DESIRING HAYDEN.NET PRESS ARCHIVE

Genius Products will release “Awake” on DVD this March 4th. The film stars Jessica Alba, Hayden Christensen, and Terrence Howard.

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).

Popularity: 3% [?]

If we’re following in the footsteps of actor Hayden Christensen’s character in the soon-to-be-released sci-fi thriller Jumper,the day will come when we won’t have to sit in traffic anymore. We’ll be able to get around through teleporting.

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Actor HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN was wracked with nerves filming an intimate love scene with JESSICA ALBA in new move AWAKE – because he was in awe of her beauty.
The Star Wars hunk admits starring alongside sexy Alba was one of the most scary moments of his life.
He says, “I was just so nervous. Really nervous.
“Running around with a lightsaber is really pretend, but when you are put in a situation where the scene you are doing become so real, it is terrifying!”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tor Books is proud to present a new edition of Jumper, the classic novel about a young man who discovers his ability to “jump”—or, teleport—anywhere on Earth in the blink of an eye. First published in 1992, Steven Gould’s debut novel elicited immediate acclaim and awards, but Jumper’s historical status would be clinched by its inclusion among the American Library Association’s Most Banned Books of 1990 to 1999, a list that included authors such as Stephen King, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, and Kurt Vonnegut.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Director Doug Liman didn’t get much teleporting love when he tried to talk science with a professor at the University of Toronto last year.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

The 26-year-old star of Jumper (in theaters Feb. 14) chatted with CG!’s Michelle Lee Ribeiro as he drove to his farm in Canada. (He has pigs. We think that’s pretty neat.) Here are a few random snippets from their conversation.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

The science fiction thriller leaps into a new realm with “Jumper,” which begins the epic adventures of a man who discovers that he possesses the exhilarating ability to instantly teleport anywhere in the world he can imagine. From New York to Tokyo, from the ruins of Rome to the heart of the Saharan Desert, anywhere is possible for David Rice (Hayden Christensen), until he begins to see that his freedom is not total, that he’s not alone . . . but part of an ongoing, global war that threatens the very survival of his rare and extraordinary kind.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Director Doug Liman, whose work includes Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and television’s The OC, is a reputed flake. His productions typically run off the rails because he’s apt to change his mind or even have trouble making it up. But then he delivers something none of us has quite seen before. His new film, Jumper, is no exception. Based on the book by Stephen Gould, it stars Hayden Christensen as a kid from a broken home who discovers he can teleport himself all over the world, including bank vaults, the Egyptian pyramids, Big Ben, and the distance between his couch and the refrigerator. This power leaves him a bit isolated until he encounters a guy just like him (Jamie Bell), a group of men bent on destroying guys like him (led by Samuel L. Jackson), and an old girlfriend (Rachel Bilson).

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

HE IS a big-picture sort of guy. That means he’s worried about the planet, is against seal hunts in Canada, is into organic farming on his 80-hectare spread outside Toronto and always remembers his mother’s birthday.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

February 10, 2008 — HAYDEN Christensen on a physics panel at MIT?

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.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hayden Christensen of ‘Star Wars’ fame is unhappy with the overwhelming ambition in Hollywood to get ahead.

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.’

Popularity: 2% [?]

STAR Wars actor Hayden Christensen went blind on the set of his latest movie, Jumper.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Star Wars actor Hayden Christensen is learning to fly a plane.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Special to the Star

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

STAR Wars star Hayden Christensen longs for love, but he’s playing coy about rumours that he may have found it on the set of his new film, Jumper.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

This weekend, millions of moviegoers will pay to see a science-fiction flick about teleportation, destiny and unlimited opportunity. Few, however, will realize how close they came to seeing what could have been a very different film — had Eminem not jumped out of “Jumper.”

“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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Shooting an action scene is always a fragmented, choreographed affair for the actors involved. But that hardly describes the work that went into the big faceoff between Jamie Bell and Hayden Christensen in the sci-fi action-thriller “Jumper,” which opened yesterday.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hayden Christensen has the ultimate superpower, but nothing to do with Darth Vader. Hayden leaves “Star Wars” behind to teleport through time and space in the sci-fi thriller “Jumper.” He needs to keep moving, because Samuel L. Jackson is out to get him. Hayden loved hopping the globe without worrying about planes, and trains. “I wish I could do it for real,” he told Parade, “especially when i’m waiting in those security lines at the airport.”

Source: JEANNE WOLF

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hayden Christensen has the ultimate superpower–and it has nothing to do with his stint as Darth Vader.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]