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Kate
on the making of
Underworld and
Van Helsing
In Underworld, georgeous Kate Beckinsale stars
as Selene, a vampire warrior who forms an unprecedented bond with
a human, Dr. Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), who is being hunted
by the werewolves. Selene must protect Michael while unraveling
the mystery behind the werewolves' desire to kidnap the young
doctor.
Though she plays a vampire, Kate Beckinsale was quick to point
out this is an action movie. Revealing that her favorite movies
are from the action genre, Beckinsale always has an eye out for
a well-written script that revolves around a great female action
character.
When she
first took a look at the script for “Underworld,”
she almost put it aside without considering it. “I got [the
script] with a pile of scripts and this was one the top. It said
vampires and werewolves and I said, ‘Oh God, I better put
this to one side.’ Then I opened it up and the director
had done these amazing drawings, he’s an incredible artist.
They were really not what I was expecting.”
Unlike most
horror movies, this movie doesn’t rely on the classic myths
and legends surrounding the killing of vampires and werewolves.
“We heal like vampires do. We don’t have a whole lot
about garlic and crucifixes. We don’t have any of that.
It’s much more high-tech than that. The werewolves kill
with ultraviolet bullets that shoot daylight into us. I can jump
from this great height and land. We don’t turn into bats.
None of the stuff that kind of makes me feel a bit [creepy] about
doing a vampire movie is really in it, which I was kind of glad
about. We shoot the werewolves with silver nitrate bullets. It’s
really just having a couple of big-ass Glocks,” explained
Beckinsale.
Even the biting
is kept to a minimum in “Underworld.” Bags of blood
are used at feeding time and though Beckinsale’s character
Selene does give Scott Speedman’s character a nip in the
neck, according to Beckinsale, it’s done in a friendly,
life-saving way. Without revealing too much of the storyline Beckinsale
explained the ‘friendly’ bite by carefully describing
it as necessary since the plot has to do with the mixing of bloodlines.
Much of the
filming was done in Budapest, and the outfit ‘Selene’
wears was not the most comfortable under the extreme weather conditions
the cast encountered during the shoot. Beckinsale described the
conditions as awful, saying, “The first thing that we shot
was the subway, [where] there was no air conditioning. It was
boiling hot in there. The outfit was out of latex, I think –
the stuff they make condoms out of. If it’s hot, it gets
really hot. If it’s cold, it gets really cold. And in Budapest
it goes from [blazing hot to winter] in one day. It was kind of
uncomfortable.”
Beckinsale
went on to explain that there were some good points to be dressed
in black latex, “I did kind of like the way it sort of holds
everything in, in a good way. It kind of pushes everything up
to where it actually ought to be in life.”
Being the
lead in an action movie doesn’t come naturally to Kate Beckinsale.
Growing up in a family with four brothers, Kate wasn’t a
tomboy and she never considered herself tough. After months of
combat training including time spent learning to shoot guns and
box, Beckinsale laughingly admits the most hazardous aspect of
being in an action movie is the time immediately after filming
is completed. “The dangerous thing about doing an action
movie is that for about a month afterwards, you think you’re
pretty tough.”
Kate learned
an interesting fact about herself while preparing for “Underworld,”
she’s good with guns. “They hardly had to do any [training
with guns] with me because I was naturally a genius at guns.
I must say, I would never have known. I think the key to it is
having enormous hands like a man, just to be able to unload them.
I think if you’ve got small, delicate girly hands it’s
hard to reach.”
Kate Beckinsale
put her training sessions from “Underworld” to good
use in the other vampire movie she’s just completed work
on – “Van Helsing.” “They didn’t
really have me do any [training] for ‘Van Helsing.’
They’d say, ‘Today you’re doing a back flip.’
If they’d said that to me last year… But now it’s
like, ‘Okay, I can do that.’ I had a huge problem
with the ballroom dancing. That was the weirdest thing. I sucked
so badly at the ballroom dancing. I’d said, ‘I didn’t
really do sports when I was a kid, I mainly did like dancing and
stuff,’ and then it’s like,
“Really,
if you give me a gun…”
“Underworld” was shot on a relatively modest budget
of approximately $25 million. Because of the look that director
Len Wiseman was going for, and the small budget, “Underworld”
features a lot of practical rather than CGI effects. Michael Sheen
who plays Lucian, the head of the werewolf clan, was involved
in one of the film’s most interesting action sequences.
“Michael
Sheen is running along behind the car and he’s running so
fast. [On the set] you see the guys literally hammering a long
piece of carpet to the back of a car and he’s running on
it. That’s so cool and it looks really incredible. But when
they’re doing it while you’re actually there, it’s
so low-tech.”
Kate Beckinsale
admits she doesn’t like to see CGI people, though some action
sequences are definitely improved with the CGI effects. “I
think it was really important to see an actor doing it themselves.
I know that at the very beginning [of ‘Underworld’]
they said, ‘Don’t worry. If you really suck the stunt
girl will do it, but these are the stunts we’d like to pull
off showing that it’s you.’ And we did. We really
didn’t have to use her for anything they had me do. I want
to see the real person doing the action. That was what was so
great about this - and the budget didn’t really allow for
much.”
“Everyone
is doing wirework and I do think this is the last year of wirework
not being just incredibly old. I think in terms of what [‘Underworld’]
is most like you hear kind of ‘The Crow’ and ‘The
Matrix’ and ‘Interview with a Vampire’ all together.
That’s not what this is as far as I’m concerned.”
If the prelease
buzz is any indicator, then the studio should be in talks to turn
“Underworld” into a franchise. Asked if she’d
sign on for a sequel, Kate Beckinsale said, “Yes, if there’s
a script that’s as good as the first one. It was a great
experience.”
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