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Carla Gugino on Race to Witch Mountain
By Fred Topel | Images property of Walt Disney Pictures
Race to Witch Mountain
Race to Witch Mountain will introduce this generation's kids to Disney's young alien franchise from the '60s. In the new version, a cab driver (Dwayne Johnson) and a scientist (Carla Gugino) protect super powered kids from the bad guys.
Carla Gugino Races to Witch Mountain
"I play an astrophysicist, named Dr. Alex Friedman," said Gugino. "She’s been discredited from several universities because she has decided that there is enough hard data to prove that there probably is alien life and, at the universities that she was working for, that wasn’t a popular notion for a respectable university. So she’s relegated to lecturing at the UFO Con in Las Vegas. She’s hoping, of course, that she’ll get some support, and all they want to talk about is crop circles and kooky theories. She’s pretty much having one of the worst days of her life, when Dwayne’s character, Jack, the cab driver who drove her from the airport, walks in and says, 'Hey, these two kids are aliens.' She’s like, 'Great, and now I’m being made fun of.' Then she comes to realize that, in fact, they are aliens. It’s basically the most exciting thing, the thing she’s been waiting for, her entire life. Then she is swept away to help on the journey to save the world, or two, in this case."
Gugino has played alien specialists before, but she barely got started on the short-lived TV series Threshold. "It’s definitely a different vibe. When I sat down with [director] Andy [Fickman], it was very cool because he was a big fan of Threshold. So, when I first thought about her as an astrophysicist, she was a contingency analyst and there are certainly differences, and tonally the movie is very different from that. Molly was much more super-serious. With that show, which I loved so much, inevitably, it’s very difficult in TV if you are the hero of the show. You have to behave in a very particular kind of way. This was almost like Molly gone berserk. It was the flipside of that, where I just got to have so much fun in this movie. She takes her job very seriously, but she ends up in an unknown terrain. I think they definitely could be sisters, but they were extremely different to play, much more so than I thought they would be." "
Promoting the film at this year's San Diego Comic Con, Gugino has met some real life Alex Friedmans. "One person did say to me, 'Next year, for sure, they’re going to reveal on television that we have found an actual alien.' I was like, 'Wow, did you find him yet?,' and he was like, 'I can’t speak about that right now, but I will tell you by next year.' I was like, 'Okay, great.'"
In the world of cinematic special effects, Gugino has done all green screen movies, heavy CGI movies and big, practical action movies. "With Sin City, I had worked with Robert Rodriguez in Spy Kids and I was really up for the challenge of doing a completely different character. For me, it always comes down to how I relate to the character, who I’m working with and the vision of the director because that is ultimately what you’re serving. In that way, [Watchmen] was a director I trust implicitly, and I did love Frank Miller’s graphic novel. With Watchmen, I get to play somebody who starts at 25 years old and ages to 67, with full prosthetics, and becomes an alcoholic mother. I was like, 'Are you kidding?' I think that with this movie, in particular, there’s something great about the authenticity and the fact that it’s a little bit messier. It’s not slick, in that way. It’s done really, really well. I watched some of the footage and it looks like they are actually fighting, and there’s something fantastic about that, as opposed to flying through the air, which is great for a different kind of movie."
Race to Witch Mountain opens to theaters on March 13th, 2009
For more movie info, go the Race to Witch Mountain
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Images property of Walt Disney Pictures
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