JustJared had the opportunity to interview Michelle on set of “Oz: The Great and Powerful” back in October 2011. Be sure to also read his interview with James Franco over here.

On being a fairytale figure:
“It’s the best! There’s nothing better than making kids happy. Seeing little girls faces light up just at the sight of me.”

On if she will keep her tiara:
“I think that the tiara has a price tag that I couldn’t afford (laughs).”

On how she referenced the 1939 version of Glinda:
“Yeah we talked about her a lot, but Sam wanted to shy away from anything that referenced her to heavily. He wanted our very own Glinda, so there’s little nods in a few costumes and a couple of lines, but she’s a starting off point. I just think of her as where Glinda started, when you meet Glinda in the original Wizard of Oz she has a kind of calm, but that’s what we like to think that’s where she wound up and this is where she began.”
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Fans of Michelle Williams, the ones who’ve followed her career from the over-articulate rants of Dawson’s Creek to her Oscar-nominated performance in My Week With Marilyn, want to believe the actress is like so many of the roles she chooses: intelligent, thoughtful, soft-spoken and sensitive.

Rest easy, everyone. She is.

It helps that she’s clearly in love with her new movie Take This Waltz; when we met to discuss the astute relationship drama co-starring Seth Rogen, Williams had plenty to say about growing up, settling down and learning that “nice guys” aren’t always the prize they’re supposed to be.

A lot of women are going to recognize themselves in Take This Waltz. We’ve all been raised on the premise that men want sex all the time and it’s up to us to decide when — and your character, Margot, isn’t the only 20-something woman to realize that’s not always true in long-term relationships. It’s a reality that doesn’t show up in movies very often.
I think, in the beginning, [writer/director] Sarah [Polley] was going to set it up in the more conventional way and then talked to a bunch of her friends. The information that she kept getting back was the opposite.

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Though her Golden Globe nomination for playing Marilyn Monroe last year came (perhaps a bit surprisingly) in the Musical or Comedy category, Michelle Williams has long focused on daunting, dramatic indie roles. In fact, it hadn’t been since her minor role in 2003′s The Station Agent that she had done anything truly resembling a light-hearted film, so when she received the script for writer/director Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, her perception may have been a little skewed.

“I gave the script to a friend of mine to read, I was like, ‘I’m so excited, I’m going to make a comedy,’” Williams told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s screening at the Tribeca Film Fest on Sunday. “And I came back an hour later and she was on the couch reading it and she was crying, and she was like, ‘I don’t know when it’s going to get funny, Michelle!’

“Yeah, that’s my kind of comedy,” Williams added, shrugging and laughing.

In the film, Williams plays a woman caught between her loving husband (Seth Rogen) and the handsome, alluring artist who lives across the street (Luke Kirby). She had long been hoping to work with Polley, she said, and the script offered her far more than just some potential laughs.

“I think one of the most important things for me is that I thought it was talking about a transition that you make in your life in your late 20s from being a girl into being a woman, and that’s the transition that I was in,” Williams offered.

Take This Waltz has run for nearly nine months on the festival circuit — it bowed at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival — building buzz and securing distribution. That is often the case for Williams’ independent projects, but her next film should face no such issues.

“That was amazing because of the man who led us all,” Williams said of working on Oz: The Great and Powerful, Disney’s star-studded Wizard of Oz prequel. “[Director] Sam Raimi is a real throwback and an absolute gentleman and made every day feel like I was on a small, collaborative indie film… It’s such an honor to have little girls think of me as Glinda the Good Witch.”

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Start with the assumption that glamour is an art—or if not an art, then at least an artifice, which is to say that it isn’t life, but it’s close. Think of it as a distillation of experience, a concentrate, something made—made to be seen: on stages, catwalks, movie screens, magazine pages, and city sidewalks, sometimes, but only briefly. In its purest form, it’s a property of pictures, still and moving, a collaboration between a woman and a lens, the curve of flesh and the curve of glass. (It’s no accident that two of the most glamorous roles in Hollywood history are about women and photographers: Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face and Grace Kelly in Rear Window.)

It isn’t beauty, not exactly or not quite. For one thing, glamour is far more difficult to find: The world is full of beautiful women, and many of them look lovely in photographs, but very few of them have the specific charisma that makes a photograph beguiling. Nor is talent in itself anywhere near enough, nor intelligence, nor charm, nor virtue. All of them are valuable qualities—indispensable, even—but essentially democratic, evenly distributed, next door. Glamour is much rarer, as rare as those elements at the end of the periodic table. Glamour is unfair—one of the only things in this unfair world that are admirable for being so.

It is a fleeting thing, captured in moments, experienced in between heartbeats. It took Rita Hayworth just seconds to establish a standard of glamour that she spent, by her own admission, the better part of her life trying to live up to, or perhaps live down. “They went to bed with Gilda,” as she famously put it. “And they woke up with me.” Well, only a knave wants the woman in the photograph to be the woman next to him when he wakes, and only a fool expects it. But knaves and fools aren’t in short supply. Nor, I might add, are women themselves immune to that kind of mistake. I saw so-and-so on Fifth Avenue this morning. She didn’t look like such a star…Well, no, but magic is difficult, even for those who have a gift for it, and in any case, it should be used sparingly. A pinch is enough. Any more would be less.

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