| By Fred Topel
In Theaters July 22
|
Don’t know what The Island is about? Don’t recognize it as the name of your favorite comic book? Confused because it doesn’t have a number after it? Thankfully, the stars and filmmakers are here to get you excited about their big summer movie.
Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play characters living in a facility they think is the last uncontaminated refuge in a post-apocalyptic earth. Turns out the earth is just fine and they are actually clones purchased by the wealthy to be harvested for body parts. When our heroes find out, they make their escape.
Johansson was happy to be part of the new action duo, especially considering the original script cast her as much more of McGregor’s damsel in distress. “First of all, my name was Esther, there you go right there. I was pregnant. I was being used as sort of a womb. I had horrible asthma which was cause for us to have to stop constantly. Ewan was taking care of me and I almost died. Ewan was this big macho man and I was this kind of helpless young girl.”
Now her name is Jordan, she’s physically trained and she saves McGregor’s life as often as he saves hers. And also, without their sex inhibiting drugs from the compound, they start to get warm and tingly feelings towards each other.
“I met Ewan and I knew we were going to have a great time together,” she said. “He’s a wonderful guy. He’s very easy to get along with, super charming. He’s a family man. He’s got a lovely wife and two beautiful kids and he’s just a lovely guy. So when I met him I knew immediately that this was going to be a good time. We didn’t have to do that much work at how we were going to have a chemistry. I think either chemistry is there or it’s not there. You can’t rehearse that kind of thing.”
The Island is officially Johansson’s first big Hollywood blockbuster. Eight Legged Freaks had action and effects, but on a smaller scale, and I don’t think Robert Redford spent The Horse Whisperer’s budget on CGI. Still, Johansson saw little difference.
“Making a movie is hard. It’s the kind of job where even if you’ve got the flu and you have a 103 fever you have to come to work. Time is money when you’re making a film. People work harder in film than most jobs. It’s just that kind of intense work for five months or whatever. I mean, it was very physically exhausting. We were running around all the time and we’d work 14 hours a day and then we’d get off work and hit the gym for two hours. It was a lot of work. But, you know, once you start doing that after a couple of months, you just go into sort of this mode that allows you to just keep getting up at 5:30 and going to work. You just do it.”
Bay praised his leading lady’s work ethic. “I was really impressed working with Scarlett,” said Bay. “She is 20. She had her 20th birthday on this film and she’s got a sophistication about her. There are just some charming moments [because] every actor has a difference process. Scarlett’s process is like [saying], ‘No. I can’t say that. I can’t say that. I can’t. I can’t.’ I’m like, ‘Trust me. Just try it.’ So she does this line and I say, ‘Let’s do another line.’ She goes, ‘No, no, no. I like that one. Let’s keep doing it.’”
While we’re in the clone compound in the film’s first act, we’ll meet Starkweather, played by Michael Clarke Duncan. He’s all excited that he’s been chosen to go to the island. Too bad for him the island doesn’t exist and his vacation involves getting his liver removed.
For his emotional escape attempt, Duncan knew he’d have tears streaming down his face as he got dragged back to the surgery theatre. He just had to wait for director Michael Bay to realize it.
Duncan said, “When I came to Michael before we did the scene I said, ‘Do you want me to cry? Do you want me to show emotion?’ He said, ‘No. F*ck that. You’re a football player. You’re not a sissy.’ I went back and we ran down this long hallway, and I told one guy, ‘He’s going to want me to cry. I know he is.’ And I started thinking of if this were actually happening to me, if I were actually in this situation, I wake up with all these metal things hanging out of me and I just started getting the tears up and ten minutes later he gets on the bullhorn, ‘Hey. Get Michael some f*cking tears.’ I said, ‘I’m all ready to go. Let’s soot the scene. I already have the tears’ because I knew that he was going to do that. That’s how it came about.”
It was not the first time Bay made Michael Clarke Duncan cry, but in Armageddon it was for the sake of comedy. “He was in the psych office, the guy getting his psych evaluation,” Bay recalled. “I said, ‘Mike, they want. I want you to cry.’ We're just coming up, making it up on the set. He kept saying, ‘I can't cry, I can't cry!’ I said, ‘Mike, that's the charm, that's the charm!’”
The Island opens July 22. |
