Aaron Eckhart Discusses 'Love Happens'

And speaking of worrying about your co-star, Aaron Eckhart had to deal with a 20 year old white-feathered, yellow-crested parrot in Love Happens. "That cockatoo is no ordinary cockatoo, as you could see in the last scene," said Eckhart, laughing. "He literally did exactly what he was supposed to do. Now in my scenes we had a little bit more trouble, that damn cockatoo, he was so funny and his wranglers were... What you don't see on the other side, it’s funny about movies and I don't know if this will be on the DVD or not, here we are by this river and I'm sitting there on my hands and knees talking to a cockatoo. There's a camera there and a whole bunch of people, then there's wranglers on either side of me yelling at the cockatoo while I'm trying to do the scene. And I'm like trying to concentrate and say my words and they're going, you know, 'Whah, whah.' You know, jumping all over the place, and it was a nightmare. But I felt like I had some good moments with him. I felt like we really were communicating."

"He was a giving actor. He stayed right off camera," joked Eckhart. "You know, he didn't come into my trailer, but that's okay. He actually did some very, very, very funny things. I think a lot of that was improv'd. I just started, I’d be like, 'Wow, what are you doing to me?,' all that sort of stuff that probably didn’t make the movie. But it was funny."

Looking Into the Future

Every time Eckhart meets with the press he's asked if there's any way Harvey Dent will return from the dead in a future Batman movie, and the Love Happens press day was no exception to that rule. "Well, I suppose there's always the chance. I don't know anything. Chris [Nolan] hasn’t called me, so I'm going to seek other representation until further notice," said Eckhart.

But definitely in the works is the sci-fi action thriller Battle: Los Angeles. Immediately after finishing up his press rounds for Love Happens Eckhart was off to start work on Battle: Los Angeles. "It’s going to be outrageous," said Eckhart. "This movie’s going to be so great. I go out on a limb in saying that, but this movie is. We've trained hard for it. I'm coming dead right off boot camp into it. I'm going to start tomorrow. The director, Jonathan Liebesman, is great. We've got a great shooter and he’s going to do it like Black Hawk Down meets Alien, so it’s going to be real Marine stuff. We have been in boot camp for three weeks. We know our stuff and he's going to film it in a very documentary style. So it’s going to be no ordinary aliens movie, I guarantee you that."