Halle Berry: ‘If an Oscar winner tells you they can pick out hits, they’re lying!’

Still the only black woman to have won the best actress Oscar, Berry talks about frankly about the difficulty of finding great characters to play and her feelings about the state of the film industry

Hi Halle. Your film Frankie and Alice , about a woman with a multiple personality disorder, is coming out after having been on the shelf since 2009 (1). Can you even remember making it?

Oh, absolutely. When something is that important to you, and you put your blood, sweat and tears into it, I doubt you’ll ever forget it. My first meeting with Alice (2) , the day I got to work with Phylicia Rashad who I just absolutely adored, the day Stellan Skarsgård and I did our first scene together... When people say: ‘there’s no way you’re going to make a little movie about this subject no one cares about’, I think you remember every step of the way.

Is it hard to make this kind of mid-budget film nowadays?

If you have an artistic itch, and there’s a story you want to tell, you go on that journey and do it anyway. And if only five people see it, it’s worth taking the time to make the journey, to do the art. If for no other reason than to get it out of your own system. The value for me wasn’t tied to the box office in any way. These little movies are hard to do, people don’t always want to see them. My feeling of success was from the sheer accomplishment of meeting a woman, being inspired, saying I’m going to make a movie about a dark subject and shedding some light on it. And challenging myself to get it done. That was my reward – to do something I set out to do.

Related: Can playing a racist restore Halle Berry's mojo?

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