILLER AS WARHOL

Factory Girl stars Guy Pearce and Sienna Miller talked in their character’s voice on the phone.

Guy Pearce had the tricky task of turning his powerful Australian accent into the meek Middle American monotones of Andy Warhol in Factory Girl. Luckily Guy had the support of his co-star Sienna Miller playing Andy’s muse Edie Sedgwick.

Guy says they would phone each other up in character to practice.

“I think you kind of can’t help it in a way particularly when you work on a voice that’s very different to your own and you get into a particular rhythm. We were really supportive of each other through the whole process. She wanted to know if she was going a little too far with her particular thing with her voice and I was the same and she’d be going, ‘tone that down a bit,’ or whatever. I think just trying to share the experiences that we were having as far as developing our characters with each other as much as we could was actually vital and as far as with all of it feeling confident in what we were doing. We still when we see each other we kind of go, ‘Oh Edie, oh Andy.'”

Guy is carefully safeguarding copies he made of authentic phone conversations between Andy and his Factory friend Brigid Berlin.

“I was able to make recordings of the original recordings really for my own purposes. Vincent Framer and Brigid who allowed me to copy them were saying these can’t be heard. These are for you only etc, etc and so of course I will honor that and treasure them. They were really special not just for the purposes of working on the film but really just an incredible insight into these people. I think particularly because Andy was such a mysterious character and he wanted to be mysterious to actually get that sort of insight is really a great thrill in a way.”

A natural at dialects, Guy will be doing an American one for his next film First Snow as a man whose life becomes ruled by a psychic’s premonition, with Piper Perabo currently starring in Because I Said So.