The Nativity Story, New Line’s chronicling of the story of Mary’s miraculous conception and her trek to Bethlehem with young husband Joseph. And once selected, she never thought she’d be dealing with donkey hemorrhoids. But filmmaking is full of wonderful little surprises, so there you go. For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Come Early Morning, as death by papercut. But she stuck with it, and is happy with the result.

Perhaps still best known for her Golden Globe-nominated turn as Alyssa Jones in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy,
the unusually-voiced Adams isn’t the most likely candidate
to make the leap behind the camera, that’s for certain. But then again,
neither was Todd Field, who had a somewhat comparable litany of
indie-friendly and television acting credits to his name before adapting and
directing the Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom and this fall’s well regarded Little Children.

Similarly, Adams has retreated from Hollywood for the relative anonymity of Mississippi, and says — her small supporting role in this past summer’s The Break-Up notwithstanding — she now has her eye on remaining behind the camera. For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Settling into a chair with an oversized, fruit-based shake in one hand,
Emilio Estevez apologizes in advance if he doesn’t make sense.
Referring euphemistically to the last ten years of his life as “off the
grid,” Estevez cops to the fact that he hasn’t really had to exercise
his brain as an interviewee in some time, and so he worries about answering questions about his latest film — passion project Bobby, about the evening of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination — with aplomb, depth and clarity. He needn’t
necessarily worry, as there’s an abundance to glean from his demeanor. For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

For all of film’s cultural preeminence and the great insight and
immediacy that it affords, it has historically had a hard time
capturing musical trends of the moment, or telling practical and
convincing stories about bands. What’s most
difficult to convey about music, and thus fold into a proper narrative,
is its careening catharsis.
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, though, captures
with such full force of personality the swagger, unchecked id and
playtime allure of music that it reminds you – albeit in garish,
heightened strokes – of why one falls in love with music in the first
place. “For me, Tenacious D is about what you are and what you wish you were,” explains Liam Lynch, the film’s director. For the full feature, from CityBeat, click here.

Asked about the working model and narrative template for his star-stuffed ensemble pic Bobby at a press day at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles some two weeks back, writer-director Emilio Estevez held forth on some of his inspiration, which — not surprisingly — included multi-arc maestro Robert Altman.

“Robert Altman and P.T. Anderson are two of my favorite filmmakers,” said Estevez.
“I admire their audacity, their boldness. I mean, the falling frogs in Magnolia? I thought it was outrageous. And
as outrageous as I thought it was, I thought it so courageous as well. But Altman
is certainly an inspiration for me. I’d love to meet him. He doesn’t know he’s
my mentor, but he is. I’d like to meet him someday and tell him that.”

“Altman
has the luxury of having final cut,” Estevez continued, “and with that comes the length of a picture
that he determines, which is why Short
Cuts is three hours and 10 minutes, and he allows every character to be
fully realized. I don’t have the experience or the cachet to have final cut,
but had I on this one it might have been three hours, and each character would have been more fully realized than they are.”
Here Estevez pauses and laughs. “But, you know… alas.”

While his dream of meeting Altman unfortunately wasn’t realized, in a twist of kismet, Estevez did befriend Nashville writer Joan Tewkesbury a number of years back while directing an episode of The Guardian. He credits her with helping him smartly whittle down his original draft of more than 160 pages.

The Pick of Destiny. But according to director
Liam Lynch they’ll have to wait until the movie’s eventual DVD
release, however, to achieve full transcendence. For the full details of the chat with Lynch, from IGN, click here.

It’s hard to remember there was actually a time when Greg
Kinnear was a television host (that would be Talk Soup, on E!) and viewed somewhat dubiously as an actor. Those
times are bygone, as Kinnear — fresh from a summer of good notices for Little Miss Sunshine, the little indie
that could — re-teams with filmmaker Richard Linklater in Fast Food Nation, in which he plays a marketing executive for a
national eatery chain who trips to Colorado
to investigate claims of tainted beef. Redacted portions of a recent Los
Angeles roundtable chat in advance of the film’s bow
this week, November 17, are included below:

Question: Did you stop eating meat upon booking the film, or
do you still indulge?

Greg Kinnear: “I actually have not been reborn since reading
Eric’s startling book. I still eat red meat. Sorry, is that okay? You can’t
keep me away from a burger. I guess I’m guilty. Is this the 60 Minutes portion of the interview? I
guess you got me. I’ve never been a big fast food consumer, but I eat red meat.
Eric Schlosser, who spent three years writing this book, still does as well. I
don’t think the book or the movie is necessarily an indictment of red meat or
beef in general. The average burger at a fast food place could be made up of
hundreds and sometimes thousands of different cattle. And the concept of how
those cattle are fed and where that meat source comes from and the conditions
at the packing plant and who works there and all of that stuff is more what the
book and the movie are about. It just asks people to think a little bit. It’s
like a sociology study in this book. I was amazed by it. And I think at the end
of the day when he and Rick sent me the script I was kind of nervous about a
big, preachy book [telling] people how to feel or behave. But I felt they did a
really nice job in just taking real characters and telling a narrative story that
I was really intrigued by. Usually you’re asked to play a good guy or a bad
guy, you’re rarely asked to play a guy who is both, and I was kind of intrigued
by that.”

Question: Do you like finding humor in situations like this?

GK: “I guess it read a little funny to me with Don’s plight.
He definitely is a little naïve and definitely goes through a source of discovery
in this little journey.”

Question: How do you feel about your character, Don, choosing not to act?

GK: “I liked it. At first I read it and I had a problem with
it, but that really is the way it is. Of course I want him and I think an
audience that watches the movie wants him to stand up and say, ‘I’m mad as hell
and I’m not going to take it anymore,’ and he never does. And you think,
where’s the Norma Rae moment? But
that’s kind of only in the movies. And this is in some ways a more truthful
assessment of that kind of person than you could ever ask to find. I thought it
was pretty brave of Rick to throw him in to lead the charge rather than just
have him disappear. And I think it makes a pretty powerful proclamation about
that kind of guy because there are a lot of people out there who might have
some moral questions or ambiguity about what it is they do or who they serve or
what kind of industry they are in. And at the end of the day they have a
family, they have a wife and kids, they have obligations and obviously that’s
what people serve. And that’s one of the things about the book. It says, ‘Are
the individuals answering to the corporation or is the corporation answering to
the individuals?’ And that line is less clear than ever.

Question: What was most shocking for you?

GK: “I think the fact that there are chemists involved in food. You never like
those two to intersect if you can avoid it. Let’s keep the chemists over here
and the food over there, that’s my feeling, but what do I know? But that is a
big aspect of fast food — their ability to artificially taint the colors and
smells to stimulate appetite. Another thing I was amazed by, and [another] aspect of
playing this guy that I really loved is he is a marketing guy, he comes from CNN
and hasn’t really gotten his feet wet in this fast food thing yet. But if you
read the book there is a fascinating assessment of all of the grown-up men and
women with PhDs who sit around at tables like this, and figure out how to
market to children as young as 2 or 3 years old — to stimulate images on a TV
screen to make those kids think positively about their products. My daughter is
3 and I think about it all the time. There is just something very creepy about
that. But I guess it’s a reality. It’s 2006, so I need to get on with it.”

Question: Have you ever been on a kill floor?

GK: “I wanted to go to a kill floor. Catalina (Sandino
Moreno) went and Richard went obviously, and some of the crew. They were pretty
particular about who they let in. I got there the day after they had shot on
the kill floor. It was kind of a dark day on the set when I showed up, but (producer)
Jeremy (Thomas) was trying to get me access in there and we just weren’t able
to do it. So no, I never went into the kill floor. I went to the packing plant
obviously, which, as represented in the movie and in the book, is a very clean
operation. The place where they actually do the packing and the freezing and
stuff is pretty remarkable, it’s very technical and it moves very quickly and
efficiently. But there are some things you can’t change, and the ugliness of
that kill floor and what goes on there is just one of the things that it’s
unavoidable to not be shocked about.”

Question: Does it feel like you’re more in the spotlight
now?

GK: “No, look, at lot of these are small movies. Little Miss Sunshine was a small movie
that kind of found an audience and really took off, but I didn’t know that was
going to happen. I was busy last year, definitely. It’s just funny sometimes.
In a fairly consolidated wedge of time I just had a bunch of things released, but
I don’t have any control over it. It’s just the way it is.”

Question: What was the last job you had that you didn’t want
to do or weren’t proud of?

GK: “There’s a big difference between not wanting to do [something]
and not being proud of it. I was cleaning up a huge baby poop this morning that
I didn’t want to do, but I’m proud that
I did it. In terms of flat-out not proud about something, I don’t know. I’m
sure there are lots of embarrassing movies I’ve done. I’ll e-mail them to you!”

Question: How was it working with Linklater, what’s his on-set
demeanor and direction like?

GK: “He just has a very easy spirit and disposition about
him. I really like his casts. He had a great group of people in this movie that
I kind of work with. He’s very easygoing, and he tries to let his movies breath
a little bit. He doesn’t come in and say everything has to be this way. He really works with actors
and gives them room and space and lets you feel like you could own some of it.
That’s not always the case.”

For the full report, from Rotten Tomatoes, click here.

In adapting his series of Alex Rider junior spy novels — six streamlined books and counting, which have collectively sold more than
five million copies in the United States, and more than 10 million
worldwide — for the big screen, British author Anthony Horowitz chose the Weinstein brothers over bigger Hollywood studios, because they didn’t insist on aging the hero and altering his formula. For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Project Greenlight films, Gulager has had the option on his contract picked up by the Weinstein Company. For the full feature, from FilmStew, click here.

The film as a whole is taking its share of minor dings, but a measure of Oscar buzz is already building for Forest Whitaker’s turn in The Last King of Scotland, an adaptation of Giles Foden’s bestselling novel which juxtaposes the story of a composited character, a self-centered young Scottish doctor named Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), who ventures to Uganda in
the 1970s just as military dictator Idi Amin (Whitaker) seizes control of the country. Directed, in his feature debut, by documentary filmmaker Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, One Day in September) from a screenplay adaptation by Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, the film scores strongest when Whitaker is front and center, but as Macdonald mentions, he initially wasn’t sure that the erstwhile “gentle giant” could pull it off. Well, he does. For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.

FilmStew has posted a re-purposing of a piece I penned for the theatrical, ahem, exhibition of  director Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page. Even if it’s a performance in search of a movie, the lovely Gretchen Mol does a fine job, imbuing the titular pinup queen with a natural sweetness that belies her troubled past (and future, since the film centers chiefly on a very specific portion of Page’s life.) For the full feature, from FilmStew, click here.

For the independently produced World War I aviation epic Flyboys, starring James Franco, director Tony Bill and producer Dean Devlin spent seven years raising $60 million, and eventually put together the largest airplane squadron since Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels. For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Haven tells a tangled story of this ilk — of stolen money, shifty motivations and peddled
self-interest — interwoven together with a reformulated,
quasi-Shakespearean love story between Shy (Orlando Bloom) and Andrea (Zoë
Saldana), a pair of young lovers from opposite sides of the tracks. So yes, Bloom is back in the Caribbean, but this time without a sword. For the full feature, from FilmStew, click here.

Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck and Robin Tunney, the project offered a chance to look at the unique commingling of aspiration and desperation that Hollywood often induces. For the full feature, from FilmStew, click here.

Hollywoodland — very much a film about the warped intersection of celebrity, ambition and regular life — and Adrien Brody had some interesting things to say about an actor’s connection with his audience, and the (false) sense of familiarity that breeds.

Asked about the rise of tabloid culture, he responded, in part, “It’s not just an obsession with someone’s private
life. If you accomplish what you’re setting out to do, you’re expressing
intimate moments and a vulnerability you wouldn’t share with a stranger. But
you’re called upon to do it, and you have to do it with sincerity, or else why
should I expect you to believe that moment? It’s often very revealing about the
individual. And even if it is a character, there’s a sense that you know the
person who you saw expressing those emotions. And then when you encounter them
in real life you feel that you know them intimately.”

As this spring’s Take the Lead hits DVD in advance of another season of Dancing With the Stars, it’s worth noting that Antonio Banderas continues to cut his own path, sometimes to the chagrin of his agents and manager. A gleam in his eye, Banderas leans forward somewhat
conspiratorially. “People may not understand it from the outside, but
I’m not so worried about that,” he insists. “In fact, I am not worried
about my career at all. I think it’s an act of narcissism to be too
worried about your career.”

“I’ve done everything in my career. I’ve done movies for kids, I’ve done
underground movies with [Pedro] Almodovar, I’ve done action movies,
I’ve done musicals, I’ve done cartoons, I’ve done theater, I’ve
directed and I don’t care what people are going to say when I die. F*ck
’em, I don’t care.” For the full feature, re-posted on FilmStew from the film’s theatrical bow, click here.

For his romantic roundelay Trust the Man,
a New York-set movie very much in the vein of Woody Allen, Edward Burns
and early David O. Russell (see review here), writer-director Bart Freundlich did his
best myna bird impression — “gathering stuff from my life that I
thought was funny, about the way you relate to your wife and kids, or
conversations with friends about the ways that they relate to those
topics,” he explains by phone — and then shaping and pruning them down,
grinding them up against the age-old pressures of temptation and fear
of commitment.

A smart, sophisticated comedy about the challenges of love and marriage amongst modern day New Yorkers, Freundlich’s fourth feature film centers on the romantic escapades of two couples: a successful actress (Freundlich’s real-life significant other, Julianne Moore) and her stay-at-home husband (David Duchovny), and said actress’ slacker younger brother (Billy Crudup) and his aspiring novelist girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
The movie follows this flawed quartet on their pointed and surprising
searches for love in the midst of careers, family, infidelity and the
ever-daunting search for Manhattan street parking. Freundlich (above
right, with Duchovny) took some time to chat in advance of his movie’s
release, and the conversation is excerpted below.

Brent Simon: So I’m going to go with the opening question you’ve probably gotten least regarding the movie. Is a fart really
better than a poop? [This from an exchange that opens the film
between Duchovny’s character and his toilet-training tyke, played by
Moore and Freundlich’s real-life son.]

Bart Freundlich: (laughs) Sometimes. I think that’s the nice
thing about having kids — that you totally tell them the truth when it
comes to bodily functions. That was a verbatim conversation I had with
my son. I actually wrote that down in my notebook that day, and he was
wearing an Incredible Hulk T-shirt while sitting there, straining. I
really wanted to use that in the movie but we couldn’t get the rights.

BS: Is Trust the Man an externalized reflection of the inwardly reflected angst we see on display in World Traveler?

BF: That’s interesting. I definitely think it’s the same
angst, but it focuses on people who’ve made different decisions, and
it’s like an exploration of a different part of the body. It’s a
totally different lens that I was looking through. One is lyrical and
sort of poetic, I guess, almost fragmented to the point where it’s more
experiential. And this one was so much more literal. I really wanted to
try… to write a comedy, because I find that that’s so much a part of my
life — just joking around with my friends and making my wife and kids
laugh. And they really pushed me to do that, but for a while I felt
like it wasn’t important enough to spend so much time on. When I
started to do it, of course all of the same themes that I’d written
about in World Traveler came in… that of family and having a
kid and being a father and being a good husband. I think it was maybe a
reaction a little bit against World Traveler, because that
movie really hurt me because I put so much of myself into it and loved
it and it basically didn’t happen. It got such a small release that
people didn’t know about it.

BS: Well, that’s interesting. I was going to try to artfully
tiptoe around the question, but I’m glad you brought it up because I
felt like this movie was in many ways a reaction to the commercial
reception of World Traveler.

BF: Oh yeah, it definitely is, within the boundaries of
wanting to try to write a comedy. There was no question I was thinking
more about how an audience would react to this movie than World Traveler.
That movie was a pure labor of love, an expression of something that I
thought was interesting and deep. And in a weird way, I felt like World Traveler was kind of a reaction to The Myth of Fingerprints, where all the things that people were responding to in that movie were the most traditional things, like The Big Chill
aspect of it. And I was kind of angry about how that had been
distributed, so I was like, ‘Fuck all of you, I’m going to make a movie
that says fuck you!’ So I don’t know where that leaves me next. I guess
it depends on how this movie does. (laughs) But with this, I wanted to
do something that was more accessible. I didn’t know how successful or
unsuccessful it might be, but I wanted to put my own spin on it so that
it would fit into a genre but still feel idiosyncratic. It’s not really
based around a plot, sort of like those old Woody Allen movies where
you can’t really say what the plot is. It’s just people living in their
relationships in Manhattan, and it makes the marketing people at Fox
crazy, of course. They saw it in a 1,800-seat theater (at the Toronto
Film Festival), where it killed, it was fantastic. And then they start
getting into it and saying, ‘Shit, how do we market this?’ Because I
think the right way to really market this movie, which is not
happening, is to say that this is a romantic comedy for men. Or, we had
a tagline that I thought was fantastic, but they couldn’t use, which
was: ‘Women are from Mars, men have a penis.’ Because I think there’s an edge, and it’s also saying what the movie is.

BS: Was that another rights issue?

BF: No, it’s not even that. It’s an MPAA issue. You can’t put
it on the poster. I think this is something a little edgier… you know,
there are those independent films like Little Miss Sunshine or Sideways or Laurel Canyon that are really enjoyable, but also easy to watch. It’s not like watching The Limey
or something, where the form exceeds the story. Smaller, very
accessible films with a little more leeway to do interesting things —
that’s where I feel like this [film] kind of fits. But it will be
interesting trying to get people to see it.

BS: I wanted to ask you about casting David Duchovny, who to me is an untapped resource as a comedic actor.

BF: I agree with you 100 percent. If you’ve seen it, it’s the The Larry Sanders Show.
And when I got to know David and it was clear that his dry sense of
humor is one of his best characteristics. And it’s always nice when you
find an actor who has had part of their strength under-exploited. It’s
like finding a new oil well or something. And that’s what I felt about
my entire cast, actually. You have Julie and Billy and Maggie, who are
not typically comedic actors, but are so devoted to making things real
that I felt like lending that to this movie would give it an original
spin. And then David — who plays, in a weird way, the lead of the movie
— he just has this leading man quality with this really great,
sarcastic wit.

BS: Titles are quite important for me. When did you seize upon the moniker for this one?

BF: I actually had the title from the beginning. When I
started taking notes, one of the things I heard a lot on the streets of
New York was people saying, ‘Trust the man, ya gotta trust the man,’
referring to the big man, or whatever you believe God to be. It was
another way of saying, ‘Hey, life will take care of itself.’ And I felt
that this story was from such a male perspective that I liked the
double meaning of it, that women are learning how to trust their men,
because no matter how circuitous a route it is, they will eventually
come around to deserving that trust. But also, on a bigger level, it
felt like that quote about life will hold you in its hands, if you just
trust it and keep working down that path.

BS: That’s interesting, because for me it echoed in those two
ways but another way too — namely that the male protagonists in it have
to learn to surrender to their nervousness and angst, to recognize that
relationship trepidation is an inherent part of man’s nature, but not
ultimately what leads or governs him.

BF:
I wasn’t able to ever articulate that, but the fact that it’s ‘trust’
and ‘man’ seemed like two important words. They played around with
trying to have me change the title, because it doesn’t scream out what
the film is about… but for me it had become the name of the movie. In
fact, when we tested it, 30 out of 35 people said they didn’t like the
title, which was a tough one for me. And then I said, ‘Well tell me
what a better title is. I’m not calling it Love in New York or anything like that.’ It’s a little elusive but I think it sounds good.

BS: Echoing back to the Allen films you mentioned, how important was it for Trust the Man to be shot in New York?

BF: It 100 percent had to shot in New York. I felt like I
needed to know the location I was shooting in inside and out in order
to make it feel as real as possible. I didn’t want it to scream out the
New York that you know from all the other movies, but I wanted the
Village to feel like a village. There were 62 locations, and so many of
them were restaurants that Julie and I or Billy and I go to all the
time. And I like the personal aspect of that, the geography of it I had
to keep straight.

BS: So, because this is for the Internet, I’m obliged to ask
you about something sexy and/or forward-looking, like your next
project.

BF: I just finished writing a comedy that I’m going to make
with Téa Leoni, and I’m looking for the money right now, so if anyone
has any please send it along. (laughs) I’ve really wanted to work with
Téa for a long time. Her comic timing is impeccable, and this thing I
think will be a great role for her. She really wants to do it, so we
have to get it together, and I think we will. There’s a lot of physical
comedy in there for her, I can’t wait to do it.

BS: How none of her sitcoms ever caught on I’ll never know.

BF: That’s so true. This is a little bit more of a
traditional romantic comedy. She plays a 40-year-old suburban housewife
who had a great education but gave up her job when she got married, but
then ends up divorcing her husband, moving to the city and hiring a
24-year-old “manny,” who she then has a relationship with. But again,
like Trust the Man, so much of it is not about plot but these characters and who they are, and what not.

“I
don’t want to be a salesperson, I don’t want to convince anyone of
anything,” says Aaron Eckhart, who earlier this year drew rave notices
for doing just that as a smooth-talking tobacco lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking. Eckhart has always
been a reticent demi-celebrity, a chameleonic character actor trapped
in a leading man’s body, and this is reflected in his film choices,
which alternate between big-budget flicks like Paycheck and The Core, slightly more idiosyncratic genre fare like Suspect Zero and frequent collaborator Neil LaBute’s more indie-oriented offerings. His latest is the slyly seductive Conversations with Other Women,
an interpretative adult romance with Helena Bonham Carter that taps
into the same talky, intellectually stimulating vein as Richard
Linklater’s Before Sunset.

Coming off several movies in a row, Eckhart wasn’t looking to work,
but he was wooed by a script that he calls “a beautiful love story
about two people over 35 who can still be fun and sexy, playful and
tempting, and all that sort of stuff.” With little time for rehearsal,
Eckhart threw himself into the two-hander, about a nameless man and
woman whose meeting (reunion?) at a wedding reception ignites a
mysterious attraction for one another. “It’s such a well written
script, with kind of an adult love story that you don’t see too often —
a lot of good dialogue, a lot of chances to act,” he says. “Helena was
[committed to] it before me, and I just like her so much that I had to
do it. I think that we’re such an unlikely couple, that to make that
work would be fun and interesting.”

While full of ample sardonic banter (“Some of these people used to
be my friends, but they aren’t anymore…”) and also allowing plenty of
leeway for one of Eckhart’s best screen traits — his rakish charm — the
film also has an emotional richness that stems from the interplay of
two more mature characters. Shot on digital video, and directed by Hans
Canosa from a script by Gabrielle Zevin, Conversations with Other Women
also features an interesting visual storytelling approach, shot at it
is in a “dual frame” style that keeps both leads on the screen for the
duration of the 84-minute movie — mostly separately with reaches across
into one another’s frames but sometimes merging into a refracted single
shot when the pair stand side by side.

“The
way they filmed it was one camera on Helena and one on me at all
times,” Eckhart explains. “It was no more difficult than the
constraints of a normal (film). In fact, it opened us up and allowed us
to be freer as actors, because… you don’t get lazy. When a camera is on
both of you at all times, you have to play, you have to be there at all
times. So by virtue of the fact that we were on camera all the time, we
were our best at all times. We didn’t have to turn the camera around
and try to create a moment, because they were already there.”

These “moments” also have an accumulated effect, as coy flirtations
deepen into something more substantive, and we come to learn more about
these two characters even as we ultimately don’t learn their names. “I
think my character portrays more of the generalization of man,” opines
Eckhart, “this perpetual youngster-bachelor attitude toward love and
the possession of love and commitment. I think women are, in my
experience, much more rational and able to realize when something is
over and commit to the fact that it’s over. And men are always trying
to hold onto something — to conquer and to keep, but yet not commit.”
Perhaps, but Eckhart’s commitment consistently shines through, both in
general and in Conversations with Other Women, a delightful little curio.

While star Samuel L. Jackson might beg to differ, Snakes on a Plane
does in fact have a script, and its writer is busy lining his to-do
calendar with other projects, trying to capitalize on the movie’s
surging, blogosphere appeal in advance of its no-screenings-for-critics release.

“I’m working on a project called Just a Pilgrim,” screenwriter John Heffernan says in an exclusive interview, “which is sort of a post-apocalyptic adventure movie in the vein of The Road Warrior,
and this is through Bill Block… who used to run Artisan, and created,
in their finance wing, QED International. We’re working right now with
financiers and distributors to get this for me to write and direct it.
It’s actually an adaptation of a comic book by Garth Ennis.”

“And I’m also working on a horror film that takes place back in my home state of Connecticut, called Seaside Regional,”
Heffernan continues. “That, and I’m fielding offers from many other
different studios that want me to do some writing and re-writing —
script doctoring and various other things.”

And as for the buzz surrounding the movie and talk of a sequel, something Jackson has already enthusiastically talked about on The Daily Show
and elsewhere in the press? “I think it really could happen,” Heffernan
agrees. “But the movie is sort of so unique, and takes so many chances,
that for me the sequel would have to be equally so. It would probably
have to be not what you’re expecting. The easy thing to think would be
to do, OK, Spiders in a Subway or something like that, but for
me I would want the sequel to of course bring Sam back. I don’t know if
it would have snakes, I don’t know if it would have a plane, but I do
know that it would be a very cool, unique, fun wild ride, and I’d be
looking forward to writing it, whatever it might be.”

He’s not yet a household name, but Jonah Hill is getting plenty of small screen face time in the weeks leading up to the release of the new teen comedy Accepted, courtesy chiefly of two clips — one in which, clad in a foam hot dog costume, he exhorts passersby to ask him about his wiener, and another in which he lets loose with an ear-piercing, high-pitched scream. The funny thing is, that scream isn’t really his.

Directed by Steve Pink, Accepted centers on an enterprising high school senior, Bartleby (Dodgeball‘s Justin Long), who, after getting rejected by every college he applies to, creates a fake university to serve as a post-graduation refuge for he and some friends. Hill plays Bartleby’s best friend, Sherman, who actually gets into a nearby school but helps his lifelong pal by designing said fictitious school’s Web site, among other things.

The set-up for the in-heavy-rotation scream occurs when Bartleby and his friends scout a condemned mental asylum to serve as the physical location for their mock university, and a skeleton falls from a ceiling panel, frightening Sherman. In an instinctual stroke of improvisational brilliance, Hill conspired with costar Maria Thayer. “When it came time for my close-up,” relates Hill, “I said to Maria, ‘Don’t tell anybody, but you scream and I’ll just mime it. But don’t say anything to anyone else, because it’ll be way funnier that way, if they’re not expecting it.’ So we did it and everyone around us kind of lost it. I totally didn’t expect them to put it in the movie, but they haven’t changed it. And it gets a huge laugh. That’s one of my most proud moments, because if you write or [come up with something on a movie like this] and it goes in, you feel like you really contributed toward making it a little funnier.”

Also co-starring comedian Lewis Black and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants‘ Blake Lively, Accepted now opens in theaters nationwide on August 18, after pushing a week. For more information, visit the movie’s Web site.