Erstwhile Gilmore Girl
Lauren Graham didn’t only have to contend with the chance of Steve Carell cracking
her up on the set of the forthcoming Evan
Almighty — she also had to share screen time with some unusual animals.

“The amazing stuff with the animals was less what my
interaction was with them, but [just] watching these trainers get them kindly
and very simply to do what they wanted them to do,” she says. “Because I just
thought, ‘These giraffes have not been training to do Evan Almighty their whole lives. How do they know to bring him the hammer?’
You know, so much of the stuff is real that you see in the movie. So that was
really amazing. I mean, we weren’t sitting around petting the lions or
anything, but it was cool to watch them walk by. You’re sitting there drinking
coffee, and you just got strangely used to it.”

“The animal we dealt the most with was Toothy the alpaca (note: above alpaca is for illustrative purposes only),
who had… this huge underbite, and was really unattractive,” Graham continues. “And
I think we made the trainers mad because we called him Toothy and that’s not
his name. But the little boys who played our sons got really into Toothy as,
like, a mythical figure, even though he was right there. They’d be like, ‘Do
you think Toothy knows we’re rolling? Do you think Toothy knows we’re home?’ And
at dinner, and they’d be like, ‘What do you think Toothy’s eating for dinner?’”
Here Graham pauses for a laugh. “So he was the one that somehow, maybe became
of his unusual appearance, struck gold in our hearts.”

Steve Carell was out in full force promoting his new film, Evan Almighty, yesterday with a battery of press interviews in Los Angeles, but he took some time to talk about his The Office cast mate, Jenna Fischer, and how she was recovering from her back injury, suffered after falling down a flight of stairs last month in New York.

“She’s much better, she’s back in Los Angeles,” says Carell of Fischer. “She will be completely fine, she’s going to kind of just lay low. She wasn’t working this summer so she can take it easy and rehab it, but she’s going to be fine.”

Carell, meanwhile, had nothing but praise for his experience on the series in general, and doesn’t seem eager to yet bolt The Office for a full-time, film-only career, despite currently shooting the big screen adaptation of Get Smart for next summer. “I think, just in terms of writing and value, nothing beats that show,” he says of The Office. “It’s such a smart group of people, and people are really devoted to the show. The actors… I think are fantastic, every one of them. We’re very lucky. That sort of [group] doesn’t come together very often. It’s sort of a brain trust, especially the writing team.” For a more fully sketched feature and interview with Carell, click here.

Forgot to mention this back when it occurred on May 19, but Michael Madsen appeared in person at the Fangoria Convention in Burbank, and did his best Tom Sizemore impression, squinting, smirking and acting quite odd.

He was talking up his participation in Shifter, a Rage comic book series about a two-legged, sunglasses-sporting, Mob hitman werewolf. Set to launch June 27, the series is being inked and published with an eye already being cast toward big screen adaptation. Saying that he’d been “in Valencia shooting a motorcycle picture for Quentin Tarantino until 3 a.m.” (that would be Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride, produced by Tarantino), Madsen says that doing something for his five sons played a big part in tackling Shifter,
but that also, “I’m trying to get away from the villain thing for a
while, and be a hero, instead of the one who gets thrown out of a
window by Steven Seagal.” (Apparently Madsen momentarily confused
himself with… Gary Busey?)

Also on hand with Madsen were Amber Benson, who models/plays informant Kimmy in the series, and Rachel Miner, the ex-Mrs. Macaulay Culkin, who portrays assassin Poison. They appeared bored and increasingly irritated, while Madsen kept interrupting the moderator, glancing around and pounding his cordless microphone on his armchair and repeating into it, “Thanksgiving!” in a deep voice, a reference to Eli Roth, who preceded the awkward Shifter panel with a chat about Hostel: Part II.

Hostel: Part II
writer-director Eli Roth and cast mates Bijou Phillips
and Vera Jordanova
took questions at the Los Angeles Fangoria Convention at the Burbank Hilton a
couple weeks back, and the answers, insights and good-naturedly gory
reminiscences came fast and furious.

While the brief clip from the Hostel sequel showing an abortive escape attempt by Phillips wasn’t
necessarily anything to write home about, Phillips did dispute gossip that she didn’t enjoy the Czechoslovakian shoot, or was hell on wheels on set, as apparently reported elsewhere in some gossip rag. Also, Roth talked at length about his
actors’ performances (making up for the fact that so few questions were lobbed
their way, perhaps), and said — however dubious a claim — that the Motion
Picture Association of America did literally
say/admit that “good acting” was responsible for an NC-17 rating on the
first-pass cut of the movie. Roth says he believes that the torturous scenes of
women in peril — and Phillips’ anguished reactions in particular — were the ratings
board’s chief cause of concern, because they played as so disturbingly real. That was kind of the point, he argued, and that, “People who come to see Hostel: Part II know exactly what kind of movie they’re getting into. They’re looking for some fucked-up shit.”

After the 35-minute-ish session, the aforementioned trio
signed autographs, but the most unnerving sight had to be folks posing for
pictures (some with their children!) with two fake-blood-covered slaughterhouse
torturers standing on either side of a bound, gagged and scantily clad model.
Still trying to figure out a way to pour some Purell on my brain after that one…

Meanwhile, for Roth’s thoughts about his infamous Thanksgiving trailer for Grindhouse
and more information on his future projects, click here.

In his latest film, Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner plays a buttoned-up businessman whose family life masks a lifetime of serial murdering. It’s an audacious movie full of wild swings in plot, and one that refreshingly embraces certain excesses. Interestingly, though, one bit that could be overplayed but isn’t comes in the form of Mr. Brooks’ murderous id, Marshall, played by William Hurt. When Brooks has conversations with Marshall, time stops in the movie. But is the character, as seen, a randomly externalized presentation of Brooks’ inner psyche, or does Marshall actually have his own back story? According to Costner at the film’s recent press day, it’s the latter.

“I found Marshall
when I was 12 years old in a book of children’s dreams,” says Costner of his character. “And he would play
basically a Black Knight, an evil person. But I liked him so much in the book
because he was kind of cool. And I liked him so much, actually, I was afraid he
was going to die in the book, so I never finished it. And my father used to
discipline me with the idea that if I wasn’t good, that the Black Knight would
come and get me [because] he actually hid in my
closet. And like any young man, eventually you challenge your dad’s theory and
you open that closet. And there was my imaginary friend, and he was not scary
at all to me. So he’s been with me, sort of as my alter-ego. And that began
when I was 12 years old.” For a full review of Mr. Brooks, click here.

The $80 million worldwide gross of 2006’s down-and-dirty
horror flick Hostel, and in particular its $19.5 million Stateside opening weekend, guaranteed writer-director
Eli Roth (above right) a couple more pictures, and he hasn’t been shy about exercising options
on a full slate of announced projects that, at times, has included up to a
whopping eight movies. Naturally, though, Roth can’t direct 24/7, nor in a
bubble (one thinks… that would present some practical hurdles), so he’s had to
trim his slate a bit.

Roth and a pair of his Hostel:
Part II leading ladies, Bijou Phillips
and Vera Jordanova,
appeared recently at the Los Angeles Fangoria Convention, and amidst information
about that movie’s production — shot primarily in Czechoslovakia, but including
location work in Iceland and the south of France — were plenty of questions about
Roth’s recent and upcoming work. Apart from exercising a pretty spot-on impression
of David Lynch (“OK, here’s the deal: rabbits!”), for whom Roth worked prior to
Cabin Fever, Roth shared his thoughts
on making the Thanksgiving trailer,
as well as other tidbits. To wit, a brief sampler:

Roth said that making the Thanksgiving trailer for
Grindhouse
was the most fun he’s ever had filming anything, and that he took particular
glee in corrupting an entire town’s schoolchildren for the outdoor processional
gone terribly wrong. “If you ever have a chance to film a parade scene where
you cut off a giant turkey’s head,” said Roth, “do it!” Asked if he would
consider extending Thanksgiving to a feature-length
production, as Robert Rodriguez has talked about doing for his trailer for Machete, Roth said he’d like to make a Thanksgiving feature, but
that the less-than-hoped-for theatrical grosses for Grindhouse have
cooled some at the Weinstein Company and elsewhere on the idea. “I made a pact
that Edgar (Wright) that if I did Thanksgiving, he’d do Don’t!,” says
Roth, in reference to Wright’s trailer contribution, before adding, “But it
would have to be, like, Dogshit ’95… instead of Dogme ’95 — shoot it down-and-dirty,
in like seven to 10 days, for under $1 million. That’s the only way it would
work. We’d have to put those limitations on ourselves.”

As widely detailed, Roth’s next directorial project is an
adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell,
penned by The People Vs. Larry Flynt’s
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. And Roth doesn’t have any involvement in the Cabin Fever sequel,
directed by Ti West, beyond taking an executive producer credit. But the Thanksgiving experience got some other
creative juices flowing, and according to Roth he’s also going to direct an entire film,
called Trailer Trash, consisting of
20 to 25 phony, stylized previews. No word yet if these would be shot in consecutive
fashion either before or after Cell,
but one can imagine that a few of Roth’s friends will likely get involved as
well.