Camilla Belle: Wary of "Strangers"

Beautiful, dark-haired, 19-year-old actress Camilla Belle really doesn't like scary movies. They're, well... too scary for her. So, what is she doing starring in a re-make of a scare-movie classic, When a Stranger Calls? During our recent chat, the actress revealed that she likes a challenge and even wandered alone in the dark, spooky house set to get in the mood.

Filling her head and spooking her out while she was sneaking around the house trying to avoid a murderous stranger was her memory of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Frequently appearing in quality indie films like The Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Chumscrubber, Camilla was happy to try a big studio film that all her friends can see in the local mall rather than searching out an art house movie theater.

Decked out in her own casual jeans and a long, beige silk blouse with green polka dots, Camilla looked very little girl-like as she fought the air conditioning at our interview by covering all with a cable knit beige sweater. Her "Stranger" director Simon West describes her as a responsible innocent, a girl who is still un-jaded by Hollywood (she grew up in L.A.) but someone who can take charge when necessary. Carrying a whole film practically on her own tested the young actress's abilities to the max. Check out our chat...

TeenHollywood: The director has said that this wasn't the kind of movie you usually would do. What sold you on it?

Camilla: Simon (West the director) really. I was really skeptical about doing it. I don't want to do a horror movie. Not my thing and my agent was like just meet with Simon and talk with him. This is a little different than you think it's going to be. I met with him and read the script and he told me the type of movie he wanted to make. He said 'I want to make a psychological thriller. I don't want to make a horror film. We want to make it like Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn'. I though 'oooh, okay'. We had the same ideas about the film and kind of clicked and then I decided to do it.

TeenHollywood: How do you feel with the movie coming out? Are you nervous or excited?

Camilla: I'm excited. It's a new thing for me. It's the first time all my friends are going 'oh, I don't have to drive 30 minutes to see your movie. I can just go around the corner'. That's exciting. It's the first time I've done a film that's accessible and people are aware of it. They don't have to go to some indie theater to see it. People ask me, 'do you feel any pressure?' and I really don't. It's just the first time I've done a film like this and, for me, it's just exciting. If it does well then, great. If not, then too bad but we hope it does well. I just try not to think about it.

TeenHollywood: If it does well, would you do a sequel?

Camilla: I don't know. I'm not going to say 'never'. It's sort of set up for that at the end. You hear talk all the time and you never know if it's true. We'll see when the time comes.

TeenHollywood: What kind of training did you have to do for this role?

Camilla: It was pretty difficult. Jill [her character] is a sprinter and I had never set foot on a track before in my life. I dance but I'm not an athlete in that way. Simon wanted me to bulk up a bit and get some muscle and have a more athletic body. So I got a trainer and we went to the gym three times a week and I lifted tons of weights and then went on the track. I didn't know how to run. I had to learn the technical aspects of how to run correctly and I had to know how to sprint and how to be good at it and I had protein shakes and lots of protein in my diet and Epsom salt baths every day.

TeenHollywood: Sounds like you had to be pretty dedicated to it.

Camilla: I had just graduated from high school when I decided to do this. It was summer vacation and all my friends are in Hawaii or on the beach and I'm there training in the gym trying to get muscle and bulk. It was pretty hard. No time to have fun. It was great at the end of it when I got to really see my body change a lot after two months' training.

TeenHollywood: How much of your training have you kept up since being in the movie?

Camilla: I tired to go back to dance to elongate all my muscles again because I was just bulk and muscle. I tired to keep it up with weights but I don't like running. I didn't like it before and I still don't. I've kept up some of the gym stuff but not the protein diet.

TeenHollywood: You don't just run in the film. You have a fight scene with the "killer". How did you get ready for that?

Camilla: I had to do the stunt training and learn some martial arts. That came easy for me because it's all about the choreography and having a dancing background, it's just about where you go, where the punch goes, he strangles you here. I really enjoyed that. I had never done anything like that before. We choreographed the whole fight scene with Tommy then being dragged down the stairs a million times. It hurt but it was really fun.

TeenHollywood: Did you get some bruises?

Camilla: Oh yeah, My mom would not let me wear a skirt when we went out together. She's like 'they'll think I beat you up. We can not go out with you in a skirt.' I had welts all over my legs. It was very painful. I had a couple of scars here and there but I wore them with pride. It was fun.

TeenHollywood: How long did it take you to shoot that scene on the stairs?

Camilla: They say a day and it ended up lasting about a week. It was constantly getting banged up every single day but now that I get to see it, it was me up there in this fight scene. It's not a stunt double and that's so satisfying for an actor to go 'that's me getting beat up and it looks real'.

TeenHollywood: Did you see the original 1978 film?

Camilla: I didn't and to be honest, I thought it was going to be a horror film and I'm not a big fan of that genre myself so I wouldn't have see it to begin with and then I made a decision not to see it. I really didn't want to be making comparisons to Carol Kane, thinking about her performance constantly. I really wanted to pretend it was an original script and start fresh.

TeenHollywood: Do you have a favorite psychological thriller if you don't like horror movies?

Camilla: Well, I just don't like being scared. But before I shot the film, I needed to see some things to get myself into the mood for it. I went back and saw some Hitchcock movies and Rosemary's Baby and I saw Wait Until Dark many times because that was our movie to base it off of. I forced myself to see The Shining so I could pretend Jack Nicholson was my stranger. That was the guy I was always thinking about in every scene.

TeenHollywood: So you just get scared when you watch scary movies?

Camilla: Yes. I just get scared really easily. I'm watching myself on screen. I know everything that's happening with every shot and I'm still scared. My mom was scared [at the screening]. She was breaking my finger holding my hand so hard. My dad was scared and he's a grown man watching his daughter. Some people get a rush off of being scared but I don't.

TeenHollywood: You are a babysitter in the film. Have you ever had a babysitting job?

Camilla: Never. Everything about this movie is new to me. New experiences. I really didn't want to baby-sit and be in a strange house in Jill's situation and being responsible for kids in a house I don't know. Even being in my own house alone, I'll hear things and start creating things in my mind, going overboard on what it is; like it's a man standing outside my house with a knife and it's just the sound of the fridge. I had to ask my friends what babysitting was like and they just talked about kids that had puked on them or weren't behaving. No scary stories to tell me.

TeenHollywood: Was this role really challenging for you?

Camilla: In a very different way. Each film I do I try to see a challenging aspect of it. Some films you do as an actor just for the pure fun and there was a fun element to this but also it was challenging as an actor to be alone in a house reacting off of Simon's assistant being the stranger in the house with shadows and noises that don't exist, going a little mad every day creating things inside your head. I wanted to see if I could do that. It's kind of like a one woman show on stage.

TeenHollywood: Simon said they made every effort to shoot in sequence. What are the advantages of that for you?

Camilla: It's a huge advantage. I was really grateful that we were able to do that. That's so helpful. In this film it really mattered because it just keeps building and building. If you had to go back from the fight scene to high school and back to the hospital and just starting to hear the noises, you can never know where you are at emotionally. It just makes it harder. This was still hard but in sequence I just knew that it was getting worse. That made it a lot easier.

TeenHollywood: You studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art?

Camilla: It was a summer program. We did scenes. We never did a whole play. We did scenes from 'The Crucible' and 'Twelve Angry Men'. I'd love to do stage. In high school I did the plays every year and had an incredible time. We did plays and musicals and Shakespeare. I really had an amazing time. It was an all-girl private high school and I played the guy a lot. I lot of times I played the love interest which was interesting [laughs].

TeenHollywood: What kinds of music are you into?

Camilla: There's a long list. It's really broad. Frank Sinatra is my constant favorite and then from Neil Young and Dylan to Nina Simone to Franz Ferdinand to Brazilian music. I'm kind of listening to Bluegrass now. I go all over the place. I had a little Beach Boys phase. I have phases.

TeenHollywood: Are you moving on to the next independent movie now that you've done a studio film?

Camilla: Not yet. I did The Quiet a year and a half ago with Elisha Cuthbert and Edie Falco and that still hasn't come out yet. I think they are re-cutting some scenes. There are a couple of things in the air. I'm still deciding.

TeenHollywood: In "Stranger", where did they shoot the track where you ran in the film?

Camilla: It used to be an old YMCA and it's rundown and now is a home for...well you feel like you're going into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was very strange. They had a strange gym there with a basketball court on the bottom and this track on the top level. It was not very big. It was raked sideways, more difficult than running on a normal track. It was hard. It was really small too. You were going in circles getting dizzy. There were spider webs there. They had to clean the whole thing up and paint.

TeenHollywood: Did you get to hang out with anyone on set? Like with Katie Cassidy [who plays her friend/rival] or were you just alone all the time?

Camilla: We had a whole high school scene with her and we got to a little bit that day. Then Katie only shot for a day in the house so we didn't have time to talk or anything. It was a really hectic schedule.

TeenHollywood: What do you do to inspire yourself when you are alone acting opposite inanimate objects and props.

Camilla: It was watching those movies and seeing women being emotionally tortured like Jill was. I'm really an observer but it was really me going crazy inside my head, trying to create as many things as possible. I'd walk around the house set alone as much as I could. They'd be setting up another shot downstairs and upstairs it would be all pitch dark and the A.C. would be on and it was kind of cold. The house was kind of scary on its own. There were a lot of shadows on the glass. There were reflections. I would go upstairs and be spooked out walking around my myself even knowing that a whole crew was downstairs setting up the shot. I tried to spend some time alone in a corner trying to put myself in Jill's position. I wouldn't want to be in her place. It was a mixture of a lot of things.

TeenHollywood: What is really scary to you in real life?

Camilla: I think something like this film. Just not being in control of my surroundings, not being in control of myself or of what could happen.

TeenHollywood: Someone was saying the house is like another character. Did you ever think, God, I don't want to be upstaged by this incredible house?

Camilla: [laughs] Really, at times, I'd think the star is the house and I'm the co-star. This house is so amazing. It really was its own character. It really had its own personality.

TeenHollywood: If you could have your own house, would it look anything like that?

Camilla: After this experience I would not want to have a house with that much glass. There's no way. I don't want anybody to look inside. I want to have walls and long drapes at all times.

TeenHollywood: What leading man are you dying to work with?

Camilla: Someone like Joaquin Phoenix or Russell Crowe, really intense actors. I love them. There's really no brooding young man I'm dying to work with. I've worked with Daniel Day Lewis. I'd die to work with him again. He's my favorite. He always has been.

***

Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.