Over the course of a lunch break during the filming at RIKEN, Liman answered questions about both the film, ‘Jumper’, and his interest in science. One of the questions put to Liman was, “Why did you come here [RIKEN] to film this movie?” He replied, “The production company of ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ offered me the job almost a year ago. The staff of ‘Jumper’ is almost the same as that of ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ and we are almost like a big family, loving and hating each other.” He was also asked whether this was the first time he had used a research facility in a film. “Yes,” he replied. “After we decided to film at RNC, I looked into all the accelerator facilities around the world on Wikipedia. Physics research using accelerators is surely as impressive as an expedition to the moon. The RIBF is an incredible place, and it really inspired me.” Finally Liman was asked whether he had an interest in science. His response was:

“In fact, the subject I got best marks in during high school was physics. And I myself have actually built a robot… a cat-shaped one. I considered studying physics at university, but I chose history instead. And I do include some more-or-less scientific factors in my movies, as I did in this one, ‘Jumper.’

“And I have a scientist in my family— my sister is a neuroscientist. That makes me feel much closer to science. My heart is always in science, and I am always interested in scientific matters.”

When the filming was over, Liman and Christensen left their signatures on top of the RNC Superconducting Ring Cyclotron.

Source

The patient’s charming new wife (Jessica Alba) is forced to struggle with her own demons as a terrifying drama unfolds around the couple. Also starring Lena Olin, Terrence Howard, and Sam Robards, the film marks the debut of Joby Harold.

Source: Moviesonline

In a first for a movie promo, Christensen’s character leapt from a 15-second spot for the film to an ad for computer maker HP and then back into another 15-second spot for the pic. Ad aired during Fox’s broadcast of the BCS Championship college football game Monday.

HP’s ad, featuring tennis champ Serena Williams, had already been airing on TV for some time, but new footage of Christensen, shot several weeks ago, was integrated to promote the film.

Brands have long pushed studio pics, looking to tie in with entertainment properties in order to court consumers. But this deal is unusual not only for its format, but also because HP is not a promo partner on “Jumper,” nor does it have its products featured in the film.

ZenithMedia handles media buying for both HP and Fox and paired up the two companies.

The tone and attitude of HP’s ad and target demo also fit well with the audience Fox is looking to draw to the pic, studio said.

“Jumper” is the latest entertainment tie-in for HP, which has created spots around DreamWorks Animation releases such as “Bee Movie” and its “Shrek” franchise and used celebs to tout its wares.

Source: Variety

Aeropostale has just launched Teens For Jeans, a new campaign to provide clothing for the less fortunate by donating your jeans to local teen homeless shelters. Got a pair of fat (or skinny) jeans that just don’t fit anymore? All you have to do is drop them off at one of the many Aeropostale location and they will be donated on your behalf. Plus, for being so darn sweet, you’ll receive a coupon for 20 percent off your next pair. On top of your generous donation, Aeropostale has made a commitment to donate 10,000 pairs of new jeans to various shelters across the USA.

If you don’t think I’m cool enough to listen to, then let Rachel Bilson and Hayden Christensen convince you. Talk about two people with good genes and good jeans.

The new 90-second “Jumper/Serena”, which played during last night’s Bowl Championship Series title game on Fox, from Omnicom Group’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, is both.The spot starts out as traditional trailer for Jumper, a movie about people with the ability to teleport, which is scheduled for release in February. The ad opens with the 20th Century-Fox logo and a deep male voiceover. Hayden Christensen is seen teleporting from and to various locales, including the top of the Empire State Building.

Things get really interesting when Christensen is seen on his sofa watching TV. Up comes Goodby’s “The computer is personal again” spot “Serena,” in which Serena Williams talks about her HP computer and what’s on it. Christensen then teleports into the commercial and seems to walk around and interact with elements of the spot by playing with bits of light that become solid.

“The creative was inherent in the tie-in: The jumper jumping into our commercial was a natural fit,” said Stephen Goldblatt, group creative director, Goodby, San Francisco. “We didn’t have to make any sacrifices. We maintained our commercial and got to use Hayden.”

Fox lent the film crew one of its studios and provided access to Christensen, said David Roman, vp, worldwide marketing communications, HP’s personal service group, which is based in Cupertino, Calif. “It brings more attention to the spot [by combining it with a movie trailer] because it’s different,” he said. “It fits into the whole philosophy of ‘The computer is personal again.’ We like to play with material and it’s a clever use of technology.”

The HP spot/movie trailer hybrid is not the first of its kind. Last July, Crispin Porter + Bogusky turned a trailer for the movie The Bourne Ultimatum into a VW spot. To read more about that effort, visit www.adweek.com/aw/creative/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003618955.

The HP/Fox spot was initially going to play on this year’s Super Bowl, which is on Fox. “We decided it wasn’t right for the Super Bowl. At the time [the spot was being made], we weren’t sure how it would look and if it would be too different,” Roman said.

Source: Ad Week

I’ve seen some people who seem to have a real hate-on for this film already, but I dig everything I’ve seen. I think there are some really inventive, unusual ideas on display in all the trailers, stuff we’ve really never seen in an action film. It looks BIG, too, which I like. I’m eager to see it sooner rather than later, and I wish I was going to be at this MIT screening. Still, there’s an opportunity if you’re in the area for you to go, and here’s hoping some of you take advantage of that and write us to tell us how the film is and how the evening goes.

Check out the details below:

Hey Harry,

This is a great opportunity for Bostonians interested in a sneak preview AND meet both the director and the lead actor. If you use this info, please call me zykorex.

MIT LSC presents a free sneak preview of the film JUMPER
(work-in-progress) next week Wednesday, 16 Jan, in 26-100 at 8:00pm.

In the science fiction-action-thriller _Jumper_, a genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He
discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them.

The screening will be followed by a discussion panel about the film and the physics of teleportation featuring lead actor HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN, director DOUG LIMAN, and MIT Physics Professors MAX TEGMARK and EDWARD FARHI.

LSC members (including permpass members) may reserve tickets (for yourself and a guest) by e-mailing me; please try to do it by Tuesday the 15th, but I’ll probably accept them afterwards.

Doors will open at 7pm. Permpass members, Execomm members, and LSC members working the sneak may reserve seats in advance of opening (email your director if you’re interested in working the sneak!).

This is a FREE Sneak Preview, with preferred admission for members of the MIT Community with an MIT ID or brass rat. Tickets will be distributed in Lobby 16 at 6pm on January 16.

Source: Ain’t It Cool News

Category:

films/movies
science/engineering

Location:

26-100

Sponsored by:

LSC

Admission:

Tickets purchased at:
Open to public

For more information:

LSC
E-mail: lsc@mit.edu
URL: http://lsc.mit.edu
Phone: 617-253-3791

The word is that Christensen is set to play the character of the hacker Case, the lead of the film.

Last we heard was that Joseph Kahn, the director of Torque, would direct and despite being and independent film the plans were for a US$70 million budget.

The producer Peter Hoffman, who also produced Johnny Mnemonic, previously said that the story would:

“…the project is not just a good sci-fi adventure but a story full of hot topics –issues like artificial intelligence, bio-engineering and alternate theories of immortality will be dealt with dramatically. There’ll be a sort of love interest as well.”

Now I don’t know how that compares with the original story because like JoBlo, where the rumour comes from, I have not read the original. So we need someone who has to tell us how that compares to the actual novel. I know it’s not much to go on just now, but it’s a starting point.

Source: Filmstalker

I find Liman, 42, sitting at a picniclike table he built out of antique pine, the apartment’s only table. He’s at work on Jumper, his $75 million movie about kids who teleport, which will be out next month. Just over his head is a colorful oil painting of his late father, one of many images in the loft of Arthur Liman. In fact, among ice skates, power tools, and dead foliage—there are more deceased plants on the fire escape—I count eleven images of Liman’s father. There’s a smiling photo of him at Yale and two framed front pages from the Times. And the desk belonged to his father. “He was the dominant relationship in my life,” Liman says fiercely. “It was like, ‘Go try anything, do anything.’”

Liman revered his father, a legendary attorney. Many people did. He represented America’s largest companies and also worked for the public good. He ran a legal clinic for the poor and served as lead counsel for the U.S. Senate’s Iran/contra investigation and for the New York State Attica commission.

Arthur might have told his son to try anything, but his own relation to entertainment was through business—he represented Warner Bros., among other companies. “My dad couldn’t connect to my wanting to be a filmmaker. He was very connected in entertainment, and through him I met Steven Spielberg and got rides on his private plane to California. I’d see Spielberg’s people reading scripts. I was like, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.’” But, Liman adds, “my father wasn’t comfortable with it. He thought I should be a studio executive. He wanted me to get married.” And, as Liman knows, he would have wanted his son to do something useful for others, too. Arthur had it both ways: He defended narrow business interests and still the Times lauded his triumphant civic efforts. “Doug was always trying to make his father proud,” says a close friend of the son’s.

Liman is sure that his father would have liked Jumper, an action-adventure film with lots of video-game-like scene changes. “I’m being productive, I’m entertaining,” Liman says. Still, Arthur’s larger accomplishments frame his son’s. “I have the commercial part,” Liman says thoughtfully. “I need to do the public-service part.”

Living up to Dad’s example isn’t the only pressure. Friends lean on him. As one close friend says, “Doug’s moral-ethical relationship to the world is not really activated by the material he’s doing.” Liman has often heard this type of comment; indeed, he’s internalized the criticism. “Jumper,” he tells me, “completes my sellout trilogy.” He’s counting The Bourne Identity and his next film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

As Jumper is about to hit theaters, Bourne J. appears to be in the midst of a little identity crisis (like Jason Bourne, by the way). “It’s time for me to grow up a little,” Liman tells me. “It’s time to tackle more serious subject matter. I’m feeling that pressure. What am I going to be? I need to reinvent myself.” I ask about future projects. “I’m looking at material related to my father,” he says.

The first time I talked to Doug Liman, a few inches of snow covered the ground. He’d ridden his single-speed bicycle the few blocks to meet me. Talking to Liman about anything can be disconcerting. There are the adult braces, which give him a slight lisp. And there’s his tendency to stare for periods between sentences. Plus he has a habit of looking past you. (“I have trouble making eye contact at first,” he explained to one actor.) Still, when he launched into a story about the film Swingers, he grew animated. His hands shot out, his fingers splayed. Swingers was his indie breakthrough movie, the one where he discovered what he likes to call his “very rebel style.” “It was the one film that was truly not a sellout,” he says, and also the last one his father saw.Liman was his family’s problem child. His two older siblings took conventional high-achiever roads—one is a lawyer, the other a scientist. Liman shuttled among three New York private schools. “I had some work-ethic issues,” he says delicately. He was frustrated and a big kid. “I was a troublemaker,” he says. “For a long time, I didn’t fit in.”

Fortunately, at Brown, Liman found his crowd—“very self-aware dorks,” says Dave Bartis, a college friend and later a business partner.

Liman was the alpha dork. (“I’d follow him anywhere,” says Avram Ludwig, a longtime friend and colleague, “and have.”) At Brown, Liman founded the campus TV station. Just as exciting, in his telling, was getting arrested for stealing a traffic light or lighting a friend’s bed on fire—Liman rigged a pen to detonate firecrackers. Though he wasn’t exactly an athlete, he also led his crew on physical adventures, a dorky action hero. Once, while white-water rafting, he was held underwater by a whirlpool. Another time, off Martha’s Vineyard, he disregarded a Coast Guard warning and sailed into eighteen-foot swells. It was reckless stuff, surprising since, as a friend explains, “Doug is a physical coward. He’s very scared of the things he does. He forces himself to do things. It’s an act of will.”

After Brown, Liman attended USC’s film school, then headed to Hollywood, where his will appeared to fizzle.

“After five, six years,” says Liman, “I didn’t have much to show for it.”

“What are you doing with your days?” asked Arthur, who figured he had a right to know. He helped support his son financially, a sore point with struggling friends. “The whole thing in my life was, ‘Am I going to have to bartend again?’” says Jon Favreau, a Queens College dropout, who wrote Swingers. “Doug knew he would be okay financially. The big thing for him was whether he was going to make a name for himself in movies.” Arthur worried less about his son’s artistic name. “His father stressed about whether he was going to be a bum, literally,” says Ludwig. “I don’t think his father took him seriously as a mature individual.” The father pushed the son to get a job as a studio executive.

“My father felt I was out of control,” Liman says. “We started getting into bigger and bigger fights.”

“I’m not going to help you out anymore,” his father told him.

“Good, cut me off,” replied Liman. “I’ll develop a thicker skin.”

It was around this time, in 1995, that Favreau showed Liman Swingers, a buddy script based loosely on the lives of him and his pals; he hoped to direct and star in it with his friend, actor Vince Vaughn. When Favreau couldn’t raise money, Liman proposed to direct the movie himself—and Favreau decided to let him. Liman knew where to get funding. Arthur Liman hadn’t cut his son off and, always patient, believed he was worth one more shot. He secured $200,000 from a client. “My father was the studio,” says Liman.

Liman’s adventurous streak was well-suited to making a low-budget film. He pulled over on the side of a highway to shoot Vaughn and Favreau, hiding the camera as cops closed in—you can hear the police radio on the soundtrack. He marched into clubs and started filming.

The movie was a critical success at festivals, and Miramax quickly offered $750,000 for the rights. Arthur was ecstatic. Not only was his wayward son a success, but he’d also get his client’s money back. But the younger Liman had by that time met producer Cary Woods, who insisted the movie was worth far more. Arthur convinced his son that producers were untrustworthy, out to take advantage of young directors. Doug drove to Woods’s house to call off the deal. But on entering, he overheard the producer on the phone. He was talking to the head of Universal about this great young director named Doug Liman.

That’s got to be worth something, Liman thought. “I disobeyed my father,” he says. He signed Woods as executive producer.

Liman was told that Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein was ready to increase his offer to $3 million. Liman was instructed not to answer the phone—the longer Weinstein stewed, the better Liman’s negotiating position. Then, a Weinstein underling showed up at Liman’s house, tapped on the window, handed Liman his cell phone. Weinstein was on the line. Liman passed the phone to Woods.

“What will it take to get this deal done?” asked Weinstein.

“Something bold,” said Woods.

The next day, Doug faxed his father: “Miramax $5.5 million.”

Vaughn got scale. While Favreau earned perhaps a few percentage points, Swingers made Liman wealthy in his own right—one reason that Favreau refused to talk to Liman for years. “I made more money out of Swingers than any of these other [projects],” says Liman Swingers did something else. “Doug’s challenge was to find himself,” says Favreau, who’s since reconciled with Liman. “He had to become Doug Liman, not Arthur Liman’s son. He did that directing Swingers.”

Soon after, Liman called his father to say that he’d been named MTV’s Young Director of the Year. His father, by then stricken with cancer, watched the awards ceremony on television. “Maybe our luck is changing,” he told his wife. A few weeks later, he died.

“He got to see that I was going to be okay,” Liman says and chokes back tears. “That’s what all the fights were about.”

Liman had dreamed of making The Bourne Identity since he was a kid reading Robert Ludlum’s book on the beach at his parents’ place in Westhampton. But the rights were out of reach.

“Doug has to be doing something,” says a friend. He shot TV—he directed the pilot for The O.C. He shot Tiger Woods’s iconic Nike commercial, where the star bounces a golf ball on the end of his club. Liman was the second-unit director. On Woods’s lunch break, Liman grabbed a camera and caught Woods in that unscripted moment.

Liman also directed Go, a $3.5 million indie hit about a teenager’s small-time drug deal gone bad. Go’s set was chaotic, a seeming extension of Liman’s personality. As Go star Sarah Polley explains, Liman is “this complete mess who can barely keep track of his possessions.” Liman filmed Go himself while carrying around The Sunset Guide to Basic Home Movie Lighting—“to make sure,” as Liman says. Liman didn’t even know how the movie would end until long after the completion of principal photography—he came up with the final scene in a bar with friends. Not only was Go a critical and commercial success, it reassured him in his make-it-up-as-you-go, very rebel style.

“ ‘Jumper’ completes my sellout trilogy,” says Liman.

Liman eventually secured the rights to Bourne. He’d just learned to fly, and jumped in a plane to meet Ludlum at his home in Montana. It was his first solo flight, and he nearly ran out of fuel on the way home. Controlling the rights gave Liman some leverage, on a vastly greater scale than the first two films.

Still, on Bourne, his filmmaking style nearly ended his career. The weird affect didn’t help. “You freaked me out at first,” Franka Potente, Bourne’s co-star, told him. “You didn’t look at me once.” Liman didn’t really come across as a movie director, a type who takes charge. Liman doesn’t have that switch. “He’s not going to tell anyone not to do anything,” says one colleague. Liman didn’t—or perhaps couldn’t—make decisions until he absolutely had to. “I like to keep my options open,” he says. “I’m known for changing my mind.”

And with Liman, a script is a fluid thing. “I go into a movie sort of saying what it’s not going to be,” he says. Ludwig, who’s worked with Liman since Swingers, says with only a little exaggeration, “He makes a movie, then starts writing the movie.” In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, screenwriter Simon Kinberg says, “I wrote 40 or 50 totally different endings.” (Liman eventually chose the first one.)

“Limania” is how Kinberg refers to the Liman moviemaking process. At the core of Limania is a belief that a film only reveals its nature as you make it. “I’m trying to find the movie during the process, as I did during Smiths. How much of a comedy it was going to be was something I was wrestling with on a daily basis.”

On Bourne, Limania infuriated producers, who were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. “Bourne was overly chaotic; we went into production with a script that was just a mess,” says Saar Klein, Bourne’s editor. Klein later became Liman’s friend, and is now editing Jumper, but he found himself hating Liman during Bourne.

Most maddening, perhaps, Liman seemed immune to the chaos he caused. “He is more comfortable with the chaos than everyone else,” says Klein. “Nothing can embarrass the guy.” Some suggest that Liman’s disruptions are strategic, that he cunningly deploys his disordered persona. “His persona is something he cultivates,” says Favreau. “There’s part of him that is him, part of him he creates. He enjoys the image he projects of being a mad scientist of cinema. It gives him leeway.”

One does notice that Liman’s tales of conflict usually turn out well. “I always get my way,” Liman confides one day, his eyes widening.

Unfortunately, Stacey Snider, the head of Universal when Bourne was being made, didn’t share Liman’s confidence in himself. To the studio, Liman’s process seemed costly, unorganized, and, worse, immature, with some justification—one night he paid the crew overtime to light a forest so he could play paintball. “Universal hated me,” says Liman. “I had an archenemy in the studio. They were trying to shut me down. The producers were bad guys.Relations got so bad that the studio rejected out of hand anything Liman said. For a time, Liman developed a back channel in Matt Damon, who was playing Bourne. “I would be his surrogate because at least I could be heard,” says Damon. That only worked sometimes. One day, Liman woke up realizing he’d missed a shot—a not-uncommon occurrence with the director. “I screwed up,” he told the producers. “I need to redo the scene.”

“We don’t care. You are not doing it again,” Liman was told.

“No is never no for Doug,” explains Ludwig. “He’s not confrontational. He goes around.” Liman loaded four minutes of film, took the camera himself, and surreptitiously reshot the scene. Liman saw it as a rebel moment necessary to assure the film’s quality—he went rogue, in the language of alter ego Bourne J.

The producers viewed it as the ultimate transgression. “That was the huge epic screaming fight, the biggest screaming fight on the set ever,” says Liman, who testily explored auctioning off his director’s credit on eBay.

Bourne was a critical success and a commercial triumph, and announced the Liman aesthetic: smart, stylish genre films that confound their genres. Jason Bourne is James Bond for a new generation—his initials are J.B. for a reason. 007 was an eminently self-assured, technology-enhanced Cold Warrior. Jason Bourne fights the U.S. government—with a ballpoint pen at one juncture. Bond was stuck in his role; Bourne looks for his true self. Other Liman movies also tend to comically overdramatize their energizing metaphors. Jason Bourne must search for his identity, since he’s lost his memory. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a movie about couples therapy in which the fighting couple is armed with real weapons.

Bourne’s success—it grossed $213 million worldwide—didn’t appease Universal, which banned Liman from directing sequels. “I lost my baby,” he says.

As Liman sees it, Universal executives hoped he’d never direct another movie. Brad Pitt rescued him. He’d been initially cast as Bourne, and he was so impressed that he brought Liman the script for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. “He was told he could pick any director he wanted except me,” says Liman. “So he brought it to me.”

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a $110 million film funded by Regency, was crazy in its own way. To start, there was media pandemonium over the Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie romance. Then Limania chewed up budgets and nerves. Liman decided that a hand grenade tossed into Pitt and Jolie’s suburban house didn’t play well onscreen. The explosion, though, had destroyed the set; the studio refused to pay to rebuild it. Liman and Ludwig went off on their own. Like the old indie days, they built part of the set in Liman’s mother’s garage in Rye, financed by Liman. They borrowed a robot from iRobot, makers of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which delivered the grenade. Liman shot the scene himself, and it ended up in the movie.

As Jumper is about to hit theaters, Limania has changed. Or, at least, the way it’s perceived has changed. “Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works,” Liman tells me at his loft one day. (And, by Hollywood standards, the Liman process works. “He’s four for four,” says Damon, who adds, “He saved my career with Bourne.”) Liman has surrounded himself with a few central people. Two key players from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, producer Lucas Foster and screenwriter Kinberg, are working on Jumper. Ludwig, his oldest colleague, is, too.

These days, Liman can’t seem to cause trouble even if he wants to. “Now, if I try to do something conventional,” he says, “I’m surrounded by people who say, ‘That’s not your way.’” It’s a pissy complaint, part self-congratulation, but a complaint nonetheless. Now, the producers play nice, even when he veers off script. One day, inching through Times Square gridlock on his way to shoot at the Empire State Building, Liman thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to pick up a piece of the final fight scene here! Hayden Christensen and Jamie Bell, two of the Jumper leads, were in the van with him, their clothing already splattered with what looked like blood. In the film, their climactic battle shifts from the pyramids to the Colosseum to the Empire State Building—they teleport, remember? Why not add Times Square? Liman rushed through tourists, cleared a space on the island in the middle of Times Square. He called action, and Christensen and Bell wrestled over a bomb detonator. It had the feel of the old days, except a producer signed off. He was in the van.

“Suddenly,” Liman tells me, “I’m nostalgic for Bourne.” He filmed Bourne in Europe. “To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic.” Fox, his new studio, dotes on him. “Doug, you pushed this to the limit and beyond,” e-mailed the studio executive in charge. Liman says, “That made me feel a little better. Now the studio is like, ‘What else can we get you?’” Liman acts deflated. “Wow,” he thinks out loud, “I must have grown up and sold out”—that phrase again. Of course, it’s a boast in the form of a complaint, a Liman habit. Still, you can’t stick it to the machine if the machine won’t act insulted.
One day I wait for Liman at his production office across from the South Street Seaport. The place looks like it could be packed up overnight. There are a few cheap desks, a bunch of papers. I notice a shelf of Liman’s favorite candy, which an assistant dutifully restocks. Liman arrives late, as usual. As usual, he wears a T-shirt and jeans, though today he’s also got on a long fitted coat. “You look good,” says an assistant. “What’s wrong?”

Liman is, by now, a respected Hollywood citizen. As Bourne’s box-office figures climbed, he called his friend Sarah Polley with updates. She told him, “I’m going to talk to you in a few months when you’ve cooled down a little, because this is really nauseating.” Liman’s deep attachment to commercial success doesn’t play particularly well with indie sensibilities, like those of many New York filmmakers. “In Hollywood, it’s cool to make movies that make money,” explains Kinberg. “In New York, it’s cool to make movies that don’t make money.” Polley, who’s something like Liman’s indie conscience—she wrote and directed Away From Her—recently invited him to escort her to an awards ceremony for the New York Film Critics Circle. “It’s the closest you’re ever going to get,” she told him.

In Liman’s office, he sits with his sheepdog Jackson—for his birthday, Liman bought him some sheep—and talks about moving beyond his adolescent taste in movies and in lifestyle. “They’re tied together,” he says. People want him to grow up—“My mom, everyone,” he says. Liman has long cherished that very rebel style, but lately he talks as if it’s merely an artifact of birth order—“it’s the style of the youngest child,” he says. Liman talks about wanting a family, kids, which his father wanted for him. He wants to see if his long-term on-again, off-again relationship can work.

And he talks about wanting to make other kinds of movies. “A part of me is a liberal New Yorker involved in politics and certain attitudes about movies,” he says, by which he means that movies should be more than entertainment. “I kind of lost my indie credibility over Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” he says. “I know I haven’t lost it. I just have to go make an independent movie. I just have to do it. Just for me.”

Polley has suggested he examine “his fascination with what his dad was able to achieve,” which sometimes strikes Liman as a good idea, too. “I may do something on prison reform,” he says.

And yet Liman recently sold his next project, based on a script he wrote ten years ago with his cousin John Hamburg about a private expedition to the moon. “Sometimes I get these ideas in my head and they don’t die,” he says. None other than Stacey Snider, now at DreamWorks, bought it. “People say that’s a sellout [to let Snider buy it],” Liman tells me. Apparently, he agreed for a time. “I had only pitched it to her so I could then say no,” he says. “But she was so unbelievably aggressive and supportive, all the other stuff evaporated. It’s hard for me to hold grudges.”

Liman tells me he has high hopes for the moon-shot project. “It’s not part of the sellout,” he says at one point. “Its aspirations are loftier. When I wrote it, it was a frivolous movie. Now the planet is in crisis. It’s wrestling with the dominant social issue facing us today, overpopulation.” He was going to do good, have it both ways, like his father. Some part of this is true, no doubt. But as Liman knows, the new movie will have a huge budget, an unrealistic premise, an escapist plot, a ton of special effects, and grand commercial expectations. It’s exactly the type of film Liman can do like few others. Adventure movies excite Liman. And so he changes his tune—Limania in action. “All this talking about [worthy stuff],” he says, “it goes out the window when I have a story I want to tell.” Liman likes being the big kid living out his fantasy life onscreen and off. He lets me know he’s got to go. There are some cool special effects to review for Jumper. And he’s got an idea about flying his plane to the Vineyard, where he keeps his boat. I’m not really in a rush to grow up, he says.

Source: NY Mag

MIT physicists Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark joined Christensen and director Doug Liman of “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” fame, to discuss the real-world knowledge and research in the branch of physics that deals with teleportation and quantum mechanics.

“Transporting people isn’t too far off,” the sci-fi stud told the Track while being hounded by a pack of Trekkie nerds. “They’ve already transported a light photon. And to think a few years back people didn’t think TV was possible.”

In the flick, opening Valentine’s Day, Christensen plays a guy who discovers he can teleport himself anywhere. The good news is he can go to Nevis at the drop of a hat. The bad, he finds out he’s in the middle of a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them.

So, where would you like to be teleported, Hayden?

“Home, it’s always good to be home,” the Canadian said with a grin.

Christensen said don’t think of him just as a sci-fi kinda guy.

“I do whatever appeals to me, but I have two films coming out that have nothing to do with science fiction,” he said. “It will be a nice change.”

Source: Boston Herald

Source: www.boston.com

LSC GUY: Hello, and on behalf of LSC, thank you for coming to this free screening of Jumper! Speaking of Jumper, I’m wearing a blue sweater. And now, here to talk about his movie, Doug Liman.

DOUG LIMAN: Hello, my name is Doug Liman and this is my movie. These clips are from a week ago, which is like a year in Hollywood time, so it’s like going back in time for me. And also, I didn’t get to pick them – Fox did. Okay, here we go.

CLIP 1: (DAVEY, the movie’s main character, discovers he can teleport. Joke about a library.)

AUDIENCE: HAHAHAHA!

DL: And this clip is why I fell in love with the movie.

CLIP 2: (DAVEY robs a bank. Lots of money.)

DL: And this clip is where we see Hayden.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Woo!

CLIP 3: (HAYDEN gets beaten to a pulp by SAMUEL L. JACKSON)

MALE AND FEMALE AUDIENCE: WOO!

DL: And this is the clip where we see another one of the jumpers, who is played by Jamie Bell.

HALF OF THE AUDIENCE: Hey, wasn’t he Billy Elliott?

OTHER HALF OF AUDIENCE: Ohhh yeah.

DL: Some of you thought you were going to come see the whole movie tonight, but we actually just finished it last night, so uh, sorry, that’s pretty much it. I have no idea how that rumor got out. Uh, now the guy you probably actually came to see.

HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN: Hi, I’m Hayden Christensen.

LSC GUY: OKAY! Now we’re going to have a discussion panel!

HC: Oh, uh, okay.

LSC GUY: Talking about the physics of teleportation tonight – Professor Edward Farhi!

AUDIENCE: WOO!!! (more cheering and applause than for HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN)

LSC GUY: And Professor Max Tegmark!

AUDIENCE: WOO!!! (more cheering and applause than for HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN)

EDWARD FARHI: Hey, this is like teaching 8.01 all over again.

AUDIENCE: Guhhh.

EF: Wow, major Debbie Downer. Anyway, I’m going to talk about quantum teleportation. But in order to do that, I have to teach you quantum mechanics. It’ll just take a minute.

SOME FRESHMAN COURSE 8 MAJOR: Oh good, so I don’t have to take 8.05 now.EF: So you take an entangled pair of electrons, put each one at point A and point B, and put the electron you want to teleport at point A. Then you take a “measurement function” which collapses the wave function of the electrons, which will give you any number 1-4. You pass that information through conventional methods, like radio or light, to point B, and “you do some quantum thingy” (his words) depending on the quantum number to the electron at point B, which will result in the electron having transported over there. So.. basically to do this with Hayden, from Earth to Mars, you’d have to destroy him on Earth. (This explanation brought to you with major help from The Angela Monster.)

HC and DL: K.

MAX TEGMARK: So now I’m going to talk a little more about classical teleportation – which isn’t necessarily teleportation, per se, but is more like transporting someone from point A to B very quickly. But I’m going to do it with a power point that isn’t always grammatically correct, and features a lot of pictures of Hayden Christensen in various poses. MT: You would never be able to do what Eddy said, because there would be a LOT of energy required. So, say you wanted to classically teleport someone from here to another solar system. The problem with doing it that way is that once you get there, someone would’ve built a better and faster approach to do it. So you’d get there and it’d be like, uhh, who’s that guy? LSC GUY: Let’s open up the panel to questions!

MIT STUDENT: Physics question!

EF: Physics answer!

DL: Hahaha!

MALE MIT STUDENT: This question is for Doug Liman. How much effort do you put in trying to stay true to real-world science?

DL: I do a lot of research for my movies. Like I talked to a real world assassin when I was doing the Bourne movies. I try to still think of the science of my movies, you know, like, if Hayden’s sitting over here, and you teleport him, the air should like collapse in, so much so that there might be condensation created..

MT: Mmm. Yeah.

EF: Actually, I have a question for you guys (Liman and Hayden Christensen). What do you think we, as scientists, can do for Hollywood?

HC: Go see Jumper. And then, you know, get on it. Make it happen.

MALE MIT STUDENT 2: This question’s for Hayden – I was just wondering what you were expecting when you agreed to come talk to us at MIT tonight..

AUDIENCE and HC: HAHAHHA

MALE MIT STUDENT 2: Like, were you expecting just normal kids, or did you think we’d be like (nerd voice) “huhhh, flux capacitors”?

AUDIENCE and HC: HAHAHAHAH

HC: Uhh.. I guess I wasn’t expecting you guys to be such a lively group.. but ah, no.. this is cool.

OTHER MIT STUDENTS: Other various physics and/or film related questions!

PANEL: Other various physics and/or film related answers!

FEMALE MIT STUDENT: This question is for Hayden. My best friend is recently single; would you ever consider dating an MIT girl?

HC: Uh- yeahhhh- no- I…

LSC GUY: And that’s it for tonight! Make sure to come to our other LSC events coming up, like Hotel Rwanda this weekend co-hosted by MIT’s STAND..

STEPH SHIM: I LOVE YOU HAYDEN!!!

HC: (head nod) And that’s pretty much how it went. I didn’t get to talk to, touch, or even really see Hayden because I was in the back row, but here is a pretty good picture of the top of Hayden Christensen’s head that I rushed the stage for just for this blog entry. Tomorrow, it’s back to Matlabbing and UROPing, but tonight, JUST FOR TONIGHT, I got to photograph the top of Hayden Christensen’s head. And also, learn the mechanics behind quantum teleportation. Not bad for a Wednesday night!

Source:MIT Admissions

Also present were two professors from the physics department, Max Tegmark and Edward Farhi, who explained that the teleportation in the movie was not scientifically possible.

Afterwards there was a Q&A session, during which Christensen dodged questions about possibly dating an MIT girl and going to a local party, and also whether he expected extreme nerds or normal people before coming to campus. And then a horde of fangirls mobbed Christensen before a combination of Fox executives, press people, and one security dude made them back off and took both Christensen and Liman to do more interviews backstage.

Also, Doug Liman was nice enough to autograph my copy of Bourne Identity.

“It’s a little less exotic than what you see in the movie,” said Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. “Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.”

It is, however, in the foreseeable future in the Hollywood world of lights and special effects. Jumper, which is scheduled to be released on Feb. 14, is a sci-fi thriller about a man, played by Hayden Christensen, who discovers he has the ability to teleport himself anywhere, anytime. There’s no old-fashioned Star Trek-like “Beam me up, Scottie” in this movie. The character simply wills himself to “jump” from one place to another.

Of course, nothing can be that easy in an action-adventure thriller. Christensen’s character discovers that he’s not the only Jumper alive and that there’s a secret organization of people sworn to kill all Jumpers because they believe the teleporters’ ability makes them a danger to everyone else. Actor Samuel L. Jackson plays the man in charge of tracking down and killing the Jumpers.

While the movie, directed by Doug Liman, may have taken the reality of teleportation and spiced it up quite a bit, Christensen, who gained fame and heart-throb status playing Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episodes II and II, told Computerworld that it’s an alluring fantasy.

“I’ve always been a sci-fi fan. I like things that stimulate the imagination,” he said before clips of the movie were screened for the MIT audience. “Obviously, I think there’s great appeal to be able to be where you want, whenever you want. You could escape anything you need to escape.”

And what situation would he like to teleport out of the most? “I might be home right now,” he said, laughing. “Just kidding. Just kidding. Well, I’d at least like to be somewhere warm.”
Hayden Christensen and Doug Liman
Doug Liman, left, director of the film Jumper, and Hayden Christensen, the film’s star, discuss the science of teleportation at MIT. Photo by Sharon Gaudin.

Liman, who joked about doubting his decision to appear at MIT, where the technology in his movie could be ripped apart, said he tried to find a source of reality in the science behind teleportation. “When we started Jumper, I got hooked up with a professor at the University of Toronto,” said Liman, who traveled to 14 countries and 20 cities to make the movie. “He basically threw me out of his office. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor about what we were doing.”

The science still intrigues the director, who said he would recommend that would-be directors go to a school like MIT instead of to film school. “Sitting here listening to your professors, I got five movie ideas in the bathroom and two ideas for sequels,” said Liman. “This is where great ideas for films are born, so this is far more important than film school.”

And the science obviously intrigues the professors and students at MIT, which may be one of the few places where professors get the same raucous hoots, foot stomping and cheers as a Hollywood star and a famed director. Farhi and Max Tegmark, an associate professor of physics at MIT, can separate fact from fiction when it comes to wormholes, time travel and teleportation.

Quantum teleportation, Farhi explained to the audience, entails destroying something in its original place and re-creating it somewhere else. To do this with an electron, for instance, scientists would need to have another electron, basically a mate, in place where they wanted the first electron to appear. That second electron would receive the essence of the first electron.

“Quantum teleportation has occurred in the laboratory,” Farhi added. “They’ve moved single particles over two miles, but there is no instantaneous transportation. You could just pick it up and move it much more easily, but that would be less exotic … and cheaper.”

Right now, Fahri said, scientists are still experimenting with teleporting single protons or electrons. The next step would be to teleport a more complex object, like an atom. When that might happen, the theorist just isn’t sure.

“I don’t think distance will be the problem,” he said. “The issue will be the size of the object.”

Fahri also said he would have no interest in being able to teleport like the character in Jumper, even if it were possible.

“No. No. Once you destroy the quantum state of the object, the thing is gone,” he explained. “If you mess up the teleportation, then you’re a goner.”

Tegmark noted that there is a major benefit to sci-fi movies like Jumper.

“People watch movies and get all fired up to be scientists,” he said. “Sometimes I watch sci-fi and it raises interesting questions. When you walk up to a door and it automatically opens, it’s because someone watched Star Trek. … Sci-fi can get kids interested in learning about science.”
Source of this article :

“I wasn’t expecting such a lively group,” Christensen told attendees at the MIT event, which showcased four clips from the film set to open next month. Yet Liman said he anticipated the excitement around the science of teleportation because it drew him to make the film and to travel to 14 countries and 20 cities to lend credibility to the locations to which Christensen jumped.

Liman, who also directed “The Bourne Identity,” explained how he realized while he could train Matt Damon to fight like an assassin, he would not be able to get Christensen up to speed on teleportation abilities. But that didn’t stop him from wanting to make the film and to add as much science to the process as he could.
“There is a tendency in Hollywood to want to dumb topics down for the audience,” Liman said. But he visited a physics expert — who shunned his concept immediately — to try to make the impossible act of complete human teleportation seem plausible enough for the audience to suspend reality and accept that Christensen’s character and others in the film were able to teleport themselves.
“I wanted to figure out what it would look like if someone is in a chair and then suddenly not in a chair. I took a very scientific approach” by considering objects moving and climate conditions in the environment, Liman said, amid uproarious laughter from the audience. He then added good-naturedly, “When I speak other places I sound very scientific.”

Admittedly Liman didn’t have much of a chance of coming off knowledgeable about science in the company of Farhi and Tegmark, who separately discussed in detail the facts around teleportation that have their roots in quantum mechanics.

To start, Farhi explained that businesses have been able to teleport a single quantum particle — such as an electron or a photon — in laboratories over fiber-optic cable up to a distance of 2 miles. The process requires three particles, two of which could be an entangled pair of electrons. In its simplest explanation, the two electrons must be split and a third particle would destroy and copy the information from one electron and then send that data in a signal to the other electron, which in essence would be teleportation of the first electron, he explained. He added that it is not possible to send the signal over in less time than the distance divided by the speed of light.

“In quantum teleportation, there is no instantaneous transport of information. Everything is nice and consistent with the laws of relatively and quantum mechanics … which can be very strange but also happened to be true,” Farhi said.

Tegmark continued with a presentation that provided great detail as to why the world would not want to teleport Christensen; many reasons would be to prevent harm to the Canadian actor. But he also commented on the importance of the sci-fi genre of films driving scientific research to solve many of the questions raised by the creator’s imagination. While Liman said he came up with multiple movie ideas simply from listening to the physicists talk, Tegmark argued scientists do the same with sci-fi films.
“The hard part is finding the right question to ask, it’s not always the answer,” he said. And when asked by the audience the hard question that was bound to come up with Christensen in attendance — which sci-fi film depicts a science or technology more likely to become reality: Star Wars’ lightsabers or Jumper’s teleportation? — the MIT experts had to answer with the former.
“The lightsaber, but the hard part is getting the laser beam to stop,” Tegmark said.

And if any question remained, they both reiterated that human teleportation is not possible. But there is a practical application to the science of teleportation today: secure key distribution. Farhi explained that by sending quantum particles down channels, companies can ensure 100% secure communications and detect “eavesdropping.”

“Someday it could be possible to teleport millions of particles, they can teleport a single photon today,” he said.

Most people understand that MIT is not your average place. But at a special media panel held there last night some of the differences really stood out.

After all, there aren’t that many other places where two renowned physicists would receive as much applause, cheers and enthusiasm as successful Hollywood director Doug Liman (who has directed major hits such as Swingers and The Bourne Identity) and major movie star Hayden Christensen (aka Anakin Skywalker aka Darth freaking Vader!).

But what was the purpose of this strange panel? Well, Liman and Christensen were there to talk about the upcoming science fiction film Jumper (based on the 1992 novel by Steven Gould) and for the first time show extended clips of the film to a live audience. But why the physicists?

Well, the plot of Jumper centers around a young man who discovers that he has a genetic trait that makes it possible for him to teleport himself to anyplace he can see, knows well or that he sees in a photograph.

So to help ground the idea of teleportation in some hard science, the panel included Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark, both MIT professors and esteemed physicists.

During the panel Farhi and Tegmark covered a lot of ground in potential areas where teleportation could be theoretically possible, ranging everywhere from worm holes to interstellar travel to time travel.

MIT Jumper Panel
However, one of the more interesting parts of the discussion covered experiments where teleportation has actually occurred, namely experiments where scientists have been able to take a single nanoparticle and transport it over distance.

The details of this were fascinating (covering things such as quantum entanglement and the phenomenon that Einstein called spooky action at a distance). However, as a technology journalist I was also surprised by the practical implications of this discussion and technology, as much of this technology is also the basis of quantum computing.

Quantum computing is pretty much the ultimate emerging technology, since once it finally emerges it will radically change computing as we know it, providing exponentially greater computing power than possible today and making it possible to solve technological problems that are impossible to solve using current technology.

That was the practical side of the discussion. What about the fictional ability of Christensen’s character to teleport himself anywhere in the world?

Well, while the physicists were nice to the film makers and had some fun with working on possible teleportation scenarios for Christensen, they pretty much shot down the idea of any large teleportation (especially of humans) happening anytime soon.

One telling point came in answer to an audience member question on what we would see first, teleportation of humans as seen in the film Jumper or light sabers and Death Stars like in Star Wars. Without hesitating the physicists said we would see light sabers and Death Stars before we saw teleportation (though to be honest the geek part of me half expected Christensen to stand up and say to the physicists “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”)

Of course, most people don’t go to action packed science fiction movies to debate the actual science portrayed in the movie. And based on the clips shown at the event (and on Liman’s track record as a film maker), Jumper looks like it will fill the key Hollywood science requirements of action and excitement.

So did Hollywood get it right this time? Not so much, says H. Jeff Kimble, a Caltech physicist. Since teleportation is a transfer of quantum states, not particles, “you’re not actually sending atoms,” he says. “You’re only sending information about their quantum state.” Which means it’s more like a Xerox machine than a wormhole, with no movement or connection across space and time. (You hear that, Heroes?) In real life, only a beam of light has been, er, beamed a short distance (about 3 feet) but that, Kimble says, “is a set of completely different physics,” and Hollywood-style teleportation is just not possible. But don’t tell Liman. With hopes for a Jumper trilogy, he has already outlined a second film involving — great Scotty! — researchers teleporting molecules in a lab. OK, physics may not be his strongest suit, but Liman is obviously expert in the science of sequels.

Match the teleportation tip with its film or TV show source (answers below).

1 Squinting your eyes improves your ability to jump through time and space exponentially.
2 Don’t trust Ziggy Stardust to build a decent transport machine.
3 Before dissolving into a million particles — close the damn window.
4 It may scramble your brain, but teleporting is a lot safer than riding shotgun in a starship.
5 Never be the first to try out a brand-spankin’-new teleporter.
6 Even though you’re not actually shooting up through the teleportation machine, look up anyway.
7 Screw phasers — teleportation is the only foolproof method of escaping aliens.
A Stargate
B The Prestige
C Spaceballs
D The Fly
E Heroes
F Star Trek

“It’s a little less exotic than what you see in the movie,” said Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. “Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.”

It is, however, in the foreseeable future in the Hollywood world of lights and special effects. Jumper, which is scheduled to be released on Feb. 14, is a sci-fi thriller about a man, played by Hayden Christensen, who discovers he has the ability to teleport himself anywhere and at anytime. There’s no old-fashioned Star Trek-like “Beam me up, Scottie” in this movie. The character simply wills himself to “jump” from one place to another.

Of course, nothing can be that easy in an action-adventure thriller. Christensen’s character discovers that he’s not the only Jumper alive and that there’s a secret organization of people sworn to kill all Jumpers because they believe the teleporters’ ability makes them a danger to everyone else. Actor Samuel L. Jackson plays the man in charge of tracking down, and killing, the Jumpers.

While the movie, directed by Doug Liman, may have taken the reality of teleportation and spiced it up quite a bit, Christensen, who gained fame and heart-throb status playing Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episodes II and II, told Computerworld that it’s an alluring fantasy.

“I’ve always been a sci-fi fan. I like things that stimulate the imagination,” he said before clips of the movie were screened for the MIT audience. “Obviously, I think there’s great appeal to be able to be where you want, whenever you want. You could escape anything you need to escape.”

And what situation would he like to teleport out of the most? “I might be home right now,” he said, laughing. “Just kidding. Just kidding. Well, I’d at least like to be somewhere warm.”

Liman, who joked about doubting his decision to go to MIT where the technology in his movie could be ripped apart, said he tried to find a source of reality in the science behind teleportation. “When we started Jumper, I got hooked up with a professor at the University of Toronto,” said Liman, who traveled to 14 countries and 20 cities to make the movie. “He basically threw me out of his office. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor about what we were doing.”

The science still intrigues the director, who said he would recommend that would-be directors go to a school like MIT instead of film school. “Sitting here listening to your professors, I got five movie ideas in the bathroom and two ideas for sequels,” said Liman. “This is where great ideas for films are born, so this is far more important than film school.”

And the science obviously intrigues the professors and students at MIT, which may be one of the few places where professors get the same raucous hoots, foot stomping and cheers as the Hollywood star and a famed director. Farhi and Max Tegmark, an associate professor of physics at MIT, are the ones to separate fact from fiction when it comes to worm holes, time travel and teleportation. Quantum teleportation, Farhi explained to the audience, entails destroying something in its original place and recreating it somewhere else. To do this with an electron, for instance, scientists would need to have another electron, basically a mate, in place where they want the first electron to appear. That second electron would receive the essence of the first electron.

“Quantum teleportation has occurred in the laboratory,” he added. “They’ve moved single particles over two miles, but there is no instantaneous transportation. You could just pick it up and move it much more easily, but that would be less exotic … and cheaper.”

Right now, Fahri said scientists are still experimenting with teleporting single protons or electrons. The next step would be to teleport a more complex object, like an atom. When that might happen, the theorist just isn’t sure.

“I don’t think distance will be the problem,” he noted. “The issue will be the size of the object.”

And Fahri also said he would have no interest in being able to teleport like the character in Jumper, even if it was possible.

“No. No. Once you destroy the quantum state of the object, the thing is gone,” he explained. “If you mess up the teleportation, then you’re a goner.”

Fahri’s colleague Tegmark said there is a major benefit, though, to sci-fi movies like Jumper.

“People watch movies and get all fired up to be scientists,” he said. “Sometimes I watch sci-fi and it raises interesting questions. When you walk up to a door and it automatically opens, it’s because someone watched Star Trek… Sci-fi can get kids interested in learning about science.

Funniest thing…while I was getting these pics ready to post and simultaneously watching American Dad on Adult Swim, they had a funny little dialogue about JUMPER. It went like this,

Anyone gonna see that new movie JUMPER? You know the one where Darth Vader can ski and teleport? But look out Anakin, Mace Windu has a new hair cut and he’s gonna kill you!

I was like, whoa coincidence and very funny. I was giggling and had to jot it down to share. Adult Swim kills me, it’s great.

Ok, well on with what this was originally about. JUMPER had a special presentation at M.I.T., Hayden Christensen and director Doug Liman were in attendance.

Extras will include: an “Audio commentary,” “Seven deleted scenes,” a “Behind the scenes featurette,” and “Storyboard-to-film comparisons.”

Be sure to check under Related Releases below for more details.

Synopsis:
“…a surprisingly effective thriller.” – Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert

During surgery, more than 60,000 people domestically each year experience “anesthetical awareness,” a condition when anesthesia fails during surgery, leaving one completely conscious and feeling every incision, but paralyzed and incapable of doing anything about it. This is what happens to Clay (Hayden Christensen).

But the kind of human time travel Christensen’s character does in Jumper is a little more sophisticated than what currently can be done, said scientists in a discussion of the movie’s special effects and technology last week at MIT.

Christensen along with Jumper director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) joined forces with two MIT physicists, Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark, to talk about teleportation.

In Jumper, out Feb. 14, a seemingly normal young man discovers he has the ability to jump from any location in the world to another – sort of like Platform 9 in the Harry Potter books – a shortcut through space and time.

Farhi, the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said breakthroughs in physics have allowed a particle to be teleported up to two miles. To move a human, though, well, let’s just say, Christensen might not like the answer.

We would have to destroy the actor, Farhi said in jest as the panel dissected the film’s take on science. That’s a very hard protocol.

For all of the scientific jargon – protons, neutrons, electrons and the like – Liman was nothing if not inspired.

Sitting here listening to your professors, I got five movie ideas, Liman said.Scientifically speaking, though, the technology in Jumper is pretty far off. So much so that Liman said a physics professor in Toronto threw him out of his office when he first proposed the movie’s plot.

But the science community at MIT was a more welcoming bunch. The scientists credited the film industry for its ability to get kids into science with an interesting sci-fi movie. Tegmark, an associate professor of physics, wanted to know how scientists could assist filmmakers.

Watch Jumper, be inspired by it, get to work and figure it out, Christensen said.

You never know, teleportation just may be the transportation mode of the future.

Now, Gould’s classic novel has been transformed by Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises into a major motion picture starring Hayden Christensen (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith), Rachel Bilson (The O.C.), Jamie Bell (King Kong), with Diane Lane (Unfaithful), and Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction). Directed by Doug Liman (Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity), the film opens everywhere February 14, 2008.

A memorable and action-packed coming-of-age story, Jumper brings to life wandering hero David Rice—for whom “anywhere is possible.” But to survive, he must learn to use his power in a world that is more threatening and complex than he ever imagined.

Tor Books is also proud to present Jumper: Griffin’s Story, an original novel by Steven Gould that introduces a whole new character created specifically for the movie. Griffin O’Connor is also a jumper. But unlike Davy, he wasn’t able to keep his power a secret. He has been hunted for as long as he can remember, first with his family, then on his own. Don’t miss his side of the dangerous adventures in Jumper: Griffin’s Story.

Steven Gould is the author of Jumper, Wildside, Helm, Blind Waves, Reflex, and Jumper: Griffin’s Story, as well as several short stories. He is the recipient of the Hal Clement Young Adult Award for Science Fiction and has been on the Hugo ballot twice and the Nebula ballot once for his short fiction, but his favorite distinction was being listed among the American Library Association’s Top 100 Banned Books of 1990-1999. “Jumper was right there at #94 between Stephen King’s Christine and a nonfiction book on sex education.” Steve lives in New Mexico with his wife, writer Laura J. Mixon, and their two daughters. As he is somewhere between birth and death, he considers himself to be middle-aged.

Source: SfFWA.Org

In town then to shoot the sci-ficaper Jumper, the big-time lens-man thought he’d try to learn more about the ins and outs of electrons. His movie, after all, concerned a man — played by Hayden Christensen — who could beam himself anywhere, anytime, anyhow. So, off went Liman to the inner reaches of academia.

Or, as Liman elaborates, “When we started Jumper, I got hooked up with a professor at the University of Toronto. He basically threw me out of his office. He didn’t have much of a sense of humour about what we were doing.”

The director behind such films as The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith told the story recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he managed not to be thrown out and where everybody’s humour seemed to be in check.

Fact and fiction shook hands and got to know each other at the legendary school when Liman — accompanied by his star Canadian — sat down with two MIT physicists to a) talk about the omigod reality of time-travel! and b) plug the movie, out in theatres on Feb. 14!

“It’s a little less exotic than what you see in the movie,” explained Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics, as our Hayden loomed, trying to telegraph the inner nerd nestled within the contours of his outer hunkiness.

“Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles,” went on the scientist.

“[But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.”

Quantum teleportation, it was explained, entails destroying something in its original place and re-creating it somewhere else. So far, it has occurred in the laboratory. “They’ve moved single particles over two miles, but there is no instantaneous transportation.”

Right now, Farhi said, scientists are still experimenting with teleporting single protons or electrons. The next step would be to teleport a more complex object, such as an atom. When might that happen? He isn’t sure.

Hayden, who travelled to 20 cities to make the movie– the old-fashioned way — noted then that he’s always been a fan of sci-fiand “obviously, I think there’s great appeal to be able to be where you want, whenever you want. You could escape anything you need to escape.”

Source: Nationalpost

What’s something you absolutely have to have when you’re on set filming a movie?

Music. It helps me get into whatever state of mind I’m supposed to be in that day. I try to find artists, or genres, that are fitting for a specific role. When I was filming Jumper, I was listening to a lot of upbeat hip-hop mixed with a little bit of Bob Dylan and Neil Young. The hip-hop to get in the right mood, the Dylan and Neil Young to keep me sane.

What do you like to do when you’re not working?

I like to travel and just do different things. See what sort of catches me at certain times and be open to it. I still like to play with toys. I’ve got some good ones up at the farm — dirt bikes, ATVs, snowmobiles, a big excavator, a dump truck…. Right now I’m trying to learn how to fly a plane. Unfortunately, I haven’t logged that many official hours — I have about eight right now. But I have been flying. I just haven’t been very smart about doing my plane log-hour journal thing.
What’s in your pockets right now?

Let me see … I’ve got 45 cents in paper Canadian Tire money. Canadian Tire is like a Home Depot in Canada, and they give you these sort of coupons as incentives to come back. That’s just my pants pockets, though. Let me go into my jacket, where the fun is. Okay, so I’ve got flight itineraries from Dubai. I’ve got my keys. I’ve got earphones. An iPod. Receipts. I’ve got little mint things. More change. I’ve got cellophane wrappers from candies, it appears. Chap stuff. And I’ve got a business card, I guess from one of the town cars that I got to the airport in. His name is actually Julius Caesar — very funny! One second, I have one last pocket to check. I’ve got a passport. And my money clip, with money and cards and a license and stuff.

What are you doing tomorrow?

I actually have to go to L.A. tomorrow for a day to shoot these things for these Superbowl commercials that Jumper’s been involved with, where I’m actually jumping into another commercial. Then I’ll be back at the farm the next day.

Actors sort of have to be observers. Growing up, were you always a pretty observant kid?

Yeah, I was definitely a people watcher. I was definitely the one who was listening, rather than the one who was talking. It’s fascinating how different people are. And the reverse of that as well — how similar we can be and appear to be different. But that’s a long conversation….

Source: Cosmogirl.com

But when David discovers another young man like himself, a fiery, globetrotting rebel named Griffin (Jamie Bell), the truth of his existence begins to dawn. He is not just a lone freak of nature, but part of a long line of genetic anomalies known as Jumpers, none of whom are safe. Now, David has now been identified by the secret organization sworn to kill him and all Jumpers. For Jamie Bell, who plays Griffin, the intense action of “Jumper” was real change of pace. Bell came to international acclaim in the poignant title role of Stephen Daldry’s Oscar®-nominated indie hit Billy Elliot, in which he played a working-class British boy with an unlikely dream of becoming a dancer. He has gone on to diverse roles ranging from the servant Smike in Nicholas Nickleby to a young seaman in Peter Jackson’s King Kong and a U.S. Marine in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers – but the role of Griffin was like nothing he’d attempted before.

This was key for the filmmakers who wanted a very unpredictable presence for Griffin, the defiant Jumper who initiates David Rice into the entire mythology behind who he really is – and explains the perilous stakes he faces. But Griffin also has his own story of loss and anger-fueled vengeance that will become deeply intertwined with David’s survival.

Bell was first and foremost magnetically drawn to the concept of Jumper. “There was something about the script that I really connected to, something that reminded me of being a kid desperately searching for a way out,” explains Bell. “Teleportation is the ultimate out. You can go anywhere at any time. Who doesn’t dream of that? As for Griffin, he’s incredibly wild, colorful and funny. He has this intense, kinetic kind of energy; he doesn’t have anything that’s permanent, he doesn’t have any sense of family or a social life, and in fact he has no real social skills at all, but I think all that makes him a really dynamic and interesting character.” Bell not only was intrigued by Griffin’s internal world but by the chance to use his physical skills to explore Griffin’s external style as well. No stranger to bounding and soaring on film, he worked closely with the filmmakers to develop Griffin’s own personal mode of moving, and especially Jumping. “He’s got a frantic, kinetic way of being that I think you need to see in his Jumping,” Bell explains. “His jumps are very intense and almost brutal, which is something Doug wanted to see.”

Equally intriguing to Bell was the evolving relationship between Griffin and the uninitiated David Rice, whose partnership gets off to a rather shaky start. “Every good relationship starts with a punch,” laughs Bell. “Griffin has lived a renegade existence since his parents were killed by Roland and so, at first, he sees David as a liability. But I think he also secretly enjoys the fact that he is able to teach him the rules, to teach him to defend himself and to really open up the world of Jumping to him.”

That edgy but real rapport came naturally between Bell and Hayden Christensen. Says Bell: “Hayden really stepped up my game. We just reacted off each other so well.”

Adds director Doug Liman: “Hayden and Jamie played off one another so beautifully that we ended up re-writing entire scenes so there would be more of that. We redesigned the Colosseum fight sequence so that they would literally be tied together and it would be about them and their relationship. We were constantly trying to come up with fun things for Griffin to do to challenge David.”

Bell notes that Liman’s spontaneous bursts of vision were a big part of the production’s fun. “I really respect that Doug’s mind is basically wild with creativity,” he summarizes. “It was something I came to feed off in playing Griffin.”

Exhilarating ride with modern-day superheroes comes very soon when “Jumper” opens February 13 in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Source: Guides.clickthecity

While most directors would let CGI do all the work, Liman wasn’t satisfied with that, nor with leads Tom Sturridge and Teresa Palmer — he replaced them right before the shoot. We spoke to him before he jetted off to Cairo to promote the film.

What happened with the leads?
Just before we started shooting the movie (Fox studio executive) Tom Rothman and (producer) Arnon Milchan came to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if your leads were not in high school?’ They were very clear about it. They’re like, ‘We’re telling you this from a commercial point of view. Now that you’re about to start shooting the movie and we’re starting to see what it’s going to be, we think this is going to be a huge movie, and we think it’s too big to be a high school movie. We think you should recast it and make it older.’ I had never thought of that. I just took the book for what it was and accepted the characters. But as soon I started to spend a little time thinking about it, I realized creatively they were right, that the relationship between David (Christensen) and Millie (Bilson) would be more interesting if they were 25 than if they were 18, that there was a lot more I could do with it. There would be more backstory, more baggage.

This had nothing to do with name recognition?
No. I think Hayden and Rachel have huge futures ahead of them, but it’s not like I cast Will Smith. The thing about me that makes me not the most popular guy in the studio circuit is that if I hear of a better idea, regardless of how disruptive it is, I physically can’t not pursue it. It was like, “OK, we’re a week from shooting, this is a better idea.” In this case the studio brought it to me. Normally I’m the one doing something to wreak havoc on them.

Was casting Rachel something you had to sell to the producers?
When I chose to cast her she was the star of The OC and the show was still on the air and still shooting. Traditionally if you want to hire an actor who is the star of a TV show you wait until their hiatus. And I didn’t plan on doing that. I was going to shoot it at the same time as the TV show even if the TV show shot in Manhattan Beach and the movie shot in Toronto predominately and also traveled the globe. That was the biggest challenge with the studio. It was something they’d never done before. She’d work in L.A., get on the red eye, get four or five hours of sleep, work the whole day, work one more day with us, then fly back and go right back to work. She had about two and half months of no days off and at least one or two nights of sleep a week being on an airplane. A first class seat for her, that’s like a lot of room, so I didn’t feel that guilty about it.

So she’s flying from L.A. to Cairo?
Or then on to Rome. She holds the record for the shortest amount of time from my waking up to rolling camera. There’s this scene where she’s flying back from Rome. It’s like ten seconds in the movie. To get an airplane that looks like a transatlantic airplane is extraordinarily expensive. We couldn’t spend that kind of money for ten seconds. So I had this idea where I’d fly to Rome with Rachel, and I would shoot the scene on the airplane. This was post-911 — there might be an air marshal, God knows what’s going to happen. It was an overnight flight. We were seated next to each other in first class. I first shot it shortly after we took off, but it was a little dark in the plane. Obviously I didn’t have any lighting equipment with me. I thought we should wait for morning and do it again before we landed. So I was like, “I’m going to go to sleep and then I’ll wake up for breakfast and then I’ll shoot the scene.” I tend to sleep really well on airplanes, so I actually woke up to the captain saying, “Fasten your seat belts, we’re getting ready to land.” I’d slept through breakfast. And I just grabbed the camera and ran into the aisle — Rachel was up — and I was like, “OK, I’m going to roll in a couple of seconds.” Because they were literally going to make me sit down not because I was shooting a movie, but because the airplane was landing.

They probably thought, Oh, it’s just some idiot with a video camera.
Yeah, I’d kind of given the impression to the flight attendants that we were on some kind of honeymoon.

Will there be a sequel?
I’m not somebody who ever thought he would do a sequel, because I’ve never repeated the same genre. But I had such an amazing time working with Hayden and Rachel and Jamie. And I had so much fun envisioning where this world could go. This is based on a series of books and the second one has an amazing twist that would fundamentally change what the sequel would be about. It’s so dramatic that for me it would be a fresh enough approach to the material that I could do a sequel without feeling like I was repeating myself. We’ll see. No one really likes to talk sequel before a film comes out because it’s bad luck or bad form.

So Hayden bears no ill will for all of the abuse he took (including a hyper-dilated pupil that required hospitalization)?
Hayden, more than any other actor I’ve ever worked with, is the hardest working. He is literally the first guy to pick up a piece of gear for a crew member. He has a value system — when I was casting for the movie, this was a go movie, I was a popular director, so all of these actors were coming in, and I’m like, “What else are you working on?” And they’re trying to impress me with all the interest in them by other directors. And Hayden came in to meet and I said, “What else do you have on your plate?” And he said, “Well, I just rented a Bobcat, and I was going to spend the summer landscaping my parents’ backyard.” “No movies?” “No, I thought I’d do that.” I was like, “You’re not going to say anything here to impress me or make me feel like I’ve got to act right now?” “Nope. Take your time. I’d really like to work with you. I’ll be in my parents’ backyard. If I don’t answer the phone it’s because I can’t hear it over the Bobcat.”

Source: Premiere.com

But for Hayden Christensen, big pictures also mean blockbuster movies. He played Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker in the most recent Star Wars movies, the prequels Attack Of The Clones (2002) and Revenge Of The Sith (2005). These roles set the stage for those events that we knew 20 years ago were coming: Luke Skywalker’s young dad selling out the Republic and becoming Darth Vader. Sounds like a subtle cue for, say, a movie about teleporting.

Between and beyond his turns in Star Wars, his youthfully clear Canadian good looks cropped up in conspicuously smaller, more cerebral films such as his media ethics foray, Shattered Glass (2003), and the slice of life from the Andy Warhol era, Factory Girl (2006).

“Every opportunity I’ve had since Stars Wars is the result of having done the movies and the exposure they gave my acting to a wider audience,” he says.

“I’m really grateful that George Lucas gave me the chance because the ‘Hayden who’ factor was gone. But I did worry about getting typecast as the ‘franchise kid’.”

But not so worried that he felt the need to labour the point in endless low-budget servitude. A year or two of penance is contrition enough for the sins of blockbuster movie life: the eye-popping salaries, re-affirmation of celebrity status, playing the biggest screens in the biggest multiplexes. Anything more is flagellation. So now Christensen is back with Jumper, his first big-budget movie since the Star Wars films. It tackles the scientific conundrum of teleporting. By definition that makes it a fast-paced movie because teleporting is what happens if you can jump from one place to a distant place in next to no time.

“It’s got philosophy, it’s got physics,” says director Doug Liman.

“But you have to make a big leap of faith to start with about teleportation as a viable concept. Do that and everything that follows is scientific. I was a physics geek growing up, so the really arcane details of it have fascinated me.

“So what you would feel and experience, if it happened in front of you, is factored in. But how the air would react to a sudden displacement, we factored in, too.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which like Jumper was a novel adapted for the movies, made teleporting sound as inviting as major surgery: “[Imagine] having your atoms ripped apart in one place and put back together somewhere?else.” Additional random safety hazards have been documented,?too.

“We don’t say it’s all good,” Christensen says. “And it’s not a sci-fi concept dreamed up by a fertile mind with a word processor. They’re working on this stuff at places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Toronto.”

Jumper begins with Christensen’s character, Davey Rice, living in fear of an abusive single parent, his father, who is a mean drunk. At one point a beating from dad seems seconds away. Rice finds himself willing, with the power of a brain focused on avoiding pain and injury, that he was anywhere but where he is And suddenly he is somewhere else. He’s jumping, not quaking, and it’s a neat trick. Soon he is spending time with the other “jumpers” on the global circuit – most notably Jamie Bell’s Griffin – and they pal up and see the world. Rice reconnects with his old girlfriend, a non-jumper, played by Rachel Bilson (Christensen’s real-life girlfriend).

The jumpers in the movie face at least one downside. There’s a paramilitary force called the Paladin led by another Star Wars alumnus, Samuel L. Jackson, whose goal is to rid the world of jumpers, if necessary one by one. It has been going on, right under our noses, for centuries, the film suggests.

The studio behind Jumper, 20th Century Fox, hopes the film has the potential to spin off a sequel or two. Which means Christensen really will be “the franchise kid”.

It was Liman who boldly shapeshifted the Bourne trilogy from its literary life as Robert Ludlum’s ageing Cold War spy series. The Bourne Identity’s success turned Liman into a Hollywood folk hero because of his battles with Universal Pictures to get the first Bourne made his way.

“I really like the idea of no one in my films being all good or all bad,” Liman says. “Life’s not like that, it’s more human to have a mix of characters. I love big Hollywood movies but character is everything. If they suck I hate them.”

Liman says the “jumps” run into the hundreds and, since they were Jumper’s signature action sequences, he was determined to get each of them technically correct. Some were pretty special, such as the nose of the Sphinx in Egypt.

“I wasn’t burning to saddle up for another big movie franchise,” Christensen says. “What made it easy was to ask the question: how bad could it be to work with a director like Doug Liman on three big movies?

“He had a knack for making these things really breathe. The thing he did with the Bourne movies was amazing.”

Jumper is also a literary adaptation. The source material is a 1992 novel by American writer Steven Gould. Clearly Liman encouraged his screenwriters to feel free to improve on the book if they could. Bell’s character, who ends up as Davey Rice’s friend, didn’t exist in the book. His presence means a lot of the ensuing action is different. Some plot points from Reflex, the 1995 sequel, end up in the original film.

In a thriller where the take-off point is jumping, a leap of faith is the least you can expect. Besides, the chances of teleporting replacing the evening commute anytime soon look as promising as Dr Who’s time machine from the 1960s getting him back to the 13th century.

Source: Smh.com

An angry, misunderstood boy-on-the-verge-of-manhood seeks respect and attention and has a fantastically affecting crying scene along the way to his eventual enlightenment and/or vindication.

Really, this happens in virtually all his films — from the Goth teen in “Life as a House” to a cub reporter in “Shattered Glass” to his eventual turn to the dark side in “Star Wars.” (And no one cries like Christensen. He’s even the cover face on “Crying Men,” fine art photographer Sam Taylor-Wood’s book, which also features the teary cheeks of Jude Law, Ryan Gosling and Ed Harris.)

We explain this theory to the actor at lunch at the Georgetown Four Seasons, where he’s just come from a panel discussion at MIT on quantum teleportation — the basis for his latest film, “Jumper,” out Thursday. The 26-year-old Canadian seems relieved to learn (after inquiring) that we, too, are 26, and that we want to talk about acting rather than physics.

“You’re right,” he says of our theory. “There is an underlying theme. I like characters that have an interesting growth, when there’s change, and they’re affected by the elements of the story. I’ve always believed that conflict is the essence of drama.”

But now he’s breaking the formula; the trembling man-child character is growing up. In the recent thriller “Awake,” Christensen plays a rich businessman who undergoes heart transplant surgery, but begins to suspect the doctors are trying to do him harm. (Critics and moviegoers were not impressed.) In the action movie “Jumper,” he plays the ultimate wayfarer, a man who can teleport himself around the globe and becomes a reluctant hero in a secret war.

If you only know Christensen as the young, pre-scary-breathing Darth Vader, here’s a little H.C. catch-up class (we’re kind of a fan, if you hadn’t guessed).

He started acting at 7.

“I did a few commercials. Growing up it was a means to get a day off of school, and more money than you could earn with a paper route, but at the same time I profusely denied it, and — ”

Denied it?

“Yeah, like if someone said they had seen me in a commercial, I’d say, ‘What are you talking about? That wasn’t me.’ I was playing competitive hockey, and the kids I was hanging out with weren’t really the theater crowd.”

When he was cast as Anakin Skywalker, the flawed Jedi knight, suddenly being Hayden Christensen meant magazine cover shoots, look-alike action figures — and your face on a bag of chips.
“When it happened, for a while I wouldn’t leave the house. I mean, since my face was in every convenience store, that meant everyone would recognize me and that’s really odd. So I just sort of hermitized for a little while.”

Young, beautiful, rich and famous and you didn’t leave the house?

“Well, I’m not talking like I locked myself in a room and wouldn’t speak to anyone, but I laid low in Toronto.”

In between filming “Star Wars” Episodes II and III, he set out to make “Shattered Glass,” about disgraced New Republic writer Stephen Glass, after reading about the scandal in Vanity Fair. It was the first film produced by Forest Park Pictures, the L.A.-based production company Christensen runs with older brother Tove.

Christensen says he doesn’t spend much time in Los Angeles. We learn that he, too, has a theory — on celebrity.

“I think that people’s exposure is in your realm of control. It’s largely just a function of your choices, and if you don’t want to be seen, they don’t see you.”

He pauses.

“I think I do an okay job of proving my theory. Sure, fame has its affectation, but you can still lead the life you want to lead. I’ve never had that fame motivation. The less people know about me, the better my work will be, because the more they know about me, then I’m less believable as a character.”

Christensen contrasts his experience acting in “Jumper,” directed by Doug Liman, with his experiences on the two “Star Wars” directed by George Lucas, movies in which even fans found him a tad, well, wooden.

“Doug . . . really wanted the actors’ insight into the story, asking us to script meetings, which was a treat, you know, how collaborative he was. It was really satisfying.”

And Lucas?

“George came up to me on the set one day during my first ‘Star Wars’ and said something that I never fully understood until after we were done filming. He said, ‘As an actor, you have to think of yourself as a ditch digger.’ . . . What he was implying was that on his movie, I needed to think of myself as a ditch digger, because it wasn’t the proper arena for actual creative expression. This was his thing. It was all very thought-out in his head, and I needed to show up to make his wants a reality. And so really, what he was saying to me, was: ‘Don’t let this experience discourage you from what acting can really be about, because that’s not what this is.’ I just wish I would’ve figured that out a little sooner.”
Christensen recently bought a 19th-century farm south of Toronto, so he can finally move the things he’s been storing at Mom and Dad’s. We ask if he kept that rat-tail Jedi braid.

“I did! Only because it was my first ‘Star Wars,’ and I wanted to keep as much as I could. I got a light saber, of course, and then I had to keep my boots. I keep all my characters’ shoes, actually.”

Shoes?

“Yeah, it’s sort of the first bit of my character that I sort of decide on, while I’m figuring them out. Because that’s what grounds me and it informs how I walk and how I feel on my feet.”

We ask about “Virgin Territory,” a period piece based on the 14th-century Italian classic “The Decameron,” which Christensen filmed in Florence with Mischa Barton. It’s a comedy. With no release date.

Hayden stops mid-slurp from his bowl of steaming chicken noodle.

“You know about that one? Damn. I’m not sure what they’re calling it now and it’s hard to speak to, because I haven’t seen the film in its current state and I haven’t heard boo from the people who made it. That stuff always shocks me. How people can be so flippant with money. And that for me was a real departure. It’s a comedy, you know, which I’ve never done.”

Oh, we know.
Source: Washingtonpost.com

In terms of unlikely occurrences, it’s right up there with John McCain french-kissing Mike Huckabee, or Eli “Hostel” Roth directing a romantic comedy.

But the presence of Christensen – the adult Anakin from the last two “Star Wars” movies – made sense, in light of the subject at hand: teleportation and the movie “Jumper.”

Director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”) and Christensen, the film’s star, sat down with two physics professors to compare and contrast the “quantum teleportation” that happens in the movie, and the kind that’s actually taken place in a laboratory.

In “Jumper,” out Friday, Christensen plays a young guy who discovers he can teleport anywhere in the world simply by thinking really hard. And, the actor learned, that could really happen someday!

Kind of. In a long, long time.

Maybe.

“I’ve learned that we’ve actually teleported something, which I didn’t know before we started filming,” he said before he headed into the lecture hall. “Scientists have actually teleported a particle of light. So . . . they’re doin’ it!”

Liman summed up Hollywood science this way: “I think I’m gonna be shredded in there by the expert panel.”

But you have to give the guy props: How many Hollywood filmmakers would dare submit their work – particularly a superhero-themed movie – for scrutiny by real-life experts?

Inside the lecture hall, MIT professors Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark gave short, civilian-oriented presentations on how teleportation works, using the example of a single electron across the span of a room (although they’ve actually done it over two miles). Basically, they explained, you break it down, send information about it over radio waves to another spot, and rebuild it.

Farhi poured cold water on the notion of Christensen’s character teleporting jauntily around the world, vacationing in four different locations before lunch and ending up atop the head of the Sphinx with a deck chair and a sandwich.

“The quantum state of a living creature is a pretty complicated thing,” he said, “and to get all the information about it to a different location looks pretty formidable. I can’t see that being in the reasonable future.”

But Farhi gamely moved on to what they would hypothetically do with Christensen: “We would have to, let’s say, have a huge bag of electrons, protons and neutrons, and destroy the actor, and send a large amount of information to the other side of the room,” said Farhi. “Then we’d do a complicated quantum transformation, and that big bag of neutrons and protons and electrons would reappear as the distinguished actor.

“That,” he concluded wryly, “is a hard acting job.”

But Liman isn’t taking any of this reality-check stuff lying down. He swears that once the profs “get beyond the fact that Hayden can teleport in the blink of an eye, I think they’ll appreciate the physics that were involved in the crafting of the special effects.”

Fortunately for Liman, Tegmark and Farhi were at least willing to entertain his attempt to link up academia and pop culture – unlike his initial scholarly target.

“I got hooked up with a [physics professor] in Toronto, and he basically threw me out of his office,” the director said. “He really had no sense of humor about what we were doing.”

Thesun.co.uk quoted him as saying: ‘I would say I have an ambition, but not an ambition that fits with any sort of greater endeavour, you know? You might achieve a lot but I gauge it by the experience I have on set. It’s such a struggle to protect your integrity and dignity in this industry.

‘They really want to attack your morality and your beliefs. They need you to give up a certain part of yourself before they’ll initiate you into ‘stardom’. I’ve always been kind of a hermit. I find my joy in the little things they want to take away from me. Prior to all this, I took pleasure from being the observer. Now I’m the observed.’

The actor has bought a farm and is busy setting it up.

He added: ‘I got the farm about a year ago and just really turned my hand to it. Organic farming interests me. Although so far I’ve only planted a small vegetable patch but I definitely want to get the pigs, cattle and horses.

‘It’s a new endeavour and I’m not very good at it yet but I’m trying to figure it out. I’m learning new things and it’s a great challenge. It’s also really pleasurable. There’s throwing the dirt around, getting your hands dirty and watching things grow.’

The 26-year-old – who found fame as the young Darth Vader – stars as David Rice in the new action movie about teenagers who can teleport anywhere in the world.

But he feared he would never see again after sustaining a particularly bad head injury during a fight scene.

He said: “It was physically the most challenging work on a film I have done so far in my career, even more so than the Star Wars movies.

“I got beat up almost every day but enjoyed it thoroughly. I went home with bruises on my body and a big smile on my face.

“I knocked my head really badly in this one scene and my pupil got stuck in this extremely dilated position, which was disconcerting because I couldn’t see.

“We started keeping a tally of all the injuries I was accumulating and there were quite a few. I also sliced my hand open from the bottom of my thumb across to my pinky during a fight scene with Sam Jackson when he throws me over the balcony of my apartment.

“He tosses me from one level to the lower level of my penthouse suite. I land on the couch, leap forward and knock a big plastic globe that was part of the set and put my hand right through it.

“I sliced my ear open as well. I still have a scar – and that was also from a fight with Sam Jackson.

“It was all my own misdoing, not Sam’s fault at all, but my injuries did occur during fights with him.”

Jumper is the first sci-fi film he’s been in since he landed the role of Anakin Skywalker, the young Darth Vader in 2001′s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

Instead, he has focused on indie films such as The Virgin Suicides, Shattered Glass and Factory Girl, in which he played a Bob Dylan like guy opposite Sienna Miller.

Despite his success, Hayden shies away from the Hollywood lifestyle. He has bought an organic farm just outside Toronto.

Source: dailyrecord

The 26-year-old actor, who played Anakin Skywalker in the most recent trilogy, said he had not had any accidents – but was still to scared to fly on his own. “I’m still taking lessons with a co-pilot. I haven’t soloed yet,” he told MTV music show TRL. “I’m a little nervous to go in a plane by myself.”

Christensen appeared on TRL to promote new movie Jumper, alongside co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Rachel Bilson. But it was the actor’s flying lessons that got the most attention.

Christensen revealed he was learning to be a pilot “slowly but surely” in “little engine prop planes”.

“Have you called John Travolta and asked him if you could fly his plane?” Jackson joked.

Bilson, meanwhile, told the TRL audience she was a fan of hip-hop music. “I grew up on hip-hop,” she said. “I like all music, but I’m true to my roots – sort of.”

Source: Showbizspy

NEW YORK–There is a reason why Hayden Christensen has not been seen much on cinema screens in the past few years.

The Canadian actor, who has never worried much about planning his career, has bought a farm just outside Toronto and is devoting his energies to learning everything he can about livestock, crops and agricultural machinery.

“It’s a hobby, but I want to have the appearance of being a proper farmer,” he said.

“I’m trying to figure it out. It’s all new to me, but I would eventually like it to be a fully operational farm with livestock and different crops.”

A city boy who was born in Vancouver and raised in Markham, the 26-year-old actor admits he bought the farm on a whim.

“It’s very much a departure for me. I was looking at places in New York City and I could either get a couple of thousand square feet or a couple of hundred acres, and having a bit more land appealed to me.

“It’s my sanctuary. I’ve been trying to do most of the work myself, including a lot of the carpentry and tiling. I’ve fixed up an old farmhouse that was on the property.

“I’ve got a tractor and an excavator and I’m learning to use all the construction equipment. Right now there’s an apple orchard that I want to extend and I’ve started a small vegetable garden and I want to turn a hayfield into lavender,” he says.

“As far as the farming goes, I want to get horses and cows and sheep and pigs. I’ve already got a couple of pot-bellied pigs named Buddy and Petunia, but they’re pets and they stay in the house.”

The actor is taking flying lessons and, when he receives his pilot’s licence, he plans to build a landing strip on the property as a prelude to more flying adventures.

“My ultimate dream is getting a float plane and exploring parts of Canada I’ve never been to. That gets me excited,” he said.

We were talking in New York before the world premiere of his latest film, the science fiction thriller Jumper. It opens tomorrow.

He plays David Rice, a young man who discovers he has the mysterious power to instantly teleport himself anywhere in the world he can imagine. Filmed on location in Rome, Tokyo, Mexico, New York and Toronto, the film also stars Jamie Bell as another Jumper and Samuel L. Jackson as the leader of the Paladins, a secret organization whose members wage war against Jumpers.

All three have signed for two sequels, which will only be made if Jumper is a financial success.

“David Rice isn’t like anyone I’ve ever played before and it was exciting to get the chance to explore something new,” said Christensen. “He has a really interesting journey and the whole concept of teleportation is just so cool.”

Christensen himself is a bit of a Jumper, dividing his time between the farm and homes in Los Angeles and the Bahamas, and only working when the mood takes him. He is currently dating his Jumper co-star Rachel Bilson, who lives in Los Angeles.

He started acting in Canadian television productions, first in Family Passions in 1993 and later starring in the series Higher Ground, where his role as a drug-abusing delinquent won him a strong fan base.

He landed a small role in Sofia Coppola’s directing debut The Virgin Suicides (1999) and then George Lucas cast him as Anakin Skywalker opposite Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002). After Shattered Glass in 2003, he returned to the next Star Wars saga, Episode 111 – Revenge Of The Sith (2005).

His most recent film role was two years ago as Bob Dylan in Factory Girl; he made Virgin Territory three years ago.

He is due to begin work soon on director Fred Schepisi’s Beast of Bataan, about the Japanese Bataan Death March, although like every other project he takes, it is not part of any well thought-out career plan.

“I don’t really think about my career because the idea of a career is not something I can put a lot of thought into,” he said.

“I do the work that appeals to me and I pass on films that would probably benefit my career.”

Source:Thestar.com

Hayden Christensen describes Rachael Bilson as ‘‘one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met”.

‘‘That’s what makes her so interesting to watch on screen,” he says. ‘‘She’s just one of those really genuinely nice people.”

Leigh Paatsch: Review of Jumper and this week’s other cinema releases

In the other corner, the news gets relayed to Bilson, the young actor who has already outed herself as a homebody, saying ‘‘I feel like an 80-year-old woman sometimes,”. The plot thickens as an unsuspecting sweathog from the world’s press points out to Bilson that Christensen is, indeed, looking for a nice, homely girl.

‘‘Hayden is?” Bilson says, all wide-eyed and innocent. ‘‘I’ll put an ad in the classifieds for him.”
It was a fine piece of impromptu acting.

For, according to Hollywood insiders, Christensen and Bilson already are a couple.

They met on the set of the new science fiction franchise Jumper after Bilson, 26, was brought in to replace 21-year-old Australian actor Teresa Palmer after shooting had started.

‘‘They aged up the roles,” Bilson says.

‘‘Other actors were in Hayden’s and my roles, but they decided they wanted to make the characters older, so they recast.”

Bilson received a text message from director Doug Liman and a day later she was in his apartment, meeting Christensen and starting rehearsals.

It was another big step for the actor who had roles a few high school plays but didn’t seriously consider acting until after she graduated.

She found quick fame as Summer Roberts in The O.C. before taking the step into films in 2006′s The Last Kiss.

It’s been grand timing all round, not least giving her the opportunity to meet Christensen at a time when one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors was preparing to take the next step in life.

In many ways, Christensen says, his real life mirrors the marvellous opportunities afforded his Jumper character, who can transport himself anywhere in the world simply by thinking about it.

‘‘But he’s reluctant to follow that dream that everyone assumes he follows, and I kind of feel the same in certain respects.

‘‘I have a lot of great opportunities out there that I don’t pursue, and my agents sometimes wonder why I don’t work that much and why I pass on some of the things that I pass on. So on that level I could relate to this character.

‘‘I also think no matter what you have, if you don’t have someone to share it with, you’re inevitably going to be lonely.

‘‘It’s something I’m figuring out . . . that I have so many great things but I move around so much. I’m not married, don’t have kids, and those sorts of things are starting to appeal to me.”

Christensen, 26, has lived a wonderful life since being cast as Anakin Skywalker in his breakthrough role in the final two Star Wars instalments. He has been able to pick and choose roles according to his wants and not his needs.

‘‘First and foremost, financially it gave me the ability to not have to work and to approach my work as a creative person who is looking to be creatively fulfilled, and that’s been a great luxury,” he says.

‘‘It’s something I’m really grateful for. I don’t think I’d have made the same choices had I not had that financial security.

‘‘It’s about having other interests as well and enjoying other things. I really love acting, but it’s not everything.”

It’s a sign of his depth as an actor and a man that he recognises the emptiness that can still exist.

‘‘He gets the girl,” he says of his Jumper character, ‘‘so I’d like to get my girl and start a family, have a family to share the nice things about my life with.”

There’s no mention of Bilson, or even a girlfriend, so in the interests of accuracy the prospect of a girlfriend is put to him.

‘‘I don’t talk about that stuff, sir,” he says. ‘‘I don’t confirm or deny.”

He is too well schooled to catch himself out, even if his admiration for Bilson is obvious.

‘‘She’s great,” he says. ‘‘I really enjoyed getting to work with her. I think she’s really good in the movie, too. She’s consistent. She’s not one of those actors who has seven different faces depending on which day you catch her.

‘‘I won’t elaborate,” he says, laughing, ‘‘but I’ve had some experiences. She’s a normal girl and I really dug that about her. We spent a lot of time together. We got along really well.”

Bilson’s first reaction to working with Christensen was more simplistic: ‘‘Oh Hayden Christensen.

Do I get to kiss him?”

Even if she didn’t, she still would have taken the role.

That she did was just a bonus, it seems, but also an opportunity to break away from the sugary typecasting her role on The O.C.

‘‘I’ve decided to try to pick certain roles and break away from that. This role, I didn’t pick it by any means. Doug Liman sent me a text message asking me to join,” she says.

‘‘I lucked out that it was such a different thing, a different genre and a different character. It just worked out for me.”

It’s a deliberate step away from the teen angst of The O.C. and the shallow stardom it brought.

‘‘I would never go in a mall right after school because that might be scary. A lot of young teenage girls really love the show and think that I am that character.”

It also is a step towards becoming an actor with substance rather than a pretty face that is part of Hollywood’s party set.

She is glad she is not offered ‘‘Paris Hilton roles”.

‘‘I think I have branched out a little bit. I like to lie low and that’s my lifestyle, so it works out that I’m not all over the place, falling out of cars, dancing on tables.

‘‘I really waited after The O.C. and was really patient for my first film. I wanted it to be something I really respected, with people I respected and a character that was different.

‘‘It was just the perfect thing for me, whether it was successful financially or not, it was still the best film for me.”

With all the platitudes and despite the cloaks and daggers and a commendable knack of talking in circles, Christensen’s admiration is certainly returned.

‘‘He’s not ‘the actor’ in the Hollywood scene,” she says. ‘‘He’s got the farm, he’s a farmer boy.”

And then she adds, almost as an aside, ‘‘I think I could handle that.

‘‘I like to be so removed. I could definitely live that sort of lifestyle.

‘‘I think it’s really important to have that kind of environment if you’re bringing up a family, or if you have your children, not to really put them in the whole thing.

‘‘If you’re an actor living in Hollywood, you’re exposing them so much.”

Almost sounds as if they’ve been talking.

Jumper opens Thursday February 14.

Source: Paul Kent

“We did have a meeting,” writer/director Doug Liman confirmed this week, confessing that surly hip-hop superstar Marshall Mathers was once in talks for the starring role. “We did have conversations with Eminem.”

It was early 2006, just a few months after “The Bourne Identity” director Liman had been hired to adapt Steven Gould’s sci-fi novel of the same name. Despite huge obstacles, Eminem had made a smash debut with 2002′s “8 Mile” and was fielding offers to take on his first non-autobiographical role. The “Jumper” script caught his eye, and he and Liman began discussing plans to bring the real Slim Shady back to the big screen.

“The thing is that you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what would that movie have been like?’ ” the director said. “But you’ve got to understand that Nicole Kidman was originally cast as the lead in [the Liman-directed] ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ and Brad Pitt was originally the lead in ‘Bourne Identity.’ ”

In April 2006, Liman cast English actor Tom Sturridge (“Vanity Fair”) in the lead role, but was being pressured to replace him with a more bankable star. Suddenly, with the part of teleporting hunk David Rice in the air, he met with up-and-coming “Star Wars” actor Hayden Christensen, as well as the “8 Mile” star.

“[The idea to meet with the rapper] was sort of coming from the producer and [Eminem's] manager,” remembered the director, who made his own breakthrough with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau in the 1996 classic “Swingers.” For a brief time, after meeting with the chart-topping rapper, Liman considered the notion. “If I’ve proven anything to myself, it’s that I can tailor a role to an actor. … [I could] develop the role with [someone like Eminem] and make it extremely specific to them,” he said of his thoughts at the time. “So as long as the person has acting chops, I’m open to talking to almost anybody for almost any role.”

When the director considered Christensen more seriously, however, the Eminem flirtation vanished as quickly as David Rice jumping between Egypt and New York. “At that point, I had already met Hayden and had fallen in love with Hayden,” he recalled. “It was one of those things where the studio, with all things being equal, would rather put a bigger name in the movie [and wanted Eminem]. At some point, I just put my foot down and said, ‘I love Hayden.’ ”

So now, six years after Eminem earned an MTV Movie Award for Best Male Performance, he still hasn’t made his follow-up flick. And while Liman hopes to see the hip-hop star in a movie again soon, the director is happy with the way “Jumper” turned out. “I’m always willing to consider other people the studio may want to put in front of me before we commit to the movie,” he explained. “But I already had the person I was in love with.”

Source: Larry Carroll, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Playing a pair of ordinary guys (except, that is, for their ability to teleport themselves anywhere in the world), they get into a tussle that has them jumping from continent to continent – from the Sahara to Tokyo to the top of the Empire State Building and beyond. The action continues nonstop from location to location: Throw a punch in Paris, watch it land atop the Sphinx.

“You’d shoot one segment – and then there’d be a two-week gap before you shot the immediate next action,” Bell says. “And there was all this green-screen (visual effects) work, which is a very tedious process. But there’s something about (director) Doug Liman’s energy that just makes you want to keep that energy going.”

Liman, who also directed “The Bourne Identity,” returns the compliment. “Hayden came off years of working with George Lucas, so he was schooled in the green screen. But Jamie hadn’t really had any experience like this – so his willingness to try anything paid off in how consistent and strong his performance is, under challenging shooting conditions.”

“Jumper” focuses on Christensen’s David Rice, who discovers at 15 that he has the ability to “jump” at will, and uses it to teleport himself in and out of bank vaults to finance a quietly lavish lifestyle. But he’s being tracked by a group of “paladins,” led by Samuel L. Jackson, who believe that godlike powers are best left to deities, and who want to destroy the jumpers.

Bell plays Griffin, a fellow jumper who schools David in how to battle the paladins and then falls out with him over the best course of action. The role gave Bell the chance to beat the tar out of the imposing Jackson.

“Sam left me a very sweet note at the end of shooting,” Bell, 21, says. “I’d done action before, but nothing with the physical intensity of grappling and stunts.”

Bell, a native of northern England, has been acting since he won the title role in “Billy Elliot” in an open casting call that drew 2,000 hopefuls. A longtime dancer who studied both ballet and tap, Bell won the British Academy award as best actor for that film – over such competition as Tom Hanks, Geoffrey Rush and Russell Crowe (who won the Oscar that year).

“It’s a little dangerous when a kid breaks out at a young age,” Bell says. “My choices have been my own, but I was very fortunate to grow up with people around me who actually cared about me and my ultimate goal. I needed that support.”

Since then, he’s found a steady stream of roles for directors as diverse as Eastwood, David Gordon Green (“Undertow”) and Peter Jackson (“King Kong”). “Jumper” is a departure from the kind of pentup, interior characters he frequently plays. As Griffin, he’s a smart-aleck chatterbox – which is much closer to his real personality.

“He has this energy that’s infectious,” Liman says. “I haven’t had that kind of reaction to an actor since I met Vince Vaughn. There are people who take chances and people who live within their comfort zone. Jamie is up for taking chances – and doing it onscreen.”

Bell divides his time between London, Los Angeles and New York, but prefers East Coast life.

“Los Angeles is kind of an anxiety time bomb,” he says. “If I had to live in this country, it would be in New York. New York really does feel like home.”

Source: Nydailynews

Source: JEANNE WOLF

Hayden, who teleports through time and space in the new movie Jumper, hasn’t been in the middle of so many special effects since he filled Anakin Skywalker’s shoes. And adding to that feeling of deja vu, his character is on the run from Samuel L. Jackson, who went head to head with him as the Jedi Master in Stars Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

“I wish I could teleport for real,” Hayden says, of hanging from a harness to create the illusion with CGI, “especially when I’m waiting in those security lines at the airport. I would be all over the place. I’d be back home with my family one second, I’d be on some beach in some tropical location the next second, and then maybe doing some surfing or snow boarding, just having fun with it.”

Speaking of fun, Hayden appears to spending a lot of time with his co-star, Rachel Bilson, who he reveals is a “good kisser.” The pair were seen “teleporting” around some of Rome’s hot spots while doing publicity for the film.

Fortunately, Hayden came through the stunts in Jumper without a scratch, but he revealed that, as a kid, he wasn’t so lucky and picked up a scar that adds character to his handsome face.

“I took a nasty spill when I was five or six years old,” he remembers. “I got a really bad cut just above my eyebrow after hitting my head pretty hard.”

I had visions of Hayden making a dramatic leap out of a tree, or maybe tumbling off a skateboard. But, as he confessed, the truth hurt him more than the accident.

“I’m embarrassed to say I actually just fell off a sidewalk,” he says. “Even at five, I was still figuring out the whole walking thing and just tripped.”

Source: Parade.com