| By Fred Topel
In Theaters April 29
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Girls in space movies tend to be scantily clad babes who bounce around as the male heroes do their thing. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the girl may be the only one who knows what she’s doing. In Douglas Adams’ creation, Trillian is the brains that Zaphod Beeblebrox lacks, the motivation that Arthur Dent lacks and the common sense that sometimes escapes Ford Prefect.
Zooey Deschanel plays Trillian in the Hollywood film of Hitchhiker’s Guide. A fan of the book since she was 10, Deschanel did not want to play Trillian as the sex kitten she was in the BBC television miniseries.
“Her intellect was one of the qualities that I really liked about her in the book and in the radio series,” Deschanel said. “This was a very different style from the BBC series. That's a little more out there, off the wall quirky comedy. This we were really trying to ground in reality. If I was dressed like a cocktail waitress I don't think it would have worked. There's a reason for all the things that happen in this movie. The suit is something that's on the ship, so I'm wearing that suit but it's really supposed to be made for a man. There's really no rhyme or reason why she's wearing a leotard in the BBC show. It's funny, it's really funny. I think the show is hilarious and she's really good on it, but it's just very different form the way we approached it.”
When she got to the set, the movie’s costumes blew her mind. “Oh my God, they were amazing. When I first saw the sketches I never thought I'd get to wear something cool as this. They made everything perfectly. It was so cool to have costumes made for you. I love clothes.”
The costume included a killer pair of glasses, based on ones she actually wears. “I actually had glasses like that and they really liked them so they found a pair like them. Nick Goldsmith's father is like the glasses master. He has owned glasses stores for years so he tracked down all the glasses for the movie. I just thought it would be cool if I'm wearing those little shorts, and I'm wearing Zaphod's shirt that has the extra arm on it and I had these nerdy ‘50s glasses on it would look really neat. Also in the costume sketches they had me wearing glasses and I really liked the idea of this sexy look with the glasses.”
The film is an irreverent science fiction tale, focused more on random non sequiturs and philosophy than space travel and explosions. Likewise, working on the film was as much fun as traveling the galaxy.
“The English version of Big Brother was shooting there,” Deschanel recalled. “We had the rest of the studio but the Big Brother house was on the lot. We had to get out by five on Fridays because if we didn't, the fans from Big Brother would come to watch the person kicked off the show. So we would read about it all the time. Just knowing that all this weird stuff was happening, like all these strange people that had all been thrown in this house, they're living there. It was so weird. One day all four of us - Martin, Sam, Mos and I - were all scheming to try and figure out how to get through to the Big Brother people. Mos was like if we get boom boxes and we all press play at the same time and we play them a song. Or we could throw paper airplanes. Why we wanted to do that, I don't know. They were also shooting TV spots for Big Brother and we'd be walking in the background trying to hide. They had the most vapid people living in that house. They had one guy who was a total bigot and then this crazy transsexual woman. It was like watching Jerry Springer times 10. All this drama right across the way from us.”
If you’re keeping track, Deschanel does another shower scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Just like in Elf, the main character walks into the bathroom while she’s in the shower. “It keeps happening. I kind of laughed about it. There's another movie when I'm in the shower, too. It's funny. People just want to put me in the shower for some reason.”
If the name Zooey Deschanel doesn’t ring a bell when you read the headline to this story, don’t feel bad. The actresses has made a name for herself on the indie circuit and playing solid, thought not flashy, roles in a few mainstream movies like Elf and Almost Famous. She is happy to bounce back and forth.
“A long as everybody cares and wants to make a good movie it doesn't make such a huge difference. There's usually more people working on [a big budget film] and it's longer and you have more time to do things, but I would say not that different than in the case of All the Real Girls you had a ton of people who really, really cared about making a good film and about being true to David [Gordon Green's] vision. In this one we all really cared about being true to [director] Garth [Jennings]' vision and Douglas Adam's vision and making the best movie we could. It's just a scaled down version of the same thing. On every set you get a call sheet every day and there's a sound person, and a make-up person and a hair person. Pretty much the same elements go together. It's just pared down.”
With the film’s question about life, the universe and everything, Deschanel does not place as much emphasis on the answer as the pursuit of it. “The human mind is constantly questioning. That's what I take away from it in the end is that… we're always questioning things and we're always coming up with new questions. And that's kind of what we do best.
But I don't know if that is the ultimate or if the movie is saying that is the ultimate question. The ultimate question is a lot of different questions. We rehearsed for three weeks before we shot the movie and we talked about all these different things, the different relationships and the philosophical elements of the film. That's what makes it interesting to me, I think. It's very sophisticated philosophically and it's also really clever and funny and also doesn't take itself too seriously. It's all about not taking things too seriously in a lot of ways. I think that's a wise point of view.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens Friday. |
