Beckensale Talks About Pearl Harbour

[Monday, May 7th, 2001]
Kate Beckensale recently talked to The LA Times about her new movie 'Pearl Harbor', she talks about how she did'nt expect the movie to be so big, and did'nt know about Micheal Bay Jerry Bruckheimer. Here's the article:

"To me, it was just the same as with every other movie I've really wanted to do," she claims during a recent interview in Santa Monica. "I read a fabulous script and was dying to play the part. I keep telling people this, and they look at me like I'm mad. But when everyone said to me, 'This is Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer,' I really didn't know that meant something about the kind of movie it was going to be."

The actress found out just what she had signed up for when she arrived on location in Hawaii last year for the "Pearl Harbor" shoot. The combined budgets of every other movie she has made could fit comfortably into "Pearl Harbor's" $135-million price tag, a good deal of which went into re-creating the surprise Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, which forced the U.S. entry into World War II. Beckinsale was admittedly a bit overwhelmed both physically and emotionally when it came to filming the bombing and its aftermath, which called for her character, nurse Evelyn Stewart, to lead those tending to the wounded. This was a long way, after all, from the cerebral posturing of the tea-and-china set in "Golden Bowl," which is based on Henry James' early-20th century novel of manners.

"Every time there was going to be a stunt or an explosion, there would first be a terrifying safety meeting," she recalls. "That was enough to get us all completely worked up. Even now, if someone yelled out, 'Fire in the hold!' I'd hit the floor."

What struck Beckinsale most about "Pearl Harbor," however, wasn't the pyrotechnics but, yes, the script. "It's so unusual these days to read a script that has those old-fashioned values to it," she explains. "Not morals, but movie values."

"It's a big, sweeping epic. Evelyn is a young Navy nurse stationed at Pearl Harbor whose boyfriend [Affleck] has volunteered to fight for the British. She's young and innocent and brave and wise, in that old-fashioned kind of way. You just never get the chance to do that."

The film was also an education for Beckinsale. Growing up in England, which was itself the victim of much wartime bombing, Beckinsale learned a lot in school about World War II, but the emphasis tended to be on the Nazi offensive in Europe, and she didn't know much about what happened at Pearl Harbor.

"I certainly knew about it being a part of the war, and I had a sense of where it was," she says. "At that time Britain was in total war crisis, but America really wasn't. Everything was happening elsewhere, and people in America—even those in Pearl Harbor—were just going along with their lives. And then the war began, in such a shocking way."

Beckinsale, 27, is slim enough to hold her own against any of Hollywood's lithe beauties, but is in no apparent danger of being blown off her feet by a rainy wind. She is often photographed in glamour mode, but for the interview she's casually dressed. She arrives shortly after putting her 2-year-old daughter, Lily, to sleep, with Lily's dad—Beckinsale's boyfriend, actor Michael Sheen—on baby-sitter duty.

Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and Beckinsale's quintessentially British porcelain skin and delicate features are accented only by a trace of face powder and lip gloss.

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