KATHERINE HEIGL ONLINE

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Without giving too much away - Katherine effectively has two roles to play in the film. She seemed to have a lot of fun portraying the Lolita-esque Marissa. Did you enjoy the contrasts in her portrayal?

Between the two, it was of course much more fun working with the Lolita-esque Marissa, because here's this very beautiful adult woman, playing this teenager doing the teen thing and it was fun dealing with Katherine as a teenager.

We had one scene where Katherine plants a kiss on me as part of the scene. We're both one or two take actors so we move right along really quickly. There's no rehearsing, she's a pro and I'm a pro and we just do it. When you get your head spun around by a Katie Heigl kiss, you kind of wish you were a method actor and had to do the thing twenty times!

The contrast in her portrayal… well, let me share a behind the scenes anecdote - and tell you the level of her commitment. Both Katie and I did a lot of our own stunts. In the last scene of the movie, when Katie is crossing the road, she trips and falls into the sandbank on the side of the highway, and of course they had to film her falling into the bank three or four different ways, and they had to do the scene several times because of all the action that was happening, so Katie did her own stunt and fell into the side of the road. And every time she did, her forearm would break her fall, and she picked up little tiny cactus hairs from the cactus that was in the ground. When the scene was over, back at her trailer, she had a million little cactus things stuck in her arm and little red bumps. I taped her arm and stripped it off like a wax job. She was in pain, but she just kept doing the fall over and over again because that was what we needed. That's the kind of girl you want in your movie.

Similarly as the film evolves, the viewer sees personality changes in your character Grant and the whole perspective of the film switches several times. As an actor was it challenging to show those differences?

Whatever that mechanism inside of you is that makes you an actor and lets the people see who the character is through you, you just trust that that is going to work. The interesting thing was to know where we were in the film at any one time. As you know, a film is shot out of sequence. If you read this film in sequence, it was difficult enough to figure out what the hell was going on in the script, but to then to shoot it out of sequence, many times even the director would come up to me and say "okay, now what are you doing in this scene again?!".

That was very challenging. But as long as Grant knew what was going on, I could trust Grant and Grant would tell me what was going on. Challenging, but nothing insurmountable, it all worked out quite well. There were some things that people questioned… they'd say "ummm, what happened there?" and I'd tell them to just trust, because I knew it was true, and even though it looked wrong to them, I knew it was true, therefore it was right. And later in editing, they knew it was right.

For instance, there's a moment when she's (Marissa) hysterical, she's totally flipped out in the car, she was so scared because she thought she was almost just killed, and Grant comes back in the car and just holds her and gives her a "there, there, everything is going to be fine". It was so weird that he was not empathizing with her on a different level and was very detached from her. And people watching the scene wanted to know why it just went flat like that, and I told them to just trust it. Later you learn of course why he did what he did and what he was responding to, and it makes sense. Yeah, following this kind of thriller out of sequence is a challenge.

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