By Todd Gilchrist

hollywoodnews.com: It’s taken several years and several dozen delays, setbacks and rumors, but on Friday, January 14, “The Green Hornet” finally opens nationwide. Directed by Michel Gondry, the film stars Seth Green and Jay Chou as The Green Hornet and his partner, Kato, who enlist an unwitting expert named Lenore (Diaz) to fight against a crime lord (Waltz) who’s going through a midlife crisis. Last week, Hollywood News sat down with members of the cast and crew, also including director Michel Gondry and producer Neal Moritz, to discuss the epic saga of bringing this film to the big screen.

[Note: Although "Hollywood News" is used to distinguish questions from answers in the text below, our journalist was just one of many reporters asking questions of the filmmakers.]

Hollywood News: Cameron, what was like working on this guy-heavy set and is it true that you are the best stunt driver but you just didn’t get to show it?

Cameron Diaz: Well, I can only comment on one of those. It was awesome working with them. I didn’t realize that it was such a huge action movie because I came in the first week of shooting and the last week of shooting and all of my bits, there was no action. So I went away to be in another movie with a lot of action, and I came back and when I saw what they’d done I was like, ‘Wait a second. How did this happen? How did I not know this?’ But before we started I went out and I took the Black Beauty for a spin.

Seth Rogen: Well, I drove it, too and I don’t drive it in the movie at all. They just wanted us to have fun.

Hollywood News: The characters in the film seem to be very aware of comic book style storytelling and clichés and tropes. Was that awareness important to you in the storytelling and in the performances and in the making of the film?

Michel Gondry: It’s something that we had differences in opinion about. I think it was important for you guys to acknowledge that we are in this world, that it talks about a comic book or not.

Rogen: Yeah, we kind of wanted it to be a world. The kid is a comic book superhero fan, obviously. To us the simple thought was, ‘Who’s the kind of guy who’s likely to become a superhero? Probably someone who reads comic books and is a comic book fan or is at least aware of them.’ But in the writing we kind of wanted to subvert notions that are in a lot of these comic book type movies, things you’d find in a lot of early origin stories of comic book characters. I think in order to play with those ideas you have to be very aware of what they are in the first place, that they exist and to acknowledge them to some degree. So, for us, we kind of wanted to dance on the line between being a comic book movie and commenting on a comic book movie.

Gondry: Another thing was Bruce Lee. One of the reasons that we love Jay Chou is because he didn’t want to do a spin on Bruce Lee. We knew that we had to pay homage or tribute to Bruce Lee because of his character, but we don’t want to remake him or have Jay remake him. So we included a drawing of Bruce Lee in Jay’s notebook [as a tribute].

Hollywood News: Did you go all the way back to the radio serials and watch all the episodes of the show? How much of that did you take in and how much did you have to tune out to do your own thing?

Rogen: In the beginning phases of writing the script we did a ton of research just to accumulate ideas. The way that we write is that we just start by making tons of lists of ideas and thoughts and things that we’d like to include into the movie. We tried to listen to almost all the radio serials. They’re a little outdated, I guess. I guess back then just hearing footsteps for thirty seconds straight was really suspenseful and interesting, the creaking of a door opening was real cinema at that time, but it’s a  little hard to sit through hours of it at this point for me. But I’m very stupid. We went back to the radio show and the serials that were in movie theaters and the TV show, and we really tried to include ideas from all these things. The Zephyr is in there and little tips of the hat to the previous incarnations of it.

Neal Moritz: One of the biggest twists in the movie, the end of the movie is from the show.

Rogen: Exactly, the whole notion of me getting shot and having to conceal that from the police is from an episode of the TV show. We tried to update that for the movie.

Hollywood News: I think we can tell what the Michel Gondry sequences in the movie are, such as when you see everything come together in his head. Was there a lot of negotiation about how many of those elements you could have? Was there more that you wanted in the film?

Gondry: Well, it’s sort of easy for me because I remember I designed this sequence because on the paper it was like that. It was literally trying to piece it together. And I wanted to show it visually. I made a sketch and I remember telling my girlfriend, ‘Okay, they will never go for it.’ I showed the drawing to Neal on Monday morning with no hope. He just looked at it and said, ‘I don’t get it. Just shoot it though.’ On a different occasion, like for the Kato vision when he runs on the car, we had parked two sets of identical cars and nobody had a clue why we did that. People were sort of scared to ask the question because they didn’t want to look stupid or something. So they said, ‘Is anyone aware that we have parked twice the same car?’ I think Neal said that. I said, ‘Nobody is going to say anything.’ But more importantly, I guess this is the tip of the iceberg, but it’s more important to me that I can identify with there hero. And with a guy like Seth playing the main character and the dynamic between Jay and Seth on set and even on paper was something that’s different from what you see in general in comic book movies. So this part is me in a sense that I accept to do it, in a way. It’s not something that I’d done physically, but in jumping onboard on a project like that I sort of didn’t have to reflect myself. The whole story is based on their relationship and I thought that was perfect for me.

Hollywood News: Seth, can you talk about the Chinese-language labels in the car? And Jay, can you talk about doing the action scenes, whether you ever got hurt and if you watched Bruce Lee for research at all?

Rogen: I left any and all foreign language work on this film up to other people. I did no research. I don’t know what that stuff says. I trusted Jay. Jay was just like, ‘Just something in another language.’ I said, ‘Okay. Just don’t make it too dirty,’ and that was pretty much it. I’ll let Jay take the rest.

Jay Chou: I didn’t get hurt in the fight scenes because I’m Kato.

Rogen: Kato doesn’t get hurt.

Chou: I think if you see the Black Beauty it will make James Bond’s car look easy. I like cars. I have many cars, but this car is the best.

Moritz: I think that Jay is adding the Black Beauty to his collection.

Rogen: I don’t think that I can. It’s a lot to insure in L.A.

Hollywood News: Jay, you’re relatively new to American cinema. What was your first thought after your Skype audition?

Chou: Very exciting and a little bit nervous because I should speak English. I’m training in English one month.

Rogen: It’s amazing.

Moritz: When we decided that Jay should be Kato we knew that we needed more days to shoot the movie. So we pulled a little trick. We went to the studio and said, ‘We want to cast Jay and we know you want to cast Jay, but you have to give us extra shooting days,’ which we didn’t need for Jay. We needed it for us.

Rogen: We needed it for me. It was my English, really.

Hollywood News: Can you talk about casting Christoph in the film, and Christoph can you talk about your experience on the film and did you do any research for the role?

Rogen: We wanted the villain to be, I mean, just a character more than anything. We wanted him to be sympathetic. Our fixation wasn’t how to make this guy scary. We wanted more than anything to intellectually understand why someone would be so fascinated with killing another person, basically. So that’s really how we approached it. We wanted it to be funny. And when we saw Christoph’s previous work it had elements of danger, but at the same time was very entertaining and had very funny parts. That’s really why we thought that he would be a good guy to do it.

Moritz: I think when Seth and Evan and Michel, when we first started talking about the role, I think the idea of a villain going through a midlife crisis was something really strong and something that we hadn’t seen before. I think when we had our initial conversations with Christoph that was something that he gravitated towards.

Christoph Waltz: Picking up the question about the comics, I have nothing to do with comics. I know nothing about comics. I am aware of the importance of comics, but they’re not within my world. Not because I feel that I’m above it, but just that micro-surgery is not in my world either. Is that a deficit or is that an advantage? When I do Shakespeare I don’t question the world that was created there. Othello in Malta. The Jew in Venice. All these are characters and inventions. I don’t need to go to Venice or the sixteenth century or Malta of the seventeenth century to understand what’s going on. This is not what I do. I’m not a cultural anthropologist. I’m just an actor.

Gondry: I remember one day they were doing a karaoke party at Evan Golberg’s house with Seth. And I drank a half bottle of tequila and I decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to rewrite the villain in this movie all at once.’ And basically he was saying always, starting all his speeches with, ‘When I was a little boy,’ and the people would tell him, ‘No, shut up,’ which I guess happens to me all the time. I think that it was a couple of sentences that you picked up from this version and then everything was eradicated, but this sentence, you sort of used it as a way to express yourself. And I guess there was a certain confusion with the character for a while and we worked on that for a while. But I think what happened that was crucial was that Seth and Evan in the middle of the things started to really realize what the dilemma was. We had this additional shooting near the end where we brought in James Franco and then we realized that it’s really the midlife crisis problem that was prominent. I think the first scene really indicates pretty well what your problem is. I think it was an awesome job that they did, to find that while we were shooting.

Waltz: And it only took a half bottle of tequila.

Rogen: Exactly, and then we drank the whole thing.

Hollywood News: Did you base your villain character on any other well known villains and do you have a favorite villain of all time?

Waltz: No, no. This is not based on anything, but the ideas that were relevant to this story. I think that’s very important. You don’t take little bits and pieces and sort of acting by numbers and put them together into one kind of pre-fab kind of Kindle situation. No, no. Even though it might not look like that, it’s really based on actorly and authorly considerations.

Rogen: More actorly.

Hollywood News: Seth, you mentioned subverting the origin story. The body count on this film struck me on this film. Going back to Britt’s great, great, great uncle, the Lone Ranger, there’s a tradition of good guys masquerading as bad guys figuring out how not to kill people as they go through the episode.

Rogen: Yea. We didn’t quite figure that out, I guess.

Gondry: We had a problem with the body count. We killed so many people that we had to bring them back with a mustache –

Rogen: Exactly. We ran out of stunt guys. You see zombies eventually. We thought, ‘It’s an action movie.’ I’m a fan. I always thought that it was funny that on the old ‘A-Team’ TV show they would shoot four hundred people and none of them would die. I think if you’re going to make a violent action movie you might as well just go for it. It’s not explicit. It’s not in any way meant to inspire people to do anything crazy. It’s not supposed to instill any horrific images or anything like that. It’s all for the point of fun and just kind of big action more than anything. It’s funny because we actually watched a lot of action movies leading up to this, thinking, ‘Can you kill people in one of these movies?’ What we were fascinated by was, like, how many people die in your average [film]. In ‘Transformers’, Optimus Prime getting thrown through one building would kill four thousand people and there’s no mention of it at all. No one cares. No one says anything. But I don’t know if that’s the best logistical cue to take.

Gondry: But all this being said, you don’t kill anyone because you gas them.

Rogen: I gassed a lot, exactly. You don’t see any bodies on the ground.

Hollywood News: What about the guys at the construction site?

Rogen: Oh, yeah. Those guys die. They were terminally ill anyway. There’s a whole side story. We cut it out.

Hollywood News: Christoph, how did you get into character as the villain?

Gondry: He started talking like a director and became evil.

Waltz: Forgive me reverting to an answer that I’ve given before. I learn my lines and I show up on time. That’s more or less what I do. There’s no mystery behind it. I just do what is necessary. The decision as to what is necessary, that’s a bit more tricky.

Rogen: It’s impressive that he shows up and learned his lines because we would rarely give him them.

Hollywood News: How do you respond to the intensity of fan expectation on something like this?

Moritz: Well, there was a lot of speculation of what the movie was going to be and how a combination of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg who are known for stoner romance comedies and Michel who’s known for more indies and me who’s known for more straight ahead kind of action, how could this combination come up with something that would be valuable. The thing that stuck with me through this more than anything is how the team of Michel, Seth and Evan and myself, even with all the negativity that was coming at the beginning of this process, what we were going through, how we all stuck together. So the first time that we actually showed this movie to a real audience and to see their response was probably the most satisfying night of my film career. It didn’t make a difference what anyone had said in the past. When they saw the movie and they loved the movie, that they loved the relationship between the two guys, that to me is all that really matters, what a real audience says when they see the movie in a dark auditorium. We have been lucky enough on this movie through all the turmoil that we’ve had, which we’ve had plenty, that we really did stick together and ultimately make the movie that we wanted to make. Luckily audiences are embracing it as much as we hoped.

Gondry: There was a moment in time where I could describe exactly what you’re talking about. We were in this room talking about the Black Beauty. It had been a long process and we are supposed to have a deal with a big company and it was a crisis and at some point we were all in the room and Neal said the most surprising thing to us. He said, ‘Lets just shoot the car from the ’60′s.’ We sort of had a high-five moment with Seth and Evan because that’s what we wanted to do from the beginning. We didn’t even dare to ask Neal because we saw that he wanted the little nervous car that usually he has in his movies. That moment was really an awesome moment.

Moritz: We were very lucky that we were able to convince the studio to turn down millions of dollars in a car promotion to ultimately do what was best for the movie. I think we didn’t try to manufacture some new, exotic looking cool car as the Black Beauty. It stayed something that was kind of tested, tried and true. And we just ultimately felt was sexy and beautiful. Staying with that car is really a kind of hallmark of that movie. We don’t have characters with superhero powers. Our superhero in the movie is the car.

Gondry: So we bought one and we parked it right in front of the building. Everybody came down and then for some reason we felt that movie might happen.

Rogen: Once that car showed up it all seemed okay.

Hollywood News: As a comic book fan, Seth, was part of the appeal to ‘The Green Hornet’ that there isn’t a lot of mythology to it? It’s just a name that people recognize, but there’s not a lot of stuff to really look at?

Rogen: Yeah. I would have no real interest in just doing a very literal interpretation of preexisting material. I see a lot of these comic book movies that come out now and you almost feel like anyone could pick up the first few editions of the comic book and take it to a DP and say, ‘I want to shoot this,’ and then six months later you have the origin story of those superheroes. That really didn’t interest us in any way. We really wanted to be able to inject our own sensibilities into it and our own sense of humor. At the same time, too, the things that we love about superheroes and comic books ourselves. So, yeah, it was very appealing that there were a few kind of benchmark, iconic things that people knew about ‘The Green Hornet’. Kato and the car, the gas gun.

Moritz: The song.

Rogen: Yeah, the song. Lenore. The DA. It was like that kind of stuff we knew that we wanted to include. But it was fun because we could kind of integrate them into the story however we wanted and reintroduce them in a way that was organic to our characters and not the previous versions of things.

Hollywood News: Building on that, are there bits that you save as you’re writing this version just in case you’re get to do a ‘Green Hornet 2?’

Rogen: No. We’re not the kind of writers to save ideas. If its remotely good we shove it in there, nor are we confident enough to assume that there will be a sequel. Anything that seemed good we put in.

Hollywood News: Seth, can you talk about how much comedy you were willing to bring to this without slipping into parody? Was there a fine line there?

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Rogen: It’s a hard rule to articulate, I guess. There was no, like, ‘As soon as this happens you’ve just crossed the line.’ You just had to generally be aware that the comedy should come from the characters and that it all should feel real and it shouldn’t feel like we’re being funny just for the sake of being funny, but that it should kind of feel like something that would maybe actually happy with these people. We really kind of tried to approach the structure of the story in a somewhat traditional action movie sense. It was just how the characters related to one another that we hoped the humor would come from. I remember there were some things that we talked about. I remember with the car, we were like, ‘Inspector Gadget’s car is too far.’ That was our benchmark. We were like, ‘When it starts to become Inspector Gadget’s car we’ve crossed the line.’ So little things like that we would come up with, mostly arbitrarily and we would break those rules constantly. But it was just fun to say, more than anything.

Gondry: But that’s why during the shooting of the interior of the car I was worried that no dialogue was happening, and I remember you telling me, ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to work its way through the shooting,’ because I wanted those jokes to be written. I know that you and Evan were not worried about that.

Rogen: I remember that. You kept saying, ‘Where’s the car chase?’ I forgot about that.

Gondry: It happened, and I remember this journalist who asked me recently, ‘Aren’t you worried that this movie is too character based for a comic book hero?’ I said no. I think that this worry was a compliment.

Moritz: I think during the editing process one of the biggest challenges was how much action and how much comedy. We kept going back and forth.

Rogen: In editing was more where we would figure it out. Sometimes a joke in the wrong place would make an otherwise dangerous scene feel completely not dangerous because you just think, ‘If he’s making a joke there then what’s the threat,’ but at times it could just be the wrong joke and it needs to be a more situational based joke rather than a comedy writer joke. The editing was where we were really able to play with all of that.

Gondry: And you could expect that between French and American people there is a communication problem, especially with me, from the way that I speak.

Rogen: What?

Gondry: But in fact I grew up watching a lot of stuff like ‘Starsky and Hutch’. That was bigger in France. ‘Columbo’ was bigger in France than in America. So I grew up with this type of buddy movie. There was a show called ‘Avengers’ with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore that was really awesome and it was huge in France. So I was really acquainted with this type of story where the humor blends with the action. From the beginning we all knew that we didn’t want to do a spoof. This was not our purpose, to mock the genre. We took it very seriously.

Hollywood News: I believe in the original shows the Green Hornet always got the girl, but not in this film. What was the thought behind not letting him get the girl here?

Rogen: Again, we wanted to play off these notions in these movies and someone always ends up with the girl, actually. It was our instinct that Kato should wind up with the girl and Cameron, actually, had the amazing idea that no one should end up with the girl which was really funny. I think it serves the friendship between me and Jay more. It was actually a really funny joke that we would then all talk about, that we think there’s this huge competition going on and there’s literally no competition. Neither of us have a chance at all. She doesn’t even know that we like her really. To us that kind of became a funny play off of the traditional love triangle that you might find in one of these movies.

Diaz: And it relieved the story of having to wrap up that storyline which is usually what kills the end of a movie.

Rogen: Oh, yeah, if we would’ve had to have some romantic moment in the third act have some romantic moment it would’ve just been a killer.

Diaz: And it takes Lenore from then having to choose between the romance or the taking care of the villain. It just relieved the whole movie of that burden which I think you can really fall into a lot especially in things like this. It just felt really outdated, like they always end up with the girl. So what is the girl there for, but just to serve them. She’s actually an integral part of how they accomplish what they accomplish, of course, unbeknownst to her. But nonetheless that’s the purpose of her in the story rather than just being arm candy and having to wrap that up. That’s so boring.

Rogen: That’s a really good and simple way of putting it. Often when I watch these superhero movies as soon as the romantic story starts I want to kill myself. So we thought that it would be best to minimize that as much as possible.

Waltz: I suggested at one point that I end up with the girl.

Rogen: Yeah. He kept giving us pages.

Waltz: I don’t know why you didn’t want it.

Diaz: That’s really actually a great idea.

Rogen: That she wouldn’t have fought so hard against.

Gondry: Just to come back to your comment about what we changed from the original material, I think connected to that is, okay, the Green Hornet had the girl all the time, but there is one important thing, that the relationship was very condescending, that Kato was a servant. We couldn’t have that. On the first day that we started to work together the focus of the work from Seth and Evan was the relationship between the two and to find out that the sidekick is actually cooler. So that was something that we had to change because it was just plainly racist. So it was really important for us to bring Kato to an equal level as Britt.

Hollywood News: Jay, did you have a favorite scene in the movie?

Chou: So many. I like the fights. Brothers fight like kids. As a child I didn’t fight because I’m the only one. Only child. I never had a brother. So, you like my brother, and I liked this part. Driving the car like a man. Shooting bad guys. In my childhood everybody want to be a hero. So I like this part, fighting bad guys like this.

Gondry: When we did the first screen test to see how the costume fit and with the light, et cetera, I saw the dynamic immediately that would help the movie better than it could be. There was a mutual respect and a compliment from one to the other. Like, Seth felt a little under confident because everything that Jay wears makes him look cooler. With Seth, that’s not really his forte, looking super cool. On the other hand, Seth is a super improviser and would never respect the script which he even wrote. Jay was completely lost most of the time, but just had to act cooler and pretend that he understand. I think this was, as a director, the material that I had  build up, this dynamic. It was serving me a great deal and I thanked them for that. It was just awesome to see these two guys feeling underconfident about each other and then overconfident.

Rogen: Based in real life. Very sad.

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By Todd Gilchrist

hollywoodnews.com: Friday, December 17, marks the culmination of almost three years of effort from director Joe Kosinski and Walt Disney Studios. After a successful proof-of-concept preview screened at Comic-Con in 2008, Disney recruited original ‘Tron’ star Jeff Bridges and enlisted Joe Kosinski to create ‘Tron: Legacy,’ a follow-up that further explores the world created by  Steven Lisberger in 1982. Hollywood News recently sat down with Bridges and his co-stars Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde to discuss the challenges of bringing this world back to life.

Hollywood News: When was the first time you saw the original ‘Tron,’ and how did it feel to enter this world?

Garrett Hedlund: I watched Tron for the first time in 2003, actually. And it was when I was filming in Malta, the island of Malta. And I just watched on the balcony off of some guy’s laptop, and I dug it. I think back then I was just really impressed with the way the creator’s mind works, you know, with Steven Lisberger. Because when you’re at that age, you’re really inspired about things. I mean, when I read Brave New World, I was really sort of questioning all this – all the junk about genetic engineering and socialism and totalitarianism. You’re wondering, you know? So I was trying to crack his mind and everything about technology and the circle of life and questions and answers and questions to be answered. And then of course you got the young, energetic, maniacal Jeff Bridges, and all I remember was I just wished I could’ve hung out with that guy. It’s still to my benefit I got to play father and son with such an incredible, wise actor, and just a brilliant person that he is today. But I wouldn’t have minded hanging out with the Jeff of 1982 for a few days.

Hollywood News: You’ve been in a lot of high-profile films since you arrived in Hollywood. How do you think that this role fit into the kind of career trajectory that you’ve been on?

Hedlund: Well, in an odd way it’s kind of a weird little thing, you know. Like when I was sitting in a little town called Durban, North Dakota with my mother once, and the town population is 8. There was a grain elevator and three other houses. And we were watching ‘A River Runs Through It’ and my mom said to me, “that one’s you.” She pointed to me as the Brad Pitt character, so I had a fear that she knew I was always mischievous and in trouble.- but then I had a fear I was going to be killed after a bad poker hand in an alley at some point in my life. And then for my first film to be working with Brad, it was just incredibly surreal – nothing really unbelievable happened to me in my life until then. And then for the next film, I was driving the tractor on the farm, singing “Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw, and all of a sudden he’s playing my father in the next film. And then after the next film, I was working with [Mark] Wahlberg. And when I was in high school, reading ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ and John Malkovich’s portrayal of Wingfield was so inspiring to me, it was the first time that I think my instincts in my head were right, reading the voice of desperation, and him playing [the character] that way. So that I was when I thought, maybe I can be an actor – I think this voice was kind of right. And then when they called me up on ‘Aragon’ and said, “well, John Malkovich is playing the King now,” and I was like, I’m in. It’s like I got to keep connecting the dots. And Jeff has always been one that I’ve had that weird little notion about. It’s weird to talk about it, I guess, but I’ve always been so inspired by his work that being able to work with him just fills me with such incredible disbelief. But at the same time, just incredible gratification and thrill and excitement – curiosity to see what tomorrow is going to bring in this kind of journey.

Hollywood News: What was your reaction when you first watched Tron: Legacy?

Olivia Wilde: It surpassed all my expectations. What happens so often as an actor is you retain the information about the scene that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting, and the rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit. So it’s been so long since I actually kind of read the script in its entirety, you know, a good year or more, so being able to watch everyone’s performance, watch all elements of the story come together was just extraordinary. I was blown away by everyone’s work and that was my reaction – “oh my God, everyone pulled it together.” I think that was probably the most astounding thing – just being able to see the entire picture together and realize how much hard work paid off.

Hollywood News: What did you do to make sure that Quorra was interesting and formidable within this world?

Wilde: It was a true collaboration to create Quorra. When we originally started putting together ideas for it was really kind of up for grabs because Quorra was not in the original film. [But] Joe Kosinksi was very interested in making her a unique and unusual female heroine, in this film that was unlike any other. And so we worked very hard to make her very intelligent and powerful but at the same time childlike and nuanced so that she would not just be there as a kind of foil for the men, not just the eye candy; I think with a different team, that character could have easily turned into the temptress of the Tron world – she could have just been this sexy femme fatale. With a suit like that it’s easy to fall into that, I think. But because Joe was adamant that she not be that, we were able to work together to create Quorra. And I brought the concept of Joan of Arc very early on, six months before we start shooting, and I said, “Joe, I found Quorra. I figured her out. She’s Joan of Arc.” Because of Joan of Arc was this unlikely warrior – this child who could lead an army. She was kind of unnaturally powerful and seemed to have this connection to another world, to a higher power, to be guided by something greater than her and by selflessness. And that was Quorra. So once we found this historical reference, it was really fun to flesh her out. I was looking at ancient Korean Buddhist warriors and I think that Quorra’s one of them; they fight with swords, so Quorra needs a sword. And the next day, great, Quorra has a sword. So that’s part of the reason I feel so proud of the finished product of Quorra, because so much hard work went into it, so much collaboration, so much love and I feel very proud of the way she’s come out. She’s quirky and odd and I like that.

Another reason I was so adamant about making her so intelligent as well as being a warrior is because I really want her to appeal to the female audience, and particularly young females. I want girls to feel inspired by her strength and her wit and her intelligence and her compassion. I think that it’s rare these days to have a female character in these types of movies that isn’t just there to look really sexy in a suit; too often that’s what happens. When I was little we dressed as Wonder Woman [for Halloween], and Wonder Woman represented social justice and honesty – and now I’m not sure who they dress up as. I really want to Quorra to be appealing to both men and women, and I feel very proud of how she’s turned out.

Hollywood News: What sort of physical training did you do for this?

Wilde: Um, it was challenging. I was shooting House while I was training for Tron so I would wake up way earlier than anyone should ever wake up and go and do a few hours of training a day, which included crosstraining, cardio training, and martial arts training [because] a lot of what Quorra does in the movie is mixed martial arts. We had an incredible stunt team called 8711; they’ve done a lot of the big films of the last ten years, and they are just extraordinary. I really appreciated that they gave me the confidence to do a lot of my own stunts. But they said you’re going to have to train for it and I was completely open to that – and I completely physically transformed my body. I have never looked like that before and I will never look like that again. But it was important in creating Quorra to transfer myself physically, because once I understood what it was like to be able to fight and to have those kind of muscles and to have that strength, it changed the way I walked. It changed the way I stood. And I suddenly understood what it felt like to be able to protect myself, which I had never really felt before. So it was the first time I really realized how important that physical training is to creating the character beyond just the aesthetic.

Hollywood News: Did you stop training afterward?

Wilde: Yes, oh, it was such a relief. I couldn’t wait. The entire time we were shooting Tron I was planning my meal of the wrap day. I’m married to an Italian, so it was all about the pasta and wine – I couldn’t wait. I would just dream of my giant plate of pasta while we were on set. But on these big films, you’re so lucky to have the best trainers in the world teaching you how to fight, and everyone in their department is the best of the best, so it’s such an honor to have them focused on creating something for you to maximize the impact of your character. So you have to bring your focus and your energy and never complain, because this is such an honor to have these people working on you to turn you into a little warrior. I mean, it was quite an honor.

Hollywood News: Was this character always written as a Silicon Valley hippie, or did you introduce the Lebowski’ness of him?

Jeff Bridges: Yeah, no, that was Lisberger. What was it, like 28 years ago? Is that when it was? Gosh, man, it was the script basically from the original one. And that was before Lebowski still. So that I guess you could blame Stephen for that.

Hollywood News: What were your thoughts when you first saw Clu?

Bridges: Amazing. And for one thing, what that means for me as an actor that I can play myself at any age now. I love going to movies, but if there’s a movie where the character ages, or another actor plays the guy as a younger person, it always kind of takes me a while to get up to speed on it. But now, at any age, it’s quite remarkable – and they’ll be able to combine actors. I don’t know quite how I feel about this, but that’s coming up – to say, you know, “let’s get Boxleitner and Bridges, and put a little Brando in there and see what happens.” You know that they can write that – hire some other actor to drive that image that had been created. I mean, it’s getting pretty crazy.

Hollywood News: Did you have any hesitation about revisiting Tron?

Bridges: Sure, I had a lot of hesitation, making any kind of decision really in my life. I mean, I’m really slow at it. I really resist. And with this one, I thought oh God – are they going to pull it off? I mean, I could see all the technology and everything, but are they going to be able to pull it off? And Disney did a beautiful job of that. Casting I think is so important – not only the actors, but the director, the guy you get to helm the whole thing. And they got Joe, who never directed a movie before – can you imagine the pressure of that? And his personality is so calm and sure, and he brings all of his architectural knowledge to the party, so that adds to the whole set design. So that’s wonderful. They also brought Steve Lisberger onboard, which I thought was essential because while the movie is able to be seen alone and still appreciate it, this is going to be a flow between this one and that one, and he was sort of the godfather of the whole thing. He was the source. So we would always go back to him and ask him, is this consistent with the myth that you started? And that was another thing that brought me to want to do this, because I thought we could use a modern-day myth about the challenge of technology – how we’re going to surf that particular wave. Those are tough waters we’re coming into now. We could do some amazing things, and we can also head off in the wrong direction very quickly, and this is kind of a cautionary tale in a way – to look ahead and make sure this is what the direction you want to go.

Hollywood News: What are the differences between working in 1982 and now? Did you have as much green screen work then?

Bridges: Well, that one was shot in 70 millimeter black-and-white, and colored in by some ladies in Korea. We were in white leotards and there was black duvet like this tablecloth, and this is basically the set – white adhesive tape for the gridlines, and that was basically it. And then there’s some CGI, all that kind of stuff, but this one? Wow, man, making movies without cameras – what an idea. When they said that, I said, what are you talking about? They said, “you work in the volume.” What’s that? Well, it’s a room, it can be any size, painted green, and there’s no cameras but there’s hundreds of sensors pointed at you. Before each take you assume the T [position]. You stand up like this, and now you’re in the computer. You’re in a white leotard with these dots all over your body, all of your face, and you might have a helmet on with cameras [aimed at your face], and then everything from makeup, costume, the set – and this is the one that kills me, camera angles is done in post. So if you are in the volume right now, they could say, “let’s start the scene way in the back of the room under the chairs, and we’re going to come up under the chairs. Or let’s start here. It’s all done in post now. It’s just crazy. Amazing. But the other thing, one of the wild moments in this movie, was when I was scanned to get my body into the computer, and it was just like out of the first Tron. You know, I stood there like this and there’s light going; it was just bizarre. For real, it was like for real.

Hollywood News: You don’t have to think about the lens in the volume now. But does that change your performance?

Bridges: Yeah, it was a challenge because I like relating to the lens and I like having a costume and a set – those are kind of grounding to you. It helps [because] so much of making the movies is creating an illusion, and the first person you have to create the illusion for is yourself. So when I’m in a costume and the person I’m working with is in a costume and there’s a set, that helps me be in those times and be in that character. So when you don’t have that stuff, you have to kind of go back, almost like more like a child in a way. It’s like when you were a kid and you didn’t have all of the cool gear to put you there – you had to use your imagination. So it was a challenge that way. And at first it kind of rubbed against my acting; it felt odd, and I didn’t like it. But in making movies and acting, you can’t spend too much time bitching about the way it is. You’ve got to get with the program as soon as you can, so that was challenging but it was a good exercise. And that’s the way it’s going. I mean, this is the way it’s going to be.

Hollywood News: How difficult or easy was it to integrate the spiritual themes into all of the technological and storytelling logistics of the film?

Bridges: Well, one of my concerns about getting into this movie was that it would just be a special effects movie, but it would have some helpful mythology to it. And I am good friends with this Zen master, guy named Bernie Glassman. We were just at a wonderful symposium he had – the first symposium of the socially engaged Buddhism [movement], and it was you know wonderful. He came on as an advisor, and I wanted to add some of this mythology and stories and some of those thoughts. I figured Flynn’s path, what he encounters on the grid, coming in and being quite full of himself and that sort of thing thinking you know that he can beat Clu. But as he says in the movie, the more he goes against him, the stronger Clu becomes. So he’s decided I just have to stop and see the universe and everything’s that’s involved; just like weather will change by itself, he’s applying some of that knowledge. And his problem and the way he gets trapped in the absolute is he goes there so far that he’s maybe stopped being able to engage – and his son comes and shakes that all up.

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hollywoodnews.com: Looking at the ads for the new film “Black Swan,” it’s hard to tell precisely what the film is – a ballet movie, a backstage drama, or a horror flick. According to the cast and crew, the only thing they knew for sure about it was that they had to make it. Hollywood News spoke to stars Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis and director Darren Aronofsky at the film’s recent Los Angeles press day, where they discussed the various challenges of preparing and then putting together this remarkably unique film, and finding a cohesive throughline despite the variety of influences, tones and techniques that went into its creation.

Hollywood News: This has been a project in development for a long time. Darren, can you talk about how you got started on this?

Darren Aronofsky: I’ve been a fan of Natalie’s since I saw her in “The Professional.” Luc Besson is one of my favorite directors, and it turns out that her manager is an old friend of mine from college and so I had a little inside line to meet her. We met in Times Square at the old Howard Johnson’s, [and] we had a really bad cup of coffee and we talked about the early ideas I had about the film. But when she says that that I have the entire film in my head it’s a complete lie.

Natalie Portman: No. It’s was close to what you described to me.

Aronofsky: So we talked a bit about it and I started to develop it but it was a really tough film because getting into the ballet world proved to be really challenging. Most of the time when you do a movie and you say, ‘Hey, I want to make a movie about your world,’ then all the doors open up and you can do anything and see anything that you want. The ballet world really wasn’t at all interested in us hanging out, so it took a long time to sort of get the information and sort of put it together. And over the years Natalie would say, ‘I’m getting too old to play a dancer. You better hurry up.’ I was like, ‘Natalie, you look great. You’ll be fine.’ And then about a year out before the film or maybe a little bit earlier I finally got a screenplay together.

Hollywood News: Natalie, what was the appeal of taking on this kind of challenge?

Portman: Well, I had danced when I was younger – until I was about twelve – and I guess always sort of idealized it, as most young girls do, as the most sort of beautiful art, this expression without words. I always wanted to do a film relating to dance. So when Darren had this incredible idea that was not just relating to the dance world, but also had this really complicated character, two characters to go into, it was just an opportunity, and especially with Darren who is a director that I would do anything for – it was just something completely exciting.

Hollywood News: This film is about transformation, and you make a complete transformation on film. What sort of challenge was that?

Portman: Well, it was a great challenge and I had really, really amazing support. I mean all the teachers and coaches and the choreographer, obviously, and the director first and foremost were shaping and pushing along the way. But I started with my ballet teacher a year ahead of time, Mary Helen Bowers, and she started very basically with me, but we would do two hours a day for the six months. That was really just sort of strengthening and getting me ready to do more so that I wouldn’t get injured and then at about six months we started doing five hours a day where we added in swimming. So I was swimming a mile a day, toning and then doing three hours of ballet class a day and then two months before we added the choreography. So we were probably doing eight hours a day and the physical discipline of it really helped for the emotional side of the character because you get the sense of the sort of monastic lifestyle of only working out that is a ballet dancer’s life. You don’t drink. You don’t go out with your friends. You don’t have much food. You are constantly putting your body through extreme pain and you really get that understanding of the self-flagellation of a ballet dancer.

Hollywood News: Can you talk a little about working on the choreography and what that experience was like?

Portman: Well, the choreography [involved] different pieces for Black Swan and White Swan. I had an amazing coach, Georgina Parkinson, who very sadly passed away two weeks before we started shooting. She is sort of the premiere, was the premiere ‘Swan Lake’ coach for Odile/Odette and so she worked very specifically with me on everything from fingertips to where you put your eyes on different movements that are sort of ballet acting. It’s little gestures that you can do that really differentiate between those two characters.

Hollywood News: Given that you have a degree in psychology, Natalie, what would be your professional diagnosis of your character?

Portman: Well, this was actually a case where something that I did learn in school did translate into something practical – which is very, very rare. But it was absolutely a case of obsessive compulsive behavior, the scratching, the bulimia, obviously. Anorexia and bulimia are forms of OCD and ballet really lends itself to that because there’s such a sense of ritual – the wrapping of the shoes everyday and the preparing of new shoes for every performance. It’s such a process. It’s almost religious in nature. It’s almost like Jews putting on their tefillin or Catholics with their rosary beads and then they have this sort of godlike character in their director. It really is a devotional, ritualistic, religious art which you can relate to as an actor, too, because when you do a film you submit to your director in that way. Your director is your everything and you devote yourself to them and you want to help create their vision. So all of that, I think the sort of religious obsession compulsion would be my professional diagnosis.

Hollywood News: Mila, you obviously trained so hard for this – your physicality seemed so natural. How did you make it appear so effortless and sensual for this movie?

Mila Kunis: Thank you. It was far from effortless and sensual. It was three months of training beforehand. I was not a ballet dancer. I think most of the training, you can only fake so much, the physicality, and so you have to kind of immerse yourself in this world in a way that somebody walks and talks and handles themselves. So it was three months of training, seven days a week for four or five hours a day before production started and then during production it was pretty much exactly the same.

Hollywood News: Were there little details that you picked up along the way that made you feel more like a dancer?

Kunis: Yeah. A lot of things change, your body changes. Okay, here’s the thing about ballet that I never knew about. It’s one of the most physically excruciating sports that I’ve ever been a part of, and I say sports because they train constantly, every single day. So your body changes; your shoulders drop, your chest opens up and there’s a certain posture that I naturally don’t have because I slouch. So for three months, I had to constantly stand up straight and the way that they hold their arms because they always move their fingers when they’re dancing. That also changes and it also changes the way that they talk in real life and amongst the feet being different because of the ballet stuff. So there are a lot of different things.

Hollywood News: Can you talk about how you and Natalie prepared beforehand and got comfortable with doing the intimate scenes that you do in this movie?

Kunis: Well, any time that you do any intimate scene on film it’s going to be a little uncomfortable whether it’s the same sex or opposite sex. I think the great thing about this was that Natalie and I were actually lucky enough to be friends prior to production which made it all a lot easier. We didn’t really discuss it very much. We just kind of did it. It made sense for the character. It wasn’t put in for shock value. It wasn’t something that we needed to justify in our heads as to why we were doing it and that was it, but the truth of the matter is that we were friends before we started it. So with that it made it a lot easier.

Hollywood News: There are many realities in the film for the characters. Did you have different direction for those scenes, a different way that you played them or was it all the same?

Kunis: It was the farthest thing from continual. I think that Darren touched on it yesterday, but I think that whenever Natalie [Portman] and I were in the same scene I’m pretty sure that we did it about every which way possible. So whatever she would do I would do the opposite because the truth of the matter is that as much as we worked on the script and as much rehearsal you did you didn’t even know what was going to be played. It was also finicky and you just tried to give as much as you could in every single take and every single take was completely different. So, to answer your Hollywood News there was nothing continuous.

Hollywood News: Darren, this is described in the press notes as a companion piece to “The Wrestler.” You can see some parallels, but how did you approach this in contrast to “The Wrestler?”

Aronofsky: I don’t really think there’s that much difference. I don’t think it’s that much of a big deal. I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful they can connect. I keep saying that it doesn’t matter if you’re an aging fifty something year old wrestler at the end of his career or an ambitious twenty something year old ballet dancer, if they’re truthful to who they are and they’re expressing something real then audiences will connect. That’s always been the promise of cinema and that’s why we can see a film about a seven year old girl in Iran or an immortal superhero in America. It doesn’t matter as long as they’re truthful.

Hollywood News: How do you feel the film ultimately portrays the ballet world?

Aronofsky: I think so many dancers are incredibly relieved that there’s finally a ballet movie that takes ballet as a serious art and not as a place to have a love affair. If you actually look at ballet, the ballets themselves are incredibly dark and gothic. “Sleeping Beauty,” “Romeo and Juliet” and of course “Swan Lake” and this movie could’ve been called “Swan Lake.” We took the fairy tale of “Swan Lake” and the ballet of “Swan Lake” and basically turned all the characters, Rothbart, The Prince, The Queen and translated them into characters in our movie reality. So it’s really just a retelling of “Swan Lake,” but yes, it definitely shows the challenges and the darkness and the reality of how hard it is to be a ballet dancer. I think it also represents the beauty of the art and the transcendence that’s possible with in the art all within retelling “Swan Lake.” So there are going to be people who are always going to have issues with things, but the margin by far, the dancers that we have met and talked to are like, ‘Finally, we have a real movie about ballet.’

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By Todd Gilchrist

HollywoodNews.com: According to the tabloids, Drew Barrymore and Justin Long have plenty of romantic history in real life. But in Going the Distance, they deal with the very real challenge of keeping a relationship alive from two separate cities (one supposes in comparison to separate movie productions). The new film, directed by American Teen documentarian-turned-feature filmmaker Nanette Burstein, is a funny, sweet and surprisingly sensitive portrait of long-distance romance, and Long and Barrymore do a terrific job bringing it to life.

Hollywood News recently sat down with Barrymore, Long, and the rest of the film’s cast and crew at the Los Angeles press day for Going the Distance. In addition to talking about some of the more interesting challenges of long-distance relationships, including phone sex, the duo addressed their first on screen kiss, and talked about keeping a straight face while sharing the screen with such a formidable cast of supporting performers.

Hollywood News: Drew and Justin, early on in the film, you two have a dinner date, and you’re asking him questions about certain things, and I wanted to ask you yourself, what are your top three albums, and also, what are your favorite movies?

Justin Long: Ooh. Nice. Albums? I would say Tangled Up In Blue, which is actually Blood On The Tracks, sorry, Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks, Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Rubber Soul, I think, are my top three.

Jason Sudeikis: You forgot the new Justin Bieber.

Long: Well, that’s assumed, yeah. That’s given. The Bieb’s Greatest Hits. Leave it to Bieber.

Drew Barrymore: I’m gonna go with Annie Hall, Lost In America, and Sullivan’s Travels. Those are my three favorite – some of my favorite movies.

Long: Albums!

Barrymore: Spank me! No, I’m just kidding. Oh God, albums – a Radiohead album… I’m such a music nut too, this is really sad. It’s like sometimes, when someone says, “Let’s go to breakfast,” and it’s like you’ve never eaten before, and your brain just goes blank. I’m gonna call a brain blank on this one. I’m sticking with movies.

Long: I’m gonna say for what it’s worth, Annie Hall, Back To The Future, and… we’re gonna do Way Out West. Well, it’s a little more of a sentimental movie for me, Way Out West.

Hollywood News: Drew, Erin is more modern, sassy, and outspoken than some of the rom-com characters you’ve played. I wonder if the fact that she was a more modern woman attracted you to the part?

Barrymore: Yeah, I definitely was excited to play… I just wasn’t in that place in my life where I wanted to play a cuckoo, wacky role-reversal scenario. I wanted to play someone – you’re all travelers, and you try to make distance work with relationships, and someone who can hang out with guys, and loves women, but isn’t – has spine and is funny and I feel like I relate to that kind of person right now in my life. It was a pleasure for me to get to improv and work on a much more free-flowing way where you could play around and you don’t have to be so censored, because you had an R-rating. That, to me, was just an absolute pleasure.

Hollywood News: What was the most challenging scene?

Barrymore: My most challenging – well, one of the challenges I was most excited about was doing the drunk scene, and me and Nanette really focused on what type of drunk is she, and what can we ad-lib, and what can be spontaneous, like, if you were really angry, how would you just let loose? It was the most fun day at work ever, because I just really let loose.

Long: A monkey flinging poo. I would say some of the naked stuff was a little uncomfortable, but I think the most challenging was trying to keep a straight face around these clowns. A lot of this intimate, sexual stuff around a room full of 30, 40 grown men was a challenge.

Hollywood News: I thought the casting of Christina Applegate and Drew as sisters was genius, because you both started in this business when you were kids, and you’ve lived your whole life in the public eye. When did you realize that you were going to have this relationship of your personal life with the rest of the world, and how has it affected you?

Barrymore: I thought it was interesting. I thought we started to really look alike, which I thought was cool. I love when people cast siblings that actually feasibly could have come from the same womb, so I felt like we started to morph. We used to be in a dance class together when we were kids, but she looked really good in spandex, and I did not. I celebrated it. I was horrified, in the corner, but I’ve known her forever! We have a lot of parallels. It worked for us.

Hollywood News: The key moment in any romantic comedy is that first kiss. When you see something like that in a script, is it something you think about, or is it just part of the role, and you just think of it as one more part of the job?

Long: Yeah, I was like, “Necessary evil. Okay. Here we go.” No, the first kiss for us in the movie was very sloppy, we were drunk! We were stoned! Sorry. We were stoned and it was just so easy to do, we’re so comfortable. Is that what you mean? I like to think about… my grandmother. Just because she’s always been an inspiration to me, in my life. I think you just hope that you’re invested in the scene, hopefully, and sometimes it can be a surprise when you’ve never kissed anyone before you’ve just met recently, and people have different ways with kissing, and sometimes it can be very jarringly uncomfortable. There can be very little movement involved, and then a quick, sudden movement from the tongue that you don’t expect.

Barrymore: I just was lucky, for me, because he’s a good kisser. So I was like, “Phew! Thank God.” It’s the worst when you’re kissing someone who’s not a good kisser, and you’re trying to make it look good, and you feel like you’re just working on your own. At least it was a real team effort.

Long: She’s a great kisser too, I just want to reiterate. Right back at you.

Hollywood News: Drew and Justin, you had that couple cute scenes where you exchange your gifts, the Tom Cruise poster and the Centipede shirt. What’s your most cherished item in your house?

Barrymore: Any of my dogs are my most cherished thing, I’d have to say.

Hollywood News: Was the phone sex scene scripted or off the cuff?

Barrymore: I think the Marky Mark was written, for sure and I was so excited to hit that. I really wanted to hit hard.

Long: I think you told him that and he got – - remember that?

Barrymore: I did tell him that. I ran into him at an award show and I was like, “I just talked about how hot you are in your underwear and you’re sexy.”

Long: It didn’t go over great. I think in his defense, it is a strange thing to just come up and say. I don’t think he was prepared for it but I think he was flattered.

Barrymore: Who would not be excited about that? And he’s a very nice guy. I’ve had other conversations with him that went much better than that. Nothing against him for sure. That was a great scene written and I was really excited to go out there and try it because I just thought this is one of those things that’s going to fail miserably and be a really gross, upsetting moment or it could be fun and exciting. It was just one of those scenes you just have to kind of go for it not knowing if it’s going to work or not but don’t compromise along the way because you’re afraid of it.

Hollywood News: And you were on the phone with each other.

Barrymore: And we shot it simultaneously.

Long: We were comparing who had a more awkward experience, me as a guy in front of a room full of men simulating masturbation, or Drew. I said, “All the guys in my room, all the crew guys were trying to make jokes to keep it light. They were making sex jokes. So it made it kind of more awkward. I’d have to laugh and then get into this weird sexual mode.” But I think Drew had it more awkward because she said everyone in the room was being stone cold silent and respectful and it made it that much weirder for her. They were tiptoeing around whispering and we’re in this very intimate – - but then Nanette kept coming over to me and she kept describing cinematically how to masturbate, how it would look better if I – - She’s like, “You know, try kinda up like this. You can kind of go in like this.” I was like, “Nanette, I think I know how to do it. I’ve had a lot of experience.”

Hollywood News: How did it feel to have a real ensemble in the group of actors you guys assembled for this movie?

Barrymore: I find that films for me watching them work best when you’re kind of really invested in the whole group of people. I love films, whether it’s like a Judd Apatow or Christopher Guest, they have this great sort of alumni quality and you’re just really into all the people in it. You really like the people’s world so when you cut back and forth between a couple and it’s like their friends or family or it’s just this group of people interacting, I love when the chemistry goes far beyond just the couple. This movie stands on that and Jim Gaffigan who’s not in this room right now, I almost sabotaged every single one of his takes because he’s so funny. I think this movie, if you like it, at least one of the reasons I like it best is because of all the people in it.

Long: I pride myself on being able to hold it together and being stable and keep it together. I’ve never had a harder time keeping a straight face than working with these guys. Rob Riggle and Kristen Schall, we were so lucky to be surrounded by all these people.

Barrymore: I ruined most of her takes. I felt terrible.

Hollywood News: Do you see this as a recession romance?

Barrymore: I just feel like I personally want something that I can escape into and sort of forget what’s going on around me but I don’t want to lose sight of being able to relate to something. So for me, I just want that beautiful striking balance. I feel like this film has that. I’m laughing but I’m crying and relating and emotional about it. I feel like it gets surprisingly real but then it does come and save you and make you laugh. I think the question is more eloquent than the answer actually.

Long: I disagree. I was indifferent about the question and I loved the answer. I also think the fiscal realities of both the characters play a large part and it was nice to see that played out, something that a lot of people, especially now can relate to and just the things that you take for granted when you enter into a long distance relationship, chief among them the logistics. Just getting from point A to B and what is involved with that.

Barrymore: You’re like I can’t. You want to see each other but you can’t because of money or schedule.

Long: I ran out of fuel for my hot air balloon.

Barrymore: Obligation, absolutely.

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Last month, we were able to attend a press conference with the “Guys,” as well as director Adam McKay and co-stars Eva Mendes and Michael Keaton. We’ll bring you exclusive content from our interviews all week long, leading up to a full review of “The Other Guys” on opening day.

One of the first questions directed at McKay asked how he balanced the requisite cop-drama elements with the script’s intended comedy.

“You know there are certain beats that you have to hit,” McKay told the gathered journalists. “(Steve Coogan) has to be taken from them in the car, because that’s what’s happening to them in the scene. And then you know also know when there are scenes where you can just go off. If it’s Mark saying a monologue or Will chewing out Mark, you know you’ve got room there. We sort of identify the areas where you can get sort of fuzzy and crazy, like when Michael (Keaton) was talking to the Bed, Bath and Beyond employees. We improvised about a half-hour worth of material out of just that, where it just went on and on.”

“This, probably, is the most plot-driven movie we’ve done,” Ferrell added.

When asked if he contributed knowledge of action-movie mechanics, thanks to his extensive experience shooting pictures like “Max Payne,” “Shooter,” “The Departed” or “The Italian Job,” Wahlberg admitted, “I obviously had a lot of fun making this movie. I certainly felt very comfortable when it came to anything cop-ish or action (related). But with all of the other (comedic) stuff, I just basically wanted to follow their lead.”

“It was funny, we’d be shooting a big, giant action scene, and Will and I would be like, ‘Wow, look at this. We’re breaking a window!’” said McKay. “And Mark would come over, almost yawning, and be like, ‘Yeah, we did this one time except I was being shot out of a cannon and I was on fire.’ And we’d be like, ‘You know what, Mark, let us have our fun. Please.’”

We’ll have more coverage of “The Other Guys” as the week progresses, including additional quotes from Ferrell, Wahlberg, Eva Mendes and Michael Keaton.

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By Todd Gilchrist

hollywoodnews.com: Although he’s just shy of 80, Robert Duvall seems as active as he did when he started his acting career some 50 years ago: from Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird to Felix Bush in Get Low, Duvall has played every variety of cultured, ignorant, aggressive, deferential, poetic, blustery character you can imagine, and shows no signs of slowing down. In Get Low, his latest, he’s commanding the screen as a bearded, eccentric recluse who emerges from self-imposed exile to enlist a funeral director and his assistant for a living funeral – as in one for himself that he wants to attend while he’s still around.

Hollywood News joined a small group of press Wednesday to talk to Duvall and his co-star, Sissy Spacek, about this idiosyncratic little film. In addition to talking about the appeal of Felix Bush, both actors examined their approach to playing various roles, and Duvall reflected on the longevity of his career, which he hopes will continue well into the future.

Hollywood News: Sissy, what was your rehearsal process like, or what did you do to develop the chemistry we saw on screen?

Robert Duvall: There was no –

Sissy Spacek: We really didn’t have any rehearsal. I think Bill [Murray] and Aaron, the director and I read through the script, but we ran lines on set occasionally just so we would remember things, but we didn’t really rehearse. This man comes in prepared.

Duvall: No, no. If you’re not prepared, Take One is a rehearsal, because you can always take Take Two and Take Three – or the rehearsal before Take One is a rehearsal. So I don’t think you have to rehearse necessarily. I think you can, but Take One is a rehearsal. But sometimes Take One is the one they use, too. So it’s different strokes, I think.

Spacek: I came thinking “I’m going to watch Bobby and see how he, you know, see his process, but you can’t see it. It’s invisible.

Duvall: Well, especially with writing like this. It helps to make it invisible, the writing is so good in this. The structure of this script, the myth, the tale, the Southern tale is so beautifully written you just go along with it, really.

Hollywood News: What is it about the characters that resonated with each you?

Spacek: One of the things that I loved was I really loved Felix Bush, and he’s a peculiar character – he’s funny and he’s deep, and I’ve often felt like Felix, wanting to what I call “go to ground” and just get away from the maddening crowd. Not for 40 years, but –

Duvall: Not even 40 days.

Spacek: Not even 40 days. Well, 40 days would be good.

Duvall: 40 hours.

Spacek: You know, the thing I loved about it was that for me, I didn’t think, oh, Maddie is this character I have to play. It was the piece, really, that pulled me in, and it’s a very lyrical story. When I was reading it, I just never knew from page to page what was going to happen. I guessed a couple of times, and I guessed wrong. But they’re also people that I’ve – I’ve known people like that. I grew up in a rural area and I live in a rural area now, and there are people that their personas are very expansive, like Felix Bush’s character, and it was just the overall lyricism, I think, of the film, and kind of the quirkiness of it.

Duvall: There was someone I was talking to today who said there was a kind of mysticism to the way things went.

Spacek: I think it has depth. More than it being about the characters or what the characters do, it’s about what the characters feel and think. It’s a real – I don’t know, you stumped me (laughs). Help me out here.

Duvall: No, you said it. I don’t have to say anything.

Hollywood News: Robert, this seems like almost a companion piece to To Kill a Mockingbird. Do you see parallels with your character here with Boo Radley?

Duvall: No, I disagree. Many people say that and they’re both hermetic guys but this guy could have been a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor, and that guy was off a little bit mentally. This guy, his hermetic life isn’t an arbitrary thing, he chooses [it]. I think the writing and the whole project is a little bit like Horton Foote who made the adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, but they’re both hermit guys but very different.

Hollywood News: How does it feel that this is finally coming out, and what do you have coming up?

Spacek: Well, first of all, it feels great to – we’re tired (laughs). It feels great to have it finally coming out, because we want people to get to see it, and it’s a lovely movie. You know, it’s always nice to have a movie in the can, but this was getting ridiculous. And I am leaving this weekend to do The Help, down in Mississippi.

Duvall: I am leaving tomorrow to go to Texas to do a film called Seven Days in Utopia with Lucas Black, who’s pretty much a scratch golfer. Usually golf movies, I haven’t seen too many of them but I don’t think they can hit the ball, the actors, but this kid’s a legitimate golfer. So I’ll be working with him, it will be nice, and it will be in Utopia, Texas.

Hollywood News: Sissy can you elaborate on your role in The Help?

Spacek: Well, I haven’t really done it yet, so I haven’t really got it figured out. But obviously I play Mrs. Walters, and she’s the mother of one of the lead characters that’s played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

Hollywood News: Robert, can you talk about finding the substance in the dialogue? Because it all seems very simple, but it’s got real resonance as well.

Duvall: Just go with it. I mean, it’s very specifically written that way by the two authors, and especially Charlie Mitchell from Alabama came in later and put the final touches, embellishments and also the structure and you just went with it and tried to feel it. You know, just go with it – the writing just kind of takes you. You think about the character and you daydream about the character day and night, and you just kind of let it happen. The writing is beautiful, but it’s nothing that makes you feel foreign when you read the dialogue. It just takes you.

Hollywood News: Robert, is there something that particularly appeals to you about working with younger or first-time directors?

Duvall: No, it’s mainly the script or the story, and then it just so happens that the director might be a first-time director. That’s okay. I mean, it might not be okay if it’s the 50^th time he’s directed. You’ve got to say, beware, careful. But it can be fantastic. There’s always a time where you’re kind of parrying, no matter how much experience they have. You try to stake out your ground, and it should be collaborative thing and it can be and sometimes there are differences and there’s conflict, and that can be better sometimes than if it’s 1000 percent harmonious. That can end up dull sometimes.

Hollywood News: When did you first hear of this story and when did it first catch your attention? And can you talk about casting Bill Murray, who’s great in the movie?

Duvall: Yeah, it was good working with him. He added a lot of stuff and in between takes he would play music on set, crazy different types of music, and he was always on the present in a pretty good way, I think. He added a lot, and I think he came on a little bit later but he heard about the project, he doesn’t have an agent but they finally got it to him and he responded, he really wanted to do it. I don’t know where he is today. He never showed up in LA. [But] I think the director and producer thought of him. Way, way, way back they were thinking of other people, I think, and then he kind of got wind of it and he approached them as much as they approached him.

Hollywood News: Can you talk about the first time you heard this story?

Duvall: Yeah, well, it was a true story but it’s all mainly fictionalized so it’s a new thing, even from the reality of the old guy. And it was a when I first heard about it and read about it, I liked it, the idea of a guy who sets up and goes to his own funeral, because it was probably something I would never do. They’re just good characters. It’s like Chekhov or anything. It’s our own. Some Russian ballet master woman said there’s no culture in America, but if you look you can find interesting stuff in this country, don’t you think?

Hollywood News: Robert, can you reflect upon your now 50-year career since debuting with To Kill a Mockingbird and how it’s evolved?

Duvall: Well, I had a wonderful career. Had I only worked with Horton Foote who wrote that adaptation, had I only worked with Horton Foote and Francis Ford Coppola, I would have had a wonderful mini career. But I’ve had many other opportunities as well. And Horton was a friend for – how many friends do you have for 50 years and stay friends? Two or three, you know. But it’s been a good career and it’s been varied and I haven’t done theater in quite a while since I did American Buffalo on Broadway, but I like film. I figured there are certain film projects you can do on stage anyway, but I don’t like to do things seven or eight times a week. It’s like eating steak every night – you get tired. But I’ve had a great career and it’s been varied and there’s I always like to think of myself with potential. There’s stuff left even as we speak, there’s stuff out there.

Hollywood News: So how do you prepare, as an actor, for a movie?

Duvall: Depends on the part. Sometimes you don’t prepare much. I mean, when I did Lonesome Dove way back I rode horses day and night for like three or four months, and that got me ready for that. Different things, you know, but something like this, you just sit. This part, we spent Christmas in northern Argentina with my wife’s parents and her family, so I was just sitting in this little hotel studying the part, looking at the Andes, these beautiful Andes mountains, and it gave me a sense of solitude and peace, rumination. Different way, depends on the project. There are many ways to approach it, some simpler than others.

Spacek: Well, exactly like Bobby said, it depends on the role. In Coal Miner’s Daughter I went to Nashville and worked with Loretta, her producer and her band. One movie, they set up a real kitchen for me in the location, I was playing a farm wife, and I baked pies and bread all day, and the crew just – I had them eating out of my hands. I could say when we were shooting, “Would you move that light?” “Oh, you made that good cherry pie. Sure I will!” It’s a wonderful thing, one film I learned, when I was working with Tommy Lee Jones, on a film he directed, I learned to ride side saddle, The Good Old Boys.

Duvall: She does it better than I do, but when I did Tender Mercies down in Italy, Texas, and all those towns, Waxahachie. I got up and sang with the local bands, and see the people two-stepping by you and everything, hopefully there’s not a fight breaking out in the back, you do that as your homework too.

Spacek: That’s one of the real beautiful perks, you get to do these things you wouldn’t ordinarily get to do, and people help you. It’s great, I learned to make strudel on a table where you rolled it out on the whole table!

Duvall: You get a jack of all trades, master of some. So you try to master those things.

Hollywood News: You both have largely been associated with rural roles, but you’ve also done urban ones, and I was wondering, aside from the accents, do you think there’s any difference between those two kinds of roles when you take them and how you approach them?

Duvall: Oh, they’re different, yeah. I don’t know if it can be explained. Billy Bob Thornton wants to direct The Hatfields and the McCoys, he said, “no New York actors will be allowed below the Mason-Dixon Line.”

Spacek: That is true, there’s something about Southern characters-

Duvall: Maybe an English actor would be better at it than a guy from New York, playing a Southern guy.

Spacek: Maybe. I wouldn’t sell those New York actors short.

Duvall: When I played Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals, we brought Bob Easton back, this great dialectitian, he lives out in Texas. They wanted a Virginia accent, he said, “Well, there’s twelve distinct Virginia accents, from the Piedmont to the coast.” Black and white, many different accents. You’ve just gotta hit on a flavor sometime, rather than just going for an all out accent.

Spacek: I think people are people. The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is eliminate the human condition. I think people in the north, and the south, and the east and the west, anywhere they come from are just as interesting, and they’re humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I’m just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful. And the music, I’ve been so fascinated with that. But when I first started working as an actress, I thought, “I am going to break the stereotype, the Southern stereotype. We’ve gotten a bad rap.” I don’t think I did it alone, but… (laughs) there’s so many different Southern accents.

Duvall: When I was in the Army, I bunked over a guy that was a Virginia farmer. For some reason, we changed companies a month or so later, I bunked over a guy that was a potato farmer from Maine, and they both were very rural guys. The potato farmer from Maine was almost related to this speech from Old England, but they both were interesting guys, and both rural guys. And if you could capture either one on film, it would be wonderful. But it goes back to the story, a guy drove in a car service in New York, and he says, “You know, when I was in the Deep South in the Army, in the hills, all those hillbillies and those guys in the creeks in the mountains, they constantly outscore the New Yorkers on the aptitude tests.” Interesting.

Spacek: How’d they know that?

Duvall: He was in the Army. I don’t know if that’s a generalization, but it’s specific to him. You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don’t know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

Hollywood News: Do you think there’s any different in their body language?

Duvall: I don’t know if you can break it down, maybe. Somebody did some research recently about if you bump people in a school room, guys in the South were quicker to fist fight than guys from the North.

Spacek: Well, probably because people from the North are used to getting bumped. It’s crowded where they are. I think maybe part of the thing is that the South is so hot, that people are pushed to their limits.

Duvall: Yeah, but the hottest I’ve ever felt in my life is Chicago, IL. Sixteen year, when all those people died in a heatwave. I’ve been in Houston, and the Philippines, and that’s the hottest I’ve ever felt. I don’t know why.

Spacek: Maybe because they weren’t serving sweet tea.

Hollywood News: Sort of along the same lines, having played a lot of Southern or Midwestern characters, what is the key to playing one authentically? Because if it’s not right, it’s absolutely wrong. You guys have consistently done a great job of playing characters that seem fully authentic, rather than somebody, like a New York actor trying to affect a twang.

Duvall: It’s a pleasant challenge.

Spacek: It’s a pleasant challenge, I think for me it’s what I know. I’m just attracted. Also, maybe we can choose better Southern scripts, because we’re familiar with that genre, and we’ve lived that, and we see beyond the stereotypes.

Duvall: Yeah. When I played Robert E. Lee, I’d seen it done before, and I didn’t agree with it, but my father was from Alexandria, Virginia, and he went to the Naval Academy when he was 16 years old, off the farm from a one-room country school, he went to high school at 11, and he talked probably just like Robert E. Lee talked, who spent most of his growing-up years near Alexandria, VA. “Out” and “house,” that soft r, so I just talk like my father and my uncles when I played that part. Because that’s the way Lee must’ve talked. I once was in – where they played golf, in eastern Scotland, and some people were talking, and I said, “I don’t mean to interrupt you, but do you happen to come from near the South Carolina border?” They said, “Yes, we do.” And I think the most beautiful English spoken is from Virginia, down to the South Carolina border. More than England or anyplace. Beautiful English. Soft, cultivated, yeah. “Our area.” They’d talk about “our area.” There’s so many different ones, black and white. There’s accents all over the South. Parts of Georgia, they’ll say “furst,” and New Orleans too, almost like New York somewhat. And Texas has so many.

Spacek: Down in Texas we say, “hurri-kin”, and “forrid,” not “forehead”, my girls laugh at me.

Duvall: But there’s so many different accents, I think, in Texas too.

Hollywood News: Robert, who’d you prefer as a leading lady? The mule, or Sissy?

Duvall: If she’d give me a little hoot, I’d prefer the leading lady over the mule. I can’t answer that one! (laughs) That was an improvised scene we did! When I introduced you to the mule, that was improvised! That wasn’t in there.

Spacek: He only likes me because I held my gloved hand out, with that mule.

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Although she had more than ten credits on her resume by the time An Education was released last year, Carey Mulligan came out of nowhere and became the closest thing Hollywood has to an overnight success these days when the film became a surprise hit and a award-season contender. Subsequently, she hasn’t let that initial tidal wave knock down her momentum, nor drag her out to the dregs of commercial viability: after a tiny role in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, she co-stars in Oliver Stone’s upcoming follow-up to his 1987 classic Wall Street, entitled Money Never Sleeps. But before that film is release later this year, she turns up as one of the leads in the new film The Greatest, where she plays the pregnant girlfriend of a dead boy (played by Kick-Ass star Aaron Johnson) who turns up at his family’s home looking for refuge.

Hollywood News recently spoke to Mulligan in Los Angeles at a press day for the film. In addition to speaking about the appeal of working on another modest project as she ventures tentatively into the world of big-budget filmmaking, she offered a few updates about some future projects, including Money Never Sleeps, the Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation Never Let Me Go, and My Fair Lady, a proposed remake of the acclaimed musical for which Mulligan is considered the perfect stand-in for her on-screen forebear, Audrey Hepburn.

Hollywood News: What was the award season like? It seems like such a big deal.

Carey Mulligan: It was long (laughs). In a way, it was really from Sundance on. Sundance was really the first time I had done any press at all. I had done like one interview in England before that. So that was doubly nerve-wracking because I had two films there and it was the first time that I had a big part in any film. The award season was crazy and all good, but ultimately, it is not why you sign up. After a while, you are sort of aching to go and act. Enough people ask you what you are wearing, and you are like, “I used to be an actress before I wore clothes.”

Hollywood News: Does it become distracting at all?

Mulligan: Actually, I wrapped Wall Street at the end of November and then I haven’t worked since. So I don’t think I could have done a film in January or February through all of that. It was good to do Wall Street at the same time as releasing An Education, because when I was promoting, I always knew I was going back to work. But I think it would have been too much and I wouldn’t have been able to do either things properly. It was good to not work for the past couple of months, but I would like to now.

Hollywood News: Do you have any scripts you are looking at now? Do you have any new projects lined up?

Mulligan: Nothing lined up.

Hollywood News: There are rumors circulating that you will be playing Eliza Dolittle for a My Fair Lady remake.

Mulligan: Yeah, I have heard rumors as well. It is all rumors. I am reading things. I am kind of relieved to not really [have] taken longer than like a month off. So, this is the longest time I have not worked. It is kind of alright. I thought it would be horrible, but it has been quite fun.

Hollywood News: You seem to have a natural presence. How much do you prepare for each role, and how have you experiences varied given you’ve worked with seasoned filmmakers and total newcomers?

Mulligan: It varies. For theater, probably, is the most preparation you do, only because you have five weeks of rehearsal. The work two weeks, or week and a half, is spent sitting around discussing things. You don’t get that time in a film. On this, we had three days of rehearsal and then 28 days to film. So really, then you are like, what is on the page? What do I think? How is everyone else behaving? You just do it. There isn’t a huge amount of time for preparation, or nerves really. You kind of just have to get through the scenes. It really varies. On Wall Street, we had three weeks of sitting around and talking about the script and the characters and dissecting the script. Sometimes I think that if I do a lot of research and write a lot of things down then that makes me qualified to do the job… but often it makes no difference. It just depends on the project.

Hollywood News: What have you found works best for mastering an American accent?

Mulligan: God, I haven’t mastered it. I don’t know the secret. It is nerve-wracking because the film is coming out in America. I am distracted by bad accents. On this there was so little budget, I had two sessions with the dialect coach. That was it. There was no coach on set to monitor my accent. On Wall Street, I had a great dialect coach, Tim Monich, who is a very famous dialect coach. He could come up after every take and tweak things. That was helpful. I struggle to watch this film. I think it is brilliant and I think she did a brilliant job. I think she has done something people really rarely do, which is giving characters room to breathe. For me, accents are 95% of what you do. I think I would like to work in my own accent. I think when it comes to emotional stuff, it is really hard to hang onto an accent. If you do think of hanging onto your accent, then you are not in the moment. I always think that I’ll just do it and then if it is terrible, I’ll just fix it in ADR. I hate ADR, but when you do American accents, you have to give yourself to the fact that you’ll have to spend a couple days in the studio afterwards. It is not worth it to become preoccupied on set.

Hollywood News: How did the script come to you and what attracted you to this role?

Mulligan: The script came to me through my agent. It was the normal audition process. I think part of the attraction was that she is somewhat lighter. I think she kind of defers her grief to them because she couldn’t possibly feel as much as they do. There is sort of a generosity in that. I think she is trying to find a security and a base, and she is trying to be attached to him by being with them. I like the idea of working with a small company of actors, and with those actors especially. It kind of feels like theater. Susan [Sarandon] and Pierce [Brosnan] were a huge draw because I didn’t know Shana [Feste]. The minute we met and started working together, I just loved her.

Hollywood News: The movie was very dark, but not too depressing, and I think it was partly because of your character. Was it difficult to keep that smile through all this grieving and sadness? Do you like playing the dark and serious role?

Mulligan: Yeah, I’m always inclined to be self-indulgent [laughs]. I love getting all dramatic and I need to be held back, actually. I think Shauna did a great job with that. You can’t have four people walking around all the time crying. You need to have some levity and she was good at monitoring that for us, because with 28 days, you don’t really have time. You just play your scene and hope that someone will pull you back if you are going to far, and she did that. She had a real command of the story. She was never overprotective of her material; she was really open to changes.

Hollywood News: How does it differ working with female directors compared to working with a male director on Wall Street 2?

Mulligan: Oliver! It is different, but I can’t say if it is a female thing, a male thing, or just a barrel of individuals. With Lone [Scherfig] on An Education, she has a brilliant bluntness where there is no reward or punishment. If you are good, you are good. If you are bad, you are bad and she doesn’t favor you. She is very even. She really was dedicated to telling the story in the best way possible and has no ego at all. I loved her. She had an outsider’s perspective in that she is Danish, so she could view England in a way we wouldn’t. With Shana, it is her material and she was so passionate about it. She got it made. She trusted us with these parts, and it felt like a family environment because we were thrust together so fast and we had very little time. Susan kind of became the mother of all of us. Shana worked her ass off and it was insane. She was incredible.

Oliver was in charge of an enormous crew and the responsibility to making a sequel to a really famous film. And in trying to explain in a kind of accessible way, what happened to the economy in 2008, whilst telling a dramatic story as well. And Oliver is a trip. Every story you have ever heard about Oliver just goes out the window when you meet him and he’s great. He didn’t mollycoddle me which I kind of enjoyed. He treated me like one of the boys. You have to be ready to work and never be unprepared. He just expects you to be ready and he challenges you. There were a lot of men on Wall Street so it did feel like a very male dominated environment but then you just had to be a bit ballsy and get through it.

Hollywood News: Can you talk a little bit about Never Let Me Go?

Mulligan: I shot that last year after Sundance. That’s an adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, the guy who wrote Remains of the Day and Alex Garland adapted it and Mark Romanek directed it. And that’s me, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield and it’s been described as a Sci-Fi film, which if you’ve read the book it’s just not. It’s sort of a story about the examination of the soul, the existence of the human soul, and what makes us all basically the same and it investigates that in a love story and a friendship story and also in the fact that lives of the characters in the film are limited. Their lives are compressed into about 27 years and how they deal with that.

“WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS” TRAILER

This afternoon, Hollywood News caught up with Menke via telephone to follow up on a few of the questions she answered during the panel. In addition to talking about the process of putting together Inglourious Basterds, Menke mused about the necessity for classic film rules, and reflected about her longtime partnership with Tarantino, which began when she worked with him on Reservoir Dogs back in 1991.

Hollywood News: At the panel last night, you talked about what the changes were you implemented between the Cannes screening and the film’s theatrical release. Can you talk about what prompted you to make them?

Sally Menke: We went to Cannes knowing that we were going to be coming back and making changes. We went to Cannes really proud of the movie we were presenting, but we knew there were only so many hours in the day, and I think it was only like eight weeks from the time Quentin actually walked into the editing suite at the house that we rented. We were very proud of the movie but we knew that we were going to make changes, and we just ran out of time.

One of the scenes we changed was the cream scene. It was the end of it that we elongated with Shoshanna, where she actually breaks down, and we kind of changed some of the shots a little bit. We kind of had more going back and forth between Landa and Shoshanna, and then for the commercial release, we ended up playing a little bit more on Shoshanna. [Also,] we knew that there was a 99.9 percent chance that the [scene with the] Basterds across the street from the tavern was going to go back in, but he just wanted to play it without it, and we did.

Hollywood News: Even though Landa steals the movie in many ways, what stood out immediately for me about the film was that the story was the main character. Was the process of finding that throughline pretty faithful to how the film was shot, or did you find that it was necessary to reduce the screen time of some of the actors in order to keep the narrative moving?

Menke: I think that the balance of all of the characters was pretty much set that way in the script. Yes, there was a little bit of the characters throughout, but I would say the balance was pretty much the way it was in the script. We didn’t have to tear away from one character to give strength to another character. But as far as editing itself, in terms of how we balanced out scenes, you always do that in every single movie. You always go, okay, we’re going to play this a little bit more on Shoshanna, or we’re going to play this a little bit more on the farm. There’s always that balancing act, just specifically within scenes so that we tell the audience whose perspective this scene [is from] or who we want the audience to pay attention to. Or, to trick the audience to pay attention to this, and then, wow, really this is where we’re going with this scene.

Hollywood News: I spoke to Quentin at the junket, and interviewers were speculating about what the themes or ideas of the film were. He was pretty quick to say he wasn’t really thinking about those things consciously, and was interested to see how others analyze and interpret the movie. When you’re looking at all of a movie’s component parts and putting them together, are you thinking about what themes or motifs are emerging and which you’re now tasked with the responsibility of bringing out or fortifying?

Menke: I absolutely do, and they just become my own private feeling about what some themes and threads that I like to circulate in the back of my head. A couple of them I kept thinking about throughout the whole film that rose to the surface for me was, first of all, the power of cinema, and how we were using cinema to not only topple the Third Reich, but Winston Churchill hires Hickox based on his knowledge of German cinema. And then, also the power of words, and how Landa – and by the way, I’m working on The Green Hornet and I’m cutting a scene with Christoph Waltz right now, so I’m looking at him again as I speak to you (laughs). But Christoph’s elegance and eloquence with words – not only can he speak all of these languages, but then of course Quentin’s so eloquent with words and his ability manipulate thoughts and feelings so masterfully, and then Landa’s character can control a scene with his words and then be able to go in and out of languages and control a scene. You think that in the beginning, it’s just a contrivance that he goes, “I’m running out of my ability to speak French,” when in fact he speaks French quite well, and then you realize that is not a contrivance; he’s using it as a ploy. So the language became a thread. The cinema. The strength of a woman. There were just so many things as I was cutting this film that it was a joy and just thrilling beyond belief.

Hollywood News: Was there one sequence or scene where you and he disagreed, where you would have liked to see a shot or a cut changed a little bit, but that didn’t make it into the movie?

Menke: You know, you’re the only person who’s asked that. That’s an interesting question. I haven’t thought about that. (pauses) Let’s see… my immediate response is that there must not be because I’m having to go through all of the scenes in my head.

Hollywood News: You two share such an interesting, intimate collaboration, it would be interesting to know if you and he differed on the approach or tone or cut of any scene you worked on together.

Menke: You know, it’s pretty weird that we actually don’t have those conflicts, I have to say. It’s pretty weird, because you really are the only person to ask that, and we really do kind of agree on everything. Maybe that’s why it’s been such a long relationship, because somehow I must live in the same world as him. Even though we do live in very different worlds, we do live in the same world. Because I’m a mom and I have two kids and it’s so funny, [and I remember] after I did like the first Kill Bill and some people came over from Japan and they interviewed me and they came to my house. I have a lab and a cat and two little kids, and they came into my house and they were like, really? You’re Quentin’s editor? Where are all of the tattoos?

I remember in Kill Bill I was working so hard and I had to take a break because I was in the middle of the black and white sequence where Uma was killing all of these people and she was trying to stab this guy, and I couldn’t figure out the most effective way to stab him. So I had to go take a walk around Larchmont, and I walked outside and I was like, and I thought of all of these ways you could stab a person. Then I looked out and there was like this little baby stroller outside and I said, oh, how cute! And then I realized, oh my God, I’m thinking about how to stab a person while I’m looking at this baby! I was like, oh my God, I’m so insane.

Hollywood News: What was your initial reaction to Quentin and then how did you acclimate yourself to his world? Or was that an easy process?

Menke: Well, this is the thing: when I went to college and film school, my hero was Scorsese. I mean, my life was his world, and I lived in New York City, so when I met Quentin, which of course was on [Reservoir Dogs], the world of Reservoir Dogs was so thrilling to me, and I guess I have a dark side. I guess I do even though I couldn’t be more of a mom, and I kept thinking, Jesus, what are my kids going to think of me when they see my films? Of course, now they’re older, and they’re just normal wonderful acclimated children. But when I met Quentin, he was just so exciting and the script was so exciting and I just loved him. Every day I came home from editing Reservoir Dogs just excited. It was just so thrilling to me, and I’m so lucky. So, I don’t know – we’re just a perfect match.

“It has to speak to me in some way and that’s always hard to describe, so I don’t know what I want to do,” she explained. “This is the first time I haven’t had one of my next jobs lined up, so I have a totally clean horizon. That’s actually pretty exciting.”

In The Yellow Handkerchief, Stewart plays Martine, a troubled teenager who begins to find herself when she gets lost with an ex-convict (William Hurt) and a hyperactive teenage drifter (Eddie Redmayne). She explained that Martine’s appeal was her ordinariness, but also the seeming self-discovery of a girl who starts off isolated from everyone despite her appeal, and especially her age. “I could relate to her in that she’s so sort of the typical girl that really wants to be out there and smiling and totally in the middle of whatever is going on, but has been sort of embarrassed one too many times and has just gone, ‘I can’t do that anymore’,” Stewart said.

“I feel like she’s also isolated herself in terms of she’s put herself above everyone else. It’s like she can’t talk to people because they’ve let her down too many times and so she’s suddenly – - in reaction to that, you sort of make yourself better than them. She realizes through this journey, which is a really cool thing to see such a young person go through. To go, ‘oh God, I never looked at you and now I’m opening my eyes and I can see you and I was wrong’. So I liked that.”

One might expect that after the success of the Twilight films, Stewart would be fending away offers for any- and everything. She admitted there are plenty of people out there trying to make money off of her visibility, but that also means lots of different opportunities – which is what she’s always wanted as an actress. “I mean, it’s not like I’m getting [every offer],” she said. “It’s not like everyone’s like, ‘oooh.’ [And] you always sort of don’t look at scripts that are very clearly just a framework and they just want to put a dollar sign in the picture frame. It’s so obvious. I only want to do work that I find to be moving and that’s something that I can’t be specific about. So I’m totally lucky and I can’t believe that I am. I’m not saying that I can do anything, but I definitely have more opportunity than I’ve ever had – so it’s awesome.”

Stewart’s next movie to be released is The Runaways, a chronicle of the rise and fall of the famous all-girl rock band from the 1970s. After that, it’s back to the Twilight grindstone, where she will reprise her role as Bella for a fourth time in Breaking Dawn. Stewart said that the prospect of picking parts, and then finding them picked apart by critics or fans, is something she hasn’t tried to think about too consciously. “Really I follow, to put it absolutely lamely, my heart,” Stewart said. “I don’t have this scheme of how people are going to receive my movies in the order that I do them and why I do scary movies and why I do movies about ‘disaffected teens’, which I get all the time. They’re just people I really wanted to play. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m just playing parts that speak to me.”

The Yellow Handkerchief opens in limited release on February 26, 2010.

Depp plays the Mad Hatter, who in the actor’s typical style is fleshed out with fascinating, oddball flourishes. He explained that what he took most inspiration from was Carroll’s own idiosyncratic additions to the periphery of the character, rather than the comparatively simpler stuff of his physicality. “Ironically, it was only maybe a year prior to Tim calling, I had re-read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and what I took away from it was these very strange, little cryptic nuggets that he’d thrown in there,” he said. “I was really intrigued by them, became fascinated by them because they were asking questions that couldn’t be answered almost, or were making statements that you couldn’t quite understand.”

“Like, ‘I’m investigating things that begin with the letter M’,” Depp offered as an example. “That took me through a whole stratosphere of possibilities, and doing a little research and discovered that the M is mercury. And then, ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, [and] if I read the book again today, I’d find 100 other things that I missed last time. It’s a constantly changing book.”

Depp’s filmography is populated with adaptations of 19^th century fantasy literature, from Sleepy Hollow to his portrayal of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland. When asked what it is that keeps bringing him back to subject matter from that era, he explained it was the complexity and timelessness of that material that keeps him creatively stimulated. “I’m hoping to do The Hashish-Eater next,” Depp joked. “I just adore it, from certainly J.M. Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the states, Poe. You open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read, if it were written today, you’d be absolutely stupefied by the work.”

“It’s this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless,” he continued. “So yeah, I just love all those guys. It’s my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.”

Alice in Wonderland opens nationwide in Disney 3D on March 5, 2010.