Dwayne and Richard Tell Southland Tales

Okay, it's official, The Rock is no longer The Rock. Dwayne Johnson is the gorgeous fellow making movies. The other guy was a cool wrestler. Dwayne, the hunky actor, stars as a film icon with amnesia in the futuristic, apocalyptic, dark comedy Southland Tales, written and directed by another hunk; ultra-cute, perfect fratboy-faced writer/director Richard Kelly who gave us the deeply disturbed but brilliant Donnie Darko. "Tales" has a huge ensemble cast including "Saturday Night Live" alums, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star with a reality series, Mandy Moore as Dwayne's estranged, senator's daughter wife and Justin Timberlake as a damaged Iraq war vet!

Southland Tales is pretty hard to follow so you might want to read the three graphic novels that serve as a prequel to the movie. "Southland Tales Book I: Two Roads Diverge," "Southland Tales Book II: Fingerprints," and "Southland Tales Book III: The Mechanicals." Kelly told us that the film functions as the final three chapters of his love/hate relationship with L.A.

We met with Dwayne and Richard in Beverly Hills recently. Dwayne told us about getting involved in the film, developing his character and dancing with Sarah Michelle. Richard spilled the goods on getting Justin Timberlake to narrate his movie and do a musical number! Read on for our insider "Tales"....

TeenHollywood: So, Dwayne, how did you get involved in this movie project?

Dwayne: Richard had spoken to my agent and my agent said, 'Are you familiar with Richard Kelly?' I said, 'Ironically enough I just saw Donnie Darko a couple months ago and enjoyed it. So sure. Send over the script.' He said, 'Well Richard doesn't want to send it over. He just wants to meet with you first. He wants to talk with you about it.' We met in Venice and it was a very long meeting, but it was great and Richard was great. You could tell just how passionate he was about it and he brought all these visuals for me to look at and these renditions of what the characters would look like. I read the script and I thought, 'Wow. That's really ambitious. I'd never read anything like that before and I said, 'Sure. I'd love to do it.'

TeenHollywood: Dwayne, how would you describe Southland Tales?

Dwayne: I still think of it as a dark comedy. It's been described as a lot of things - sci fi, a little bit of musical, a little bit of thriller, and a lot of things. I would describe it as a dark comedy about the end of the world and how we here in Los Angeles would react. I've always felt that Southland Tales is a love letter to Los Angeles. Richard loves L.A. and loves the fact that we are the cornerstone for pop culture and everything comes out of Los Angeles. He also wanted to show the seedy underbelly too of L.A. I would say it's a comedy. I think it's funny. [Laughs]

TeenHollywood: Richard, how did this crazy tale come to be?

Richard: We [Richard and his producing partner] were just back from Sundance with Donnie Darko and we didn't have a distribution deal so we were like, 'Ugh! Is our career over?' We were frustrated and I was like, 'Okay. I'm going to write this big L.A. comedy which ends with rioting and the Hindenberg.' And that's what it was. It was always the movie star [Dwayne] and the cop [Seann William Scott] with the twin brother who is an actor and the porn star [Sarah Michelle] and an acting troupe that wanted to humiliate the actor but after 9/11 it was like, 'Okay. I've got this apocalyptic comedy and now the apocalypse is arguably happening so let's make this more political'. So, it evolved and that became the challenge of trying to balance this massive story. It became bigger and it expanded.

TeenHollywood: There is a lot going on. Dwayne, did you just follow your character through the story?

Dwayne: Well you had to read it again. The very first time I read it through with the character of Boxer, I loved it. I thought, 'Oh, what a great challenge. I should have a lot of fun'. I enjoyed meeting with Richard. At that time, Seann William Scott who I'd worked with before in The Rundown had already signed on and Sarah Michelle. So I said, 'Great. Sure.'

TeenHollywood: How was it working with Sarah Michelle Gellar because she's going against type in this movie? She looked like she was having a lot of fun.

Dwayne: We were having a good time. Sure. I think Sarah did great. I think with a role like that, it's in her best interests to really own it and she did. She went after it and she did a great job and sure, we had a lot of fun. The dance at the end was fun. Sure. I thought that was great. You know the music throughout was great. [Big grin] We had a great time with that dance.

TeenHollywood: Richard, can you talk a little about casting Sarah Michelle against type? She's not exactly Buffy here.

Richard: She's a really smart girl. She's like a New York girl. She grew up very well educated, among the high end New York kids and she was on a soap opera when she was a young teenager, so Sarah's been around the block. She knows the deal and she gets it. And there's part of the concept of a porn star, and this character is like Arianna Huffington meets Jenna Jameson, how ambitious and driven she is with the energy drink and the talk show and the perfume, and all the multi-branding. She got it, she understood the absurdity of it, and I think being an actress you understand what it's like to be exploited. Actresses are tough, they have to have a tough demeanor to survive in this town, and she kind of saw in Krysta [her character] this subversive version of herself. I think she ran with it, and the more time I spent with her I'm like, 'Okay, she was meant to play this part.'

TeenHollywood: Let's talk Justin Timberlake. Richard, did having Justin in the film prompt the musical elements or did the musical elements come first and then he followed?

Richard: The musical elements were always there. Moby was involved early on. He wrote a lot of the score before we started shooting even. There was always a pop star actor who was drafted and disfigured in Iraq by his best friend and then returns home. I became obsessed with the character and then when I met Justin, I became convinced that he was the right person to play it. He felt like he could be a voice for the disenfranchised veteran who doesn't have a voice and has to deal with all the trauma and torment of having been in war and all the things that we take for granted so I kept expanding his role.

TeenHollywood: His sort of fantasy music video was fun. Talk about bringing that together.

Richard: We had one day with him at the Santa Monica Pier. We shot that musical number in four hours. We pre-rehearsed with all the dancers and then Justin came for one day and he walked in basically to a live set with all these dancers and smoke and bubbles and a six-pack of Budweiser that he just kept drinking [laughter] and he just went for it. We had no costume so I threw a T-shirt on him and I grabbed a bunch of fake blood and I just painted it all over him. I had to do one take with no lip synching. We cut it together and like the next day we sent it off to The Killers, to their management and they were like, 'Okay. We love this. How much money do you have?' And we were like (gestures to indicate a very small amount) and they were like, 'Okay. You can have it.' Then [we got] The Pixies and Muse and Radiohead. Thank God!

TeenHollywood: Dwayne, this is the first film where you totally dropped "The Rock" from your credit. What's up with that?

Dwayne: Yes. I just made a decision. I wanted it to happen naturally. I never wanted to push anything. I just wanted to make it feel natural so it kind of naturally evolved from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to now Dwayne Johnson. I never wanted to just cut out "The Rock" entirely at first. I knew eventually I would get there but I just wanted to do it in an easy way if you will.

TeenHollywood: And what about the character of Boxer Santaros appealed to you?

Dwayne: I had never had the opportunity to play a character like this where there is so much going on. He has multiple personalities. He's a paranoid schizophrenic but yet he perceives the future. There's a lot happening so I was intrigued by that challenge. And I have Mandy (Moore) as my wife and Sarah as my girlfriend. A lot happening.

TeenHollywood: Did you and Mandy ever get together and compare notes about what you thought was going on in the whole movie?

Dwayne: [Laughs] No, no, we never did. The very first scene I shot, I shot with Mandy which was great. I really enjoyed her. Mandy had said, 'Do you know what's going on with this entire script?' and I said, 'Well, with the entire script I don't know. But what I can tell you is in our scene here, when I tell you that the world's gonna end, I'm going to mean it. When we kiss, we're going to mean it.' [Laughs]

TeenHollywood: In the film an hysterical fan makes a pretty raunchy request of your character. Have you ever dealt with a crazed fan?

Dwayne: [Laughs] I've gotten that request a couple times but no, never that graphic or anything like that or inappropriate. I think there's different levels of excitement that I get from fans. I certainly try to calm the person down. I mean it happened the other day. Usually everybody is just very nice. You know some people get emotional out of being happy and excited. I try and diffuse it and make them feel good.

TeenHollywood: Were the wresting fans different from your movie fans now?

Dwayne: Back in the days when I was wrestling, those fans were not necessarily more passionate because fans are passionate either way I think, but I think with being on television, it's more intimate I think. I got approached a lot more just constantly regardless of whether I was with family or whatever I was doing. Now I don't get approached as often. They just stand back. [Laughs]

TeenHollywood: Richard, you got so many talented alumni from "Saturday Night Live" in your cast. What is up with that?

Richard: I love "Saturday Night Live". I've always watched it and it's one of the great talent pools. Some of the great comedic actors of the past forty years have come out of SNL, and I thought 'if I'm going to try to do this movie that is the blackest of black comedy, the darkest subject matter, let's try to bring in some of the funniest people like Lovitz and Nora Dunn and the Sweeney sisters and the skits that they used to do'. Comedians are adventurous spirits, they'll take risks, and they're okay with the script being incomprehensible or unfinished and crazy. There's a lot of improv in this movie.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about the graphic novel?

Richard: The graphic novel is the prequel. The film is chapters 4, 5 and 6. In the book it's chapters 1, 2 and 3. Literally, the movie picks up right where the book leaves off. It's like a whole movie before the movie in graphic novel form. And there's an animation of the doomsday scenario interface at the beginning. You see little glimpses of this. It's a whole other movie really. It sets everything in motion, so it's a cross media experiment to try to do the graphic novel and tie in with the movie. It's available in stores now.

TeenHollywood: Dwayne, what is next for you? Comedy?

Dwayne: I keep getting drawn back to comedy with Get Smart and Witch Mountain is going to have a lot of comedy. That's going to be great. I love comedy and I think it's always something very unique and special. You know when you can make people laugh and feel good, that's great. Also too, I've been really fortunate to go from genre to genre and find a little bit of success in them which has really been nice.

TeenHollywood: Do you have a pet project that you're developing that you would like to do some day?

Dwayne: Yes. It's a project called King Kamehameha, the story of the King of Hawaii. It's with Sony and it's still there and we talk about it every once and awhile, about the right timing, and I'm sure it'll get done one day.

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