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In the romantic comedy When in Rome, Beth (Kristen Bell) is a young, ambitious New Yorker who is completely unlucky in love. Disillusioned with romance, she travels to Rome, where she impulsively steals some coins from a reputed fountain of live. The coins attract an assortment of odd suitors, including a sausage merchant, a street magician and an artist. But, when a persistent reporter throws his hat in the ring, she wonders if his love is the real thing. During a press conference to promote the film, co-stars Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel talked about how much fun they had making When in Rome together. Q: Kristen, are you as much of a workaholic as your character? If you met a guy, would he have to be as important to you as your job? Kristen: I think your significant other should be way more important than your work. Personally, I love working. I don’t know that I’d say I’m a workaholic because I also love relaxing. I don’t think I’m a workaholic, but currently I feel I’m at a really lovely place and I’m grateful to be where I am, so I like working too. Q: Your character doesn’t believe in magic or superstitions. What about yourself? Josh: One of her hobbies is breaking mirrors, in fact. Kristen: Absolutely! I like to smash mirrors, any chance I get. No, I’m not superstitious at all. Q: Kristen, how was the experience of carrying this film for you? Kristen: First of all, being surrounded by these guys was so flattering because they all have a style of comedy that I just really envy and often laugh out loud at them. I was grateful for the opportunity. I’m glad that they had the faith in me to be able to pull it off, and I just tried to do the best I could. Q: Josh, you had the opportunity in this to exercise the physical comedy muscle that people haven’t often seen you do, with all of the pratfalls. How was it to get the opportunity to do that? Was that fun or did you worry about hurting yourself? Josh: (Director) Mark Steven Johnson worried about me hurting myself more than I did. Kristen: We took out a huge policy on his face, before we started this movie. Josh: If Mark and I had any arguments in this film, it was for that. There was a scene where I was supposed to run into this car, but the stunt coordinator had it set up where the car was going to sweep out my leg, I was going to roll under the front of the hood and roll up onto the windshield, and look in and see that it was my friend, Puck (Bobby Moynihan). It wasn’t the most well-conceived stunt ever performed, and it took us a few times. The first two times we did it, I literally went right over the top of the car. One time, I fell on my shoulder and neck. And then, another time, I fell some other way over the other edge of the car. They almost pulled the plug on the stunt, but I talked Mark into letting me do it one more time because I’d figured it out and when we did it right. We literally took out the windshield on the front of the car. But, this was more in line with the way I am, anyway. I’m more of a klutz than anything, so I just had a lot of fun coming up with as much stuff as we could. Q: Kristen and Josh, what was it like to do a romantic comedy together? How did you build that relationship enough, so that it pays off in the end for the audience? Kristen: It’s definitely a difficult thing to capture. I’ve seen a ton of movies where I’ve believed the couple, and I’ve seen a ton of movies where I have not believed them at all. Unfortunately, as an audience member, you check out if you don’t believe them. So, we knew it was really important. That’s something you trust your director to bring out as well. But, Josh and I got along so well, right from the very beginning. I think it was just natural that it read as romantic chemistry because we got along very well in real life. It’s kind of a crap shoot. You just have to hope for the best because you really don’t know until you’re in the editing booth and the director figures out whether or not we captured it. What I liked about this is that it’s not the sad, downtrodden girl, who is just chasing after the guy all the time and revolving around his world. This was the opposite. Who wouldn’t want all of these guys chasing after them? I was like, “Okay, I’ll do it!” Josh: For Kristen and I, because we had to fall in love so quick, in order in a way to propel the movie through, we had to really make those first couple scenes work, at the wedding and the stuff afterwards, when we get back to New York. Otherwise, it would have felt like there was nothing there to begin with, so you wouldn’t understand what she was really chasing after. We really focused on that wedding scene, and trying to establish as much of a love-at-first-sight thing as we could, so that when she got back to New York and all these guys were chasing after her, it would make some sense. Kristen: We shot that wedding scene very, very late in the game, so we had already established a friendship and it was much easier to connect immediately. We knew each other’s rhythms and we knew how we were going to play it. So, our first meeting was actually the end of the movie. The way in which you shoot a movie is really beneficial to your actors, sometimes. We lucked out there. Q: What was the atmosphere like on the set? Kristen: I’m going to say loud. There was malarkey, here and there. Q: Were there any on-set bloopers? Josh: There were no mistakes in this movie. Kristen: There was a lot of laughing, off camera. There was a lot of ruining other people’s shots because we were laughing. Q: Kristen, do you subscribe to the adage that you’ve got to play the character with the utmost seriousness when you’re doing the comic scenes? Kristen: Yes and no. You have to be the character, but the character was written fairly klutzy. People embarrass themselves on a daily basis. I know I do. And this character did a lot, which I think is what makes her likeable and also leaves room for a lot of funnies. That vase breaking scene allowed me to get really physical, which sometimes when you see people getting physical, it’s just very funny. I’m very klutzy in real life and we just captured that on film. Basically, there wasn’t much training or stunt coordinating going on. I would just trip. Mark would happen to be rolling the camera and we would put it in the movie. Q: Would you say you constantly fall over things in real life? Kristen: There’s a fair amount of that, yes. I also bruise like a peach. I knock into things and I’m not the most coordinated person in the world. Q: How was your experience in Italy? Kristen: Glorious. Josh: I loved it. The only thing was that it was just so hot. They were in the middle of a heat wave when we were shooting the stuff in Rome. Kristen: And Italy has not discovered air conditioning. That was different for us because we were so spoiled with every room being air conditioned. Josh: But, for myself, I got to study a lot of art history in college, and it was always a dream of mine to go to Rome and see some of the things there. That was the best part of it for me. I had a day off when we were there and I rented a Vespa and just went out. I didn’t know where I was going, but I got to see a bunch of the sights in Rome. I still can’t believe that I had the balls to do that because there’s nine million Vespas running around and cars, and I did not knowing where I was going. It was a great day. Q: Kristen, is it true there’s going to be a Veronica Mars movie? Kristen: Not as of yet. The way it stands right now, from the information that I have, is that Rob Thomas wrote the script, or the treatment or synopsis or whatever, and we brought it to Warner Bros., and Joel Silver and Warner Bros. had said there was no enthusiasm to make a Veronica Mars movie, at this point. That means they don’t think they can sell tickets. I think that the Veronica Mars fans would say otherwise. But, it’s all a matter of convincing them that people would see it. I know some of the online groups that are still so dedicated are trying to do that, which is awesome, but at this point, we have no control. One day, Rob and I will just shoot it in his backyard. I’m positive of that. When In Rome opens on January 29th Source: IESB.net Related Posts: |
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