Gen X icon Ione Skye on why she's more Liz Taylor than Jennifer Aniston
Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we're told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they're given. This week he talks to Ione Skye. The British-born American actor, director, painter, writer and podcaster, 54, is a Gen X film icon best known for her role in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. Her memoir is Say Everything.
BODIES
You started acting at a young age. How much of the attention on your looks was flattering and how much was annoying? I was very photogenic, which was helpful, but there was so much worry about weight. One time, I did a job in Rome and in Tunisia and was told, 'Lose 10 pounds in Italy.' Are you kidding me? But I did, then gained it back in two days. I didn't get to eat any amazing Italian food the whole time.
None of this sounds healthy or joyous. I was never – for better or worse – strict enough. I did a movie with Jennifer Aniston before she did Friends. She'd eat a bagel and cut out the inside. That's someone who's very ordered. I'm more Elizabeth Taylor-messy, I think, which is kind of fun.
Do you have tattoos? [ Counts ] I have one … two … how many tattoos? … Three? Technically, four.
What are they and where are they? My first one was done by hand by the same guy who did my mum's tattoo: your classic moon and star that a young person gets. Then I did a swan on my hip with my ex-sister-in-law. This other tattoo is meant to say 'NOW' but it just looks like a blob. Then I had the name 'Adam' for my ex-husband [Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys], but I changed that to 'Madam'.
MONEY
Your father is the Scottish musician Donovan, your mother is model Enid Karl. As a result, you've been described as 'the OG nepo baby'. Is that fair? When I say I didn't get one cent from my parents, it's kind of true. I mean, my father paid child support, but my mum didn't make a lot of money. So it gave me a lot of confidence and pride when I started making my own. My father didn't really open any doors, but there were creative people around me, via my mother. So I saw examples of people in the industry, which was helpful. And having my father's name was intriguing to someone like [director] Cameron Crowe who was really into music; he cast me in Say Anything.
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So he started jotting it down in a notebook, which he'd pop in his pocket as he headed off to the video store for his latest batch of three tapes. (As an aside, Needham tells me that by 1982 or 1983, some entrepreneurial character had started doing the rounds of his neighbourhood with a stash of VHS tapes in his car. 'The doorbell would ring, 'Oh, hey, video man'. He'd pop the boot open, and you'd be like, 'Oh, yeah, heard of that one'. It was an entirely different kind of streaming.' ) The first inklings of IMDb would soon emerge, as he transferred his jottings to his home computer. 'It was a Sharp MZ80k,' he recalls. 'It was 48KB [of RAM], and a cassette hard drive.' Needham spent his summer pausing and rewinding videotapes and typing credits into his database. He backdated his entries to January 1, 1980, though he admits some of those entries, which are still on IMDb today, might be a bit sketchy. 'I've been meaning to go back ...' For years it was a solitary pursuit, but in 1985, he discovered online bulletin boards, where members could dial a number, get online, sign up for a mailing list, and message other members. 'You'd probably be mailing, like, 100 fellow movie fans,' he says. 'But that's when I discovered there were other people like me. I was not the only crazy one.' Loading In the early days, it could take a couple of days for someone to respond. But by the late '80s, things were picking up pace. 'You might get a response the same day – shock, horror,' he jokes. He was sharing his database with anyone who was interested, and others shared their own lists: one kept tabs on actresses, but only those still alive; another tracked directors. In September 1990, someone – their name is lost to the mists of time, so no credit there – suggested collating all those separate lists into a single database. 'And so, on October 17, 1990 the first version of IMDb was published onto the public internet,' he says. It was 1993, though, before this hobby pursued by a few film nerds really crossed the Rubicon. Someone at Cardiff University emailed to say he'd downloaded the movie database software and thought it was amazing. 'And he said, 'have you heard of this World Wide Web thing, because I think it might be quite big'.' It was the early days of the internet, so early that a site called What's New on the Web published a daily list of new sites, typically just a couple each day. And Needham was all over it. 'I'd done the web,' he says, laughing. 'I'd been to every website that existed.' Fast forward to late 1997, and Needham received a call from someone at Amazon to say Jeff Bezos would be in England in January and would like to meet. 'We thought we were going to talk about an ad deal,' he says. 'But Jeff had other plans.' On April 24, 1998, IMDb became an Amazon company, and Needham and everyone who'd been working on it swapped their shares in their start-up for cash and shares in Amazon. 'In retrospect, I should have taken all shares,' he says. He's done all right, though. Needham now gets to indulge his nerdy passion as much as he likes, all over the world. He's done jury duty at around 20 festivals, he thinks, including alongside Taika Waititi at Sundance in 2015. 'This is not my first rodeo,' he says of MIFF. His favourite film? Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which he estimates he has seen about 50 times. His most-watched? Not Alien, but its sequel, Aliens, which he has seen 63 times. And the running tally? 'It's 16,446, plus the 13 jury films,' he says. He'll add those to the total once the deliberations are complete. There's always a carry-forward column.
