Let’s deal with this upfront. For some of us—most of us, probably—Ellen Burstyn symbolizes a holy period in American cinema. Between 1971 and 1974, she took a key role in The Last Picture Show and starred in both The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, bagging three Oscar nominations and one win in the process. Other films from the same era (Harry and Tonto, The King of Marvin Gardens) were hardly shabby. She’s been working and winning major awards ever since, notably in such wildly challenging fare as 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, but you have to wonder if that historic early run is something of an albatross for the 83-year-old actor.

“I don’t dwell on it,” says Burstyn, calling the Straight from New York. “It’s your problem, not mine!” For the record, she also half guiltily admits that Peter Biskind’s seminal Easy Riders, Raging Bulls sits unopened on her bookshelf. “I have it and I meant to read it,” she says, “but I find myself not reading books about the movie business very much. When I’m not making them, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about them. I try not to.” Mercifully, Ellen Burstyn is still making (and occasionally thinking about) movies, the latest one, Wiener-Dog, being as piquant as any of her best. She plays Nana in Todd Solondz’s thrillingly misanthropic new film, a terminally sour senior with questionable mobility issues who ends up adopting the canine of the title. She cheerfully christens the new pet Cancer.

“At one point he was thinking of changing the dog’s name,” remarks Burstyn, between bouts of giggling. “I said, ‘Don’t you dare! That’s exactly right.’ Cancer will probably come to her for that. It’ll answer her call.” Remarkably, up until Wiener-Dog, Burstyn had managed to ignore Solondz and key films like Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse, largely because the latter was released the same year as Requiem. “We were in all the same festivals and we were kind of competing against each other,” she recalls, “so I didn’t really let him into my consciousness. I knew about him and I knew about his films, but I hadn’t really seen them until after I read the script and decided that I really wanted to know more about this strange person.”

Burstyn’s verdict? “I think he’s one of the weirdest people I’ve ever known,” she says, with an affectionate laugh. “And absolutely delightful. But I have no idea what goes on in that brain of his. He’s odd. He’s just deliciously odd.”Given that she’s spent some 60 years inside the Babylon of American film, theatre, and television, Solondz must be extremely fucking weird to top Burstyn’s list. She cracks up again. “Well, I’ve said it to him,” she insists. “He doesn’t understand what I’m talking about.” Thinning her voice to a flat whine, Burstyn adds: “‘Why do you say that I’m weird?’ ” On top of every other achievement, let it be said that Academy Award–winning actor Ellen Burstyn does a killer impression of Todd Solondz.

Georgia Straight, July 2016