o ensure that audiences don't miss out on their daily dose of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, this week brings the release of Godsend, a SF thriller about a couple who are offered a second chance at parenthood after their child dies in an accident. Romijn-Stamos, after appearing just weeks ago in the comic-book adaptation The Punisher, returns to the big screen as Jessie Duncan, who with her husband Paul (Greg Kinnear) decides to clone their deceased child. Robert De Niro (Analyze That) plays Richard Wells, the doctor who promises to bring back their son.
Romijn-Stamos and the film's director, Nick Hamm, recently spoke to Science Fiction Weekly about their latest project. The movie, which is released by Lions Gate Films, opens nationwide April 30.
[Rebecca enters with a brown puppy.] So is this an indicator of what you'll be like as a parent someday?
Romijn-Stamos: What, you mean a dog owner? [Laughs.]
No, do you think you'll be overprotective of your children in the way Jessie is in the movie?
Romijn-Stamos: I doubt that I'll ever be a mother of a cloned child. I certainly hope I won't be. I don't have a child, and I can't imagine how painful it would be if I did lose one. I sympathize with the character; just two days after she has lost her child, a man comes up to her on the street and says he can bring her child back to her. Of course she'd go for it. And once she has the cloned version, there's no way she's going to lose him twice. She goes into protective lioness mode, and full-on denial.
Did playing a mom on screen make you want children in real life?
Romijn-Stamos: I would like to have children within the next 4 to 5 years, certainly.
What are your views on cloning?
Romijn-Stamos: It's far from being a perfect science. In the right hands, I think it can be a good thing, and in the wrong hands a very, very bad thing. Certainly, this movie touches upon that idea. In terms of world population, I don't think the idea of cloning human beings is a very good idea, but we met this doctor when we were working on this movie who's working on cloning organs, and he's getting really close. I think that's great for health reasons.
Would you ever do that?
Romijn-Stamos: Again, it's not a perfect science. I have an 11-year-old German shepherd at home and he's the love of my life. It breaks my heart to think about losing him, but if I cloned him, would it really be the same dog? There are so many other factors besides genetics. Dolly the sheep, for example, the clone only survived a third of the life span of the original, so it's almost like it's a simpler version of the original. It doesn't seem right yet; it's a little scary.
Speaking of scary, how was it working with Robert De Niro?
Romijn-Stamos: Unbelievable. You pinch yourself for a few days. He's great. He's really low-key, really funny. We all came together to start rehearsing a few days before we started shooting, which was amazing. Anybody, including Robert De Niro, feels awkward when they start working together, so we're working out all these scenes, not giving it your all, but just trying to find your marks and figuring out the beats of the scenes. It took us all a little bit of time to know each other. You don't know what to call him the first few days; do you call him Mr. De Niro? No, that's too formal. Bobby is too familiar. So I just waited to see what Greg would call him.
And what did he call him?
Romijn-Stamos: Bob. Once I heard him call him Bob, I was OK with that.
When "Bob" talks to the press, he often seems guarded, but we've heard from other actors that he can talk for hours and is very articulate. Is that what you experienced?
Romijn-Stamos: Sometimes. Sometimes he can be a man of few words. He's very, very sweet. He's real huggy. He wants to hug everyone at the end of the day. And he's not perfect. We'd have a couple afternoons where we'd be losing the light and only had a few minutes to get the last shot, and it was his shot. With that much pressure, sometimes you lose it and fall into that conniption fit-type laughter. He did that a couple of times. Greg and I would do it sometimes and feel very unprofessional, so when he'd do it, we'd be like, "Whew!" He'd do it, and we'd lose it, so forget about it; you've lost the shot, and you can't even look at each other cause you're in convulsions. It was good to see that even he does it.
What usually scares you in horror movies?
Romijn-Stamos: Concepts. The scariest movie I've ever seen is The Vanishing, the original Dutch version. Like being buried alive. And Jacob's Ladder is very scary; there's really scary images in there.
Did you feel closer to Jessie or Joan, your character in The Punisher?
Romijn-Stamos: I really liked playing both, and it's different aspects of my own personality in both of those characters. They're both extensions of me in a way. It was nice to play a really soft, normal girl for a change, for both characters, and two girls who didn't have to sit in the makeup chair. Especially coming off the X-Men movies and Femme Fatale and these overstylized, kick-ass, slick action girls.
Are you dreading X3 then?
Romijn-Stamos: I'm dreading the makeup part, but nothing else. I'm so happy to be a part of that franchise, and I love those people. It's a really exciting thing to be a part of.
Have you seen a script for X3 yet?
Romijn-Stamos: No, I know nothing about it.
Other beautiful actresses have said they had to develop their own projects, like Charlize Theron in Monster, to be taken seriously as an actress. What are your thoughts about that?
Romijn-Stamos: I think there's an element of truth to that. I think you need a lot more than beauty to be a great actress in this world. There's lots of beautiful women out there, and I think sometimes you have to remove that whole element of physical beauty in order to get people to see that you're actually a really talented person, because sometimes people just can't get over it. I think Charlize Theron is a great example. She's a really talented woman, and so is Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry. But that's the joy of acting, too; you get to embody these different characters and turn yourself into somebody else. My own example being Mystique.
You could have worse problems, right?
Romijn-Stamos: Exactly. There are a lot of worse problems to have. Anyway, any actor's looks are going to dictate, to a certain extent, the types of roles you'll be up for, depending on your race, height, gender, how fat, how skinny you are.
How research-intensive or intuitive was the process of developing the parts in both of these recent projects?
Romijn-Stamos: I didn't have to do a lot of research for either of these characters; they were mainly emotionally driven. It was figuring out how to bring myself to these characters and make them real for me. I played the game of "OK, what would I do if this happened to me?"
Do you typically find it difficult to walk away from the role when the cameras are off, or are you more method-acting intense?
Romijn-Stamos: I don't completely break when it's over. It depends on what we're shooting. I try and stay in [character] as much as possible. Especially on Godsend, we had to work so quickly that we really didn't have time to go back to our trailers. We had to keep the momentum going, and a lot of it was very emotional. The day we shot the scene where De Niro's character offers to clone our kid for us, and we'd just buried our son, Greg and I were down and out, Bob was doing his thing. He's a little more method. Instead of sending us back to our trailers in between takes, they put us in the church with three chairs set up for us inside. We weren't really talking to each other.
They had an extra playing the priest of the church, this 80-year-old man who came in, and he walks up to Bob and says, "Hey, I'm Bernie, I'm from Newfoundland, do you know any Newfie jokes?" And Bob is trying to be polite and says, "Nope, I don't know any Newfie jokes." At this point, I'm starting to lose it, and Greg looks at me and we're starting to tear up just before the conniption fit laughter sets in. Then Bob says, "I know some Polish jokes, but no Newfie jokes." Then Bernie starts to tell him some Newfie jokes, which, by the way, weren't funny, but Bob being the good guy he is, is politely laughing. I actually had to walk out of the church because I was laughing so hard. And also I had been crying all day, and now these tears of laughter are streaming down my face.
Nick Hamm, the movie seems to leave itself open for a number of different endings. Did screenwriter Mark Bomback give you some options for possible endings?
Hamm: Bomback wrote all of the endings. We shot five endings, and you're going to have all of those on the DVD. It's sort of better that way, because it's an organic process, so show it. [SPOILER ALERT] There are permutations of Greg dying, Greg living, the kid killing everybody, the doctor dying, doctor dying in two different ways, Greg dying in two different ways. It's very hard to end a horror film, unless you want to go with a bloodbath, which I didn't want to do.
Did the alternate endings alter the theme of the movie?
Hamm: Unless you're backing into an ending with a picture, unless the whole movie is designed to go into one ending, endings are artificial most of the time; you know that, you see hundreds of movies. And how many times do you go, oh, for Christ's sake, they have to tie it up, they have to wrap it up in some ridiculously stupid way, so they wrapped it up, right? So it's a genuinely proper process to say, OK, how can we end it in some sort of a sophisticated way and with some sort of energy? And there's no point in hiding it. It doesn't make the movie worse or better because you shot a bunch of different endings over a period of time as you were cutting it. We never really shot a good ending while I was shooting the picture; I knew there was something wrong and we needed to find one.
What are your feelings about the moral implications of cloning?
Hamm: What I think is interesting is you're separating the argument of stem-cell research from cloning. They're two separate things. Cloning is the result of stem-cell research. I was told by some quite heavyweight scientists that some of the greatest scientific minds involved in genetic engineering in the United States fully expect to be made criminals in the next four to five years as a result of their work. And this is not just in the United States, this is also in Europe. In other words, there is this kind of embargo on this kind of research, and it's such a hot potato that no political party, no religious group, nobody wants to open up the possibility that this actually has beneficial results for us as a proper medical advancement. So we get this sort of really Neanderthal view of how stem-cell research is. It's all to do with, "We're going to clone 15 Hitlers and we're going to bring back awful mass murderers," and this is just nonsense. This is proper medical research.
At the same time, your film takes a sort of "mad scientist" approach to the subject.
Hamm: I think what the movie does is just kind of go into the debate a little bit, to be honest with you. Genetic engineering is happening, it's going on, so why is it conducted in these ridiculously tabloid terms all of the time? My movie doesn't go into this; it is not an intellectual picture about the nature of cloning. It's a piece of entertainment which has at its source, I think, something original as a catalyst to make the horror work. That's why I thought it was an interesting piece.
So why make a horror movie instead of one that explores the subject realistically?
Hamm: Well, I do think you explore a little bit as a result of the kid's experience, and that becomes a kind of sympathetic side of the film. That's one of the identifiable storylines in the movie, his suffering as a result of being mixed up. The question was why not, but that's a different movie. That wasn't the script that this was. What I find original in stories like this, I like to tell a story in some sense which is domestic, which is real, the real effects of this situation on this couple, not something which is using fantasy or cliched horror iconography to create horror. It's much more interesting if you can do that in daylight, if you can do that in stillness, if you can create genuinely disturbing stories using original material. Now, whether I succeeded or not I don't know, but I tried to use science to create something which was original.
We've seen so many movies with creepy kids in them. How do you keep that concept original?
Hamm: Creepy kids are a staple diet of this genre. It goes right back to Bad Seed, The Omen, you know that. This is an original twist on that. It's supposed to be supernatural; it's something to do with something that's outside of your experience. This is what I think is interesting about the script is that it's absolutely real. The horror happens in the kitchen, it happens in the lounge, it happens in the dining room, and they realize their kid has become something awful. You're watching it on the parents. It's not an outright horror movie; I'm not particularly interested in that genre. I'm interested in mixing ... I call it a dramatic thriller. I'm interested in the drama, and peppering in the moments that jolt you or scare you or frighten you into that genre.
How did Robert De Niro get involved?
Hamm: Well, he read the script and he was really interested in the part, and you don't say no. You're kind of privileged in that situation to have him there, but you're dealing with a level of scientific mumbo-jumbo which, if you can give a level of authority to the person speaking that, it's [believable]. He's just going to give you, when he makes those speeches about cloning, a level of credibility that you then say, okay, I believe that.
How about casting Greg and Rebecca as a modern American couple?
Hamm: Greg was cast because what you needed in that role was someone who had a moral center. You need to believe in him as a genuinely decent father figure who was defending his family in some way or trying to find out what was going on here, and you had to be completely sympathetic to him in that situation, to find someone who you wanted to go down that journey with, and who the audience could simply see as an Everyman character. And Rebecca was a completely different side of that. We were looking for somebody who can play that kind of reality, but from a completely different tradition. Rebecca had never done anything like this before. Her image wasn't there. To me, it was much more interesting to give the audience something they hadn't seen before rather than cast an actress who had done this role of the woman playing her family in jeopardy 10 times. So it was quite interesting to cast someone from a different era.
What about Cameron Bright, who plays their son?
Hamm: Well, Cameron, as you know is a young boy, and basically with kids, you're very clear, you're very specific, you're not ambiguous. You try to protect them a little bit from the situation around them. What I find amazing about kids is their learning curve. It's incredibly fast. They're telling you lens sizes by the end of the shoot: "Are you really going to put that light there?" He has a wonderful duality, I think; he can play angelic and demonic, and it works.
Did you talk ever to the actors about their feelings about cloning?
Hamm: If this happened to you, if this was in your situation, and something horrific happened in your life and you had the possibility of rectifying that, what would you do? That is the choice in the film. They didn't need to kind of go through that discussion. I think what they needed to do was kind of go into an area when they were dealing with the early scenes, with the loss. They had to make those scenes quite accurate and quite personal. It's a very hard balance in the film to not allow the audience to be mawkish or judgmental.
Having researched the material so thoroughly and made this film about it, do you see any downside to cloning?
Hamm: To me, I separate the two questions, and what I think is the downside is the fact that stem-cell research is condemned and mainly is legislated against, even harder here in North America than it is in Europe. I suspect that most scientific advancements worth their salt have been conducted in the murky areas of immorality and illegality when they first came out, and what you're dealing with here is the exact same situation. And I would parallel that with the same way they would talk about [intravenous fertilization].
IVF, when it first came out 30 years ago, was babies inside test tubes; how could we do it? How could we create life like this? Now it is common practice. You can get it on the national health service in England. Are you going to tell me when you actually have the ability to conduct this research, you can grow your own lung, grow your own liver, grow your own heart, in a town like Hollywood that believes in eternal life and beauty, they're not going to pay for that? I don't think so.
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