Now, however, after years of fun and high living, David is on the run from figures called Paladins, who want all Jumpers eradicated. On David's side, however, are his very confused girlfriend, Millie (Rachel Bilson), and a fellow Jumper, Griffin (Jamie Bell). SCI FI Weekly recently caught up with Bell by telephone from Los Angeles and Jackson in person at a New York City hotel to talk about Jumper, which will open nationwide on Feb. 14.Jamie Bell, Jumper veers very far away from something like Spider-Man or Heroes in its depiction of ordinary joes gaining extraordinary powers. What did you make of that take?

Bell: David realizes that he has this power, and he reacts differently than Peter Parker. Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider and he immediately goes, "I've got to save people." David goes, "I can teleport places. I've got to rob banks immediately. I have to have sex with a lot of women immediately. I have to get a big apartment in New York immediately." That's a complete reversal of Peter Parker. Peter Parker lives with his grandparents up until the third movie. He doesn't really think these things through. David goes on a whole journey to get to that idea of "Oh, I have to be responsible for my actions. Now I understand." I think the idea of this movie is that with great power comes great consequence, rather than with great power comes great responsibility.Griffin is an important but complicated character to pull off. He's Mr. Exposition for the moviegoer and David, plus he's the comic relief, and he's supposed to not care, yet care just enough to help David try to save Millie. What kind of line did you have to walk playing Griffin?

Bell: It's a tough line to walk. I'll tell you, the true master of this kind of role, the true genius is for sure Johnny Depp. His work in the Pirates movies is amazing. He's an incredibly talented actor. In those movies the script sometimes, I guess, doesn't really call for the best kind of acting, because it's just not there on the page, but what he does with it is amazing, because he's never involved too much with the stakes of the movies. You love whatever comes out of his mouth, and he's invented such an amazing character within what I think could have been, from the outset, a very bland genre adventure movie. But he made this character so impressive, and he's really the anchor to all of those films, in my opinion. With those characters you can afford to have so much fun and take chances with them, and you need a director who is going to guide you and help you with that. I'm obviously not Johnny Depp at all, but I just tried to have fun with it [playing Griffin]. That's the biggest part of it. Doug Liman was totally supportive. Being able to do it in my own [British] accent was definitely a massive thing. I immediately sound so alien to everybody. It's ultimately about comfort and being able to express yourself and have fun with it.How physical a shoot was Jumper for you?

Bell: When I think physical, I think Flags of Our Fathers, which I did with Clint Eastwood. That was a physical movie to me, because you're out there amongst the conditions, in war-zone conditions with pyrotechnics going off next to you, and you're manhandling a weapon. That, to me, is physical. This, you're suspended on wires in front of a green screen, not really moving at all, and doing tiny little pieces of scenes. You're doing 10 seconds, and then they yell "Cut!" and then you do it again in a different place. So that's not really very physical. It's physical in its painstaking process.Most of your scenes are with Hayden Christensen. What did you make of working with him?

Bell: As long and tough as the shoot was, there's a very solid friendship that's the result of all that. We had a lot of fun working together. We riffed a lot and went off the script a lot and came up with our own dialogue a lot. He's a very generous actor and he's a great guy, too.Last question: Would you ever want Griffin's power?

Bell: Absolutely, I'd want the power. To not have to sit in traffic? To not have to think about having to go to the airport and be on planes? To be able to run away? Absolutely.Samuel L. Jackson, how familiar were you with the Jumper books, if at all?

Jackson: When Doug first approached me about doing the film the books were, not out of print, but they were hard to find. I guess now that all of a sudden the movie is coming out they're back, but they weren't easy to find at that time. And my character didn't show up until the last book anyway.We don't get to know a whole lot about Roland in the film, so far as what drives him, why he hates Jumpers, etc. How much did you want or need to know, and was there more that you did that's not in the film?

Jackson: I don't know. I didn't want a lot. Actually, what's there comes a little later. There were other explanations when we were shooting, or there were things that were shot or things that were in the script that were different from what is left, I guess. I don't know what's left because I haven't seen it in a while. At one point I'd talked to my son about the history of who we are and what I do, because I'm leaving home and his birthday is coming up and he wants to know if I'll be back for his birthday. And I tell him, "I have to go out and do this job. Your great-great-grandfather did it, your grandmother did it, I'm doing it, and hopefully one day you'll do it. These people are very dangerous, and I have to go out and do this thing." I guess that's not there.You guess correctly.

Jackson: That explanation is gone. Then we did some enhancement shots and all of a sudden Doug is saying, "Oh yeah, there's this thing. You're the only guy to have the power." I thought, "Oh, so now I'm a religious zealot?" "Oh, yeah." But that's Doug. One day you're in this place and the next day you're in this other place, and you've kind of got to flow with it. So it's not something I had to play with the whole time we were shooting. This was something I only had to play with in that one particular shot, when I got to kill that kid, because they kept saying, "Well, we need to show Roland doing what Roland does," because people know he's a bad guy, but they don't know how bad he is, in terms of being a guy who hates Jumpers. So that shot was added later, me killing this kid hanging in this tree. That's another layer of Roland I actually didn't have to work with when I was doing it, other than knowing that I hate them and I wanted to kill them.When this came to you, was it packaged as a potential franchise?

Jackson: Yeah, of course. I was looking forward to doing three jobs, not one.But that wasn't the key element ...

Jackson: That's always an enticement. I [also] like the genre. I love science fiction. I think the concept is great. I'm sure most kids or most people sitting there [watching Jumper] wish they could do that very same thing. We've all been stuck in an airport or had our flight delayed and wished we could just be there, or been in a car driving, driving and going, "Damn, I wish I could get there." So it'd be great to be able to just beam down somewhere. It's a great thing to do, a great superpower to have. It's better than invisibility and all that other stuff. So it's a great concept. I liked it. I liked the idea of there being this conflict between these people, the Paladins and the Jumpers, and not necessarily being the bad guy, although all my friends who watch the trailer go, "You're the bad guy." Am I? I don't know. It's kind of hard to say, because these kids, they do things. They jump into banks. They steal money. They make their lives whatever. I seem to think that at some point they all go bad, whatever that means, somewhere down the line, and we'll see what that is. But you can see that Hayden is very different from Jamie in that Hayden jumps and he has fun jumping. He jumps in banks and takes money. He goes on dates and goes on vacations. Jamie is isolated, kind of psychotic, fixated on killing me and whoever else works for me, and something has gone on with him. But he's been jumping longer. So maybe the longer you jump the more twisted you get or something that we don't know yet. And they also leave these rips in the atmosphere, which could be environmentally dangerous. We don't know yet. I could be a good guy working for Greenpeace. Who knows?