Sally Field Interview (page: 7 / 8) Two Oscars for Best Actress	Print Interview

Could you tell us about your role in Places in the Heart?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Sally Field: Just a gift of an opportunity because, now I had Robert Benton, an unbelievably eloquent, beautiful writer, a wonderful man who was really telling the story of his own life. It was emotional for him. I was his grandmother, and it was such an interesting...we had this huge ensemble cast. When the film originally started out, it was Edna and Moze, and the story of the blind man and the sharecropper and big gorgeous black man, and this little woman was a tiny part of the story. And then there was these other stories, the things that were happening in town. Benton would tell me we all shot it, and ours -- the thing in the farm -- was the last one to shoot, and we shot that. We were there all the time in Waxahachie, Texas. And then when Benton went to make the movie, Moze and Edna took over. It was some odd thing that they became more the center of the film than some of the other stories. And I think it was Benton, subconsciously, because he was examining his grandmother that he was much more emotionally connected to than any of the other characters in the town. This did happen to his grandmother. Grandmother lost her husband, almost lost her children and -- he believed -- had a really long relationship with this man who came to farm her land. We don't show that in the film, but we'd always go, "All right, come on, he doesn't just leave here. Doesn't he come back?" And it was an important, obviously important film for me, but also because it actually was the story of my grandmother in a way. So, it really linked up with things that were deeply ingrained in my person.

When you accepted the second Oscar you gave one of the most famous acceptance speeches of all time, and it's almost always misquoted.

Sally Field: I know. It is. They've made it to be what they want it to be. What it really is is about performing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It is about the struggle of performing, and how hard it is to hear the applause really, when you spend all of your time with your head down, trying to be better, trying to get to a place where you can do the work. You have to pause yourself, to hear when you actually achieve what it is you set out to do. And that is that the character worked, the film worked, the work worked. My problem with this is that I wasn't terribly eloquent about it. But then I'm not really terribly eloquent. The lights were flashing, and I think I said exactly what I really meant, that the first time it happened to me, I was so scared, and it was so overwhelming that all of this was really happening to me after I had come from what I had come from, which was an impossible place to be, when people wouldn't let me in the door. And I was winning my second Oscar. I said to myself, "If I go up there, I must own this. It must be for me, and not for them. It must not matter whether I'd be pleasing to them." And that's what came out.

Maybe one of the reasons it's so famous is that it was so authentic. It was very endearing, and we felt your soul it in. Recently you won another Emmy. Could you talk about how you were censored in accepting that?

Sally Field: Right. I think being censored for that really does speak of our time right now, which is very frightening.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. These are very, very frightening times. I won an Emmy this year, most especially because my character is the mother of a son who was in harm's way. And if I won it -- there were so many wonderful actors that were nominated for that Emmy -- it was solely because of the impact of what that woman went through. And I owed it to the mothers who wait for their children to come home from harm's way, from danger. And what I said was that, "As I owe this to those mothers, those brave mothers who wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm's way and from war." And they censored "war." It made no sense. And it is really illustrative of Fox. It's really illustrative of some of the networks and corporations that are running our institutions that should not be run by people who are going to say what should be heard and not heard. It's kind of remarkable. The interesting thing was is because I was censored, so many more people heard it. It was huge. It was everywhere. It was huge. It was like the biggest seen thing on YouTube and all of that because they did that. If they would've just allowed me to say that, it was just simple. "From danger, from harm's way, and from war." Duh! And the mothers who stand there and wait for their children to return, how is that political?

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