Neve Campbell Interview for The Company 5/13/04

Look who's talking tutu
James Wanwick 5/13/04

    Neve Campbell has always felt like a dancer at heart. While the Canadian actress is best known for her roles in the television series Party of Five and the Scream movies, dancing remains her primary love. A former student of Canada's National Ballet School, Campbell, 30, says professional dancing requires incredible mental and physical strength.
    "Dancers are paid little money, suffer broken bodies and arthritis and in some cases, eating disorders," she says. Which is why she made a movie about it
    The film, The Company, gives audiences a chance to see Campbell doing what she loves best - and what hurts the most. "I've got snapping hips syndrome and arthritis in my hips, neck and feet. I've had surgery on my feet and knees, shin splints, torn ligaments in both ankles, sciatica and dislocated knees. And I broke a rib making the movie."
    The Company tracks three months in the lives of the Chicago-based Joffrey Ballet. Campbell came up with the movie's idea, co-wrote the script and is one of the producers.
What she didn't come up with is The Company's story - because there really isn't one. A quasi-documentary, the film is a series of scenes showing dancers' insecurities, sacrifices and injuries.
Campbell plays a gifted but conflicted member of the company who is on the verge of becoming a principal dancer.
    Malcolm McDowell plays the company's co-founder and artistic director, while Spider-Man star James Franco plays Campbell's boyfriend and one of the few characters not involved in the world of dance. "I wanted it to feel like a documentary," Campbell says, speaking in a Toronto hotel room.
    "There's no real way to make this film with actors because then you wouldn't get the dance. This movie is about the dance. If you are shooting actors you have to shoot the face and bodies and you would never see the choreography." Campbell once had aspirations of becoming a ballet star.
    She was dancing at six and a member of the National Ballet School at nine, on a full-time scholarship: "As a child I think I felt myself better through movement than through my voice. That was my way of expressing myself." But the expectations and pressures of a dancing career, coupled with her parents' divorce (her father is Scottish, her mother Dutch) saw Campbell suffer a mini-breakdown in her teens.
    "I didn't necessarily quit. It was a conscious decision. "I had always been performing as a kid and acting on stage in amateur theatre with my parents and stuff and started professionally acting while I was doing dancing. I had suffered a lot of injuries in my body and I knew if I continued and joined a company I was going to be suffering a lot more."
    Campbell says she never succumbed to the eating disorders that affected many of her friends. "I like to eat too much. I certainly had a lot of friends who were anorexic who ended up in the hospital. That was all part of the dance world. But eating disorders are not as prevalent today as they once were. Dancers have become much more educated about the body and what to eat and nutrition than 20 years ago."
    With her dance career over, Campbell took up modeling, did a few TV commercials and landed some roles in made-for-television movies in Canada. At 21, she married a struggling actor, Jeff Colt, and the two moved to Los Angeles. Within weeks, Campbell found herself thrust into the limelight in Party of Five, playing Julia Salinger. While that gave her unexpected success, it was also the catalyst for marital problems.She was a star. He struggled for work. Two-and-a-half years later, the couple divorced.
    "We both lost something along the way," Campbell says. "It was another of life's lessons." She had an on-again, off-again romance with fellow actor John Cusack and the two remain close friends today. So much so that Campbell helped cast Cusack's sister, Susie Cusack, in The Company.
    Campbell is now with another unknown actor, Billy Burke, but says she has no plans for marriage.
Playing the hapless Sidney Prescott in the phenomenally successful Scream movies, which grossed nearly $1 billion, has enabled Campbell to mix up her choice of roles.
    Her light comedies include Three to Tango opposite Friends star Matthew Perry; Drowning Mona with Jamie Lee Curtis; and Panic opposite veterans Donald Sutherland and William H. Macy.
She has finished filming a thriller, Blind Horizon, with Val Kilmer and a broad English comedy, Churchill: The Hollywood Years, in which she plays a young Queen Elizabeth, opposite Christian Slater.
    "I think at the beginning of our careers, we don't get to choose the roles that come to us. Party of Five was my first American job and Scream was my first lead in a feature film. I wasn't choosing stuff, I was being chosen. It was a good show and I am not going to bash that. And Scream was really well done. In a sense, those jobs helped me to be able to now go out and explore the things I want to make."
    Playing a drug-addicted bisexual in the 1998 film Wild Things certainly gave Campbell a legion of male fans. Her sex scene with Denise Richards and Matt Dillon repeatedly rates in magazines' Top 10 sexiest movie memories. "Guys always want to talk to me about Wild Things," Campbell laughs. "So many guys come up to me and say, 'You know what my favorite movie is?' I'm like, 'Oh, let me guess.'"
    But Campbell is most proud of The Company. "It wasn't about 'What's this going to do for my career?' I will do other movies to try to do that but not this one." One thing is for certain, though. There is no chance Campbell will do a Scream 4. "I said no to that years ago. What's left to do? The poor girl must be in an asylum by now. Every boyfriend or friend she has ever had has tried to kill her."