Water sensation

RISING Hollywood star Bryce Dallas Howard has found the perfect way to keep out of the pages of the celebrity magazines. "It's very easy - I am very uninteresting," says the actress daughter of Happy Days star turned successful movie director Ron Howard.

"I simply don't go out. I hardly go out to restaurants. I am married, so it's not like I'm dating. I look at some of the magazines and it's dark and scary. But that's how my parents live too," she says.

She made her starring feature film debut in M Night Shyamalan's The Village, playing a blind girl, and now appears in his latest movie, Lady In The Water, as a mystical creature - a narf - who enters the lives of residents in a modern apartment block when she surfaces from the swimming pool. It's a role that requires her to spend a lot of the time wet as well as undergoing a three-hour make-up job to transform her into the nearly translucent narf.

Shyamalan offered the role eight months before it was even written on the day that she saw The Village for the first time. "He set up this very dramatic scenario so when the script arrived I was so struck by it because it reminds me of the great films I saw when I was a child. They challenged children's and adult's imagination and were like allegories for what's possible," she says.

She admits that she had too much time to prepare to play Narf, not that she could find out anything about narfs on the internet as they're the product of writer-director Shyamalan's imagination. "I realised what I needed to do was go to the source, and go to the person who is the visionary who created the mythology, and ask a million questions. And that's what I did, and that's what set the tone for me for my journey and my process in this film.

"I realised, 'okay, all I'm here to do is be the physical manifestation of Night's vision. Not to be a collaborator, not to come in with my 600 ideas as to how it could be done. Ask him what he wants to be done, and do it. "I have a tendency to over-prepare, and have six million ideas that aren't even cohesive ideas. So it was nice to just kind of relax and totally rely on another person."

She's used to to challenges. One of her early jobs was on stage in Alan Ayckbourn's double comedy House/Garden in Manhattan. This involves two plays running simultaneously in adjoining theatres with the same cast playing the same characters. "I got that when I was 20 and still at college," she recalls.

"No-one would give me a part because there was no assurance I could do eight shows a week. The director of the Ayckbourns didn't see that resume, I auditioned and got the part - and because it was two plays, I was doing 16 performances a week."

Being the third generation of actors in the Howard family means she has a pretty good idea of how the business works.

"Because I grew up in a household with a film-maker, I know what you expect is never gong to be half of it so I never make decisions from that place because I've had that experience from my parents, grandparents and uncle," she says.

ALL he ever wanted was to be a character actor so perhaps it's understandable if Paul Giamatti has the startled look of a rabbit caught in headlights after being promoted to leading man. He's achieved starring status in Lady In The Water, the latest film from M Night Shayamalan, the writer-director of The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable and The Village.

Last year's Sideways finally brought Giamatti to the fore after years of critical acclaim but little public recognition in films including American Splendour, Donnie Brasco and The Truman Show.

In Lady In The Water he plays a man hiding from the world working as caretaker at a apartment block where a strange creature from another underwater world suddenly appears and seeks his help.

Giamatti admits to being "slightly taken aback" by this new-found star status."It's a little different to where I was going to end up," he says.

"Being a character actor was all I basically wanted to do - and that's what I've done. The easiest thing to be in Hollywood is a white, middle-aged character actor. There's always work for you. That was the ambition I had, just to work at that kind of thing.

"Every fourth or fifth job would be an interesting role, but it was a living and continues to be. It's probably something I will have to go back to. The leading thing is not something I anticipated."

He says it's be "a gradual up and down" in a way, feeling like a "series of dazed, hallucinatory moments" including one big moment while filming boxing drama Cinderella Man, playing Russell Crowe's trainer.

"I was massaging Russell Crowe, taking the thing out of his mouth and shouting at him - and I had this out of body moment when I thought, 'what the hell?'," he recalls. "But that sort of thing happens more when I'm acting that when I meet journalists."

Lady In The Water began life as a bedtime story that Shyamalan told his two young daughters. At just five, Giamatti feels his own son is too young for such scary tales. "I try to a void him knowing what I do for a living as much as possible, although he gets more of what I do now," he says.

"I did tell him what I do and occasionally bring him to the set and downplay it a lot. I don't know why. I think acting is a very La-La-Land thing to do with yourself, especially a movie set. It's all the paraphenalia and I don't want him to think this is what people's lives are like.

"I can function in it but I would like him to know it's not the only world. I am fine with the job and the work. I'm not embarrassed at being an actor but it's strange, it's a weird world."

Many in the industry were surprised - and said so publicly - when he failed to win an Oscar nomination for his performance in Sideways. He seems vaguely embarrassed by the fuss saying "it was sort of silly to me that people made that much of a big deal of it. The whole idea of those awards and stuff seems like a different profession. I couldn't bring myself to worry about it."

Making Lady In The Water seems to have been a happy time. He even enjoyed the sequences in which he explores the pool's deep end leading to an underwater world.

"The swimming was really fun. I just dived into the pool and wallowed aroun"' he says.

"I had to learn how to breath an air bubble out of an upside-down beer glass. The underwater swimming was one of the things I was looking forward to doing."

He may have found a niche playing self-tortured guys but they're easier for him to handle.

"I actually find playing a happy, together person much harder. This guy is good, a good man and that was really hard to play. He's the hero of a fairy tale and that's hard. Hopefully it doesn't become insipid."

* Lady In The Water is showing across the region from tomorrow.