Enter Detective Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt). Detective Lone finds himself falling for Patience Philips, yet strangely attracted to Catwoman, a feline figure who might be responsible for a series of crimes being committed in his city.
Here "Catwoman" good guy Benjamin Bratt and "Catwoman" bad guy Lambert Wilson discuss their roles and what sets this comic book-based movie apart from others of its genre.
INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN BRATT:
How do you separate this "Catwoman" from the Batman series?
That’s assuming you want to separate them. I don’t really have a concern about it so much. I didn’t know much about the comic book when I came to the film. You know, when I was a kid there were two separate camps when it came to being fans of comic books. You were a Marvel guy or you were a DC guy. I happened to be a Marvel guy at the time. But that said, this film takes the legacy and the origin of “Catwoman” and it shapes it into something quite contemporary, a lot more urban. You plug into that Halle Berry as Catwoman and Patience Philips and you have something very unique.
What kind of training did you go through for this?
Just your basic strength training, cardiovascular work, there’s a lot of physical sequences that required that little extra oomph so…
Wife Taliso Soto adds: He didn’t have to train that much. The man is in great shape (laughing).
Did you have to do any special training to take on Halle Berry in basketball?
I had to learn to dribble a little bit.
INTERVIEW WITH LAMBERT WILSON:
What sets this film apart from all these other summer action movies?
I think the sense of movement, which is very archetypal of Pitof’s work. It’s like you’re flying within the story. You fly in the story, you are like a bird and you follow inside the sets with a great sense of dynamics. Of course, you know you’ve got great action, you’ve got great fights, you’ve got great special effects and all that, but what I think is new and very specific is the way Pitof filmed it. It’s very new and exciting visually. It’s very sleek.
How do not lose the humanity with all the special effects?
It’s so happened, like with “The Matrix,” the characters that I do are more ‘acting’ characters and so therefore I don’t see any blue screen. It’s all about acting so with Halle it’s very easy to act, and Sharon [Stone] also. It’s all about connecting and I haven’t done yet a film in which I had to be completely suspended in the air, where you can possibly lose a sense of reality of the characters. As far as I’m concerned it’s like doing another normal film.
Why do they keep casting you as the bad guy?
(Laughing) Because I’m French.
Is that really what it is?
That’s the trouble with actors, if you do very well in one type, it’s very hard to propose another genre of characters. So I’m going to put all my energy trying to find all those different parts, which I’ve been doing in France. In France, I do bad guys, nice guys, usually rather good guys actually.
We need to see you play a good guy in America.
I know. We have to talk to the directors.
ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS FROM THE WORLD PREMIERE OF "CATWOMAN"
Halle Berry and Sharon Stone / Director Pitof / Alex Borstein and Kim Smith
