Feeling Fearless

"The more I spent time with Keanu before we went to Minnesota," says Baigelman, "I perceived that he's very much like this character. I told Keanu that if he wanted to, to be himself. I wanted this to be the guy from River's Edge and the guy from Bill & Ted and the guy from My Own Private Idaho wrapped up in one. The only thing he did in terms of immersion was smoke. I got him addicted to nicotine. The character [has this habit where he] flips the cigarette in his mouth. We were driving down the street in Minneapolis in pre-production, and there was Keanu walking along in broad daylight practicing his cigarette flips."

"He has a scalding reputation for cranky shenanigans on the set." I offer delicately.

"Yeah, but I don't know if that's so recent. I certainly heard the same things you heard, but I would bet that if you did research on the set of Speed or Johnny Mnemonic, you'd find that he didn't misbehave in any fashion. On this movie he was extraordinarily polite. He has his days, he can be an asshole like I can be an asshole, like you can he an asshole, but there's nothing extreme about him. Never once did he pull a movie star stunt. None of that shit."

In conversation, Baigelman comes off as genuinely levelheaded, self-effacing and generous in his assessments of people. Perhaps its exactly those simple, solid qualities that made Sher think she could put all of her chips on him and not eat herself alive with worry. Not every writer capable of coming up with the off-center originality of the Feeling Minnesota script turns out to be a guy with his head screwed on straight. Though being an indisputable nice guy may not count for much on your reśumé', it certainly might have helped Baigelman with some of directing's trickier tasks. Like sex scenes.

"Keanu hasn't humped around in movies before, has he?" I ask. ''Except that sleeping bag session with lone Skye in River's Edge."

Baigelman kicks it around. "He had sex in My Own Private Idaho, right? Y'know, in Italy he meets that beautiful girl. But Gus Van Sant did it weird, didn't he, as stills or something. Well, here there's sex but no nudity."

"What kind of sex scene is that?"

"It's very erotic, actually. They fuck in a bathroom, all over the bathroom, and then on the floor. Cameron's in her wedding dress, and humps Keanu in the bathroom on her wedding day."

"Did you find directing sex scenes difficult?"

"The truth is, it's more difficult for the actors than it is for me. These are two really hot people who have some attraction for each other -- they liked each other as people -- but they knew their parts, they knew their scenes, and I shot the sex scenes very basically. There's no bright shaft of light coming through the window with smoke and soft, bad synthesized music playing. It's not 'Red Shoe Diaries' or whatever. The most difficult part was keeping Keanu's thing inside the jock. If it fell out. he'd put it back and go on. That was the only problem logistically."

"You had him wear a jock?"

"You have to, because they're humping and nobody wants an accident. It was just an accepted thing."

"How did you react to the whole thing?"

"I had a boner. I knew something was working, something was going on. Keanu and Cameron looked like they were enjoying themselves. That's their job. Their enjoyment certainly translated to me."

For Diaz, the doe-eyed ivory goddess from The Mask, this film represents a leap beyond looking lovely while Jim Carrey's face ties itself into taffy knots.

"Cameron very much wanted to prove herself as an actress here," Baigelman confirms. "[Unfortunately] that first sex scene was her first day of shooting. It wasn't supposed to be, but we had a weather problem and the other set wasn't ready. But she did fine."

As if Baigelman didn't already have enough on his plate, he cast Courtney Love in a small role as a waitress. Inasmuch as she shot her scenes not long before pounding on a few Lollapalooza audience members in the middle of a concert. I wonder just how directable she seemed to Baigelman.

"The thing I can tell you about Courtney, she is relentless about what she wants," says Baigelman. '"In the classic sense, she's somebody who'll stop you in the street and tell you her life story. If she hooks onto you, she just opens up. She's tough, but she's an open sore, and you want to just hold her. There's a fascination too, because I'm a guy from Toronto who was bar mitzvahed. I don't know rock stars."

"So, does she have a screen career ahead in your opinion?"

"She's got a small part, but she's very good. So good that on two occasions when people were seeing footage, they said, 'Hey, that actress looks a lot like Courtney Love. It's a huge compliment to her, because she never draws attention to herself as Courtney Love, the rock star or 'the widow of' or anything like that. She just played the part. She really is a waitress in this movie. She wears orange polyester, and she let me dye her hair."

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