Elijah Wood Keeps Faith In 'Different Kind of Heroism'

Go ahead, call him Frodo. Many people on the planet still do.

"Oh, it's pretty consistent," Elijah Wood says of being hailed on the street as hobbit Frodo Baggins by "Lord of the Rings" fans. "It doesn't bother me. But it is funny. It's literally everywhere in the world I go."

Like on a tiny island in Malaysia, where he was vacationing a few months ago. This Southeast Asian dot on a globe was so small it didn't have a movie theater.

"But everybody there knew 'Lord of the Rings,' " Wood says. "It's really amazing."

So here sits Frodo recently in an Atlanta hotel, visiting to talk about his latest movie, "Everything Is Illuminated," opening today. At 5-foot-6, Wood is maybe a hair taller in real life than the ultra-short Baggins was portrayed onscreen. Maybe. He's as thin as Gandalf's staff and has pasty-white, almost translucent, skin.

At 24, Wood's career choices are not unlike life pre-"Rings." He gravitates toward indie films and his first love, music.

This year he launched his own indie record label, Simian, in Los Angeles ("I like the idea of having a small label where I can release bands I believe in purely as a love of music"). The moniker Simian echoes Wood's boyhood nickname - Monkey. He's also made three small-studio or indie movies this year, including Frank Miller's graphic-novel-come-to-life, "Sin City."

"Everything Is Illuminated" is based on Jonathan Safran Foer's intelligent novel exploring his family's past. It was adapted for the screen and directed by accomplished stage and film actor Liev Schreiber. The film is like its marquee star - small, smart, at times, well, illuminating and always veering more than a bit to the left of the mainstream.

Wood plays Foer as an ultra-introvert. Having his hair plastered to his head and sporting thick glasses, a neatly pressed dark suit and the whitest of shirts, Foer quietly and studiously collects family mementos and keepsakes. Buttons and flowers. Rings and old photos.

One particular, yellowing photograph of his grandfather as a young man standing in a field with a mysterious young woman sends Foer on a quest to Ukraine to uncover family secrets.

There, he travels in a tiny car, escorted by the strangest of strange trios - an old driver (who claims to be blind), a ratty dog and the aged man's grandson Alex, who idolizes American pop culture and regurgitates it through his own kind of Eastern European verbal riffs .

"Illuminated" is Schreiber's first directorial effort. Wood met with him in Los Angeles for a two-hour conversation and knew immediately he would accept the role.

"It was one of those things where he's having his first experience meeting actors from that perspective and we both kind of acknowledged that, so it was easy from there on out," Wood says. "He basically articulated to me the story he wanted to tell, how he wanted to tell it. We talked about the cinematography. We talked about how the character of Jonathan would be visualized, the suit and all that. It excited me."

Almost as much as when he heard about plans for the big-screen version of "Sin City."

Wood had just finished re-reading Miller's graphic novel series and was having dinner with pals Robert Rodriguez (they worked together on "The Faculty") and George Huang ("Swimming with Sharks") when Wood found out Rodriguez was going to co-direct "Sin City."

"I nearly fell out of my chair," Wood says.

Eventually, Wood landed the small, nonspeaking part of Kevin, the ultra-creepy cannibal killer with the kung-fu kicks, a long haul from the earnest demeanor of Frodo.

"To be on the set for two days with Frank Miller, like, giving me directions about his own character was incredible," Wood says.

Wood's third film this year is the violent "Green Street Hooligans," the soccer gang story filled with beer and bloody brawls. Wood plays an American Ivy League student who becomes embroiled in the soccer-mad gang fights in England.

"The challenge with that film and that character was to make it seem authentic," Wood says. "I find fists to be far more brutal (than guns). And the way these guys fight is so unhinged and so chaotic. There is something incredibly frightening about 20 guys here and 20 guys there running at each other."

The frequent fist fights are a far cry from the more reflective, Eastern Europe-set "Illuminated," in which Wood's Foer is incredibly insular - a very quiet hero.

"It's all about the information reflected back on him from Alex and the grandfather and the dog and the foreign place he's in," Wood says. "For me, the most complicated element of playing a character like that is to not make him so still that he's lifeless or to be so subtle that there's no sense of a person."

For Wood these days, acting seems to frequently hark back to Frodo.

"There is always that thing - understanding what your role is in reference to everything else," he says, talking about "Rings." "Frodo is merely the conduit to get that ring."

He isn't Aragorn, the future king, or Legolas, the brave killer of giant beasts .

"You learn to accept your role and understand it's not insignificant," Wood says, speaking of Frodo and Foer. "It's just a different kind of heroism."