After 15 years,
Jane Fonda returns

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AP: Are you looking to do more movies?

Fonda: I don’t care if I ever make a movie again. It would be fun, because I had a good time on this one, but I’m not looking to sort of rebuild a career in movies. I’ve got a very full, interesting, wonderful life. ... I just don’t want to be scared anymore. I want to have a good time. That’s why I left the business. Every year, I would just get more and more fearful that I couldn’t do it, I was losing it and losing the creative juices. It was just agony. Agony. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I had no intention of coming back. I didn’t miss it. I was very happy.

AP: There’s a remake of “Fun With Dick and Jane” coming out, and there’s been talk of a new “Barbarella.” What’s your take on remakes?

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Fonda: I think it’s scary. The things that make a movie like “Barbarella” work, it’s hard to get it back. Part of what made it work was the sort of jury-rigged charm. There were no digital effects. It was not a very big-budget film, and that kind of contributed to what made it what it was. I don’t know today how they would pull it off.

AP: Speaking of Barbarella. Sex kitten, or empowered female?

Fonda: Ahh. It came just shy of being empowered female. Just shy. It was almost. With a little tweaking, it could have been. And it would have been just as funny, and just as sexy, but it didn’t quite get there.

AP: What tweaking?

Fonda: Well, you see, I have a whole theory about this. If Barbarella came from a planet that was so enlightened that they didn’t even know what the word war meant, and I was sent to the other planet to do away with evil, they got it wrong. I shouldn’t have been the one that made love by taking a pill and touching fingertips. That should have been the planet of evil. What Barbarella would bring to these other planets, they had forgotten intimacy. They were the ones that had never made love face to face, looking eye to eye and having their heart affected. They were the ones that would take pills and touch fingertips. So Barbarella would bring love with her. It just needed to be reversed.

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