It just kind of happened right away. I remember when they were trying to cast that character, they sent me a tape of her when she’d done a short film. I just kind of went, “Yeah. She’s really charming. Yeah, great. Let’s do it.” Then I went to this club and I bumped into Eva there. That was the first time we’d ever met. She kind of knew Kieran from “Igby.” So we met and I said, “Let’s get together and talk about this.” We met at my place and just kind of chatted a little bit about the movie and a little bit about other stuff. She’s just a cool person. I really enjoyed her.
Brian [Dannelly] was really big into rehearsals and research. I dig that stuff. We wanted to make sure that ‘Roland’ and ‘Cassandra’ had a very passionate relationship. You see people in movies and their wheelchair’s doing the acting for them. That character is the fact that they’re in a wheelchair. They are very asexual and they’re very one-dimensional. We didn’t want that. We wanted them to have a very passionate, sexual relationship. We wanted to make sure that you could see why they ended up together. That happens a lot of times in movies where they’re kind of together and you don’t really see how it all clicked. I think that was something we really made an effort to do. It all felt right. It was one of these things where the stars lined up and everything fell into place. I don’t think there’s a single weak point in the movie. I think everyone is so strong in it and I think she’s f***king fantastic in it.
Your character’s a rebel. Did you ever have any periods of rebellion in high school?
Kind of. But I went to a very small high school. There couldn’t have been more than 80 people in the entire school. It was a small school. I was more of a social butterfly. I didn’t really have a clique. It was the Professional Children’s School – I have to set this up - the Professional Children’s School, which is none of the above. It’s not professional, there are no children there, and it’s hardly a school. It’s a place where they say young professionals can go and be normal kids and, “Don’t worry. If you leave, we’ll send your work out to you.” Actually I went to a Catholic school for about five years and they didn’t really kick me out, but they essentially said, “We can’t keep up with your schedule.” So I couldn’t really go anywhere else, except for this place that would send your work out. It’s about 40% ballerinas from the School of American Ballet, and another 40% Juilliard prodigy musicians who are all Asian, by the way. All prodigy musicians are Asian. Then you have 5% actors and 5% miscellaneous. We had a professional rollerblader who was ranked 7th in the world. We had a prodigy golfer. We had weird kind of people there. So you know, basically this is a place touted as you can go and be a normal person. Go to school and forget about work and things like that. So you’re like, “Okay, cool.” You figure it’s a melting pot of all these creative, artist kinds of people. You’ve got the musicians, the dancers, the actors, you’ve got all kinds of people coming together to do some cool stuff. And we were exactly like any other high school. It was cliquey. The ballerinas stick with the ballerinas. The musicians stick with the musicians, and never the twain shall meet. So I kind of floated in and out of these groups because I actually did dance ballet for a while. I did go to the School of American Ballet. At that point, at least in high school, I’d already kind of quit so I was an actor. I was a lot of these things.
Have you been actively seeking offbeat roles to counter your childhood roles?
Not really. It’s not like I’m consciously saying that. It’s almost like you’re putting yourself in a box, you’re limiting yourself. You’re saying, “I’m only going to do movies if their budgets are below $10 million.” Or, “I’m only going to play these kinds of characters.” I’m really open-minded. I’ll do anything as long as it’s good and unique and special, and as long as I haven’t seen it before. My first rule is if I’d want to go see this myself. Will I go see this myself? And I’m actually relatively picky about the kinds of things I get up off my chair and go see. I try not to limit myself like that. I’ll do anything as long as it’s good, whether it’s stage or movies or television or whatever it is. I’m pretty open-minded about the whole thing.
PAGE 4: Macaulay Culkin on News of His Book Deal with Miramax
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