Keanu's philosophy of life

From Bill and Ted's slacker, to finding love on a lake, Keanu Reeves keeps it low-key, writes Claire Sutherland

July 22, 2006

KEANU Reeves: Matrix hero, stoner icon, A-list actor, babysitter. As unlikely as it sounds, it's the final title Reeves is giving his attention to right now.

After finishing a busy round of promotion for his latest film The Lake House he's now looking after the 14-year-old daughter of a friend for 10 days in New York.

"We've been having a nice time," he says. "We've been going to the movies, lunch. She's been summer vacationing here, she's been hanging out with friends, seen some plays. Lots to do. I've had to figure dinner out."

A relaxing few weeks playing New York tour guide is typical of the low-key way Reeves is said to live his life.

He spent two years in Sydney shooting The Matrix. In his time off he'd take off on his motorbike, unencumbered by minders or entourage.

"I guess you call more attention to yourself if you're a party of six than if you're a party of one," he says. "I've had minders once in a while. It's nice to have someone watching your back in certain social situations.

"But in general on the street I like to be able to live it out normal.

"I had lunch today and there was a couple of photographers which was a pain in the ass.

"You're eating lunch and someone's got a camera in a bush, so I'm like 'Dude, let me eat lunch and I'll see you after', but otherwise no one cares, you can walk the street, live your life."

Reeves has always been something of an enigma. He shot to fame with his exemplary use of the word "dude" in the slacker hit Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and followed it with some big movies including Speed and The Matrix trilogy.

But he's never been a red-carpet back-slapper and people-pleaser. His love life has always remained mysterious and his family life out of bounds.

Widely reported has been his sister's long battle with leukemia and the death of his former fiancee in a car crash, but the only statement Reeves has ever made on that matter was: "I'm grieving in private."

When he doesn't want to answer a question he has a disarming habit of seeming to answer it, without actually providing anything concrete.

Take the story of him taking a pay cut to ensure the sequels to The Matrix were made.

"No," he says.

Adding, when pressed for details: "Maybe. Those films were going to get made."

Asked if he is one of the few people in the world who can boast a full understanding of the tangled web that was the plot of The Matrix and he laughs: "What I don't understand I had a point of view about."

Almost as tangled as The Matrix is The Lake House, a romantic drama in two dimensions co-starring Sandra Bullock. A remake of a Korean film, it follows two people living in the same house two years apart.

In an unexplained quirk, they can write letters to one another and gradually fall in love.

Reeves says he was happier to accept the script at face value than his co-star, who was more keen to search for a solution.

"Sandra especially did a lot of that. I think her character was really trying to figure it out and my character was more being accepting," he says.

"Ultimately, it can't make sense in a literal way, but in a figurative sense, of two people getting together and something happening that's unexplained, the mystery how people are attracted, the mysteries of love, in a fable way, I think is what is really going on."

The couple fall in love through the written word. Letter writing is a habit Reeves says he keeps up. "I've always enjoyed writing and I like writing letters," he says. "I think there's something very nice about receiving a letter. It's a pleasure I hope doesn't go by the wayside.

"They're objects that are independent of batteries and you can smell them and read them and touch them and the imprint of the other person is literally on you."

The Lake House was the first English-language film by Argentinian director Alejandro Agresti, who adopted a studio-baiting policy of shooting only the bare minimum.

"He didn't shoot in the traditional sense of master, medium and close-ups," Reeves says.

"He would just know that this scene just needed a master with a moving camera, or just a couple of close-ups. He was editing in the camera. He didn't just shoot general coverage. I think in the early days with them kind of getting to know him they were hoping they would have some extra material that they could use if it didn't work out ? but he was shooting his movie, the film that he saw in his head."

Bullock and Reeves first met when they co-starred in Speed and remained friends ? even as Bullock was persuaded to sign for the dud sequel and Reeves resisted.

Asked if Bullock wishes he'd talked her into making the same wise decision he made, and he laughs again: "It wouldn't have mattered what I said."

Producers threw money at Reeves to get his name on the bill, but money isn't his motivation. He negotiated a lucrative share-of-the-profits deal for his participation in the second and third Matrix films, which earned him a reported $196 million, and promptly handed $122 million of it back to the films' costume and special effects departments, after buying each of his stunt men a motorbike.

The scripts he's working on include one he's writing himself, but he has no plans to follow Bullock into film production.

Instead, he adopts a simple acting philosophy.

"Play the role, work with the director, keep your fingers crossed."

The Lake House opens next Thursday

Keanu's Bed For Sale

It's not often you get the chance to buy a bed which has been slept in by a Hollywood celeb.

But you can right now...

A bed belonging to a former girlfriend of none other than Keanu Reeves is being auctioned on eBay.

The seller is a lady who hopes to raise money for her daughter's school fees.

So as not to offend anyone she asked to remain nameless and said: "The bed's probably worth about $400 (£215) but with its connection to Keanu, I hope to get more.

"If I even get $2,000 (£1,080)I'd be happy. It came with a mattress that I got rid of immediately. Perhaps I should have kept it.

"I don't want to upset anyone but I have a very small house and the bed has to go, and I thought it would be a good idea to get my daughter's college fund started."

Unwilling to divulge too much information, the unnamed seller added: "I'm not naming names but I know for a fact that Keanu Reeves slept on this bed."

Get bidding you Speed fans.

Last Updated: 10:14 UK, Monday July 24, 2006

Animators put Keanu in a 'rotoscoped world'

Roger Moore
The Orlando Sentinel
Jul. 13, 2006 12:00 AM

Keanu Reeves' beard "was just a disaster to try and animate," says Sterling Allen.

The 25-year-old lead animator found himself pulling out his own hair as he and the other animators tried to master the Keanu stubble for Richard Linklater's new film, "A Scanner Darkly."

"It's not a full beard, so you can't animate these big chunks of the frame," Allen says. "You can't draw in the individual hairs. We actually had a 'beard team' that came in and cleaned up his beard in every shot in the movie." advertisement

Linklater, the Austin filmmaker, director of "Before Sunrise" and "School of Rock," fell in love with animation when making 2001's "Waking Life." He made "A Scanner Darkly" the same way. It's a sci-fi film that uses real actors, shot on real locations, which are then painted over. Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson all look like themselves - cartoon versions of themselves, with heightened colors and stylized movements. That's where animators such as Allen came in.

The technique is called "digital rotoscoping" or "interpolated rotoscoping." A film is shot, usually on digital video, and it is then turned into an animated movie, with the help of artists playing around with colors, movement and effects - and computers.

"If you draw a line on frame one of a shot, and jump ahead and draw another line on frame ten, the computer interpolates the eight frames in between, filling in the movement and everything," Allen explains.

While rotoscoping - the act of painting over frames of celluloid to turn conventional film into an animated movie - has been around for years (remember Ralph Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings," or "Cool World") - the computer has truly revolutionized the process, Allen says.

"The budget on this film was tiny, like $8.5 million," he says. "We could never have animated it doing it hand-drawn for that little. This software speeds up the process so much, because you're paying attention to every frame, but you don't necessarily have to draw each single line for each single frame.

"For instance, I'm talking right now. If we were animating me, my mouth would get a lot more key (human drawn) frames, but my shoulders won't be drawn every frame. You can let the computer do 39 out of every 40 frames. And by letting the computer do it, you don't get that jittery rotoscoping feel. It's smooth, lifelike."

Allen, an Austin fine artist, had never done animation before hooking up with Linklater. He described the software, called ColorEngine or RotoShop, as "very easy to learn. If you can draw, your learning curve will be really steep, and it allows you to make an animated film with just a very few people."

Plus, he adds, "It looks really cool. The movie (based on a Philip K. Dick novel about the human cost of drugs and the war on drugs) is sci-fi, but it doesn't have a lot of sci-fi elements. Just this 'scramble suit' (an electronic disguise gadget), and things like that. You can't pull those elements off without them being cheesy without animation.

"The animation puts you in a different reality, a rotoscoped world, and it allows you to pull off things like the scramble suit, make them believable. The animation allows you to get into the characters' altered states, too. You get their paranoia, that uneasiness, as if you're on drugs, like they are. Hallucinations come off beautifully using this."

Where "Waking Life," Linklater's earlier foray into rotoscoping, was a dream trip, "A Scanner Darkly" mimics a drug trip.

Linklater has said he used 50 animators, working on home PCs, putting in roughly 500 man-hours per minute of finished film for the movie. Critics have largely praised the film as "a mind bender" (USA Today) and "visionary head trip" (Rolling Stone). But this animation style is not for everybody, Allen admits.

"Even I notice that when you blow the movie up for the big screen, it's harder on the eyes," Allen says. "Watching as you're making it on monitor is one thing. Seeing it on a TV screen will be easier on some people than seeing it in a theater."

The actor talks about his new film, plus gives us the lowdown on the new David Fincher film.

Robert Downey Jr. had us all in stitches. He's a pretty funny guy and had no problems having fun during the interview. I don't think I've ever had to edit out this many expletives from an interview. A Scanner Darkly was a labor of love for him. We didn't get too into his past, and the relevance of drug use as a motivation, but it seemed understood. Robert took the film seriously and had nothing but praise for Richard Linklater and his creative vision.

Robert Downey Jr: I got a call, I read the script, and I thought, this is nuts, this is going to be cool. And Keanu was playing the lead, so I went to the chateau, and we just started to have this spit ball session. We talked about the characters and all that. And Woody, and Winona, it was just a great experience for me.

Was working with Richard Linklater also a draw?

Robert Downey Jr: I saw School of Rock, and I was like, why haven't I worked with Richard Linklater already? Then by the time I got him I was like, I'm really pissed off I feel like you owe me some retroactive swag. He gave me the 10-year anniversary "Dazed and Confused" T-shirt, which I still wear with relish.

Would you have made it without Linklater?

Robert Downey Jr: It would have had to be someone real special, and I am convinced that he is one of our great American directors.

What was the rapport like on set? Did everyone share the same vision of the film?

Robert Downey Jr: I would say that Rick and Keanu got it, that Winona looked great and is a great actress and really smart, and Woody and I were basically in a scenery chewing contest. At one point I shoot off this silencer, and I hear a thud. I go, did he just fall out of a tree? Without a crash pad or anything? What is he trying to do, this is my scene! I look over and he's, "that's lunch."

Did you ever think about being animated?

Robert Downey Jr: I kind of forgot to tell you the truth. I forgot and then I was really pleased. It's the greatest smoke ring blown in the history of cinema.

Did you get to see any of the live footage? Could that have been released as the film?

Robert Downey Jr: It looked really simple and crude and improperly lit, which it was, but it also would have sufficed.

Is it easier to shoot a film without worrying about lighting, hair, make-up etc?

Robert Downey Jr: Yeah, isn't it great? I gave myself a really bad haircut a week before we started. The missus was like "wow! What the fuck? You cut your hair yourself! You look crazy." Body mikes would fall out. Things would fall on the table and be in frame.

Did you enjoy the process of making it?

Robert Downey Jr: It was fantastically fun. I'll go back to it as a period in time, it was in Austin, we were all staying at this hotel. Woody wouldn't put on the air conditioning, Keanu had his bass in the next room, Winona was like, "guys, you want to go to a movie?" I was like, no, I want to make a fucking movie! I went to workout when I wasn't on set. I treated it like it was boot camp.

What was your reaction to the final product?

Robert Downey Jr: I had a really emotional reaction to seeing the movie at Cannes, because it's touching and personal and it's Dick's story. But it's science fiction, it's got this generation of actors, except for maybe Keanu, we haven't gotten through the last ten years all in one piece.

That bicycle scene is absolutely hilarious. Was that verbatim from the script?

Robert Downey Jr: I just kept looking at it and saying my lines, following the logic of the scene with someone who's obviously wrong, but is very excited about how great things are. Then his life crashes before his eyes and he pulls everyone else in. He condescends to people.

Do you read anything into the subject matter? Are we really being manipulated?

Robert Downey Jr: You have to give credit to any institution that's so evil that they're completely running the program. I'm not a big Illuminati guy. I think paranoia goes from generation to generation. It's convenient to imagine that there's a few people controlling everything, that way it's manageable and small. But that's not life, life is messy.

Is there thought to your character's logic processes? Or is he just unnecessarily paranoid?

Robert Downey Jr: If you're anything like me there are days when you're convinced you know more than everyone around you. Which is often confirmed by your interactions with people. I know if you talk faster and use more ten-dollar words than everyone around you, you convince half of them that they should shut up because you know what you're talking about. I think Dick [Linklater] was really fantastic at throwing up a stereotype or an archetype, better yet, and then throwing why it's full of holes.

Do you think that this film is made at a time when its message is particularly relevant?

Robert Downey Jr: Yeah. Every frame and every instance of the film is supported by - I'm not big on this word- but the karma of the people who came together. This film, ten years ago would have meant one thing. It's just seeing cycles, and having been around enough cycles to understand that I'm playing the school principle instead of the rebel student, things tend to repeat themselves in a way that's predictable and yet exciting.

You just wrapped Zodiac. What was it like working with David Fincher?

Robert Downey Jr: He's very tough on technique. So if you're a technically proficient actor, you're going to survive. If you're not, you're going to hate him.

Why make films like A Scanner Darkly and Zodiac, but also do The Shaggy Dog?

Robert Downey Jr: I just wanted to be in a Disney movie and they offered it. Best job I ever had. The craft service is amazing. Fucking crazy. "Hey, thanks, we got that shot with you and the monkeys, we'll see you in three weeks, did you get your check?" I'm like, wow.

What's next for you?

Robert Downey Jr: Zodiac's done, Fur's coming out, I'm doing this movie called Charlie Bartlett in Toronto, which I adore. It's like if Mean Girls was like a "Harold and Maude" type thing. I play a school principle.

A Scanner Darkly is open in limited cities now; it expands nationwide in the coming weeks; it's rated R.

REEVES LAUGHS OFF FORLANI ROMANCE

Hollywood heart-throb KEANU REEVES has laughed off reports he is engaged to CLAIRE FORLANI - insisting they're not even dating. THE MATRIX star had reportedly popped the question to the stunning MEET JOE BLACK actress at celebrity chef WOLFGANG PUCK's new Hollywood restaurant Cut after a 'three-year relationship'. However, Reeves tells the News York Daily News, "We're good friends."
10/07/2006 12:21

'A SCANNER DARKLY' IS SCI-FI COME TRUE

Hugh Hart

Sunday, July 9, 2006
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(07-09) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles -- Shortly after he began adapting Philip K. Dick's drug surveillance saga "A Scanner Darkly," Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater imagined the late sci-fi writer having a laugh at his expense.

"I was out here in Los Angeles briefly, 2 in the morning, not a car in sight, you hit an intersection as the light turns red," he says. "Boom, a few weeks later this $265 traffic ticket shows up in the mail with my license plate and a picture of my face -- they tracked me down. The logical next step is, 'OK, we've scanned you biometrically, we know you jaywalked. Fifty bucks, please.' And I could just hear Philip K. Dick chuckling in my head: 'See? I told you -- the future.' "

Linklater, sitting cross-legged yoga style in his socks, jeans and short-sleeved shirt, laughs often and easily, even as he describes the pitch-black themes explored in Dick's novel, published in 1979, three years before the writer's death at age 53. Set in Anaheim in 2013, "A Scanner Darkly" stars Keanu Reeves as undercover cop Bob Arctor, who works with other "scanners" to monitor surveillance footage in an effort to nab dealers of Substance D, a crack cocaine-like drug threatening to wreak neurochemical havoc on the entire Southern California population. Complications ensue when Arctor, disguised at work in a shape-shifting "scramble suit," is forced to wire his own dilapidated ranch house with hidden cameras to track the activities of zany addict roommates (Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson) and the cute neighborhood slacker (Winona Ryder).

"It's a real tribute to Philip K. Dick's prescience, the way he saw how technologies in the hands of government would be used not for the liberation of individuals but for their oppression," Linklater says, referring to the raft of domestic security measures that have become commonplace in the post-Sept. 11 war-on-terror era. "Sure enough, what 30 years ago was seen as this kind of crackpot conspiracy paranoia is becoming our reality today. It's kind of like 1984 missed it by about 20 years, but now it's upon us."

To convey the jittery breakdown in perception experienced by the story's drug-addled characters, Linklater decided to use the same animation techniques introduced in his 2001 stream-of-consciousness feature "Waking Life."

"Once I got into Philip K. Dick's world, I felt animation was the best way to tell this particular story," he says. "You're looking at something that seems real, but is it? Your brain gets put in this kind of dissonant state, maybe, of (both) reality and unreality. I felt that would be the right way to perceive this story, similar to what Bob Arctor is going through with his own unreality."

Linklater shot and edited the film in conventional live-action fashion.

"Then the fun began," he jokes.

A team of 50 animators, equipped with digital pens and pressure-sensitive Wacom computer tablets, spent 18 months painting each frame of digital video footage. So-called interpolated rotoscoping software enabled the artists to apply layers of color, line and texture over the original live-action images.

"We essentially made the same movie twice," says producer Tommy Pallotta, who helped oversee animation. "What you're seeing is an artist's interpretation of the live action."

Unlike "Waking Life," in which animators created completely different styles for each scene, "this was a little less free-form," Linklater says. "We were going for a uniform graphic-novel look throughout, so it put us closer to traditional animation style sheets: 'How to draw Dumbo.' For us, it was: 'Here's how you do Winona's jaw, here's how you do Keanu's beard.' "

The labor-intensive process required animators to put in as many as 500 hours to render a single minute of on-screen action.

"I'm surprised I'm the only guy who's done two movies like this," Linklater says. "People have inquired, and I think they're a little disappointed to find out how much work it is. They think you hit a button and you get this good-looking image."

The remarkably prolific Dick, who battled drugs for much of his life, lived in Berkeley for many years, where he wrote science fiction that inspired movies such as "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and "Minority Report." In the course of developing "A Scanner Darkly" for the screen, Linklater flew to the Bay Area to secure the blessing of Dick's daughters, Laura and Isa.

"The first thing they told me was, 'If it wasn't for drugs our dad would still be writing,' " Linklater says. "They wanted to make sure that the film would still be this cautionary tale, and I assured them, yes (it would), because that's my own view of drugs."

At the same time, Linklater wanted to offer a three-dimensional saga that would include a few antic bonding moments along the way.

"It was important to not just do the vacuous 'drugs are bad, just say no' (message)," he says. "Yes, drugs are bad and they can kill you, but there can also be this kind of fun, familial, communal aspect.

"There's potentially this exuberant upside, which in a very short amount of time, can get very paranoid, dark and tragic."

Linklater found that Dick's satiric jabs meshed well with his own sensibility, which has fueled a number of off-kilter comedic pieces, including "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused" in the early '90s and the more recent "School of Rock" and "Bad News Bears."

In "A Scanner Darkly," as in some of his more personal relationship dramas, such as "Before Sunset" and "Before Sunrise," Linklater says he's more interested in raising questions than he is in providing a neatly resolved plot.

"The whole notion of one hemisphere in the brain attempting to compensate for the other is interesting," he says, pondering the mental "cross chatter" suffered by "Scanner's" delusional drug addicts. "My mother is a speech pathologist who treats patients who've had strokes or motorcycle accidents. Part of their brain's not working because the highway between one part of the brain and the other has been demolished. Growing up around that, I've always been kind of fascinated with seeing a brain trying to make a new pathway, and that's what's going on in this movie. People are attempting to compensate."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------A SCANNER DARKLY (R) opened this weekend in the Bay Area.
Hugh Hart is a Chronicle correspondent.

Page PK - 28

ANISTON BEATS PITT AND JOLIE IN ALL-AMERICAN POLL

JENNIFER ANISTON is still everyone's favourite All-American, according to an Independence Day (04JUL06) TV poll. Showbusiness news show ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT asked viewers to vote for their favourite red, white and blue superstars - and Aniston's fans came out in their thousands to put the former FRIENDS star at the top of the list. The actress' ex-husband, BRAD PITT, also made the top 10 list but only just. The TROY star shares 10th place with KEANU REEVES on the new poll. Aniston's one-time love rival, ANGELINA JOLIE, also makes the list - at number eight. The top 10 is: 1. JENNIFER ANISTON 2. REESE WITHERSPOON 3. TOM CRUISE 4. JOHNNY DEPP 5. CLAY AIKEN 6. GEORGE CLOONEY 7. JENNIFER GARNER 8. ANGELINA JOLIE 9. JULIA ROBERTS 10. BRAD PITT + KEANU REEVES.04/07/2006 19:42

New Keanu/ Winona Flick Has Philip K. Dick Fans Excited, Anxious

Keanu Reeves as Fred/ Bob Arctor in "A Scanner Darkly" Photo: Warner Independent Pictures

>Ask Winona Ryder about the author of the book behind her new movie, "A Scanner Darkly," and her eyes light up.

"I could talk about that forever," she said. "I have a million things to say about that."

Like the psychics in his 1956

short story "Minority Report," sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick was something of a "precog" himself. But instead of predicting murders before they happened, the prolific author imagined various unsettling futures ? any number of which, one feels, might still come true.

His nightmares of twisted realities and even more twisted identities ? an android-hunter suddenly unsure whether he's an android himself; a policeman accused of a crime he's yet to commit; a man planning a vacation to Mars, only to learn that he's already been there ? have been made into a half-dozen movies of varying merit, including "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and "Paycheck." The sci-fi concepts he pioneered, meanwhile, reverberate through countless other films, from "The Matrix" to "The Truman Show" to "The X-Files."

Unsurprisingly, Dick fans (in fact, they call themselves "Dickheads") have eagerly awaited the release of the film version of "A Scanner Darkly," featuring Keanu Reeves as an undercover agent and/or suspected drug dealer who is, it appears, spying on himself. It's a convoluted, schizophrenic story where drug use fractures brains so thoroughly that abusers can't even recognize themselves. (Dick, a former drug enthusiast himself, intended the story as a cautionary tale.)

"I watched it and felt like I really didn't want what was about to happen, to happen," Ryder said. "I was gripping the seat. Honestly. I'm not just saying that because I'm in it."

It's been called by the author's daughters the "first faithful adaptation" of their late father's work. But what does "faithful" mean, really? Books always have to be changed ? slimmed, reshaped ? for the screen. Does a more "faithful" adaptation mean a better movie?

Ridley Scott's hugely influential 1982 film, "Blade Runner," for example, is hardly a "faithful" rendition of Dick's novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" As Richard Linklater, the director of the new "Scanner" movie, said, "It kind of takes the central idea and runs with it ? successfully, I think. The movies can't help but reflect the filmmakers. 'Paycheck' becomes a John Woo movie. 'Minority Report' becomes a Spielberg movie. 'Scanner' becomes my type of movie ? a bunch of guys talking."

Unlike most of the films adapted from PKD works, "Scanner" doesn't feel like an adventure in Tomorrowland.

"The futuristic aspect is handled in a smart way," Ryder said. "It doesn't have a future look ? no silver shoulder pads. You can get into the characters, instead of [watching a] giant movie [with] big visuals and crawly things."

Ryder and Reeves both consider themselves Dickheads ? Reeves started reading Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" while filming the first "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," to offset the airhead character he played in that picture.

"Dick kind of transformed the American novel," Reeves said, "from the Western to sci-fi, exploring new frontiers." And Ryder's godfather, the 1960s' LSD proselytizer Timothy Leary, was once a roommate of Dick's, so she was raised on his stories.

"He was prophetic," she said. "He wrote these things 30 years ago and look what's happening right now. He was pretty much on the money."

Many PKD fans have been annoyed that the author's richly philosophical stories have for the most part been turned into big action-adventure blockbuster movies. Two of Dick's stories, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" and "Second Variety," both set on Earth, were turned into outer-space adventures in their respective movies, "Total Recall" and "Screamers." Inevitably, significant elements were lost in translation. On the other hand, major changes made for other film adaptations wound up enhancing the original work on other levels.

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"Blade Runner" went through a number of script revisions before Dick was happy with it. Hampton Fancher's original screenplay enraged him. "They had cleaned my book up of all the subtleties and of the meaning," he told Twilight Zone magazine at the time. "I had this vision that I would go up there and watch a scene being shot, and Harrison Ford would say, 'Lower that blast-pistol or you're a dead android!' And I'd be screaming, 'You've destroyed my book!' That would be a little item in the newspaper: 'Obscure Author Becomes Psychotic on H'wood Set; Minor Damage, Mostly to the Author.' "

After David Peoples revised the screenplay and Dick saw a preview segment of the movie's special effects, he was placated

"They caught it perfectly," Dick told the magazine, saying the movie and the book would "reinforce each other." Dick never got the chance to find out, however; he died just a few months before the film's release.

Harrison Ford, the movie's star (also known to be displeased with the film version), came around in the end himself, telling MTV News in 1996, "I like 'Blade Runner' a lot more than I used to. There were some things that I was frankly disappointed in about it, but I think it's an awfully good film, and a real original film."

The 1990 film "Total Recall" suffered similar detours on its way to the screen. Originally, David Cronenberg ? a natural choice for a PKD project ? was slated to direct and Richard Dreyfuss, William Hurt and Patrick Swayze were considered for the lead role. But when Cronenberg's draft was rejected ? because it was "the Philip K. Dick version," he was told ? the director moved on, disgusted by the fact that the movie was becoming "Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars," he told Wired magazine. In the end the seemingly ordinary clerk in the PKD story became a beefy construction worker (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and instead of just dreaming of Mars, he got to go there (again).

A related Dickian theme occurs in two of his stories: "Second Variety," which was (rather crudely) turned into the 1996 movie "Screamers," and "Imposter," which was made into the 2002 film of the same name. Here, human identity has grown unstable in a world populated by highly advanced robots and "replicants" just as lethal as those in "Blade Runner." "Screamers" turned out to be a fairly routine space-horror slasher film. "Imposter" preserved some of Dick's paranoid vision but had nowhere near the visual or philosophical punch as Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "Minority Report."

Spielberg took the short story and made it even more Dickian: Tom Cruise's character works in an even more menacing police state than that imagined by the author, where citizens are scanned by robot spiders and can be sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes they might have committed had the government's "pre-crime" cops not intervened.

"The idea of being arrested before you commit a crime is terrifying," Ryder said. "The reason it's terrifying is that I can see it happening. Journalists are already being jailed for writing something."

"In Dick's short story, the hero is trying to preserve the pre-crime program," said "Minority Report" screenwriter Scott Frank. "And he commits murder in the end to prove that it works, and to save the system. But no matter how you look at it, the system is fascistic. So I just thought about what kind of people would embrace or fall prey to this system. Tom Cruise's character had lost his son to a murderer, and he was still grieving, still obsessing, so he was in effect taking out his anger on the rest of society."

So "Minority Report" became a psychological thriller, although a very Dickian one. It could have been worse. Consider 2003's "Paycheck," which actually played down the police-state overtones of Dick's original story and turned it into a chase flick.

Will "Scanner" be the last of the really ambitious Philip K. Dick movies? Richard Linklater doesn't think so and has his own vision of the future: "We'll be seeing his movies for the next hundred years."

Check out everything we've got on "A Scanner Darkly."

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Jennifer Vineyard, with additional reporting by Larry Carroll

THE CULTUREPULP Q&A: Richard Linklater

As promised to readers of this Sunday's Boston Globe comic: Here's a slightly edited transcript of my full 45-minute phone conversation with director Richard Linklater….

Remember the dizzying rotoscoped animation in Richard Linklater's “Waking Life”? Well, Linklater (who also directed "Slacker," "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise" and "School of Rock") revisits that unsettling filmmaking technique for “A Scanner Darkly” -- his faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 sci-fi novel.

Dick (who died in 1982) was a brilliant, troubled writer, plagued by mystical visions and paranoia. His stories were almost always obsessed with fractured reality. But Hollywood loves turning his trippy concepts into big-budget entertainment. “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report” (and, alas, "Paycheck") were all loosely adapted from his stories. (The Boston Globe's Web site has a nice slide show on "Philip K. Dick movies" right here.)

“Scanner Darkly” is Dick's most personal novel, and Linklater shows unusual fidelity to the page with his film adaptation. The book’s based partly on Dick’s sad, funny experiences living in a house full of drug users in the early ’70s. Layered over this is a genre story about a narc named Bob (Keanu Reeves in the movie) who's addicted to the overpowering "Substance D." Bob slowly loses his mind after he’s assigned to surveil himself.

I talked with Linklater for 45 minutes about Dick’s life and work; the late author's family; "Scanner"'s more muted use of "Waking Life"'s pioneering animation technique; why the theatrical cut of "Blade Runner" is superior; and much more.

MIKE RUSSELL: So this interview is actually for a comic strip.

RICHARD LINKLATER: Okay. Should I answer in a comic way?

Q. That actually ties into one of my questions: When you were making "Scanner Darkly," did you have to sit down with the actors and say, "We're making a movie that looks like a cartoon, but don't act like you're in one?"

A. Yeah. You gotta play it real, because that's all you have in front of you. And in our case, the animation is really just going over -- what you see is what you get. You can't embellish much. You're pretty much stuck with what the actors do.

Q. I saw the movie a couple of days ago. And I must say: Robert Downey, Jr. [who plays Barris, the logorrheic conspiracy theorist] has a bizarre gift for speaking paranoid dialogue.

A. He's really one of the few actors who could pull that off. He said he had more dialogue in this movie than in the last five or six things he's done combined. It was good for him. Got him in shape

Q. I just listened to an audio file of Dick reading a passage from "Scanner Darkly" --

A. The suicide scene?

Q. Yeah. The overdose-of-Freck sequence.

A. Yeah, that's on the Internet. I never could find a good original of that. It's a crappy old recording. I was hoping to use that in the movie. But it was just too poorly recorded.

Q. What's interesting to me about that recording is that Dick is cracking up throughout the reading.

A. Philip K. Dick is hilarious. The great thing about making this movie was that, as much as possible, I got to know him. I got to know his daughters. I read a lot about him.But no one talks about how damn funny he was. And smart. Kind of like Downey's character -- he could spin a story and keep adding these elaborate, intelligent pathways to whatever he was talking about. I think he's an incredibly comedic writer. He creates absurdist situations with a feel for people. That was a big deal for me -- to bring out the humor.

Q. I read "The Divine Invasion," which he wrote when he was starting to personally sort of spin off [into paranoia and mystical experiences]…

A. Yeah. There are definitely some dark areas in there. His paranoia was real.

Q. But I recall a character in that book sort of comedically acknowledging that his reality was fractured.

A. Dick had a sense of self-irony. He was kind of absurdly aware of his condition. Not just his condition, but the human condition.That's how I always talked about the movie. I said, "It's a lot like life -- really funny, and then darker and sadder sometimes that you could have ever imagined."I think Philip K. Dick knew when he was spinning out. There's a famous incident: He was a real foe of the establishment -- he thought his phones were tapped and his apartment had been broken into, and that the government was pretty much out to get him. He was pretty sure of that. He just figured he was a major target.And the Freedom of Information Act allowed people to get their own FBI files. And he thought for sure it would be this thick thing about how they'd been after him all these years. He was ready for the big awakening -- finally, the proof of everything! And he got the file, and it was kind of empty. It's similar to Freck and his [jar of] bugs -- you get wound up, and there's nothing there. He never registered with the authorities -- he was just some crackpot sci-fi writer. His little world, his thinking, had never broken through to them.

Q. Why has a man so eccentric -- and so marginal in life -- inspired so many movies of his work? Movies of his books have a combined box-office take of something like $700 million at this point.

A. He was alive when "Blade Runner" was made. He kind of knew. People were catchin' up to him for a long time, and he was certainly big in other countries. I think there's a certain ghetto with sci-fi where you're not taken as seriously as a writer. People sort of judge you real easily that way. It's like Poe in his day -- "He wrote thrillers." Now, he's a real writer.In Japan, they consider Dick a top American writer. And nowadays, it's pretty obvious. As far as adaptability goes: He has fantastic core ideas. "Scanner"'s only the second novel made into a movie -- "Blade Runner" being the other. All the rest have been from short stories. And these stories are often just one incredible idea: "PreCogs can arrest people before they commit the crimes." That's a great idea for a movie. "Total Recall," all these movies -- great, singular ideas, one after the other. And Hollywood's good at nabbin' a good idea whenever they can find it.

Q. And yours is really the first adaptation of an entire Dick novel. "Blade Runner" adapted -- what? -- 10 pages of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

A. Yeah. And they kind of ran with it. But I think Philip K. Dick liked what they were doing -- he understood that adaption process. The gist of it was there. But I wanted to be faithful. I think he's a significant enough writer that someone should adapt the whole story, not just take an idea.
And you could just take "Scanner Darkly"'s idea: Narc gets addicted, and the Philip K. Dick twist is that -- because of the scramble suit and his hidden identity -- he's assigned to surveil himself. but his brain is split and he's forgetting who he is. That gets you into the Philip K. Dick area of "Who am I?" "What is reality?" Those ideas could probably have been spun into a thriller -- something a little more jacked-up Hollywood. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to tell the story the way I thought he saw it -- which was about people hanging out. I could tell it was very personal to him. And I wanted to keep the humor. I'd always been sort of bummed that so many of his films lose a lot of that humor. And now I see why. Movies are mostly just finely tuned short stories. You hit a tone -- you take the viewer on a ride, but you don't change tones completely. It just kind of goes against simple storytelling, I guess. But to actually be true to Philip K. Dick's work, you have to be…. I saw this early on: "We're going to be a full-blown comedy, on the one hand, but we're also going to be a full-blown tragedy. Those are gonna be right on top of each other." Tonally, it's a difficult thing to undertake. It throws you a little bit. But that's what you have to do to be true to the work -- and true to his view of the world.

Q. The scenes with the guys hanging out in the tweaker house are very much of a piece with "Slacker." We're getting right back to your origins.

A. [laughs] I always related to that. When I read that, I was like, "This is real." I think I had these guys as roommates, you know? Sitting around, bullshitting, and not even sure how they got there.

Q. Though I expect you spent less time obsessing over the number of gears in a bicycle [a scene in the movie].

A. Well, in the real world, that's as important as anything. Isn't it? At that moment?

Q. Well, it's a marvelous piece of writing. I've been witness to that conversation where people are getting collectively worked up over nothing. That's hard to capture in a script.

A. Well, it's a hard thing to get in a movie. You've got a committee of people saying, "Well, it doesn't move the story forward. We can kind of lose that. It doesn't tell us anything." So I was just lucky that our budget was low enough that I had creative freedom. That's what the movie's all about.

Q. And so many movies about addiction play up the glamour or the bathos. They never get into the absurdity or the silliness.

A. Well, it's communal -- you have a few people that you're using with, and they become your surrogate family, except it's a family you chose. There's this exuberant, communal upside. And of course that's missing, because no one ever wants to hint that any of that could actually be fun in any way. But if you show that, it's more than compensated for by the fact that…. It's sort of like a crime movie. In "Goodfellas," you see them at the top of their game -- but then it ends. And it's the same thing in the drug world: You catch a groove for a second and have fun. But the price you're going to pay for that little bit of fun is enormous. It's everything. So you feel kind of sad for the frailty of the people who wanted that fun and were willing to risk everything for it. And it goes from fun to dark paranoid death really fast. That can happen in one day.

Q. At the end of the movie, you include Dick's dedication, from the novel, that lists his friends lost to drug use. Why was that important to put in the movie?

A. He wrote more. I left the same list of people and shortened the dedication, because it was pretty lengthy. But when you read the book, you realize, just as I suspected, "Oh -- these were real people." He's on the list. One of his wives is on the list -- the mother of one of his daughters.For all of us working on the movie, that was an issue: "Are we gonna put that in? Does that have anything to do with the movie?" But you know, it's a tribute. Everyone involved in the movie has their own list. Doesn't everybody have their own list?

Q. It's also a nice nod to Philip K. Dick's family -- who I undertand keep a pretty careful watch over his estate. Was approaching them to let you adapt this novel tricky at all?

A. It wasn't tricky. They weren't just, "Do whatever you want with our dad's work." They were like, "If it wasn't for drugs, our dad would still be writing." They wanted to see that I wouldn't be cavalier with that. I think they really loved the fact that I still had that dedication. It showed that it was still seen in tragic terms. I think they wanted some assurances that I was on the right wavelength with that.

Q. I read that several real-world Philip K. Dick artifacts appear as "Easter eggs" throughout the film. True?

A. [laughs] Yeah, they were very generous that way. I got the ultimate anointment -- Philip K. Dick's own copy, from his own library, of "Scanner Darkly." The original paperback they gave to me, with his initials in the front. I was sitting there going, "Holy shit!"

Q. What did you do with it?

A. Well, it's wrapped in plastic in a special place.

Q. It's bagged and boarded.

A. [laughs] I don't think he'd be too precious about it.

Q. The story's about people who disappear into illogic and lose control of their language. Maybe you don't even care about this, but I have to ask: How do you film that and keep the audience interested without causing them to tune out like they would when listening to a tweaker ranting?

A. I've had some experience with this before…. [laughs] In real life, if a person is ranting in your living room, it's amusing for two minutes and then you're like, "Would that person get out of here, please?" or "Are they dangerous?" You have to think of real-world consequences.In a movie, though, you know, you're sittin' in your seat in a dark world, and it's a safe distance. And I think obsession is kind of fun to watch. I kind of count on that a lot -- people can watch obsessed people [in movies].

Q. It's like they're being obsessed for the rest of us. By the way, I wasn't trying to suggest that "Scanner Darkly" made me tune out.

A. Oh, I think a lot of people WILL tune out. [laughs] But they would never tune in in the first place. But that's obviously not who this film was made for. They're the people who call the cops when that person starts talking to them.

Q. You've said you felt you were "channeling" Dick while making the film.

A. I don't think "channeling." That's not fair. Spielberg said he was "channeling" Kubrick when he made "A.I.," so….I thought, in some spiritual way, that I had his permission. I had his chuckling permission to make this as a movie. [laughs] But it's important to delude ourselves. It's important to become an obsessed weirdo. You have to meet the energy of the book in a similar way.

Q. Any odd magic moments on-set?

A. I have those all the time. I'm really hard-pressed for any one incident of, like, "Ooooo!" I kind of felt it in an all-pervasive way. I know that's a boring answer, but it's kind of true. I just felt it with the cast when they came in, rehearsals, everything -- it just felt like we were on the right wavelength, you know? We were just in this perfect place where we didn't totally get everything that we were doing, but were excited by it.Q. Have you read Robert Crumb's fantastic comic adaptation of Dick's mystical experiences?

A. Yes. I have that.

Q. I would love to see a short film of that.

A. Someone could make it. There it is. All laid out, right there.

Q. You've described "Scanner Darkly" the novel as Dick's "love letter" to his lost friends. But that love letter is a story of paranoia, to some degree.

A. Well, let's not forget: All the paranoia in the movie is justified. Their house is bugged. There is an undercover agent living amongst them -- he just happens to be our hero. Even when Downey says, "Might I suggest that the tow truck was bugged -- thus allowing an operative time to come back and dismantle…" -- you could look at it that he's right.

Q. You could argue that the "Bob Arctor" half of Keanu Reeves' character did do the damage to his car that required them to have to call a tow truck.

A. Yeah. Because it gets them out of the house. If you go back and start piecing it all together, he's not the one tweaked out. I mean, he is a little bit -- but Woody Harrelson's tweaked more. It all pieces together in some fascinating retroactive ways.So I think the "love letter," to be true to this world, could only end this way. You've gotta be honest.

Q. So it's a love letter in the form of a lament.

A. Yeah. There's a little requiem, you know?

Q. Why did you use interpolated rotoscoping on this in a way that was so much more muted than "Waking Life"? I was frankly surprised by how muted the overall look and tone of the film was.

A. Yeah, you could do some much more interpretive or out-there kind of stuff [with this animation technique] -- stylistic and otherwise. I don't know. I just wanted it to look kind of like a graphic novel come to life -- consistent design, pretty straightforward. I wanted you to go into the story and not be consistently pulled out of it by artistic flourishes.You know, my previous foray into this, "Waking Life," the movie was so much about itself as a meta-cinematic undertaking [laughs] that it was okay to be changing styles and drawing attention to how you were experiencing something being created -- and you were part of it, in some way. But this was a totally different vibe. I was trying to engage your brain and your emotions, not pull you out of the story.

Q. In "Waking Life," the style kept shifting so much, I never forgot it was animated. I actually sort of forgot "Scanner" was animated while I was watching it.

A. Hopefully you would.

Q. You delivered a monologue at the end of "Waking Life" about Dick and his … complicated mystical/paranoid relationship with the Book of Acts. It leads me to wonder why you didn't adapt "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" [the Dick novel Linklater references in that monologue].

A. Ah, that would have been a little too obvious. I feel closer, in a way, to "Scanner."

Q. Would "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" even make a decent film?

A. I don't know. It probably could. I like it, but I wasn't thinking of it in cinematic terms.

Q. Some people have argued that your speech in "Waking Life" is, in fact, the key to understanding the movie. If Wiley Wiggins' character says "Yes" -- essentially admitting he's dead -- he floats up to Heaven.

A. [laughs] Or wakes up. Well, I guess it sort of reads that way, but I don't think it's some singular Rosetta Stone type of thing, you know? No more than anything else in the movie. The placement of my scene near the end probably gives it a certain gravity.

Q. William Gibson has talked about how all science fiction that picks a specific year in which it takes place has a "sell-by date." "Scanner Darkly," the novel, takes place in 1994.

A. Yeah. '92 or '94. Something like that.

Q. Now, you purposely made that vague in the film, correct? And you played up the surveillance aspects of the novel?

A. Well, adapting is choosing. The stuff I dropped [from the book] was '70s slang and stuff that seemed to put it in the '70s.

Q. Sure. Otherwise you end up with a Heston sci-fi movie.

A. You can't really imagine the future, and I didn't want to try too much. If the "scramble suit" [the morphing camouflage suit in the movie and novel] got invented tomorrow, that's our future. We'll just say, vaguely, seven years from now. But I didn't want to put a date on it, because that date does eventually come. We'll be at 2019 before we know it, looking at "Blade Runner." Is that 2019?

Q. Yeah. It's November 2019.

A. So we'll be there someday going, "Here's what happened! Here's what didn't!" Same with "2001." Where this will be just perpetually out of reach in front of us.

Q. Well, we're almost to the scramble suit. They're developing projecting fabric now.

A. Right. Whether it would get that application [that it has in "Scanner"]…. [laughs] It's vaguely absurdist.

Q. By the way, if I can fanboy out for a second: Whenever I saw one of those scramble suits in the movie, I thought, "Man, that looks like it was hard to animate."

A. Oooh, yeah. It was. It was. In live-action, I think that would have stood out. At some point, that would have just looked cheesy. If not now, then three years from now.

Q. I'd love to hear a little about your personal relationship with Dick's writing. When did you first read his stuff? Have you ever tried to work your way through the "Exegesis"?

A. No. I have it, and I've just read parts. But I'm not hard-core like that. I kind of came to Dick a little bit later; I wish I could say, "Oh, yeah -- I've been reading him since I was a teenager." I mean, I'd heard about him, but sci-fi's not my biggest genre. I read some as a teenager, and I wrote sci-fi stuff as a youngster. But into my 20s, I was kind of on another wavelength. So I missed him, to a large degree, early on.But somewhere around '85 or '86 -- mid-twenties-ish -- the girl I was dating was talking about "VALIS" and how much she liked it, and got me a copy. So I read it, and that got me thinking about his mind, because that book is out there.But I haven't read the entire library. And I've always seen him from a film perspective, too -- I can't help but read his work and think, "Film? No film?"

Q. Did [frequent Linklater performer] Wiley Wiggins get you turned on to some of Dick's stuff?

A. Yeah. For a while, I was thinking of [adapting] "Ubik." I like that one a lot. That would make a good movie.

Q. There's a really trippy story in that.

A. And that's a fun adaptation, too. How do you take that '60s notion of cybergenics and update that to the digital age? That got me goin'. I was really thinking about that, and working on it on my own. But the rights to that weren't available. And I remember, I was just talking to Wiley, and he mentioned "Scanner," and I said, "Yeah, I need to go back and read that again. I remember liking it, but…." And post-9/11, I read it and saw it in a whole new way. The way power works, and surveillance, and government control -- all those elements make it more relevant than ever. What was paranoid then is our reality.

Q. Yeah, what's fascinating, from what I've read, is that Dick actually wanted to write a book about his real-world experiences in that drug house -- and then he added a lot of the sci-fi references to keep it within his genre. And it's odd that we're sort of caught up with those genre elements.

A. Yeah. The drug thing's never gone away, but his genre stuff -- he was so right-on. What was a crackpot theory from the margin right then is our reality now.

Q. Your stock response to questions about why you were making a science-fiction film was that "we're living in science fiction."

A. And it's not the fun sci-fi from when we were kids. We're not on Jupiter. It's sort of the darker sci-fi. And that's what Dick saw -- government and corporate control, used to condition you. To alienate you from others and yourself. I think he thought pretty damn clearly

Q. After yours, which film is the most effective (if not faithful) adaptation of a Dick novel?

A. Well, I'm not even claiming a position. Every film can't help but reflect the personality of the filmmaker. And so many don't want to be faithful -- that's not what they're aiming to do. So I don't want to seem like we're any holier than anyone else.My opinions on previous Philip K. Dick adaptations are probably really similar to everybody else's. I think we all rally around "Blade Runner." There's no obscure Dick film that everybody doesn't like where I go, "Oh! That's a masterpiece!" And I haven't seen all of them. Even making this movie, I didn't go back and reference or re-watch any of them.I like the original cut of "Blade Runner" more than the Director's Cut -- the so-called "Director's Cut." I liked the narrator. I hear there's a new DVD coming out with three different versions, and I'm waiting for that, because the original cut has become unavailable.It's more in the film noir tradition to have a narrated voice -- and you kind of need it to pull the elements together. It's not cheesy or bad in any way. It's classic. But I saw it in the theater at the time, too, so maybe it's just special to me.

Q. And apparently the "Director's Cut" wasn't the director's cut, because now there's going to be this "ultimate cut."

A. You know, that's what bugs me about these things. Like, Ridley Scott -- he has a stature and a position where I can't believe that film we saw back in '82 wasn't his film. It's like a James Cameron "director's cut": You're the most powerful director in the world, and the movie I'm watching in the theater isn't the movie you wanted me to be watching? Give me a break! Every film that I've put out there -- and I've got no power -- is the final film. No one's cutting things behind my back, no one's making me change anything. There won't be a "Director's Cut" of any of my films. The "Director's Cut" is the one you're watching. It becomes a marketing tool to sell more DVDs. I have mixed feelings about it.

Q. Are we going to see a Criterion edition of "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset"?

A. Ah -- those two together? I hope so. Yeah, there's talk of it. I don't know if it'll be Criterion, but it's out there somewhere.

Q. I would love to hear your take on how mentally ill Philip K. Dick actually was. He seems to have had some perspective on what was happening to him. From talking to his family, have you learned anything about how far gone he was, or wasn't?

A. Mm -- not really. There are certain areas I don't poke around in too much, but I don't think he was mentally ill. I think drugs had a negative effect, certainly. But I don't view him as that guy.

Q. Is your relationship with him more thematic than personal?

A. Yeah. It's more about the work. And there are personal traits about him that I've heard about and always want to hold on to -- what kind of guy he was. I hear things like "loyal friend" and "funny."He struggled. He never had it easy. But he persevered, and he really left so much. When he first passed away, the guy was 32 years older than me -- I was in my early 20s, and I thought, "Well, he was 53, and that's pretty old." Now, at 45, I'm going, "Damn he died young! Damn!" I feel the loss, now, that I didn't feel back then, as a person with so much of his work to catch up with. It's a loss not only of the work, but of the family. His daughters have kids, and he didn't see that. That just makes me really sad.

Q. And on a selfish level, he had at least another decade of good work in him.

A. Oh, yeah. That mind was never gonna quiet down.

Q. When you're in your 20s, you tend to think, "My creative peak is now!" Then you get older and go, "Oh. Now I'm informed by wisdom."

A. Yeah. Dammit! And the politics of the time -- he would have really gone somewhere with the Reagan '80s and the current situation. He'd have a lot to say. So we've missed a lot. But he left a lot.

A very private Keanu Reeves, a very triumphant Ellen Marfil

By Ruben V. Nepales
Inquirer
Last updated 07:57am (Mla time) 07/02/2006

Published on page A3-1 of the July 2, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
LOS ANGELES?“PAMBAYAD NG UTANG!”

That’s what “Mga Pusang Gala” (“Stray Cats”) director-producer Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil said when asked over dinner last Wednesday how she will spend the $10,000 prize she got for winning the Dockers First Feature Award at the recent San Francisco International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) film festival.

Ellen, a UP alumna and erstwhile Peta (Philippine Educational Theater Association) actress, almost missed accepting her trophy during the awards night. She was planning to leave San Francisco for nearby Oakland after her official stay as a film fest guest ended, when the festival’s executive director asked her to stay for the Closing Night party. That was a good omen for the filmmaker behind “Mga Pusang Gala,” which stars Ricky Davao, Irma Adlawan, Reggie Curly, Lauren Novelo and Alchris Galura.

Small world

We raised glasses of red wine and toasted Ellen twice?for her triumph in the San Francisco film fest, which was celebrating its 30th anniversary (hence the name of this year’s event, Frameline30); and for signing up that day in LA with Ariztical Entertainment for the film’s international release.

We also cheered how small our world really is. Ellen’s brother, JR Ongkeko, is married to Chit Bauzon Ongkeko, niece of my elementary school teacher in Calasiao, Pangasinan. And now, Mara Ongkeko, Ellen’s niece and JR and Chit’s daughter, is the high school classmate of our youngest daughter, Ella.

Since Lino Brocka’s nephew, Q. Allan Brocka, won the same award two years ago, Ellen and I couldn’t help but reminisce about Lino. We learned that Ellen had a small role in Lino’s Peta staging of “Larawan,” which we had watched. As a filmmaker, Lino was fast but passionate, according to Ellen, who worked behind the scenes for the late great director.

Very Pinoy

As a person, the late great Filipino filmmaker was “malambing,” said Ellen. To this day, she is grateful that Lino wrote a letter of recommendation that made it possible for her to get a scholarship in video production in France.

By coincidence, Ellen and Lino were on the same flight to Paris when she left Manila for the two-month course. Upon landing in France, Ellen teased Lino about why he had a larger suitcase despite the fact that he was going to be in the French capital for only five days. According to Ellen, Lino revealed that he had packed lots of adobo in his luggage so he won’t miss Pinoy food.

Ellen narrated that one of the San Francisco jurors jokingly told her that with the $10,000 she won, she could make more queer films. She might direct a horror movie next although she has four other movie projects in the slate.

If Ellen was “bibang-biba” and in a celebratory mood, Keanu Reeves was a different story. Read on.

Still-shy Keanu

In our interview with Keanu Reeves last year for “Constantine,” the one lingering image that stayed in our mind to this day was that of the actor seeming to press, with his bare arms, imaginary creases on the tablecloth as he answered journalists’ questions. The man appeared shy, uncomfortable with media scrutiny despite many years in the industry, and very private.

Cut to the present?a press con for his two new movies, “The Lake House” and “A Scanner Darkly.” Keanu is still just as shy, awkward in the interview format and fiercely protective of his privacy. Of course we like our interview subjects to be loquacious and quotable but we don’t expect all actors to be glib and gushing with sound bites. In this regard, we respect and have come to expect Keanu for what he is?a man of few words.

He didn’t hesitate to say, “It’s none of your business; that’s personal,” in response to a colleague’s persistent line of questioning.

In “The Lake House,” a remake of a Korean movie, “Il Mare,” Keanu and his “Speed” co-star Sandra Bullock are reunited as two lovers who discover that they’re actually living two years apart. They must try to solve the mystery to save their extraordinary romance.

Live to animation

Keanu’s other new movie, “A Scanner Darkly,” is interesting because it was shot as a live action and then transformed into an animated film using a technology known as “interpolated rotoscoping.” Set in the future, Keanu plays an undercover cop whose assignment to spy on his friends launches him on a paranoid journey into the absurd.

Also populating the dark work of “Scanner” are Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson.

The two movies are as different as night and day. Keanu, dressed in his favorite getup of black tee, jacket and pants, spelled it out: “‘The Lake House’ is a love story. ‘A Scanner Darkly’ is a comedy and a tragedy. I don’t think of these works as being science fiction or fantastical. I think they’re very human stories.”

Asked if he sees a parallel in the story of “Scanner” and what’s going on in the US, where the government has admitted that it is spying on “suspicious” phone conversations, he replied, “I don’t think it’s just the United States. I would say all cities around the world have to come up against this technology about surveillance. I think about how it’s used and abused. The thing that seems to be happening is that there’s just no redress. No one’s watching the keeper of the information and protesting about the loss of personal rights. The powers of the entities that control information seem to be increasing while the individual’s rights are diminishing.”

In touch with Sandra

Of Sandra, he revealed this much: “Sandra and I have kept in touch over the years. We’ve had some dinners. She’s written me some letters when I was in Australia working on a film.”

An avid reader, Keanu was more forthright with his current reading fare. “I just finished Timothy Leary’s biography, which was really good because it covers the period from the ’50s to the ’90s,” he said. “It was interesting to have that kind of cultural view of America, what happened through the years of counter culture. I am starting to read another Graham Greene novel. I’ve also been reading (F. Scott) Fitzgerald.”

When a reporter asked when was he settling down, since he was now in his 40s (he turns 42 in September), Keanu responded with, “Who knows? No comment.” But then he added, “I’d like to [settle down]?it’s certainly something I haven’t done.”

Keanu & Winona 'Scan' the Red Carpet!

June 30, 2006

WINONA RYDER and KEANU REEVES "scanned" the crowd at the premiere of their new sci-fi flick 'A Scanner Darkly' -- we're on the red carpet with the stars!

A startling vision of "The O.C." of the near future, 'A Scanner Darkly' is based on the PHILIP K. DICK ('Minority Report,' 'Blade Runner') novel of spying, drugs and paranoia in Southern California's Orange County. Keanu plays a reluctant undercover cop whose two different brain hemispheres are competing for control.

Also starring WOODY HARRELSON and ROBERT DOWNEY JR., the film employs the same technique as director RICHARD LINKLATER's 2001 film, 'Waking Life,' in which live-action photography is overlaid with animation. The result is a surreal blend of imagery, adding to the movie's detached sense of reality.

'A Scanner Darkly' opens nationwide on July 7.

For more with Keanu and Winona, watch ET!