Julia's kids love India!

My daughter wants to live in India says actress Julia Roberts, as she talks to TOI about her latest film ‘Eat Pray Love’, parts of which were shot in India
What is it about “Eat Pray Love” that made you say, “This is it”?
Well, the content of it... The way that it talks about life experience and searching for answers and how meaningful people can be in our lives. It’s a vibrant story with Ryan at the helm of it was a delicious endeavour.
Being a veteran in Hollywood means more freedom or less of it ’coz everybody expects them to be a success?
It’s insignificant to my creative choices.The outcome of them doesn’t have anything to do with my initial choice that I make while looking at a script. If you look that far down the road, you’re missing the whole point of what you’re trying to look for as an artist.
Ever made a drastic decision of taking a year off for reflection, like your character in “Eat Pray Love”?
Well, when I was in my twenties I took two years off of work, which was a really empowering decision. I did a lot of travelling and a lot of everyday life stuff. That was my big decision that’s akin to what she did, taking that year off.
How do you relate to a character who is running away from a marriage and not confronting her problems?
I don’t think it has to be so black and white, and I certainly can relate to what she’s going through. She’s a coward running away from her marriage... She’s at a place where it’s important to her to express how she feels about this relationship. It is brave to go to a foreign country where you don’t have any friends and you don’t speak the language. It’s intimidating to walk strange streets and not know to turn left or right. On a lot of different levels it’s brave, even if they’re sophomoric little directional levels. For her to take that time for herself, I think is what is deeply interesting and encouraging to other people, to take time to nurture yourself in whatever way you need to do it in whatever amount of time you need, I think is really courageous. It’s such a busy, rapid-fire world that to stop and try to figure out what’s right for you is lovely.
Have you met the novelist, Elizabeth Gilbert?
I did meet her. I met her when we were in Rome... I waited until I had, and Ryan and I had talked about it a lot. He obviously had a relationship with her before we started filming, and I had seen a conference and on television. I felt it was important for me in portraying her to go with my instinct before I met her, to get enough filming done where I couldn’t really change – I was already on course by the time that I met her. And she’s a lovely, lovely person, she has such a great way of talking, and she has very specific mannerisms. But I didn’t want to imitate her. So that’s why I stayed away from her in the beginning. But she’s a beautiful human being.
You and Richard Jenkins have such a great range of scenes together in India, from being antagonistic to best mates by the end of it...
It was dreamy really, these scenes. They were all so complicated and interesting, and to get to play with Richard Jenkins in those scenes, it was really the section, I think, acting-wise I most looked forward to, because there was so much to get to try to excavate out of that relationship. Being in India and it was so just magical to be there and act out those scenes with Richard. It’s such a vital relationship.
You brought your kids along to India...
The children love it. Hazel said that when she grows up, that’s where she wants to live. My kids were really into the culture of every place we went. Finn shaved his head while he was in India. Hazel also wanted to shave her head so I let her shave the back half of her head. They would chant, and they were so interested.
Tell us about the elephant who knows you...
I’m quite famous (laughs). I had been to India six months earlier. My husband was there working and so the children and I had gone to visit him and had gone to this lovely place, and there were two elephants there. And we rode these two elephants. And lo and behold, six months later the elephant that they had brought in for that scene I recognised, only because I had just been looking at the pictures from that trip. And it turned out it was the same elephant from Jaipur, where we had been. And that was the elephant that I had ridden that day.
And did that elephant remember you?
Well, I found out later that you have to blow into an elephant’s trunk for them to remember you forever. And I didn’t know that then and I hadn’t done that. We just shook hands. It was meaningful to me though.