The Other Woman

Alison Mosshart has been half of The Kills for the past decade, and then in 2009 she joined 'supergroup' The Dead Weather; each band earning not just the interest of rock'n'roll fans, but, due to the celebrity wives and ex-wives of co-collaborators Jamie Hince and Jack White, the interest of gossip mags. “Constructive criticism is great, but sadly we don't live in a world of that anymore,” Mosshart says. “I'd say 90 per cent of stuff written about us I don't read, because 90 per cent is, to be honest, idiotic.”

Yet, if seeing her reflection in print has long since become meaningless for Mosshart, the 34-year-old has suddenly seen a far more confronting reflection: someone evoking her on screen. “I may have become desensitised to have people write about me, but having Julianne Moore 'play' me in a performance, that's something else entirely,” Mosshart laughs.

In What Maisie Knew, Moore plays a flaky rock'n'roller going through a divorce with Steve Coogan's blithe art dealer, with their eight-year-old daughter being passed back and forth between them. Though the character isn't based, at all, on Mosshart, Moore's on-stage performances entirely are; and the film is filled with Kills songs that Moore has re-recorded the vocals for.

“Julianne Moore went through old Kills B-sides, leftover songs, vinyl bonuses, non-album tracks, things like that,” Mosshart explains.

Mosshart is speaking from Nashville, where she's in the middle of writing The Kills' forthcoming fifth album, the follow-up to 2011's Blood Pressures. It's, she says, “a very non-specific place to be”: her hot, Southern summer filled with songwriting and painting, with the end-goal still off in a fuzzy future. “I don't know when it starts and when it ends, that time in which you write a record is kinda vague,” Mosshart says.

“You just keep writing until you've got one. It might feel different if you were the kind of band that all wrote together, but Jamie's in London writing, I'm in Nashville writing, and once in a while we meet in Michigan to compare what we're doing... It's always this collision between Jamie and I. We'll go off on our own, live different lives, listen to different music, read different books, watch different movies, and then we'll come together with all this stuff in our heads, and try and invent something new out of that.”

Over their tenure, many have approached The Kills about contributing music to films, but it's “never really worked out”, almost always due to timing. But, with What Maisie Knew, Moore took the impetus herself – seeing Mosshart as a figure of inspiration for her character, and approaching the singer to ask if it was okay. “I said, 'of course!'” Mosshart offers. “I love everything that she does. She's just an incredible actress.”

This meant that The Kills' first effectively 'scored' film comes at a fictionalised remove. Moore, once having dug up the band's more obscure cuts, re-recorded versions with her vocals replacing Mosshart's; something the singer found vaguely unnerving.

“I thought she did a great job; like 'wow, she did it!'” Mosshart offers. “But it was undeniably strange to listen to them. Hearing her sing the songs with the exact same music – they've used the exact same tracks as we did on the originals; they're still Jamie's guitars and drums – that's quite weird, for me.”

This wasn't the strangest, most uncanny feeling Mosshart would experience. When she started seeing “a few rough cuts along the way”, she was confronted with what it was like to have an Oscar-nominated actor effectively impersonate her on film. “I knew she came to a couple of our shows and watched me play, but it's pretty insane to see some of the movements she did,” Mosshart says. “You can never really be sure of exactly how you look and what you do on stage, but when you see someone mimicking you, you get that sense of how the world sees you; like you can tell that they're doing you, but it isn't you. You don't look at yourself as a character. And she really got it. It's, to be honest, really eerie. It's just eerie, it really is.”

Mosshart wasn't sure how the music would actually be represented in the film, which is a very loose adaptation of Henry James' fin de siècle novel of the same name. What Maisie Knew is a portrait of divorce as seen through the eyes of the child; the pettiness and viciousness of the sparring partners seeming horrific when so little interest is paid to the eight-year-old daughter neither seems entirely willing to look after. The child is passed from hand to hand, often at a whim, and in its most poignant scene, Maisie (played by Onata Aprile) wakes up in a dark room, and she – and the audience – have no idea what room it is. “God, I'm 34 and I'd be terrified if that happened to me,” Mosshart says.

Watching the film for the first time, at 2012's Toronto International Film Festival, Mosshart went through a “whole gamut of emotions”, especially when Moore's performance cut close to home. “It's hard to watch if you're in a band, but I think it'd be a hundred times harder to watch if you were in a band and you had kids, and anyone had ever accused you of being a bad parent because you leave to go on tour,” Mosshart says. “The job is pretty crazy, you're never home; so when that's your job, it's an uncomfortable thing to watch. I can't look at it from any other perspective than as someone who knows what it's like to be in a band. I know what it's like to be on a tour bus forever, to have this schedule laid out in front of you. But if I had a child and saw this film, it would be almost too confronting.”