I woke up with plenty of time to get down to Long Beach by the check in time, I thought.  Unfortunately, my car wouldn’t start. There had been a cold snap that night, so I thought, though I had never had any battery trouble with this car before, even on freezing days in Boston, well, I’ll just call the auto club and they’ll jumpstart it. I soon learned that I would need a new battery. Now.  When I should be leaving for Long Beach.

Well, when I finally got on the road, fresh battery installed, I was running supremely late.  So I sped.  I weaved in and out of lanes, anticipating the moves of drivers up ahead of me, falling back so I could then pass and overtake . . .  The thought struck me that the way I was driving was highly appropriate, as I was on my way to the Long Beach International Speedway, on the day of the qualifying rounds of that city’s Championship Auto Racing Teams [CART] Grand Prix, for the junket for the upcoming Warner Brothers release Driven.

Now, the word junket should appropriately conjure up the thought of travel.  For those reporters who live in places other than the locations of movie junkets, travel is indeed involved.  For those of us who live in L.A., however, where they’re usually held (logically enough), a drive to the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, home of junkets, is usually the extent of our travels.  So I guess I should have considered going down to Long Beach a refreshing change of pace.  But since I had to drive myself it still didn’t seem that exciting.

As it happens, since no movie business event ever starts on time, the only thing I actually missed was breakfast.  I had time for the check-in people to figure out the reason they couldn’t originally “find me” on their list was because they had me down as Danielle and not Daniel.  I’m not quite sure why that delayed things so much, but no matter; late as I was, I and the other reporters in the room I was assigned to still had to wait for the stars to appear.

To clarify the above sentence – most interviews at junkets are conducted at what are called roundtables.  The table in question may actually be square, but that doesn’t matter.  A group of reporters sits around the table.  A celebrity comes in, sits down, and proceeds to be barraged by questioners for 20 minutes to half an hour.  Then someone comes in and whisks them away to another room where they will undergo the same process with a new batch of reporters; in the meantime, we get the next interviewee.

Everyone puts a tape recorder in front of “the talent.”  This time, in addition to their words, our devices were also picking up a noise  -- a high-pitched whine crossed with a wind-like roar – which came every few seconds and which would remain with us throughout the day – the sound of a 850 horsepower engine zooming by.  Now, we were several floors up, in a closed room, in a hotel separated by a very wide street and a number of buildings, parking lots, etc. from the racetrack.  Yet the noise was loud enough to be quite distracting.  One of the other reporters joked that it sounded like the intro to an NPR story.

Our first star, I would realize at the end of the day, turned out to be the best one, in the sense of most fun.  It was young Chilean actor Cristián De La Fuente, who has less screen time than any of the other people we talked to (well, except for director Renny Harlin of course, who actually does have screen time, though only a few seconds).  Cristián entered the room with more energy than the other three actors we would talk to after him combined.  He also looked great, and clearly had put some effort in doing so, again in contrast with the men who would follow him.  Imagine if one of the kids from Menudo had grown up into a charming, handsome guy who radiates energy, friendliness . . . . oh wait . . . okay, imagine that in addition to Ricky Martin this had happened again.  Cristián has huge eyes, like a manga character, and wavy, slicked back dark hair; he’s tall and clearly spends a lot of time in the gym – weight training, he told us, is one of his hobbies, in addition to kickboxing, tennis, and flying – as an officer in the Chilean Air Force reserves he pilots fighter jets! 

As soon as he walked in he made his way around the table, shaking the hands of all the male writers and kissing the women.  A reporter named Sperling objected to this seeming sexual discrimination; apparently he wanted a kiss too.  He didn’t get one.  Another guy, with a reporter’s physique and not a movie star’s, asked Cristián for training tips!   

Cristián is a go-getter; he told us he got the part in Driven because he saw Stallone talking about making it on Entertainment Tonight, and told his agent to see if she could get him a role as another driver.  He was also lucky enough to have a Chilean race car driver friend who gave him valuable background information for the part.  This is his first movie, although he’s a regular on the CBS TV show Family Law; in his next screen role he plays a crossbow wielding priest, opposite Jon Bon Jovi, in the sequel to John Carpenter’s Vampires.

The next actor we spoke with was Kip Pardue, who, along with Stallone, is the real star of Driven.  Upon entering, he too shook all our hands.  (No kisses, though).  Kip was very pleasant, polite, and extraordinarily thoughtful.  He went to Yale, where he studied economics, and played football – an experience which certainly proved beneficial for his role in last year’s Remember the Titans.  Showing he’s still interested in the economy, he shared with us his thoughts on why the dotcom boom has become a bust, quoting to us from Microserfs by Douglas Copland – “The Internet’s cool, but it’s not that cool,” and pointing out “there’s no money in advertising in the internet and you can’t make any money; the only companies that are succeeding are the ones that have outside interests.”

He spends his free time painting, singing, and playing the guitar.  He’s really into English bands like Travis, the Doves – “a beautiful band”, and Radiohead -- “it all begins and ends with Radiohead.”

Kip described making Driven as “like going to an amusement park every day at work,” and talked about how “everyone on this film bonded.”  He talked about the scene where he and costar Til Schweiger have to rescue De la Fuente’s character from a car and carry him to safety; while Cristian is clearly “a beautiful guy,” “he’s like lead” and “must weigh 500 pounds,” and that “Til was no help . . . he was fixing his hair.”  (He was kidding).

When we met Til Schweiger, his hair, frosted blond, was, indeed, immaculate looking. Til is a huge star in his native Germany, though in the U.S. until Driven he had only had small parts in small movies.  This means he’s still relatively anonymous over here, which he enjoys.  “It’s cool, because [here in California] I live a normal life. In Germany I don’t go to supermarkets [because I would be mobbed], and I love going shopping, to go in the supermarkets, especially in those big supermarkets here [in California] [which] are open 24 hours and I go in and say, ‘What do I buy, what do I cook tonight?” and sometimes I spend an hour.”

I asked him if he was into racing before he got this part.  “Not at all. I was not interested in racing at all.  Once I found out that I’m gonna do this movie I went to Barcelona to the Formula One Grand Prix and then I went to Monte Carlo and I got hooked.”  What attracted him to this character?  “He has an arc, and I liked that.” There was, though, the added difficulty of acting in a language not his own, which he characterized as “very tough, very difficult.”

Til came across as refreshingly unpretentious, especially when after the session was over he asked hopefully, “We have lunch now?”  He then asked us what we thought of the movie, the only person we interviewed who did so.  I told him I liked the scene with him and Stallone in a stadium having a heartfelt conversation about love, because it showed him being emotional, whereas before that in the movie he had been pretty much an Ice King.  With that he got a big laugh from everyone by responding with “Achtung!” and a salute as he left the room.           

Director Renny Harlin no longer has the long blond hair he used to sport.  He looks kind of grizzled now, which was perfect for his cameo in the end of Driven as a driver saying goodbye to his young son (played by Harlin’s own boy).  Renny has a deep voice in which he speaks slightly  accented (he’s Finnish), but perfect English.  He spoke about working with Stallone, who wrote Driven – “I’m one of those people who will tell him exactly what I think cuz I think people on that level sometimes have a hard time finding anybody who will really be honest with them.”  He told us that Stallone’s final script, after the 37 drafts Harlin made him do, grew “like some kind of a strange cake” to “220 pages long , about 100 pages more than a normal script, so we actually shot a movie that was four and a half hours long when I first cut it together.”

Renny was asked which was easier to work with, cars or sharks, in reference to his last movie Deep Blue Sea.  He without hesitation picked cars.  “The mechanical sharks never work . . . water is such a hard element to work in.  When I think back I don’t know how we survived that movie standing in the water four months.  While the cars are dangerous and difficult and temperamental as well at least you’re on dry land.”  Yet despite this, they’re currently working on the script for the sequel (though he’s only going to produce, not direct it.)

He told us about what made him choose Kip to be the lead in Driven – “I was looking for somebody who would have the strength and the intelligence but also be real vulnerable . . . [have] a strong feminine side in him at the same time.”  That seemed fitting for a director who made two films, Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Good Night, in which the action “hero” was a woman.  I asked him if this was something he planned on doing again.

“I haven’t had such great success trying to make women into heroes . . . .”  I objected that Long Kiss Goodnight was well received.  He agreed, “No, no it was very well received, but I think I was a little bit ahead of my time because now you look at Charlie’s Angels and other things, you know, Tomb Raider and whatever, it’s now widely accepted and liked, but I feel like we were maybe just a few years ahead of our time and the action audience wasn’t ready yet to embrace that.  But, no, I love making women strong in movies and I would have no problem [doing so again].

By the time Sylvester Stallone came to our room he had already been through the same process several times that morning.  Naturally, he looked a little weary, but nevertheless he was extraordinarily gracious, self-effacing, and given to lenghthy, thoughtful answers.  He also looked great for a man of 55.  Somebody asked him about keeping in shape.  “Well, after Copland I said ‘Oh, let me just try to . . . .’ I had a little time on my hands, a little bit of a challenge, so I just went back and just did a little bit of exercising, basically changed the diet a bit, and messed around with different herbs and see what could work . . . It’s just been like a hobby.  It’s a tough hobby, but a hobby.  I’d much rather be like I was in Copland. . . .  I didn’t have to make excuses, walk into a room chest first.”  Later when he was asked to name some of the herbs he takes he would only say they’re actually mushrooms.

According to the press notes we had been given, Stallone’s character in the movie, Joe Tanto had to overcome personal demons and struggle back from the depths of despair and self-doubt.  However, that’s not in the movie now.  I asked him about this.  “He was a very, very dark character and he had a lot of demons to overcome and there was a lot more with Gina Gershon.  It was basically Joe’s story. . . .  Would it be better?  I don’t know.  I don’t know, but it certainly would not have brought the other characters to the forefront which I felt are interesting and would make the movie I think more readily accepted by a younger audience, cuz I don’t want them to see like it’s Stallone’s trials and tribulations, redemptive movie.  We saw that in Copland, we’ve seen it a few times.  Enough already.  You know what I mean?  I enjoyed writing it, it was very cathartic, very personal, but I wanted this to be kind of a celebration of life rather than this [doom and gloom].

But Stallone must actually really appreciate doom and gloom, for his eyes lit up when I asked him at the end of the session about his dream project, a film about Edgar Allen Poe he’s written, which he’s been wanting to make for decades.  He said that he no longer will star in it, but he’ll maybe direct and or produce it.  “You know what would be great . . . like a Depp or Sean Penn or Robert Downey, Jr., they’re like right in the pocket, they’re just perfect.”

After the interviews were over, we were given a tour of the crew pit area at the racetrack. We needed earplugs because of the constant din of the cars whizzing by.  A celebrity race was also being held in conjunction with the Grand Prix.  A crowd of people stood behind a fence and watched William Shatner be interviewed.  Later it was David Alan Grier’s turn.

I learned from our guide, a CART insider, that a number of things in Driven are not terribly accurate.  One thing in particular in the movie really, and understandably, upset the racing organization, which is the scene in which it takes rescue crews an absurdly long amount of time to come to a crashed driver’s aid.  We were told this was unrealistic in the extreme.

Back at the hotel the official events were over.  I was chatting with another reporter, when Kip Pardue came over and joined us.  The three of us had a real conversation, as opposed to an interview, which was cool – although I was a little embarrassed when Kip twice corrected my vocabulary!  I learned something – don’t describe a character as “dopey” to the actor who portrayed him.  As Kip will be happy to tell you, he prefers to say “naïve.”  Oh, I can also share one more thing – reports on the internet to the contrary, Kip and Rose McGowan, with whom he has just worked in two back to back small independent films, are not a couple.  They really are just good friends.