Diane Keaton shows her comi and more in film about unexpected love

Film lets Keaton show funny side and more

By Glenn Whipp
Film Writer

There's a great sequence in the new romantic comedy "Something's Gotta Give" where Diane Keaton weeps in one short scene after another. Keaton is playing a woman who, against her better judgment, has fallen in love with the cad (Jack Nicholson) who, only a few weeks earlier, had been dating her daughter. Things take a rough turn, leading to the aforementioned sobbing, which, thanks to Keaton's deft touch, manages to be at once hilarious and poignant.

Although the trailers make it look like Nicholson's movie, "Something's Gotta Give" is really a showcase for the 57-year-old Keaton, one of the finest comedic actors of our time. She was named best actress of the year by the National Board of Review. What makes us want to start weeping is that Keaton so rarely gets to use those talents. Director Nancy Meyers even had to convince the folks over at Sony that Keaton was right for the role, giving them a crash course in a comic career that includes "Manhattan," "The First Wives Club" and an Oscar-winning turn in "Annie Hall."

"They just needed to be reminded of her brilliance," says Meyers, whose last film was the hit comedy "What Women Want." "Hopefully, after our film, everyone will be up to speed for a while."

We spoke to Keaton recently and found ourselves agreeing with co-star Nicholson's assessment that she is indeed "fascinating." Here she holds forth on hopping into bed with Jack, swapping spit with Keanu Reeves and the joys of being in a movie that shows you can be middle-age and still love life.

Q: You and Jack spend an awful lot of time in bed in this movie.

A: And it was spec-tac-u-lar.

Q: How long did you spend filming all those scenes?

A: Oh, a week, maybe two. Someone asked: What's it like being in bed with Jack Nicholson? I mean, are you kidding? Don't you want to be in bed with Jack? C'mon!

Q: I always thought more along the lines of sitting courtside at a Lakers game with him.

A: Yeah, well, that would be fun, too. But I tell you, the best way to get to know someone is to spend a week or two with them in bed. We talked about everything -- people we knew, former love affairs, you name it. Because the whole thing is so humiliating. It's embarrassing to sit there half-naked, kissing and, in the case of my character, confessing your love.

Q: And the whole time, you've got that -- what did you call it? -- "apparatus" covering your breasts ...

A: (Laughs) I love the apparatus idea because when you said that I immediately thought of something metal. (More laughter) No, thank God for the apparatus. I was glad to have it. But my breasts ... those things? Big deal, right?

Q: For a woman who wears turtlenecks all the time, you seem pretty cool with the movie's love scenes, not to mention that full-frontal nude shot.

A: I wanted to do that. There wasn't a question. I felt like I had to do it to be honorable to the movie. Look, the film is about middle-age love and this is a woman's body naked and this is a man's bottom just flailing about. Jack's making fun of himself. Why shouldn't I make fun of myself? And it's just a joke. I mean the day of shooting, it was embarrassing, but it was very brief. Big deal, right? I feel very differently about my body these days. I'm just happy it functions. This whole cult of the perfect body stuff is insane.

Q: What about the idea of a movie about a 50-something woman falling in love? I heard you had some doubts about doing that.

A: No, no, no. I was suuuuure about doing it. I knew that it was a fantastic, incredible opportunity to have fun and to do something in this genre -- the romantic comedy -- that I've been out of for a while. But there's always a conflict you have: Can I do it? I've been given this responsibility; can I pull it off?

Q: Nancy Meyers said your first question after reading the script was: Who wants to see a movie about me falling in love? Do you have that much self-doubt?

A: I do have that much self-doubt about myself, but you have to look beyond yourself and see that it's also a great opportunity to be vital and exciting and have a great time and fall in love in your mid-50s in a way that is wonderful and not a freak show. This whole fear of age is just terrible. To have actually been chosen to play a part where you stress the fact that just because you're older, you're not dour and morbid and hideously lost in the repetition and the cycle of living your life without change ... it's fantastic. And it's rare, too. Best of all is the fact that the movie is funny. That makes it all the more fantastic for people to know (Keaton sighs) that you're still funny when you're old. You live and you continue on and you have the same feelings and life is just as exciting, if not more exciting.

Q: Did playing this woman who was so transformed by love inspire you to give the whole idea another spin?

A: Well, the great part about being in this movie is that the whole experience is so out of keeping with my life. And that made it all the more perfect. I got to play at being in love.

Q: You don't see any parallels then between yourself and the character you play?

A: She's different. In her life, she has never opened up at all. Her expectations were very different.

Q: And you've opened up?

A: Babe ... oh, babe! I've been there.

Q: Now I know where you found the inspiration for all those crying scenes.

A: Boy, I remember doing that. My god. That was a long haul and much more. There was a lot of it. More, more, more. There was never enough.

Q: A lot, huh?

A: (Laughs) Nancy likes to do a lot of takes. It was exhausting because I really had to cry. It's not just something where you could do the fake thing. Well ... you could. But I couldn't.

Q: So how did you cry that river?

A: I was just jamming music as loud as I could. I was really in love with Macy Gray and the "8 Mile" soundtrack. The music was just so pounding, but sad. It would get me crying every time. I played it over and over again, and it drove everybody insane. But I was the one who had to cry so they just had to put up with it.

Q: Jack isn't the only one you make out with in the movie. You also have some pretty passionate scenes with Keanu Reeves ...

A: Stop. (Laughs) Just stop. That was embarrassing. I mean, it was fun in the moment, but when you're done you just think, This is absurd.

Q: He was very convincing in conveying his character's love for you.

A: He's a good actor, see? People underestimate Keanu.

Q: But maybe it wasn't all that hard for him to act that way ...

A: Oh shut up, man! (Laughing) You're making fun of me now and I know it!

Q: Not at all. Not at all. So, the lesson we've learned today is that love makes the world go around, and if it involves hopping into bed with Jack Nicholson or swapping spit with Keanu Reeves, so much the better.

A: Absolutely. I think love can be like that. Why not? Why can't it be? It's really all about a point of view, you know.

LA, here I come

After the success of Girl with a Pearl Earring actress Joanna Scanlan flew out to Hollywood for a rollercoaster ride of castings, premieres and pre-Oscar parties

Friday February 27, 2004
The Guardian

January 26 2004
Heathrow. Miss Scanlan, your career is waiting ... please pass on through to departures. I play Tanneke - Vermeer's maid

and the subject of one of his most famous paintings, The Milkmaid - in Girl with a Pearl Earring and my American agent swears to God that it's worth me going out to Los Angeles for the annual recruitment drive they call Pilot Season. Pilot Season is the Hajj of the thespian calendar. Every actress needs to make this casting trek at least once in her life. I may get squished in the crush but, boy, is it in a good cause. And on the upside I get to miss the London winter and use up all my savings. It's the Oscars in four weeks, we have three nominations and I'm really hoping to crash that party.

January 27

Miserable as sin in a freezing cold motel in Venice Beach. It might as well be Tobermory. On Friday I'm moving into an apartment in Santa Monica. I'm sharing with a Friend of a Friend, who tells me on the phone that it is beautiful and only a few blocks from the Pacific. Roll on California surf dream.

January 30

Raining. Finish reading what must be the best book on Hollywood ever written, Peter Biskind's homage to the 70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. As gripping as The Godfather Part II. Bafta nominations have been announced - we get a blinding 10.

To the spa. I need to blend in. Full set of acrylic nails with tips, pedicure, shoulder massage and total removal of all body hair bar eyebrows. $100 - with the exchange rate, that feels very affordable. Economy measure, off to Supercuts for a £20 trim. In the mirror, I'm sure I can see my scalp. Am I developing male-pattern baldness?

January 30

I could howl. The "beautiful apartment" is a squalid dump. And the F-of-F turns out to be a wannabe actress with boundary issues. Within seven hours of meeting her, she asks me to check out the humungous zit on the end of her nose, and backs me into a corner. I think I'm gonna hurl.

January 31
As they say out here, today was awesome (pronounced arse-m). Tiptoe out of the stinky flat at dawn to take a trip with my friend, Peter Webber, the Girl with a Pearl Earring helmer (that's director to you). We zoom up the Pacific Coast highway to Santa Barbara, home of many of Hollywood's elite. It's a glorious day; the coast looks like the crispest white handkerchief you ever did see. All the directors of the Oscar- nominated movies are sitting having lunch as we arrive at the Santa Barbara film festival.

We are introduced to the guy chairing the day. My legs turn to jelly; it's Peter Biskind! One day I'm reading the book, next day I'm pressing the flesh. I rush round to Barnes and Noble to buy his new book about the Miramax phenomenon, Down and Dirty Pictures. He signs it for me: "Congratulations on Girl with a Pearl Earring." Whaat? I didn't even know he'd seen it. Out of the corner of my eye I notice one of the stewards giving me hostile looks. I smile weakly, suddenly feeling out of place. She approaches Peter and whispers something in his ear. He looks horrified. She wants to call security to have the balding English stalker removed. In Hollywood you're either in or out. And there's no way of really knowing which way it's going to go.

Dash back from Santa Barbara to go to a party given by Colleen Camp for Lost in Translation. Colleen is a legend. She was one of the best things in one of the best movies of the 70s, Apocalypse Now, and has made more than 50 movies as an actress and producer. It's in a genuine Hollywood home, a tranquillising blend of chintz and family photographs. So much of the upscale side of Hollywood reminds me of the life my grandmother lived on the Wirral in the 1950s. A diet of domestic staff, early nights and golf clubs. The difference is that Hollywood has swapped whisky for wheatgrass shots, and Craven A cigarettes for cosmetic surgery.

We arrive earlyish and are warming our bottoms by the fire when we notice Barbra Streisand curled up in black cashmere on the sofa and Jim Carrey framed by the alcove in the corner. The funny girl and the funny face. Gradually the room fills up with Hollywood's A-listers. They all look terribly approachable in jeans and winter woollies. By the time I'm queuing for the loo with Ben Stiller, Benicio del Toro, Christian Slater and Robert Duvall I'm in need of a very hard slap.

I chat to Sofia Coppola, the darling of this year's Hollywood darlings. She has a touching ennui about her, so much so that she seems to find it hard to find the enthusiasm to lift her lip when she smiles. Very alluring.

What really freaks me out is that they have all watched their screeners of Girl with a Pearl and appear to know us. I'm introduced to Meg Ryan and she turns her thousand-watt smile on me. I start to shake. Meg is very flattering. I'm so flabbergasted I forget to flatter back, so Meg and I end up having a toe-curling 20-minute conversation all about me . I'm able to flee when Cher causes a momentary kerfuffle in the corner.

Catch up with Scarlett Johannson, and share some chocolate cake in the kitchen with her. She's just as gorgeous and funny as when we made our film. Back at Peter's hotel we share out the goody-bag from the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I get a plus-size beige thong and a jar of olives and he gets a computer game and a packet of Tylenol painkillers. Perfect end to a perfect day.

February 3

My first big casting. Pull into Paramount studios. There's a bigger security deal going on here than at JFK. Car search, and terrifying passport scrutiny. This is a beautiful lot. Quaint New York brownstone streets and a 100-ft blue-sky screen nestle between elegant topiaried hedging. I'm put to sit among a gaggle of 25-year-old lipgloss-lovelies reading for an Al Pacino movie. Is there some mistake? I try to strike up conversation with the girls around me, like we do at London castings. They look at me like I'm whacko.

My name is called and I'm whisked to the head of the queue. If looks could kill. I smile weakly and by way of apology wish my fellows luck as I squeeze by.

The casting director meets me on the stairs. She's seen Girl with a Pearl three times. She gives a micro- analysis of my performance. Feel like Sally Field famously collecting her Oscar: you like me, you really like me.

February 4

I begin to acclimatise to the look of the older women in Beverly Hills. The surgery gives their faces a strange vulnerability, which instinctively makes me want to go get them a glass of water, kneel beside them and say, "Don't worry, it'll all be all right."

February 5

Raining again. The F-of-F greets me at dawn with the news that all the rancid carpets in the flat are being stripped and we need to vacate for 24 hours. I'm livid.

Thank God one of my friends from London is staying in the uber-ultra hotel, The Avalon. She's making a $90m mall-whacker with Keanu Reeves at Warner Bros and has a spare room. I move in.

February 7

Keanu's assistant has fixed us up with tickets for a pre-Grammys concert at the famous House of Blues. Curtain finally goes up at 2am. P Diddy sweeps in like Moses parting the Red Sea. He is surrounded by his posse. Their shiny heads stand out a foot above the crowd like a mushroomy fairy-ring. At least I'm not that bald. Yet. On stage Mary J Blige is rooted like a mighty redwood and next to her Sting wilts like a daisy in a drought.

February 10

Something's happened. I've fallen in love with LA. All day I've been singing Neil Young ballads. I've never fallen in love with a place before. Maybe it happened in one of my mind-blowing casting meetings. Maybe it happened when I stood on the sound stage where Now, Voyager and My Fair Lady were made, watching my friend stab Keanu. Or maybe when Laura took me up into the hills above Malibu and showed me the dusty scrub they used for alien planets in Star Trek. Or maybe it happened just sitting in cafes emailing. Now I'm scared. What if LA doesn't love me back?

February 11

Phew. I receive an invitation in the post for the premiere of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, the hot sequel to the 80s leg-warming sizzler. And I had another brilliant casting meeting. The casting director thinks I'm right for at least four roles. I'm racing through Down and Dirty Pictures. It's genius. I email Peter Biskind a fan letter.

February 13

I know how Joe Simpson felt touching that void. My friend's left town and I have to move back to the flat. No flooring now, no curtains, no bed. The F-of-F is on the phone talking in Danish. I last 10 minutes before walking out again to sit in Starbucks.

February 15

Despite 10 nominations we failed to clinch a single Bafta. Harsh. At least Scarlett Johannson won. Suddenly I realise I've been here three weeks and haven't been in for any actual pilot auditions. What happened to the four roles?

I've met vice presidents from lots of companies - from 20th Century Fox to Jamba Juice. They say they love me, but they are not actually climbing into bed with me. People tried to warn me gently about this, but I wouldn't listen. Biskind's books are an object lesson and yet, you see (and this hurts), I thought that with me, it would all be different.

As Bette Davis might say: you fool, you silly little fool.

February 16

Depressed. I go round to my friend Laura's. She has cable and I plant myself in front of BBC America. Over the weekend I watch six episodes of House Invaders, four Bargain Hunts, three What Not to Wears, the final episode of The Office, a Red Cap Special and a zillion ads for hair loss remedies. Mother's milk.

February 25

Oscar fever running very high. It was all anyone could talk about at the Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights premiere last night. The shoe-ins seem to be Sean Penn, Charlize Theron and the Lord of the Rings. This week is going to be wild, I have after all, been invited to some big parties and Soho House has set up camp in the Hollywood hills for the week. All the Girl with a Pearl Earring nominees, Eduardo Serra (cinematographer), Ben van Os (production designer) and Dien van Straalen (costume designer), are swooping in to LA for Sunday's big event.

I have a feeling that at least one of our number will be up on that stage ... and if that happens I'm going to have to do something really really special to celebrate. Something off the scale. Like, maybe, coming home. What a lovely thought.

February 26

Ohmigod. If the monsoon wasn't enough excitment I just got an invitation to a big Oscar party. What in thunder am I gonna wear? I only brought with me an old House of Fraser special. Is is too late to ring round to borrow from Issey Miyake or any of the designers who have set up dress and shoe wear-houses for the week in Beverly Hills?

At least I have a lead on diamonds from my old pal Rusty in Rodeo Drive. Can I get it all sorted in three days? And how the heck am I gonna wangle myself an appointment at Supercuts during Oscar week. Boy have I got calls to make.

© Joanna Scanlan.

New Shot of the Vermin Man in Constantine!

Source: Warner Bros. Pictures Friday, February 27, 2004

Warner Bros. has provided Superhero Hype! with a sketch of the Vermin Man in the Hellblazer comic book adaptation, Constantine, opening September 17.

The film tells the story of irreverent supernatural detective John Constantine (Keanu Reeves), who has literally been to hell and back. When Constantine teams up with skeptical policewoman Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz) to solve the mysterious suicide of her twin sister (also played by Weisz), their investigation takes them through the world of demons and angels that exists just beneath the landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Caught in a catastrophic series of otherworldy events, the two become inextricably involved and seek to find their own peace at whatever cost.

Click on the teaser image below to check out the full sketch:

SET VISIT: Djimon Hounsou Talks

In Part 4 (read Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3) of our Constantine set visit, we talk with actor Djimon Hounsou about playing Papa Midnite in the Francis Lawrence "Hellblazer" comic book adaptation.

What are your character's powers?

My powers are very spiritual actually. Midnite is suave. He's a witch doctor, obviously is a great friend to John Constantine. At one point, he started doing what John Constantine is doing now. They used to do it together before he took a different direction.

What direction did John take?

The direction he took was more of a business direction where he's not taking sides.

Will you ask to keep the costume?

You should see the other costume as well. I have another one. It's beautiful. It's very flamboyant as well, even more than this one with a little bit of fur. It's not something that I'm going to be wearing around.

How are the shoes?

The shoes are different than the other one as well. They're very nice nice as well. I'm suave.

Is your character in the comics?

Yes, he is, I think. But you know what? I'm going to have to double check on that because I didn't read the comic book, and obviously the story, the film is quite different from the comic book.

How is it different?

How a comic book is portrayed is completely different from film in ways that would almost be pointless to research a comic book or read all about the characters.

Constantine uses his friends in the comics. They tend to die off. Is it the same in the movie?

Pretty much. You do have the feel, the essence of the comic book most definitely. You do have a sense of desperation on the part of John Constantine obviously.

What's the significance of your necklace, a silver scorpion?

Don't f**k with me, you know.

What is Midnite's role in the film?

Midnite at this point has much more of a business approach to Constantine, his longtime friend and longtime partner. He completely distanced himself from that world and became completely neutral in society where everything is really about business for him and he took no sides in the fight against evil. He's just there to accommodate the good and the bad.

Is he half demon?

No, Midnite is not half demon. Definitely not. He definitely is human. He's a witch doctor.

How was working with Keanu?

It's been quite an exciting experience because he's done so much and working with him on this picture firsthand, it's quite a nice surprise because I realize how actually he's a very talented man. He's so anal about the work. The guy has received some criticism, both good and bad, but working with him, you learn the generosity that he has for the work and with the people that are a part of this picture. He definitely is a very simple man and somewhat maybe misunderstood. He's reclusive in a way and very private.

What is the biggest surprise about him?

It's to see the dedication to the work, to the craft. He works hard at the work and is very supportive of other actors that come to partake in his films. The generosity of the guy at work, I was floored by that.

Where has Midnite picked up the relics through the years?

Obviously he used to do a lot of running around with Constantine and he got a lot of them from Constantine as well. It's from past adventures as well as present adventures. A lot of people bring things to me. They know that I'm in that sort of business.

Do you get any action scenes?

The one action is pretty much when Constantine breaks into my office at gunpoint, so I had to deal with that, that moment with him. That's the only time and physical moments that we have together. But since he is a longtime friend and all, there is a bit of care that goes into the fighting.

Are you working with other actors in the movie as well?

Keanu is pretty much the one that I'm mostly interacting with. Shia LaBeouf, I interact with him in one of the scenes as well, but mostly John Constantine.

How long has the film been shooting and have you been here the whole time?

No, I've only been shooting for a couple of weeks. Today is probably my last day.

Do you have any interest in the occult in real life?

Personally I don't think it's ridiculous. Although this is a fictional story that we're telling here, quite a bit of this sort of strange things that we have going on in this film happens in real life as well. People just want to find a bit of peace in this crazy world. But I also come from a country that is the source of voodoo. I come from the capitol of Benin, which is where voodoo all started. So I'm sort of drawing some ideas from that. Just some of the things they do in healing somebody. I can't tell you exactly what I'm doing and all, but I'm drawing a bit of knowledge from that.

Is the gray in your beard painted in?

No. It's my gray.

How much background did the director give you on your character?

Obviously when you read a story, you can tell that they have a bit of history, that they had been through this before. They were at one point teammates. You can definitely feel that there was a relationship before.

Must be nice to make a movie where you're not in the desert.

Oh, it is sweet. It is so, so refreshing not to be in the desert, some Sahara desert or whatever. It is really refreshing to be shooting in town as well.

Warner Bros. will release Constantine on September 17.

Let's hear it for the girls

By LYNETTE MOEY

The year 2003 has been a stellar year for the woman director. LYNETTE MOEY looks at three prominent female auteurs who have scripted and directed their own wounded observations into movies, all with very central female protagonists.

IT's a dismal job, being a woman director in Hollywood, even more so than being an Asian director (think John Woo) or an Asian American screenwriter/director (think M. Night Shyamalan.) Out of the thousands of films churned out by Hollywood each year, only a whopping 4% are directed by women.

The statistics are even drearier for awards. Only three have ever been nominated for a Best Director Oscar: Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and now Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation. And no matter how well a woman痴 first film is received, it rarely resonates with the kind of excitement reserved for say, Quentin Tarantino or Mel Gibson.

Therefore, when a year like 2003 comes along, it is a cause celebre. Sofia Coppola makes a sweep of the Golden Globes, with honours in Best Comedy (Lost in Translation), Best Comedy Actor (Bill Murray) and Best Screenplay. Diane Keaton wins Best Comedy Actress for Something痴 Gotta Give, a film scripted and directed by Nancy Meyers. And for her portrayal of cold-blooded serial killer Aileen Wournos in Monster (written and directed by Patty Jenkins), Charlize Theron clutches Best Dramatic Actress. The same entertainers are up for Oscar nominations in their respective categories.

Sofia Coppola makes a sweep of the Golden Globes for her Lost in Translation, with honours in Best Comedy, Best Comedy Actor (Bill Murray) and Best Screenplay.

Daddy's girl strikes it big

If the name Sofia Coppola sounds familiar, that's because Daddy is Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather). Sofia spent her 20s bumming around as a jet-setting Mafia princess, unable to decide on a vocation. As a child, she had bit parts in her father's movies, but when she tried her hand at major character acting (she played Mary Corleone in Godfather III), she was panned miserably by the critics.

(Ironically, Sofia surfaced again in the acting world as a stormtrooper in The Phantom Menace.)

After a flirtation with the world of photography and fashion, Sofia found her calling in scriptwriting and directing. Quietly, she scripted an adaptation to The Virgin Suicides, a 1993 book, and decided to show it to the production company who owned the rights. They loved it. When their proposed director bailed, Sofia leapt at the chance.

Lost in Translation is only her second movie, but one for which she holds full creative accountability as writer, director and producer. The story tells of a washed-up American actor (Murray) who goes to Tokyo to shoot a Suntory whiskey commercial. He experiences culture shock but finds redemption in a fellow American traveller (Scarlett Johansson), who is drifting apart from her husband (Giovanni Ribisi).

How much of real life has Sofia depicted in her movie? Sofia is seeking divorce from her husband, director Spike Jonze. The photographer husband of Scarlett Johansson in the film speaks with Jonze痴 mannerisms. And indeed, Johansson's character resembles Sofia in both style and dressing. "I know," Sofia says, when ribbed about it. "How narcissistic."

Even her own culture shock experiences as an American in Tokyo (which she has been to six or seven times to launch her own fashion label) and that of her friends play a definitive role in her script. People she has observed in real life populate the movie ・there was indeed a red-haired Australian lounge singer crooning Scarborough Fair in the Tokyo Park Hyatt, the hotel that forms the movie backdrop. Another scene partners her real-life Japanese friend, Fumihiro Hayashi, whom she nicknames Charlie Brown, with karaoke.

I've seen him sing 賎od Save the Queen・at parties and I always wanted to put that in a movie,・she explains.

Love in the viagra age

She's not the only one to immortalise her own experiences on celluloid. Nancy Meyers, long hailed as the most successful female director of all time, does too. Meyers痴 credentials include What Women Want (starring Mel Gibson), which earned US$374mil (RM1,421mil) worldwide, and the Father of the Bride series, starring her long-term friend and confidante, Diane Keaton.

Another of her success stories is Something's Gotta Give, a romantic comedy about a 50-something-year-old woman (Keaton naturally) who falls in love with her daughter痴 boyfriend (Jack Nicholson). It has already crossed the US$100mil (RM380mil) mark stateside, passing The Last Samurai on its way, proving that its audience demographic of mature women, for whom not many movies are made, is a force to be reckoned with.

Meyers wrote the script on observation of an aging Lothario friend who only dates younger women (this forms the basis of the Nicholson character.) But make no mistake about it. The film is all about Erica Barry (Keaton), whom many assay to be the screen manifestation of Meyers. Meyers had just divorced her husband, Charles Shyer, with whom she had collaborated on a lifetime of movies. Heartsick, strung and emotional, she sat down to write a script, pouring out all her anguish, hopes and desires of life after 50. Tagging photos of Keaton all over her computer, she wrote Erica Barry for herself, and her friend.

The result? Diane Keaton, who has not starred in a movie since The First Wives・Club is rediscovered by the world, proving there is still life (besides the pigeon-holed supporting roles) for an actress after 50.

Monster's ball

Ideas too can come from observations in different forms. When first time writer/director Patty Jenkins read about serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the newspapers, she was fascinated. Wuornos was a prostitute who was arrested in 1990 for the spree killing of six men.

Years later, Jenkins contacted Wuornos, who had spent 12 years on death row awaiting execution, gradually winning over the convicted killer痴 trust. On the night before her execution, Wuornos showed Jenkins her personal letters.

Stranger still is Jenkins痴 insistence to court Charlize Theron, an actress better known for girlfriend roles, to play Wuornos. Jenkins woke up at 3am one morning and the television was playing Devil痴 Advocate, in which Theron plays a distraught, emotional wife. Jenkins was hooked, and from that moment on, began to write the script with Charlize in mind.

The result is a complete makeover for the skinny, beauteous Charlize and an Oscar nomination. Thanks to Jenkins痴, she has been given an opportunity to transform herself from a ditzy blonde sidekick in male-fuelled movies into a gritty dramatic actress.

But even women directors can play it delightfully catty.

Lost in Translation features the character of an air-headed American actress (Anna Faris) who is in Tokyo to promote her new movie, which she co-stars with Keanu Reeves. As she gushes to the Japanese press about working with Keanu, several movie insiders note the real-life script undercurrents.

The Japanese Interview・is taken almost word for word from an actual press junket done by Charlize Theron for Sweet November. Keanu himself had dated Sofia when he was working on her father痴 Bram Stoker痴 Dracula, at which time he was shooting the actual Suntory whiskey commercial in Japan. And the airhead actress is a caricature of Cameron Diaz, who has worked with Spike Jonze, Sofia痴 husband. Sofia is said to despise Cameron for reasons undisclosed.

Who says female auteurs can't have claws?

Reeves Fits Constantine

Francis Lawrence, who is directing the upcoming comic-book film Constantine, told SCI FI Wire that star Keanu Reeves is the perfect actor to play the troubled supernatural detective John Constantine. "Well, I don't want to get into anything sort of personal, but, I mean, Keanu is kind of a haunted guy, and he's sort of elusive and he's kind of mysterious," Lawrence said in an interview on the set in Compton, Calif., last December. "He's had some sort of tragic things happen to him, and I think [he] ... lives that life a little bit. He's also, I would say, a little self-destructive, which I think Constantine is, you know?"

Reeves plays Constantine, a man who straddles the realms of good and evil while fighting terminal cancer, based on the DC/Vertigo comic series Hellblazer. Lawrence also defended the decision to move the comic story to Los Angeles from London and to make Constantine an American, instead of an Englishman, as he is in the comic.

"Interesting question," Lawrence said. "What I think first attracted me to this project was just the character himself. Not the fact that he was English, not the fact that he had blond hair and not the fact that he wore an olive-colored trench coat. It was sort of what made him who he was. And I think we've maintained that."

What is that, exactly? "I think it's the whole idea of an antihero," Lawrence said. "This guy that sort of understands the world to be a place that normal people don't know exists. I think that he's sort of a supernatural, hard-boiled detective. He reminds me of the Sam Spades and characters from the classic film noirs." Constantine is set to open in September.

INTERVIEW: Using Sung Hee Park to reveal Suzanne Whang

by Angela Kang

After tackling demanding courses from Yale and Brown University, Suzanne Whang finds that her most challenging role is non-academic but comedic. Playing a socially awkward Korean immigrant pushes Whang farther than she's ever gone before.

Interview with Suzanne Whang
December 4, 2003
Interviewed by Angie Kang
Transcribed by Jennifer Chong

Suzanne Whang is currently the host of House Hunters on HGTV. She has also hosted such shows as Homes of Our Heritage: Great American Women, Blitz Build 2000, and Homes of Pasadena. Suzanne appeared as Dick Clark's co-host on TV Censored Bloopers for NBC, while concurrently co-hosting New Attitudes on Lifetime Television. Prior to that, she was a field reporter/fill-in co-host for FOX After Breakfast, and a field reporter for Breakfast Time, Personal FX, and The Pet Department on the FX cable network. She has also appeared in numerous television shows, including co-starring roles on The Practice, Robbery Homicide Division, NYPD Blue, Strong Medicine, Norm, The Chronicle, and 18 Wheels of Justice, and a guest starring role on V.I.P. Her feature film credits include Housesitter with Steve Martin, and the upcoming Twice As Dead and Date or Disaster. Suzanne won the BEST UP & COMING COMEDIAN OF 2002 AWARD at the Las Vegas Comedy Festival, for her outrageous stand-up comedy act, and is currently writing a one-woman show & mockumentary based on the character she created for her stand-up, Sung Hee Park.

I can see me doing character driven feature films. I’m writing a screenplay right now featuring Sung Hee Park. I have a one-woman show that I’ve done called “I Make You Laughing” that stars Sung Hee Park. I have two great television series ideas for the character. This is not all I want to do. I just did a movie with Keanu Reeves called Constantine. I just did a movie with Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston called Along Came Polly that’s going to be released in January. I’ve done NYPD Blue and The Practice. I’ve done all that acting. I love acting and doing straight roles, not as a “fresh off the boat” Korean. But what I realized is that that “fresh off the boat” Korean girl is also a part of me – the vulnerability of that and the feeling outcast. And then people accuse me and say, “Look what you’re doing, you’re just playing right into the stereotype.” What’s interesting to me is how is it stereotypical for an Asian woman to have the balls to get on stage and make a room full of people laugh. How is that stereotypical? To me, the stereotypical Asian woman would be the woman hiding in the corner in the back of the comedy club and being afraid to even laugh at the jokes, not the woman on stage going, “Oh yeah, I’m going to make you laugh because I’m really ballsy.” To me, that’s not the stereotype. And it’s also more stereotypical to me when people are like, “That’s not funny” because I think one of the stereotypes of Asians is that we take ourselves too seriously and can’t laugh at ourselves. And so, I think their response to my act is more stereotypical than my act.

Real magic

The Visual Effects Society, the industry's largest organization of effects professionals, gathers to honor Its own.

By Ron Magid
Pictured: Industrial Light + Magic's work on "The Hulk" is among the effects work being honored.

More VES coverage:

By George:Filmmaker George Lucas -- recipient of a VES lifetime achievement award -- has authored many technological innovations.

What does it take to get respect in Hollywood?

Apparently, making significant contributions to nine of the top 10 films of all time is not enough. By now, it's an axiom that an overwhelming majority of top-earning pictures are effects-driven -- but the practitioners of movie magic are still laboring to get their due. That's in large part why a group of VFX gurus founded the Visual Effects Society in 1997. The idea was to have a mechanism to speak with one voice, casting the spotlight on noteworthy work and dialoguing on issues important to the sector.

With more than 1,000 members worldwide, the VES has become the largest organization of visual effects professionals, a loose-knit international coalition dedicated to preserving the art and sanity of its members while setting standards for film and broadcast effects, as well as for the people who create them.

An honorary society whose members must be invited to join, the group has used its muscle to initiate screenings, seminars and educational programs and has launched an annual awards show. The second annual VES Awards take place tonight at the Hollywood Palladium, honoring the best work across a broad range of media, including film, television, music videos and commercials (for a complete list of nominees, visit www.vesawards.com). George Lucas is the Lifetime Achievement honoree.

The awards offer category-specific honors, including for character animation and matte painting -- things nonprofessionals wouldn't even think about, except maybe within the context of the overall "effect." With awards in 23 categories -- also including models and miniatures, visual effects photography and compositing -- the VES seeks to highlight the efforts of everyone from top visual effects supervisors to individual artists who must fight to get their names on projects.

While the egalitarian process creates many headaches (the VES vetted several hundred applications this year), it directs recognition squarely where it's due, shining the spotlight on the overlooked in a populous field.

"We're all tired of the same guys winning the Oscar or Emmy, so we only have seven categories where supervisors are eligible -- and we've structured them so it's mandatory that the effects producer also gets honored," VES vice chairman and awards committee chairman Jeff Okun says. "We're trying to recognize the real work. The supervisor isn't qualified to win an award for compositing; it's got to be the guy who actually did it."

Although the VES has gotten many things right, there remains a lot to be done. More potential nominees would be a good start: On the film side, there's so much great work each year that the seven semifinalists that make it into the Oscar "bake-off" -- where they compete for three nominee slots -- barely represent the tip of the iceberg.

"Overall, the quality of work being done these days is incredible, across the board," VES chairman Carl Rosendahl says. "This is a great chance to look at a ton of great work and allow everyone's peers in the industry to recognize what they think is the best."

One way in which the VES has tried to include more films is by offering two categories honoring the year's best movie work: visual effects in a visual effects-driven motion picture and supporting visual effects in a motion picture.

To the VES' credit, the six nominees between the two categories include all three Oscar nominees (Buena Vista's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," Fox's "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" and New Line's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King"). The lists also include three films overlooked by the Academy: Warner Bros. Pictures' "The Matrix Revolutions" and "The Last Samurai" (the latter was supervised by Okun) and Sony's "Bad Boys II." Among major features, only Fox's "X2: X-Men United" made it to the Oscar bake-off but was shut out of the VES noms.

Nonetheless, the VES limits each awards category to three nominees, instead of leading the way by showing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences the need to recognize at least five effects nominees. While blaming the tight categories on financial constraints, Okun insists, "We do have a planned growth situation."

Possibly conceding that it takes a higher talent to act against a greenscreen rather than with other actors, the VES offers a trophy for outstanding performance by a male or female actor in an effects film -- possibly a shameless ploy to attract celebrities to the awards ceremony. It's a slot that might better be served by an award for outstanding performance by a computer-generated character.

But the VES constantly is making improvements, expanding, refining and even dropping categories. For example, the group is attempting to create guidelines to recognize video game effects in the future.

The VES scores on the TV side, opening the competition to a cornucopia of programming from multipart epics to 30-second commercials. The number of broadcast noms is extraordinary, starting with visual effects in a commercial, where Johnnie Walker's "Fish" and the Nike spots "Gamebreaker" and "Speed Chain" compete. The music video competition has OutKast's "Hey Ya!" going head-to-head with Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott's "Pass That Dutch."

In the TV series competition, UPN's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is up against HBO's "Carnivale," NBC's "ER" and the BBC's "Walking With Dinosaurs: Sea Monsters" special.

Then there's the top TV slot: outstanding visual effects in a television miniseries, movie or special, which includes epics such as Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica," Discovery Channel's "Dinosaur Planet," Sci Fi Channel's "Frank Herbert's Children of Dune" and USA Network's "Helen of Troy." "All the Robert Halmi and Hallmark guys are taking on these huge epics and coming through with some really hot work," Okun says. "Their stuff is amazingly ambitious and surprisingly excellent. They're doing 'Lord of the Rings' on a ridiculously short schedule and budget. Sure, it's low-res, but they're still doing scenes with 100,000 people and giant weather effects and spaceships. I don't know how they're doing it: These guys have no money and no time, and they're doing amazing stuff that makes you go, 'What if they had the money and the time?'"

The dirty little secret is that we might never learn the answer to that question. Despite their starship-sized breakthroughs, TV effects artists remain ghettoized. On this and a number of other issues, it's time for the VES to be heard.

But as the group enters its seventh year, it's coming to terms with some changes. VES executive director and founder Tom Atkin announced last year that he will leave his post in July, when he'll switch to a consultancy status. A search committee has been retained to find a replacement.

In January, the group ushered in a new board, consisting of Carl Rosenthal, founder of Pacific Data Images (now DreamWorks Animation), as executive chairman; Okun and Rose Duignan sharing the executive vice chairman seat; Hunter/Gratzner's Shannon Gans as treasurer; and effects producer Kim Lavery as secretary.

The changeover of the VES executive board and much of the board of directors means "now is the time for the society to either bloom or fade away," says Okun, who senses a renewed enthusiasm. "It's all turning around right now, and in the next few months, there'll be some stunning changes."

The VES often is best-defined by what it is not: It is not a trade organization or a union guild, nor does it ensure credits or set salaries. Hence, the drive is to give the society an identity beyond its coveted awards. "The VES mission is to provide an atmosphere where effects people can get together and share information to raise the standards of what we do," Okun says. "The next goal is to educate; the effects community has miseducated some seriously powerful people, so when it comes time to do our job, they think, 'Oh, all you gotta do is push a button and that truck will go away.'"

But while one of the VES' mandates is to educate producers and studios -- about things including needs to lengthen ridiculously short effects postproduction schedules and to budget for the proper number of effects shots at the outset, rather than adding dozens more shots on the already crunched backend -- Okun is hopeful that it can provide something else: protection.

"To quote some big producer, when told the effects guys are dropping like flies, 'Hey, just get more flies,'" Okun says, shaking his head. "That attitude, we're trying to change. So in addition to encouraging cross-collateralization of ideas and techniques among VFX people, the ASC and the editors' and directors' guilds, the VES wants to offer some protection to our members, most of whom are freelance, in terms of health insurance and retirement plans."

If the VES Awards are the means to facilitate the group's goal of shining a spotlight on its membership, then so be it. "The idea is to get us aligned back inside the community as artists, instead of a bunch of push-button geeks," Okun says. "Anybody can buy a machine, but an artist can make art out of anything. These people need their ounce of respect for what they do, so we need to transform the perception of what visual effects are."

Published Feb. 18, 2004

In bed with the older woman

Why do so many women in their 40s and beyond automatically assume they are no longer attractive? Men certainly don't agree, writes Bettina Arndt.

As an actress who's made her reputation playing the neurotic woman, Diane Keaton was true to form. She was being interviewed about her recent movie Something's Gotta Give, in which she has an affair with a young doctor, played by the actor Keanu Reeves. While she was kissing Reeves, who is 18 years her junior, Keaton confessed she kept thinking: "He must be hating this."

Great, eh? If the slim, attractive Keaton sees herself as so repulsive, what hope is there for the rest of us? The sad truth is most older women are in the grip of similar neurotic self-abuse. "How could I ever take off my clothes and get into bed with a man again, let him see my flabby body the way it is now?" writes Betty Friedan in her book The Fountain of Age, reporting the constant refrain of older women contemplating new relationships.

Divorced women facing the possibility of a new start, married women toying with the idea of a final fling, single women who hit their 40s ・most shudder at the thought of that humiliating disrobing.

"Sometimes I felt such a yearning," admits Friedan, "but I couldn't do it. I couldn't risk the shame." Women are unaccustomed to risking sexual rejection, to acknowledging desire that could be rebuffed. As older women in a society that so clearly favours the young, they fear cruelty and rejection under the critical gaze of a new lover. Our culture tells us we are right to be nervous. In a collection of bawdy verse there's a ditty called The Geographical Estimate of Women. It starts: "From 14-18 she is like Africa ・partly virgin and party explored." And so it goes on ・the woman in her 30s is like Asia ・"sultry, hot and mysterious". But over 50? She is Antarctica ・"everyone knows where it is but nobody wants to go there".

I have never gotten over the fear that on first sight, the man, whoever he is, will find me old, fat, just plain wrong in ways he will never explain.Jane Juska

But do men want to go there? That's the question no one ever seems to ask. Women assume the worst, as they recoil from the blokey jokes and ever-present sneers. When Dustin Hoffman plays the matronly nanny in Tootsie, he can't help a jibe at Dorothy's sexual persona: "I wasn't even attractive enough for me to want to go to bed with myself!"

The feminists have long railed about the double standards of ageing ・"It hurts to be Alive and Obsolete," was the title of a famous 1970 essay by Zoe Moss. "I do not dare show a man that I find him attractive. If I do so, he may react as if I had insulted him: with shock, with disgust," Moss complains.

TOP: Keanu Reeves and Diane Keaton pucker up in Something's Gotta Give. BOTTOM: 66-year-old Jane Juska.Photo: Peter da Silva/New York Times

Feminist scholars claim the roots of this repulsion is a historical fear of the sexuality of powerful, older women and attribute the horrors of witch-burning to the need to demonise the threat. "That old women are repulsive is one of the most profound aesthetic and erotic feelings in our culture," concluded feminist scholar Susan Sontag.

Yet there's no evidence that most older men recoil from women of their own age. On the contrary, older men who remarry generally pick a woman from their own age-group ・a trend that appears to be strengthening.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2002 the median age of brides for men aged 45-55 was 44, a figure that has increased over the past 20 years. Grooms in this age group marry brides who average 5.3 years younger. Less than a third (31.6 per cent) of these men marry women 10 or more years older.

Older men woo, bed and often marry women their own age. Admittedly, it's a different matter when it comes to their dream lovers. Earlier this month I talked with a group of older men, aged 69 to 82, all members of OM:NI (Older Men, New Ideas), an older men's group sponsored by the Council on the Ageing. Questioned about their sexual preferences, the appeal of the younger woman still had these men firmly in its grip.

The elderly roosters strutted before their female inquisitor, chests puffed, wistfully imagining they might have pulling power to bring in younger chicks. "If an attractive younger woman was interested in you, I'd suddenly see myself as an Adonis. You'd have to think you must be pretty good, if that happened to you," said Andrew, 69 (some names have been changed).

"There is a male ego thing there," admits Steve, 48, a handsome Melbourne education bureaucrat who likes to dates women far younger than himself.

"Men look to young women to enhance their own sense of attractiveness and mirror back their own youthfulness," says Melbourne psychologist and mid-life expert Peter O'Connor, whose best-known book is Facing the Fifties. Achieving maturity as a male, he says, requires a shift from an "outer definition of oneself", fixed on how one appears in the world, to acquiring a sense of self ・"defining themselves from within". For some men, making that shift is a real struggle.

As the man ages and faces a waning sense of potency, O'Connor suggests he may cling to the young woman to "keep the whole thing safely ensconced at the ego level", particularly since the possibility of real connection offered by a relationship with a mature woman can carry fears for men.

Romancing younger women may make for an easier life than facing real relationships with same-age women. Sam, from OM:NI, sadly reports the older women he knows make it clear they are not interested in a relationship with him. "I don't want to be washing your dirty underwear," one woman told him, who'd clearly had her fill of looking after a man.

But complexities or not, most men make the transition. Only a small minority choose women significantly younger than themselves, as the statistics show. "I suspect as men grow older, most do acquire something called wisdom," says Canberra University psychology professor Bob Montgomery. "They start to realise that whether or not a woman matches stereotypical standards has little to do with attractiveness of a sexual partner." Talking to many individual males about this issue, you sense he is right.

"I think a man's sense of aesthetics matures with him," says Keith, a 52-year-old company director readily attracted to women his own age. Keith is big on "the sexuality to be found in a woman's eyes and lips" and dismisses the older woman's fear that her body will be found wanting. Men embarking on sex with someone new simply aren't in the business of judging bodies, he says. "If a feller's at the point when he's about to have sex with a woman, aesthetics aren't his top priority."

There are men who wax lyrical about mature beauty. Melbourne bookseller Alan, 47, talks about the "ripened peach" of an older woman's body, admiring the dark nipples of a woman who has breast fed and stretch marks as "not scars but something to almost to be envied as a mark of experience". Others focus less on bodies but on the attractions of sexually confident women "who still have spirit and a sense of being a woman".

Of course, a great many women never have that confidence. Even as young women they are self-conscious about their bodies. "Body loathing is a life long issue for many women," says Sydney sex therapist and general practitioner Dr Rosie King. She finds it sad how many women apologise for their bodies when they undress for a medical examination. "They'll say, don't look at my thighs, don't look at my wobbly tummy."

The body loathing robs many women of the sexual blossoming that might otherwise result from greater knowledge about their sexual needs. Women now find themselves in a culture that no longer expects menopause to pull the plug on sexual pleasure, a society where Viagra and other pharmacological miracles have given older men a new sexual second wind. But what has not changed is women's fear that their bodies will be found wanting.

Men usually cannot deal with mature women's self-hatred, the sheets clutched to their bodies, insistence on lights out, their reluctance to allow their men to see them. "When a woman loses confidence, a block of ice moves in. That's reflected in the eyes, in every way the woman relates to a man," says Bob, 64, a Sydney businessman.

"My lack of confidence doesn't arise from any experience at the hands of men," says Amanda, 48, who says the many men in her life have always been complimentary about her body, even lovers 10 years younger. Amanda has just had a breast enlargement, over the protests of her male friends. Her small breasts had sagged after her two children and she hated them, hated undressing in front of other women, hated how her clothes fitted. She's actually always found fault with her body despite a lifetime of males telling her she is beautiful. "It's our own fault. It's the conversations we have with ourselves about our saggy breasts, flabby skin, dropped bum. The conversations we have with other women. We impose our opinions about our bodies on men."

Nancy Friday, in her book, The Power of Beauty suggests women are wrong to blame men for double standards regarding ageing bodies. "When a man loves a 50 or 70-year-old woman and desires her sexuality, it isn't he who turns away. We women take ourselves out of the running: even when our bodies were lush, we hated them. Now that the visible signs of the crepey-skinned witch are upon us, we turn from sex with self disgust, seeing in men's eyes our own revulsion."

It's a fear that even the lusty Jane Juska was unable to shake. In her book, A Round Heeled Woman, the 66-year-old Californian describes the adventures that ensued when she placed an ad in the New York Review of Books saying she wanted a lot of sex with a man she liked.

Despite receiving 63 responses from men all over America who desired her company, despite a series of affairs with men aged 33 to 82, she writes: "I have never gotten over the fear that on first sight, the man, whoever he is, will find me old, fat, just plain wrong in ways he will never explain."

It never happens. On the contrary, most of the men she meets tell her they think she's wonderful. Husbands of friends sidle up to her and whisper: "I admire what you've done." Her only real rejection in a series of wildly complex relationships came after three days of lovemaking with an 82-year-old who rather brutally told her he no longer desired her. The problem - she was dry (a common complaint among post-menopausal women).

The man tried to explain: "I can't keep it up long enough for you to get wet." He was actually telling her that her lack of lubrication made him feel inadequate - but she didn't want to hear, she was so determined to believe he saw her as a failure.

As Nancy Friday explains, it all stems from women's constant sense of being surveyed. From early childhood, girls are taught to look at themselves through the eyes of others. That's very different from the experience of most men. As Friday explains: "A man enjoys being looked at but doesn't walk around with a balloon constantly over his head in which he imagines how others are seeing him."

Alan's story makes that clear. The Melbourne bookseller found himself recently conducting a long-distance phone romance with a slightly older but very fit woman he'd met only once. After a year or so, in which he'd given up smoking and put on a lot of weight, he finally made it to Sydney to see her again.

She was surprisingly cool, the relationship went nowhere. Some time later he happened to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror while taking a shower. "Oh, my God," he thought, "She doesn't want to have an affair with a balding, fat, middle-aged man!"

From the female point of view, what's amazing is it never occurred to him during that year to worry about his increasing girth, whereas any woman in that situation would worry endlessly at the possibility of rejection.

It is not only women's attitudes to themselves but their treatment of each other that feeds the fear. One really striking note in Juska's adventures, was that the nastiest rejection of her brave sexual adventures comes from her 33-year-old niece who is scathing when her aunt returns from a night with a young lover. "Her disgust was visible," writes Juska.

"Most men and more women - young women afraid for themselves - punish older women with derision, punish them with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality," wrote Doris Lessing in her novel Love, Again. Women are just as harsh as men in their judgements of older women - as psychologists Francine Deutsch and colleagues from San Diego University found when they asked students to rank the attractiveness of photographs of the same people at different ages. Both males and females see women are declining rapidly in attractiveness as they age, far more quickly than men.

So the harshest judgements on older women don't always come from men but from other women and from ourselves. And the sad result is women opt out. Many older women walk around with an "Out-of-Business" sign on their chests and reap what they sew. As one such woman wrote to me: "Remember our faces may be lined and our silhouettes bulging but the heart has no wrinkles."

I regularly meet Leslie at the hairdresser where she maintains her shining shoulder-length auburn hair. She's pushing 70 but there's no "Closed" sign on this woman's chest. She still exudes sexuality, tripping out of the shop in stilettos, her suit hugging her still shapely figure.

"I even get followed down the street by young men," she says with her throaty chuckle and confesses that not so long ago she had a relationship with a 16-year-old. You can't blame them. "Men enjoy older women who know how to please a man," says Leslie. She knows it, she lives it. It's a pity it's such a well-kept secret.

Interview: Keanu Reeves

Interview: Keanu Reeves
'John Constantine' in "Constantine"
Posted: Friday February 20th, 2004 2:00 PM
Author: Garth Franklin
Location: Los Angeles, California

If you don't know the name Keanu Reeves then quite frankly you should be shot. Assuming everyone does though, suffice it to say the heart throb has seen himself come back in recent years thanks to the success of the "Matrix" movies. After spending nearly two years working on the two sequels, he chose "Constantine" as his first follow-up project and today he explains why in this special interview:

Question: So how did you get attached to this project?

Answer: Well I was finishing up in Sydney, reading scripts and came across this one and really liked it. I met the exec at Warner Bros. who was working on it, we spoke about it and then the studio said yeah lets try to develop this. Akiva Goldsman came on and worked on the script, then Francis Lawrence - a good man for the job.

Question: Could you talk about some of the changes you've made from the comic and how the character is different (ie. the comic character is British and blond, in the movie he's a black-haired American).

Answer: I think that's about the only change we've made. We spoke about it, but then it seemed in terms of the platform that we were using which became Los Angeles, kind of like the world in terms of heaven, hell and Los Angeles seemed to be attractive and make sense. We're kind of doing a hard boiled kind of take on the piece, so we kind of went this way. Kind of a more Gothic aspect.

Question: He's known for having a devilish sense of humor (ie. bad jokes). Is that in the dialogue, is it played that way or is it kind of serious?

Answer: It's serious and hopefully funny at the same time. Again, go back to that hard boiled motif. Constantine in this film is in a hospital and he finds out he's dying of lung cancer, lights a cigarette up inside the doctor's office. She says, "That's a good idea". He gets into an elevator and this character comes by and the elevator doors closing and the person says, "Going down?" and he says, "Not if I can help it".

The next scene is he's in bed with a half breed demon drinking whiskey with scratches on his back and the scene ends with her tail kind of swishing underneath the sheets laughing, going, "Lung cancer? Ha! That's funny, John!" So hopefully we have the spirit of the Constantinian factor. I'm always asking, "Is that Constantinian enough?" I think I need more Constantine in my Constantine.

Question: What drew you to the character?

Answer: I like his anger, I like his ambivalence - he's a man who's trapped and trying to find his way, I love those kind of stories. I think the story of this film is about a man whose trying to reconcile himself, find his way in the world. He's a lonely figure fighting demons, casting them out - its a dirty job, some people like it but some don't. His take on the world is slightly skewed.

Question: When you say hardboiled, don't you mean noir?

Answer: Well, there is that kind of aspect to it, but I'd say more kind of Californian noir from a literature standpoint. So there's light and shadow. There's a couple of shots of Constantine just smoking in a doorway. There's shots behind him and you see the smoke rising. It's bright outside, but it's dark in the hall and there's a stairs going up before he does his first exorcism, so there's that kind of cinematic motif.

Question: Does that come out in the dialogue?

Answer: Yeah, that short, clipped kind of thing. There's that thing where he's with that character of Ellie, the half-breed demon that he's just had sex with right after he's found out he's got terminal cancer. She's like laughing. "Terminal cancer, that's funny, John. I bet he can't wait to get his hands on you after all the half-breeds you've sent back. He's really going to have fun with you. He's going to rip you apart. You're the only soul the man himself would come up to collect." And John's like, "Yeah."

Question: What are the burns on your shirt?

Answer: Oh, there's a character, Midnite, and I want to use the chair to surf the ether and he doesn't want me to, so he digs his hands into me and it burns, so I kind of beg him.

Question: This is a pretty dark story with a sense of humor. Is that what attracted you to the project?

Answer: Yeah, I mean that's something I find is fun to play and I find it enjoyable, that kind of mixture of extreme circumstances with humor, so that's fun.

Question: Is it nice to do a movie with horror elements where you don't have to yell and scream but get to play it cool all the time?

Answer: Well, Constantine gets his ass whopped a lot in this movie, but he keeps coming. And we got some fun stuff. We've got some Ceplavites, some kind of demon aspects and they fight. Demons are coming up onto our plane, which isn't supposed to be happening. So yeah, there's elements where he does play it cool, but he also gets thrown on his back and choked and thrown against walls and hit and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

Question: So is it physical?

Answer: Yeah, there's certain elements that are physical, yeah, but I think it's part of the hero journey that you gotta go through. You gotta run and jump and get hit and kind of pull yourself back together again and shake it off and keep going.

Question: You've mentioned that the character has an ambiguous morality that you found attractive.

Answer: Yeah. Well, I mean he's not the nicest guy all the time. I don't know if he's immoral, but it's something that he's negotiating with.

Question: There's a lot of CG stuff in this. Have you seen any concept art of the demons?

Answer: They're really cool actually. They've got half their skull cut off, so they've taken out kind of the seat of the soul, and with that, no eyes and the skull is open and yet they have these long limbs and they're quite humanoid and yet the whole seat of the soul has been removed and yet they have this the Ceplavites themselves can fly and they can kind of smell and attack and they're part of the motif of devouring the damned and yet they have no feet. So they can fly but they can't rest and so even the demons are tortured and they have nothing but their desire. So that's a cool kind of concept, I thought.

Question: Can you describe the scene you're shooting today?

Answer: Right now I've asked the character Midnite to use the chair which turns out to be the electric chair from Sing Sine and right now this is his reliquary where he's collected all of these objects, religious icons and things like that. So right now we're walking toward the chair where John is going to get electrocuted.

Question: What are those glasses he's collected?

Answer: Those are some kind of nice kind of pinup girls with months on them, so I think again this is illustrated the kind of humor that you have all of these religious iconography and he's also collecting high ball glasses with girls on them.

Question: Why is John using the chair?

Answer: He's trying to find out the supposedly the dark side has the Spear of Destiny and so I'm trying to find out who has it, so he uses the chair. What's going to happen is they're playing with an aspect of time. You've seen this kind of scavenger character who's found the Spear at the beginning of the movie and every time you see this character, he looks like he looks over his shoulder like he's being watched, and ultimately John goes and it's kind of tying in time. We play with time oftentimes and it turns out that John was a guy who saw this the whole time. It's in the future. When John crosses over, he crosses over into hell a couple of times and we play with time so that when he does do that, time in the real world slows down or almost stops and so we can go off to these other places and then come back and almost nothing has happened.

Question: Had you read "Hellblazer" before you got the part?

Answer: I was not familiar with the material before reading the script.

Question: Were you just looking for this kind of movie?

Answer: I was looking for a good script and this kind of came my way and I really liked the writing and the character itself and what happened in the piece and ultimately there's a line in it where Constantine says, "God has a plan for all of us. I had to die twice just to figure that out. Some people like it, some people don't."

Question: He's always been a user in the comic. Is he nicer in the film?

Answer: No. Not really.

Question: What is Francis Lawrence like as a director?

Answer: He's great. He's really inventive. He's got a real fresh feel to his cinema. He's really great with storytelling and the camera. He's great to work with. He's a great collaborator and yet has a strong voice. He's got good taste. With actors, he knows what he's looking at and he knows what to ask to make it better or to help you kind of discover the scene. It's great.

Question: Is Constantine more vulnerable than Neo?

Answer: I don't know. I thought Neo was a very vulnerable character. He's full of doubts. He doesn't win. He has to lose his life. That's not very invulnerable. Constantine, there's an element of the greatness, the great Constantine is kind of faded. He's in a vulnerable state and this character Djimon is playing, Midnite, he has a line where he's like because I'm asking him for help and he's saying I'm neutral. I don't work on any side of the balance. I have this place, this club where half-breeds can come and be themselves and "before you were a bartender, you were one witch doctor against thirty Askar and I was" and he goes, "You were John Constantine. The John Constantine once. Times change. Balances shift and I have always been a businessman, John. You know that."

Question: What does Hell look like?

Answer: Yeah, this one is orangey. There's dust in the air, a charcoal kind of dust. There's a real strong soundscape to this film, so there's a real strong soundscape. One of the things that we came up with and you'll see this a couple of times is that when someone dies and they go to hell, part of hell is just at the moment when they die and I guess you're seeking release, these soldier demons, scavenger demons come in and they just eat you. Part of these empty skull folks is that they have these really huge maws with teeth and so instead of getting release, you get consumed and then instantly you're back to just about where you were going to die again and then come in and get you again. And so there's one element where I walk out onto a hell freeway, coming out of this character's apartment where it transforms from a real world to a hell apartment and that is just basically, you know, there's rubble and decay. Everything's broken down. Cars on the freeway have almost melted and there's just these demons with these people screaming being consumed and then they're back and then screaming and consumed and screaming and consumed.

Question: Are you ever in makeup in the movie?

Answer: No, but there's some cool elaborate makeups in this film. They're really kind of doing a nice mixture of having in camera effects or makeups and then having CGI supported, so there's a cool mixture with that. I always find that works best instead of just pure CGI because it becomes kind of flat, though it's getting much better.

Question: What about Rachel Weisz?

Answer: She's been great. She's adding a real strength and sensitivity at the same time to her role. It's enjoyable working with her.

Question: Did you enjoy playing with the gun?

Answer: There again is something that could be funny, you know its a HOLY shotgun. That whole idea of killing for God is always interesting.

Question: By making this a PG-13 movie, are you worried about losing the character's famous dark edge that you could keep in an R?

Answer: There's fights and smoking and dark edges, but its surrounding a story that I think is about knowing yourself and coming to terms with the world and I think that's relevant for all ages, particularly an adolescent coming to terms with identity. I don't think we're losing anything by doing this, except for 'f**k', I don't say 'f**k'. Sure there's a bed scene but my feet are on the floor, there's no humping - its post coital. I'm drinking, she's laughing that I've got terminal cancer and says that he's the one soul Satan himself would come up to collect. I think that's fun.

ON SET WITH CONSTANTINE!

2.20.04
By Smilin' Jack Ruby
Contributing sources:

"The holy shotgun? Yeah, there's a half-breed that kills a couple of the characters who are my friends so I'm seeking revenge. So, I put together this 'holy shotgun,' which again I think is kind of fun - 'killing with God.'" - Keanu Reeves on his brass, cross-shaped and Latin-inscribed weapon in Constantine

"The decision to make [John Constantine] American was the studio's decision, I have to say. If we had done the English version, I would've wanted Paul Bettany." - producer Lauren Shuler Donner proving that she kicks ass at casting.

Dateline: Compton, California

Hellblazer is simply one of the best comics out there and has been for quite some time. While yes, at present the current storyline (ah, the return of Swamp Thing!) has been a departure from the gritty murder and crime stories that have marked recent months, in particular the first few rounds with 100 Bullets maestro Brian Azzarello which were some of the best in the run. Like another Vertigo title, Preacher, a Hellblazer movie has been in the cards for some time (where's my Transmetropolitan Showtime series?!?!), but finally came together with a script from Frank Capello and Akiva Goldsman, the addition of first-time director Francis Lawrence and, of course, its star - Keanu Reeves as the titular John Constantine.

Last December, I and a whole bevy of my fellow genre press, including CHUD comrade Garth Franklin from Dark Horizons who was in town at the time, took a trip down to Compton to Los Angeles Abbey Memorial Park, a sprawling cemetery from the twenties that has a Persian-style mausoleum in the center of it that's old style made for a perfect shooting location for Constantine.

The mausoleum is the hang-out of a new character created for the movie named Midnite, played by Djimon Hounsou. Midnite at one time had many an adventure with John Constantine, but of late, their relationship has been strained (what's known in the genre fan community as Han-Lando Syndrome). However, Midnite is still in possession of an electric chair (the actual electric chair from Sing Sing apparently) that Constantine wants to use to "cross over" into the "Hell" version of the world where he can check out what's going on over there in his neverending quest to kick demon-ass.

After zipping down the 101 from Warner Brothers in Burbank to the Compton set, we wandered the grounds of the large cemetery - many of the graves dating back to the start of the cemetery - and into the mausoleum where the shooting was going on. A scene showing Constantine entering the building with Midnite for the first time en route to the electric chair was being shot that day and as we walked into the upper floor of the building, we could look down over the center hallway where Lawrence and his D.P. Philippe Rousselot were chatting with Reeves and Hounsou as they got ready for the next set-up. That said, this set was dressed.

It seems that Midnite is a "collector" of artifacts relating to pretty much everything at first glance, but then you start to notice that it divides down mostly into weapons and religious iconography ranging from statuary to machine guns to Samurai armor to spears (the movie focuses on the Spear of Longinus being found in the New Mexican desert - more on that later) to Nazi flags to coffins to barrels of toxic waste to an iron maiden to a number of "sexual" statues with large phalluses. It's a pretty wild collection of objects, some artistic, some just downright creepy ("[I got them] through the years as he used to do a lot of running around with Constantine," says Midnite actor Djimon Hounsou. "I think he got a lot of them from Constantine as well. A lot of people bring things to me as I'm in that kind of business.").

Now, a bit on the plot. Constantine begins when a character called "the Scavenger" played by Jesse Ramirez stumbles across the Spear of Longinus (called the "Spear of Destiny" in the movie). If you didn't watch the season two opener of Witchblade or aren't caught up on your religious history, Longinus is the Roman soldier who allegedly stabbed Jesus of Nazareth on the cross with his spear and thereby got the Christ's blood on said spear. Now, the spear held magical powers and like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders, he who wields the spear has lots of power. If you really go into supernatural history, you'll find out that, in fact, there are those who believe Hitler used the spear to conquer Europe with during World War II and when he found out it had fallen into the hands of the Allies, he immediately killed himself. But regardless, it is this spear which is at the heart of Constantine.

So anyway, the Scavenger makes his way to L.A. with the spear and it gets into the hands of the big, bad demons that Constantine must then battle at the end of the movie. Until this "spear" got in the way, Constantine has been just going along, "fighting these demons, dealing with the half-breeds and scoring his points and earning his way into Heaven" according to Ramirez. Once the spear shows up, it takes it to a different level as Constatine now has to go up against his arch-rival, Balthazar (played by Bush's Gavin Rossdale) and then Mamon - the son of Satan which really gives Constantine hell (despite being a CG-created character [according to producer Lauren Shuler Donner, the voice of this character hasn't been cast yet]. On a side note: there are characters who become possessed and have some CG added to them, but this guy is fully CG apparently).

But back to Constantine himself - a character that's always been known to have a fucked up sense of humor, pitch black and full of irony.

"It's serious and hopefully funny at the same time," suggests the man himself, Keanu Reeves. "Constantine in this film is in a hospital and he finds out he's dying of lung cancer, lights a cigarette up inside the doctor's office. She says, 'That's a good idea.' He gets into an elevator and this character comes by and the elevator doors closing and the person says, 'Going down?' and he says, 'Not if I can help it.' The next scene is he's in bed with a half breed demon drinking whiskey with scratches on his back and the scene ends with her tail swishing underneath the sheets laughing going, 'Lung cancer? Ha! That's funny, John!' So, hopefully we have the spirit of the Constantinian factor. I'm always asking, 'Is that Constantinian enough? I think I need more Constantine in my Constantine.'"

After watching him walk through the set, we got to hang with Keanu for awhile and talk about the movie. To hear Reeves tell it, Constantine is going to be a damn dark movie with tons of CGI as throughout the film, John Constantine continually "crosses over" into the 'Hell world' - a hellish version of our own world (created by visual effects supervisor Mike Fink who did X-Men and X2 with Constantine producer Lauren Shuler Donner). Where a car in real Los Angeles will be parked at a curb, in "Hell L.A." that car will be a twisted, burning hunk of metal ("There's dust in the air, a charcoal kind of dust and there's a real strong soundscape," Reeves says).

While there are some big demon makeups in the movie ("They're really cool actually," enthuses Reeves of the Stan Winston Studios-created designs), Keanu himself never had to hit the chair, though he is occasionally "CGI supported" as he says. Despite teaming up again with Rachel Weisz, his Chain Reaction co-star, Keanu's Constantine spends much of the movie alone and vulnerable due to his lung cancer. Describing the way he's being shot for the movie as "California noir," this character for Reeves will be as far from "Neo" as you can imagine - dark, brooding, solitary bastard ("[Director] Francis [Lawrence] likens him to Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten," says Donner) with more inner demons than most comic book heroes, something that made Donner really want to take on the property, something she's been trying to make into a movie for quite awhile.

"I've had this property for about six years," Donner admits. "It was actually somebody at CAA. An agent called me up and it was Michael Uslan who had the property and they brought it over. And he's the coolest character, obviously. It's the same thing that attracted me to X-Men. It's all about the characters for me. He walks both sides. He's good and he's bad. Then this wonderful writer Kevin Brodbin had this whole take on how to do it - how to bring 'Dangerous Habits,' which is the comic we focused on, how to bring that to life. It was literally about six years ago. We went through another writer and then Frank Capello came on and did a really good draft and the studio said, 'Okay, you can make the movie' and then Akiva [Goldsman] came on and he did a polish, too."

The issue of another "Hell"-titled comic book movie hitting in 2004 came up - that of Hellboy - a movie that Donner sees more in line with what she's trying to do than other comic books films.

"I think once we knew comic book movies would be successful, which was with X-Men, it's another genre," Donner suggests. "It's another way to do an action movie. What I like about this versus the Marvel characters is it's not superpowers. It's something different and that's probably what Hellboy is about. It's not superpowers. It makes it different enough from what's already out there so audiences don't feel like they've seen it before."

Constantine director Francis Lawrence is slightly more dismissive of Hellboy comparisons, however.

"I just recently saw a trailer for Hellboy and I don't think it's going to be similar at all - in terms of tone, in terms of look," Lawrence suggests. "Having a character that sort of runs around with all the prosthetics and stuff is one thing - this is going to feel so completely different."

For Lawrence, he feels Constantine is a lot more than your standard comic book movie because of just how hardcore some of the issues are that get tackled in the movie.

"I don't really think that the studio understands this movie completely and to be honest, I sort of feel like we're getting away with something because there's a lot of strange things in this," Lawrence admits. "There are some issues in this that are not [in] your typical studio film. There's John and his lung cancer - not brain cancer which all the fans think. There's a bunch of suicides that we deal with. There's some sort of religious themes, religious philosophies on how the world works. There are a lot of layers to this movie that I don't really think the studio understands, which is actually fine by me. But what there is, is some comedy. There is horror, there are scares, there's some violence."

So far, Constantine is still functionally underwraps - no trailer or footage has been shown quite yet - so there's no telling what the look and feel of the movie will be beyond the various publicity stills that have hit, showing it to have something of a gritty, Scorsese-looking (Bringing Out the Dead Scorsese) style. From the looks of everything on the set and from everything we heard, the movie is going to be as no-holds-barred when it comes to, yes-we're-talking-about-THE-Satan as Reeves' under-appreciated-for-its-daring The Devil's Advocate and will actually share a lot of the characterization of its title character with the fantastic comic book that spawned the film.

Look for Constantine to hit this September from Warner Bros. Check back here on CHUD for TONS more Constantine coverage as the movie gets closer (what, you thought this 2,000 word preview was the end of it??? Pah-shaw!).

SET VISIT: Director Francis Lawrence on Constantine! Source: Brian Carroll Friday, February 20, 2004

In the third part (read Part 1 & Part 2) of Brian Carroll's Constantine set coverage, he chats with director Francis Lawrence about bringing the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer to life. The film, starring Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale, Djimon Hounsou, Shia LaBeouf and Peter Stormare, hits theaters on September 17. As you can see, included is a first look at a new image from the film as well - just click it to view a bigger version.

How do you take a really British comic and turn it into an American studio film?

Ah, interesting question. Well, I think you start to take...what I think first attracted me to this project was just the character himself - not the fact that he was English, not the fact that he had blonde hair and not the fact that he wore an olive-colored trench coat. It was sort of what made him who he was. And I think we've maintained that.

And what is that exactly?

I think it's the whole idea of an anti-hero - this guy that sort of understands the world to place that normal people don't know exists. I think that he's sort of a supernatural, hard-boiled detective. He reminds me of the Sam Spade's and characters from the classic film noirs.

Will you talk a little about the style of the movie? Are you shooting it like a film noir?

I would say, yeah. I mean, you know, one of the ideas for this was we brought it to Los Angeles. It doesn't take place in London. Los Angeles is considered a classic city for noir. We're establishing it in the real world, which is sort of a noir element. We're leaning towards the noir sides of Los Angeles with parts of downtown, parts of Hollywood - Echo Park. We're shooting scenes in places where they shot films like 'Chinatown' and things like that. But what I'm trying to avoid as well is just going down the cliche route of comic book films - doing things at dutched angles and bright colors. We're sticking to darker muted tones. I don't know if it's just classic noir in the look considering most noir films are black-and-white anyway.

Are there any films in particular you looked at before shooting this?

Um...I'm trying to think of what I looked at. It's interesting. Since the film is set in Los Angeles and deciding to shoot what kind of Los Angeles to show - you know, Los Angeles isn't one type of city. There's a lot of different angles. So, I was looking at movies like 'Amores Perros' and 'Training Day' and things like that. Films that have an ethnicity to them and a specific sort of color palette to them. So, I watched films like that to sort of see the kind of textures and things I wanted to get out of Los Angeles.

Did you and Keanu immediately agree on your concept of the character?

I think we did. I think, you know, it's interesting because I think Keanu actually has a lot of John Constantine in him, personally. I don't think he's really portrayed anything like John Constantine before, but just the way he is in his every day normal life and the sort of experiences he's had and his view on the world and on people is really sort of similar and I think we both...

We've got to get an explanation for that!

Well, I don't want to get into anything sort of personal, but I mean, Keanu is kind of a haunted guy and he's sort of elusive and he's kind of mysterious. He's had some sort of tragic things happen to him and I think sort of kind of lives that life a little bit. He's also, I would say, a little self-destructive, which I think Constantine is, you know?

Lauren was talking a little about the horror aspects of the movie and said she just saw a scene you cut together that was really scary. Will you talk about this film as a horror movie?

Yeah, no, I mean, the idea...this was actually a hard...I don't really think that the studio understands this movie completely and it's one of these...and to be honest, I sort of feel like we're getting away with something because there's a lot of strange things in this. There are some issues in this that are not [in] your typical studio film. There's John and his lung cancer - not brain cancer which all the fans think. There's a bunch of suicides that we deal with. There's some sort of religious themes, religious philosophies on how the world works. There are a lot of layers to this movie that I don't really think the studio understands, which is actually fine by me. But what there is, is some comedy. There is horror, there are scares, there's some violence...

Sex?

There's a little bit, yeah. We don't show it, but there is. There is a little bit of that.

Are you concerned with comparisons to 'Hellboy,' which comes out next spring?

No, I don't think so. I just recently saw a trailer for 'Hellboy' and I don't think it's going to be similar at all - in terms of tone, in terms of look. Having a character that sort of runs around with all the prosthetics and stuff is one thing - this is going to feel so completely different.

How do you make a film with some of those dark themes and keep it PG-13?

Well, I'll tell you. It's interesting. We went in, the studio wants it to be PG-13. The script never...we never intentionally went in and changed anything in the script in terms of like, taking out a sex scene or taking out a lot of blood and gore. It never really had that. We always had the intention of going into this movie and sort of treating it...I'll use the movie 'Jacob's Ladder' as a reference in the way that you sort of, it's what you don't see and things that are hidden in shadows. The tough part is, this movie has a lot of things that you can't take out. There are multiple suicides in this movie - multiple. You can't take it out.

But the themes, there are adult themes in the movie...

There are adult themes and that's what's sort of interesting about this whole process with the studio is trying for PG-13, but we're not taking these things out. They haven't asked us to take these things out and the story depends on these things.

What do you think the studio is expecting?

I don't know. The studio's been watching the dailies, so they see what we've been getting and there've been no complaints so far. I just...there's part of me that just thinks that the studio really, sort of, doesn't understand it, which, I guess - for now - has been a good thing.

Have you already considered who you're going to have to score the movie?

Yeah, I mean, I've actually talked to Lisa Gerrard who used to be in the band Dead Can Dance and she has worked with Hans Zimmer a bunch on movies like 'Gladiator' and 'Black Hawk Down.' She and I talked before the movie started filming and she composed an 11-minute piece that I've been using on set and putting it over...we've been cutting stuff here with the video guy and putting the music with it to see how it feels. And playing it on set.

What kind of sound can we expect?

I mean, it's a little hard to explain. If you know Lisa Gerrard's work, she's a little like world music. She sort of broadens the scope. Since this just takes place in Los Angeles, but the themes are so much more universal, it sort of makes the movie feel like it's on a much broader scale than just in Los Angeles.

Is Gavin Rossdale going to sing?

Not as we know it right now.

Stay tuned for more set report coverage coming soon.

SET VISIT: New Constantine Set Pictures!

We continue our reports from the set of Warner Bros.' Constantine, directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Keanu Reeves, with a look at two pictures of the set described in our first interview with Keanu Reeves.

Superhero Hype! correspondent Brian Carroll wrote, "We then walked a block to Angeles Abbey Memorial Park, built in 1928. The architecture was modeled after Moorish middle eastern architecture with domed roofs and columns. Inside one of three buildings sitting around a courtyard was the set for Midnite's reliquary, a long hallway with plenty of intricate stonework on the walls. The hall was filled with religious icons and other objects, including a huge wooden cross, religious statuary, a dusty jukebox, a vintage machine gun, brains in jars, vases and more."

You can view the pictures in full by clicking the thumbnails below, and stay tuned for more interviews!

Hounsou Haunts Constantine

Djimon Hounsou, who plays a character named Midnite opposite Keanu Reeves in the upcoming Constantine movie, told SCI FI Wire that Midnite is a witch doctor who helps Reeves' supernatural detective. "He definitely is human and with a great sensibility to the spiritual world," Hounsou (Tomb Raider 2) said in an interview on the set of the movie in Compton, Calif., last December.

Reeves plays John Constantine, a haunted character who is dying of cancer, based on the hero of DC/Vertigo's Hellblazer comic series. In the scene being shot at the Angeles Abbey Memorial Park, Midnite brings Constantine to his storehouse of supernatural artifacts, including statues, what appears to be the True Cross and the electric chair from Sing Sing.

"Midnite ... definitely [has] much more of a business approach to Constantine, his longtime friend and longtime partner," Hounsou added. "He's completely distanced himself from that world and become completely neutral in society, where everything is really about business for him, and he takes no sides in the fight against evil. And he's just there to accommodate the good and the bad."

Housou said that acting with Reeves has been exciting. "He's done so much, and this time on this picture, working with him firsthand, it's quite a nice surprise," he said. "I realize how actually he's a very talented man, and ... he's so anal about the work. The guy has received some criticism, good and bad, but working with him, you have a great affinity for the kind of generosity that he has with the work and with people that [are a] part of this picture. He definitely is a very simple man and somewhat maybe misunderstood, because he's just very reclusive, very private." Constantine opens in September.

Rocker exposing his style to cameras

FLINT JOURNAL COLUMN

FLINT

THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION

Friday, February 20, 2004

By Doug Pullen
JOURNAL COLUMNIST

With his fuchsia-dyed hair, sculpted body and a sound that fuses '80s electronica with 21st century rage rock, you can see why Celldweller frontman Klayton approaches music "from a different angle."

Certainly, he'll approach tonight's show at the Machine Shop from a few different angles as up to 11 cameras capture Celldweller's unique style of performance for a future concert DVD. Doors open at 7 p.m. Die Symphony and Behind Every Smile will open.

Klayton is a native New Yorker who moved to Grand Blanc Township two years ago after working on the first Celldweller CD nearby with Grant Mohrman, the former Full on the Mouth and Lost Tribe guitarist from Grand Blanc who now runs a studio in Clarkston.

He recruited guitarist Dale and bassist Kemiikal, both local musicians, last year and debuted the band Aug. 29 last year at the Machine Shop. The group also played there in November.

Klayton (first name only, please) says his off-center approach to music stems from his strict Christian upbringing. The oldest of four children, he "was sheltered from many things my schoolmates were allowed to do. It was meant to protect me from the world, but in the long run it skewed my views of a few things."

He didn't listen to rock music until his teens, then started playing drums. Eventually, he added guitar and keyboards to his repertoire.

Klayton paints his heavy music canvasses with a broader brush than most. His music is colored by the darker, heavier rock of metal's Slayer and electronica's Skinny Puppy, with a big glob of European techno variants and a dash of classical thrown in.

A Celldweller concert is meant to be mentally stimulating and visually arresting, with, as an homage to Skinny Puppy, video footage that is synchronized to the music.

"The show itself is constantly being updated," he says, noting that tonight's perfomance will look, sound and feel much different from previous Machine Shop stops. "I have personally started shooting and editing my own video for the show, and there are quite a few new visual elements and some new musical elements."

Plus, he says, the band has been touring for nearly six months, so it's tighter than during that first show last summer.

The DVD is a natural extension of the band's visual nature. It's also a keepsake for the group's growing national fanbase, which "spans the entire country," according to Jimmy Rhodes, who manages the group's 8,200-member mailing list and 1,000-member street team (fans, who call themselves Cellmates, often discuss the band's virtues on its Web site, celldweller.com).

The group has a good local following, too. "Celldweller goes over real well at the Shop," says proprietor Kevin Zink. "Always a good turnout. People love them."

The 30-ish Klayton has built this through hard work, with a tight budget and no major label support. He'd love to have some backing, but relishes his artistic freedom.

"Though I'm relatively broke, compared to my counterparts, I have the freedom a lot of those people don't have," he says.

He plans to move west eventually; Hollywood seems to have taken an interest in his music. The song "Switchback" (set to be the first video from the CD) has been heard in the TV trailer for the movie "Timeline," and will be used in trailers for the upcoming "The Punisher" and "Constantine" (with Keanu Reeves).

"I've never been a sit-around-and-wait-for-it-to-come-to-me kind of guy," Klayton says.

William Gibson: 'Squinting at the present'

By David Hiltbrand
Philadelphia Inquirer

It takes several calls to reach sci-fi legend William Gibson at home in Vancouver, British Columbia, because his phone is on the fritz and he can't hear it ring.

It's not the type of glitch you expect from the Orwell of the Internet, the Vasco da Gama of cyberspace, the man who virtually predicted virtual reality.

The presumption is that the reclusive author, who will speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library tonight, lives huddled in some digital aerie bristling with the type of hardware Bill Gates would kill to get his hands on.

The reality is that Gibson, 55, is so far behind the curve, he'd need binoculars to see its wake.

"Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer," he says. "I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good."

That's a shocking admission from the author who has painted such a vivid and chilling portrait of our microprocessed future. Beginning with Neuromancer in 1984 - the only novel ever to win sci-fi's Triple Crown of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards - Gibson anticipated many concepts, such as cyberspace, that are now commonplace. The Washington Post called it "an amazing virtuoso performance."

His fiction inspired a generation of sci-fi writers - including Neal Stephenson, Jack Womack, Rudy Rucker and Lucius Shepard - and established the genre known as cyberpunk.

His sole Hollywood foray came when he adapted one of his short stories, "Johnny Mnemonic," into a 1995 film of that name starring Keanu Reeves. Although none of Gibson's novels has been adapted as a movie, his influence is evident in any number of futuristic films, particularly the Matrix trilogy.

"It's relatively easy," Gibson points out, "to make movies that are quite a lot like my fiction without having to buy the film rights from me."

He doesn't spend much time worrying about spin-offs. "I regard the novel as the artifact itself and any films or action figures as peripheral activities that I'm usually not going to be involved in creatively," he says.

Gibson owes his remarkable career to a bus-stop epiphany.

"I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc," he says. "Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. I didn't know anything about it technologically. I just thought if it's that small and that nicely styled, everything is changing."

Gibson is often described as prescient, as if in imagining his books he had somehow hacked directly into the future. He finds the notion ridiculous.

"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."

And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."

By any measure, his most recent novel, Pattern Recognition, from which he'll read tonight, is a departure, in that it is his first novel set in the present. Although the book was published a year ago, Gibson is only now venturing out to promote it - in the paperback version.

"I've always taken it for granted that the publisher makes their money on the mass-market edition and not the hardcover," he says. "The hardcover is the 'Let's get a lot of quotes and get on the New York Times best-seller list' tool. They always send you back out to advertise the actual product."

Given his retiring nature, Gibson looks upon these book tours as something of a necessary evil. "It can run the whole gamut from absolutely wonderful and brilliantly affirming to being really depressing. I have a surprisingly sane fan base... he said, fingers crossed."

Writing is a profession Gibson stumbled into. He was 6 when his father died during a business trip, and was raised by his mother in a small Virginia town. "My memories of growing up there in the '50s look to me like the '30s."

After three years at a boarding school in Arizona, Gibson followed the Vietnam-era migration of young people to Canada - but not to avoid the war. "I never got called up," he says. "The people in the actual draft-evader community in Canada were really politicized. I was there to have fun."

He met his future wife, Deborah, in Toronto during the Summer of Love. They eventually moved to her hometown of Vancouver, where he lived the life of a professional student, eventually earning an English degree at the University of British Columbia in 1977. "I had no career goals. When I started writing [after graduation], I thought, 'If this doesn't work out I'm going to spend the rest of my life at a cat-food factory.' "

His inspiration was the subversive sci-fi paperbacks he devoured in his teens.

"The art form I loved as a kid had gone completely flat. I realized no one had tried to write a science-fiction novel as if Lou Reed and David Bowie were writing it."

To his surprise, Neuromancer turned into a overwhelming literary sensation. For the next 20 years, Gibson continued to mine the bleak dystopia he had imagined.

The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." That explains why his nine books, all of which are still in print, have appeared at unpredictable intervals. "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder." He's now grumpily contemplating his next novel, another present-day tale.

Pattern Recognition represents a personal challenge for the author.

"It started as an attempt to prove that I could write a book set right now that would feel very much like the rest of my stuff," he says.

The novel's contemporary time frame also dictated a change of focus. Through protagonist Cayce Pollard, a "cool-hunter" who ferrets out developing consumer trends, Gibson explores the insidious effects of marketing and branding.

"The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff."

It's a topic Gibson approaches gingerly.

"In my own life I'm much more gleefully complicit than Cayce would ever be happy being," he says. "I don't mind the extent to which William Gibson is a brand as well as being me. It makes for an interesting life."

SET VISIT: Keanu Reeves Talks Constantine!

Source: Warner Bros. Pictures Thursday, February 19, 2004

Superhero Hype! correspondent Brian Carroll visited the set of Warner Bros.' upcoming Constantine, directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale, Djimon Hounsou, Shia LaBeouf and Jesse Ramirez. Based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer, the film tells the story of irreverent supernatural detective John Constantine (Reeves), who has literally been to hell and back. When Constantine teams up with skeptical policewoman Angela Dodson (Weisz) to solve the mysterious suicide of her twin sister (also played by Weisz), their investigation takes them through the world of demons and angels that exists just beneath the landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Caught in a catastrophic series of otherworldy events, the two become inextricably involved and seek to find their own peace at whatever cost. Brian reports...

We took the limo down to Compton south of L.A. and parked in a vacant lot filled with trucks and trailers. We then walked a block to Angeles Abbey Memorial Park, built in 1928. The architecture was modeled after Moorish middle eastern architecture with domed roofs and columns. Inside one of three buildings sitting around a courtyard was the set for Midnite's reliquary, a long hallway with plenty of intricate stonework on the walls. The hall was filled with religious icons and other objects, including a huge wooden cross, religious statuary, a dusty jukebox, a vintage machine gun, brains in jars, vases and more.

We watched Keanu (dressed in a black coat, pants and tie and white shirt and holding a strange golden gun, known in the film as the Holy Shotgun) and Djimon (pimped out in a red hat and velour coat) walk down the hall six times for the scene in which they walk to Midnite's electric chair. When we first came in, Keanu must have sensed us looking down from the floor above because he looked up and gave us a little wave.

And now a little background on John Constantine: John first showed up in DC's "The Saga of the Swamp Thing" # 37, as a mysterious fellow (modeled after the rock star Sting in appearance), who uses a worldwide network of contacts and operatives to keep up with what's going on in the supernatural world. He leads Swamp Thing through a number of adventures to prepare him to avert a supernatural disaster. The character's popularity got him his own book, called "Hellblazer," which debuted in 1987 and continues to this day. Hellblazer has attracted some of comicdom's most successful writers, sometimes for just one issue (Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison) or for a more extended stay, like Warren Ellis, Brian Azzarello, and Garth Ennis, who was responsible for the storyline, "Dangerous Habits," that the movie is based on.

Brian got a chance to talk to Keanu Reeves on the set and here is the interview which does contain some story spoilers, so proceed with caution.

Could you talk about some of the changes you've made from the comic and how your character may be different?

What changes are you talking about?

For example, in the comic, your character is British and blond.

I think that's about the only change we've made.

Did you have any desire to play it British?

We spoke about it, but then it seemed in terms of the platform that we were using which became Los Angeles, kind of like the world in terms of heaven, hell and Los Angeles seemed to be attractive and make sense. We're kind of doing a hard boiled kind of take on the piece, so we kind of went this way. Kind of a more Gothic aspect.

He's known for having a devilish sense of humor. Is that reflected in the dialogue?

It's serious and hopefully funny at the same time. Again, go back to that hard boiled motif. Constantine in this film is in a hospital and he finds out he's dying of lung cancer, lights a cigarette up inside the doctor's office. She says, "That's a good idea." He gets into an elevator and this character comes by and the elevator doors closing and the person says, "Going down?" and he says, "Not if I can help it." The next scene is he's in bed with a half breed demon drinking whiskey with scratches on his back and the scene ends with her tail kind of swishing underneath the sheets laughing, going, "Lung cancer? Ha! That's funny, John!" So hopefully we have the spirit of the Constantinian factor. I'm always asking, "Is that Constantinian enough?" I think I need more Constantine in my Constantine.

How is the story hard boiled?

In terms of that kind of dialogue.

But don't you mean noir, like Bogart?

Well, there is that kind of aspect to it, but I'd say more kind of Californian noir from a literature standpoint. So there's light and shadow. There's a couple of shots of Constantine just smoking in a doorway. You see the smoke rising behind him. It's bright outside, but it's dark in the hall and there's a stairs going up before he does his first exorcism, so there's that kind of cinematic motif.

Does that come out in the dialogue too?

Yeah, that short, clipped kind of thing. There's that thing where he's with that character of Ellie, the half-breed demon that he's just had sex with right after he's found out he's got terminal cancer. She's like laughing. "Terminal cancer, that's funny, John. I bet he can't wait to get his hands on you after all the half-breeds you've sent back. He's really going to have fun with you. He's going to rip you apart. You're the only soul the man himself would come up to collect." And John's like, "Yeah."

What are the burns on your shirt?

Oh, there's a character, Midnite, and I want to use the chair to surf the ether and he doesn't want me to, so he digs his hands into me and it burns, so I beg him.

This is a dark story with a sense of humor. Is that what attracted you to the project?

Yeah, that's something I find is fun to play and I find it enjoyable, that kind of mixture of extreme circumstances with humor, so that's fun.

Is it nice to do a movie with horror elements where you don't yell and scream but get to play it cool?

Well, Constantine gets his ass whupped a lot in this movie, but he keeps coming. And we got some fun stuff. We've got some Ceplavites, some kind of demon aspects and they fight. Demons are coming up onto our plane, which isn't supposed to be happening. So yeah, there's elements where he does play it cool, but he also gets thrown on his back and choked and thrown against walls and hit and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

So is it physical?

Yeah, there's certain elements that are physical, yeah, but I think it's part of the hero journey that you gotta go through. You gotta run and jump and get hit and kind of pull yourself back together again and shake it off and keep going.

You've mentioned that the character has an ambiguous morality that you found attractive.

Yeah. Well, I mean he's not the nicest guy all the time. I don't know if he's immoral, but it's something that he's negotiating with.

There's a lot of CG stuff in this. Have you seen any concept art of the demons?

They're really cool actually. They've got half their skull cut off, so they've taken out kind of the seat of the soul, and with that, no eyes and the skull is open and yet they have these long limbs and they're quite humanoid and yet the whole seat of the soul has been removed and yet they have this・the Ceplavites themselves can fly and they can kind of smell and attack and they're part of the motif of devouring the damned and yet they have no feet. So they can fly but they can't rest and so even the demons are tortured and they have nothing but their desire. So that's a cool kind of concept, I thought.

Can you describe the scene you're shooting today?

Right now I've asked the character Midnite to use the chair which turns out to be the electric chair from Sing Sine and right now this is his reliquary where he's collected all of these objects, religious icons and things like that. So right now we're walking toward the chair where John is going to get electrocuted.

What are those glasses he's collected?

Those are some kind of nice kind of pinup girls with months on them, so I think again this is illustrated the kind of humor that you have all of these religious iconography and he's also collecting high ball glasses with girls on them.

Why is John using the chair?

He's trying to find out the・supposedly the dark side has the Spear of Destiny and so I'm trying to find out who has it, so he uses the chair. What's going to happen is they're playing with an aspect of time. You've seen this kind of scavenger character who's found the Spear at the beginning of the movie and every time you see this character, he looks like he looks over his shoulder like he's being watched, and ultimately John goes and it's kind of tying in time. We play with time oftentimes and it turns out that John was a guy who saw this the whole time. It's in the future. When John crosses over, he crosses over into hell a couple of times and we play with time so that when he does do that, time in the real world slows down or almost stops and so we can go off to these other places and then come back and almost nothing has happened.

Had you read "Hellblazer" before you got the part?

I was not familiar with the material before reading the script.

Were you just looking for this kind of movie?

I was looking for a good script and this kind of came my way and I really liked the writing and the character itself and what happened in the piece and ultimately there's a line in it where Constantine says, "God has a plan for all of us. I had to die twice just to figure that out. Some people like it, some people don't."

He's always been a user in the comic. Is he nicer in the film?

No. Not really.

What is Francis Lawrence like as a director?

He's great. He's really inventive. He's got a real fresh feel to his cinema. He's really great with storytelling and the camera. He's great to work with. He's a great collaborator and yet has a strong voice. He's got good taste. With actors, he knows what he's looking at and he knows what to ask to make it better or to help you kind of discover the scene. It's great.

Is Constantine more vulnerable than Neo?

I don't know. I thought Neo was a very vulnerable character.

Well, he became a superhero in the last movie?

In what way?

Well, he's flying.

Yeah, but he's also full of doubts. He doesn't win. He has to lose his life. That's not very invulnerable. Constantine, there's an element of the greatness, the great Constantine is kind of faded. He's in a vulnerable state and this character Djimon is playing, Midnite, he has a line where he's like・because I'm asking him for help and he's saying I'm neutral. I don't work on any side of the balance. I have this place, this club where half-breeds can come and be themselves and "before you were a bartender, you were one witch doctor against thirty Askar and I was・ and he goes, "You were John Constantine. The John Constantine once. Times change. Balances shift and I have always been a businessman, John. You know that."

What does Hell look like?

Yeah, this one is orangey. There's dust in the air, a charcoal kind of dust. There's a real strong soundscape to this film, so there's a real strong soundscape. One of the things that we came up with and you'll see this a couple of times is that when someone dies and they go to hell, part of hell is just at the moment when they die and I guess you're seeking release, these soldier demons, scavenger demons come in and they just eat you. Part of these empty skull folks is that they have these really huge maws with teeth and so instead of getting release, you get consumed and then instantly you're back to just about where you were going to die again and then come in and get you again. And so there's one element where I walk out onto a hell freeway, coming out of this character's apartment where it transforms from a real world to a hell apartment and that is just basically, you know, there's rubble and decay. Everything's broken down. Cars on the freeway have almost melted and there's just these demons with these people screaming being consumed and then they're back and then screaming and consumed and screaming and consumed.

Are you ever in makeup in the movie?

No, but there's some cool elaborate makeups in this film. They're really kind of doing a nice mixture of having in camera effects or makeups and then having CGI supported, so there's a cool mixture with that. I always find that works best instead of just pure CGI because it becomes kind of flat, though it's getting much better.

What about Rachel Weisz?

She's been great. She's adding a real strength and sensitivity at the same time to her role. It's enjoyable working with her.

Stay tuned to Superhero Hype! for more interviews with stars from the set!