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Features
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Mixing Silver with Gold
She’s won two more Oscars than he has, but he’s made hundreds of millions of dollars more than she. In other words, Hilary Swank and Joel Silver is a match made in Hollywood hog heaven.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 3:30 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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Eric Charbonneau/WireImage.com
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Beauty and the producer
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It’s not exactly the kind of heat you expect a Best Actress Oscar nominee to garner the week of the Academy Award festivities. But there was Hilary Swank, in the middle of her second successful run-up for Million Dollar Baby, taking a call from Hollywood producer Joel Silver (House of Wax, The Matrix).
“He said, ‘I have a script I want you to read,’ and I said, ‘Can I read it next week?‘” recalls Swank during a recent interview with FilmStew on the Baton Rouge, LA set of The Reaping. “And he said, ‘No, I need you to read it now.’”
“The great thing about Joel is his enthusiasm is infectious,” she continues. “It’s one of his strong suits. So I said, ‘Ok, ok, I’ll read it!’ It was a real page turner- I actually read it on one of my flights, I didn’t put it down. So I called him and said, ‘I really like the concept a lot,’ and he goes, ‘I really want you to come and sit with me right now.’”
“This is the Friday before the Academy Awards. I’m like, ‘Joel, it’s Friday and I have a really big weekend and it’s 2 in the afternoon already,’ and he goes, ‘Ok, come in at 4.’ I was like ‘Ok, ok, OK!’ He told me what the ideas were for it and they were right in tune with what I felt that I wanted and I said, ‘You know what? I really like this movie, I’d be happy to do this movie.’”
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Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.com
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Co-producer Robert Zemeckis
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Like Swank’s last horror flick The Gift, The Reaping is set in the U.S. south and tries to interweave dramatic and scary strands. Interestingly enough, director Stephen Hopkins had been previously attached to The Reaping before dropping out. He was happy to come back when Swank personally called him and told him that she wanted to do the movie with him.
“I think it’s interesting what’s going on in our world with religion, and I think that’s really the basis of a lot of problems that are happening,” Swank observes. “I think that this film deals with a lot of that. A woman loses her faith because of circumstances that happen in her life and then, as the movie goes on, she’s kind of coming alive again. She regains her faith through those circumstances.”
Given what has transpired for the actress at the Kodak Theater in between her two fright fests, one has to ask. Is she going to bring the Oscar back to the horror genre?
“I don’t know about that!” she exclaims with a laugh. “But what’s fun about it is reacting to something that’s not there, because acting is reacting and obviously there are a lot [of special effects] in the film that we don’t see. It gives you a complete appreciation for these movies.”
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Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.com
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Director Stephen Hopkins
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And though Swank’s marriage to fellow actor Chad Lowe may be coming to an end, their artistic partnership is not. They are co-producers of Beautiful, Ohio, a Lowe-directed comedy-drama starring Rita Wilson and William Hurt that mines the same general family territory as the recent Running with Scissors.
“Our producer partner Mark Burton brought us this short story called “Batorsag & Szerelem,” Swank remembers. “It’s a beautiful story, one that just touches your heart. It’s a coming of age story, it’s a family drama, and it’s our first movie that we are producing under [our banner] Accomplice Films.”
Beautiful, Ohio has screened at film festivals in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Cleveland. But at press time, there was still no theatrical distributor in place.
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