Neal Moritz: Puttin' on Moritz

"At the end of the day," Moritz continues, "most of these kids say, 'Thank you for giving me this chance,' which to me is really cool. I haven't dealt with that many big stars, but the ones I have, you're basically begging them to do your movie and paying them a lot of money to do that. Actors who come into it at a young age are doing it because they want to, not to make the house payment or something."

Fresh young actors also come into a project costing much less than stars with a few hits on their résumés. "I want the movies to be the stars so that I don't necessarily have to depend on getting one of these $20 million stars," says Morirz. "The people who are worth the $20 million form a very short list. Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey." What about Leonardo? "I don't want to be quoted on that," he insists. "I'm sure the final figures on The Beach will tell us a lot. He's a very talented guy I'd love to work with, and obviously, he's a huge star worldwide." He adds just after a moment, "But movies are a lot like rock music these days. Tastes change so fast. Audiences are so fickle."

Moritz knows what it's like to have a big star in a big-budget film that tanks in a very public way. "With Volcano, we were in that race with Dante's Peak, It was a tough movie to make. It was like going to war. Bur it made me confident in my abilities to do any size budget movie." On a smaller scale, he experienced failure with the quickly aborted TV version of Cruel Intentions, "Manchester Prep." "Fox was kind of in a state of flux while it was going on. I'm actually really proud of the show. I've bought back the footage and I'm turning it into a movie prequel to Cruel Intentions." So there.

Since he's 40, not 30 or 20, Moritz is very methodical about making sure he stays in the loop with pop culture, "I keep my eyes and ears open to the world beyond Hollywood. It's such an insular world here comprised of the same 200 people, basically, who are making the decisions and making the movies. I talk to a lot of young people. I listen to a lot of music on the radio and watch MTV a lot. I read a ton of magazines, go on the Internet. I see five movies a week. My favorite thing to do on a Saturday night is to go with my fiancée to Westwood Village and see movies. And she's from Louisiana, nor from the movie business, although she's a lawyer with Paramount's television department."

Morirz is bullish at the moment on the prospects for his upcoming release Soul Survivors, the self-described "The Sixth Sense meets Jacob's Ladder" written and directed by Steve Carpenter, who had earlier worked with Moritz on the script for Blue Streak. "I'm very happy with the film I've seen so far," he says of the movie about a college coed who finds herself suspended in a world between the living and the dead. "It has a story of lost love that is compelling and visual aspects that are really interesting. What's more, any of the young people in it could break out. Wes Bentley is hard to take your eyes off of. Casey Affleck is an interesting actor who makes interesting choices, Eliza Dushku, who I'd liked on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," has great sensuality in addition to being a very good actress. And it's a first movie for Melissa Sagemiller, who's really strong the first time out on cam-era. I'm very excited about this."

Moritz has just started production on The Glass House, a thriller written by Wesley Strick in which Leelee Sobieski plays a recently orphaned girl sent with her brother to live with mysterious relatives in moneyed Malibu, "Like The Skulls, this is a very different movie from what I've done before. It's kind of like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle--a very adult thriller. The second I read it, I knew I was going to make it." Racer X will probably come after that with Paul Walker (and maybe Josh Hartnett) in a souped-up, modernized Rebel Without a Cause centering around rival gangs racing high-powered cars. Moritz is also involving himself in the Internet, albeit with caution. "There's a dot-com traffic jam going on out there," he says. "The only way any of these companies is going to be able to distinguish themselves from the rest is by making their sites the only place you can watch, rent, see, buy or hear something. For instance, if 'South Park' had been done originally for an Internet site, that site would have been great. We're talking with a number of people about aligning ourselves to make material specifically for a site, all different kinds of things."

But with the big screen as his main interest, are there any dream projects he's nursing? "There's a big-canvas Viking project called The Northmen that I hope I'll be able to do someday," he replies. "And I would die to make I Am Legend, which was remade back in the '70s as The Omega Man. They're my projects, but they're controlled by studios. But the important thing is finding the right material. I used to just want to get a movie made. Now, I want to get the right movie made. Not making a movie is less dangerous to my career than not making the right movie."

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Stephen Rebello wrote about filming on location in coastal Italy for the April issue of Movieline.

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