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brief interviews with producer Doug Wick; director Andrew Fleming; stars Rachel True, Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell.
According to the Internet website of the international organization Covenant of the Goddess, Wicca or Witchcraft is "an earth religion in which groups of women and men meet to raise energy and put themselves in tune with natural forces and honor the old Goddesses and Gods." One of the central pursuits is magic: "an art which requires adherence to certain principles, and a conscious direction of will toward the desired end." In Columbia Picture's supernatural thriller THE CRAFT the desired ends of three high school girls dabbling in magic include getting better test grades and making the right boy to pay attention. But they are having only limited success until, adding a fourth girl to make their secret circle more authentic, they start to have some real power.
The story was developed from a concept of producer Doug Wick, who had some previous interest and experience with the occult in film: "When I was working on WOLF, I started to think a lot about the supernatural genres, and why I was attracted to them. Most of my interest is relatively character-based, and there is a reason some stories keep their power, and you start to think about the supernatural in its kind of original, fancier forms, and you realize people read it and it felt true to their insides, that it was a very powerful expression of what it was like to be human. I had worked for years on the script of WOLF with Jim Harrison, and got the idea of girls coming into their sexual power, and much more broadly than that, finding out at that age that they have these gigantic insides, that there's all this mysterious world inside you. I love empowerment stories, so witchcraft became the most true way to express it."
Pat Devin, a High Priestess and Public Information Officer of Covenant of the Goddess hired by the production company as a consultant, says she can't really make any clear judgment yet of the movie, not having seen the final cut. She points out "To quote the director, this is a motion picture, it's not a documentary, and I did what I could from my end, keeping in mind that the movie deals with four young women who begin to play with magic, and essentially create their own deity; they are not practicing the religion of Wicca. It's sort of 'Girls just want to have fun' - girls just want to play with magic. This is very common with young women, and probably has been since there have been young women. It's like, 'If I light a red candle, will he love me?' - that kind of folk magic. Some of the practices that are shown in the movie are actually in that sense fairly authentic, and I created some reasonable sounding chants."
After coming up with the story idea Wick and his production company interviewed writers for about a year, and he says for that time they just couldn't connect with someone to bring it to life in a way that matched their vision: "A bad version of the movie is just sort of generic and stupid. We interviewed many male and female writers, then we found Peter Filardi (FLATLINERS). He was able to bring out the depth of the characters, and Andy [Fleming] did some good work on the script, too. With Filardi's first draft we all got really excited because he was able to create vivid girls, young women. Right away you felt like they would interact, it felt real - some of the bitchiness, the competitiveness; it just felt like high school."
In collaboration with writer Filardi, Wick says "One of the things we wanted to do was to take you in the story out on a limb a half inch at a time, so all of a sudden, to your surprise, you'd be five feet out on a branch. Hopefully you'd even bring in people who wouldn't normally go along with it if you suddenly jumped five feet out. And when we went to get a director: we had a lot of the great special effects directors interested in doing the movie, but of all the people I spoke to, Andy Fleming was the one who came with a really real gut connection with the girls, the characters.
"On the other hand, I definitely wanted to have really stunning special effect expressions of their conflict, so it wasn't like I didn't want it to go big, I just wanted to go big with specificity. In bad work they just plug in a scene everyone's seen before. There's a very stunning final conflict between two of the girls, with an amazingly developed special effect, and hopefully we've earned it. We have Sony ImageWorks literally down the hall that did the effects, which start in about the end of the first act, and they build; we didn't want wall-to-wall special effects like if you're in an alternate universe."
But there are plenty of scenes to keep things dramatic, as Devin reports: "There's that old Lovin' Spoonful song "Do You Believe in Magic in a Young Girls Heart" - well, in the movie they're levitating and doing all kinds of things. Much, much more interesting than the average Wiccan circle, I might add, where people generally don't levitate or cast balls of lightning around, or have a hundred and fifty million snakes in the room. Reality tends to be a little tamer. The highest drama you tend to run into in an average Wiccan circle would be like who gets the last piece of chicken at the feast."
Wick points out that the casting was very difficult: "To get the studio to approve the movie with less-known actresses - it was a real negotiation. From the start, the marketing department felt they could do this film without stars, because they thought the idea was so strong. Still, there was always 'Could you get Alicia Silverstone?' - you start off there - but she was in the middle of doing CLUELESS. We went through rounds and rounds of people. Luckily all the girls are really strong in the movie. Also, the studio did a test screening and found that young men liked it as much as young women."
"Our heroine is a celebration of witchcraft, a celebration of people finding out they have power they didn't know they had. It's really a celebration of the witch's world view. There may be some who don't like that we have a woman who gets drunk with her power, but on the other hand, that's part of the protagonist's journey: to overcome all that. The story both intends to be real, but is also metaphor; there's more license in that. It is about inner power, and that relates to both men and women. There's also a theme of being true to yourself, that if you can find your own rudder you can make it work; you'll probably be okay."
Devin responded positively to the film's tone and intention: "One of the things that moved me about the script was that a number of young women do become involved with magic in a search for a sense of control or power in their life. When I was sixteen, I was reading Sybil Leek (this was back in the 60s) and experimenting, so it's not just this generation. Look what happened in Salem with the young girls doing fortune telling. It was the same thing. Young women have, I think, a particular propensity, especially for charms to attract the love of their life."
Rachel True (CB4; EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE) plays Rochelle, one of the original trio of would-be witches, along with Nancy (Fairuza Balk, GAS FOOD LODGING; THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD) and Bonnie (Neve Campbell, IN DREAMS; THE DARK). They are joined by Sarah (Robin Tunney, ENCINO MAN; EMPIRE) to complete the four members needed in a coven to represent the cardinal directions and primary elements air, earth, fire and water.
True says of the group: "They're just into gaining their power, so they start off doing little chants. Their friendship strengthens as their power grows, but we know what happens when people corrupt power, right? To me, that's kind of the lesson in the film. We're talking about four girls who don't have any power in school - they are the misfits, the outcasts that everyone makes fun of and nobody wants to talk to, so in the beginning it is them just trying to say to the world, hey, I'm here and I'm okay - and nobody listens, so they take it ten steps further."
She thinks the producers were interested in making it truthful: "You're going to bend some stuff - it's a Hollywood movie - but, at the same time, having Pat Devin there was really great on their part, and a lot of the chants are true chants, which was a little freaky to me at certain points, because you think 'Oh well, you know, I'm not really into this but I am conjuring up something here'. We filmed one scene on the beach and there was definitely some weird energy, and we were followed around by a white owl to several different locations, and little things like that; or certain mishaps would happen and you'd have to wonder what that was about. I think some Wiccan groups are going to be thrilled this film is being made, and some not."
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Director Andrew Fleming notes the casting was one of the big challenges: "Once we'd started production, I really felt like we had found exactly the right people for the parts. It took a long time to cast the movie. An extraordinarily long time. I think it's because these characters are so young, and they needed to be very specific people, and all of the scenes are not just hanging-out-personalities-goofing-off type of scenes, there's a meanness, a cynicism, a kind of world-weariness to all the girls, so they needed to be young, but have this kind of experience, and that was the hard part in casting."
Fleming graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1985, and his thesis film "P.P.T" (for personal pregnancy test) was in ways a foreshadowing of THE CRAFT: "It was shot real-time, in one room; four girls waiting for a home pregnancy test to develop. In those days it took fifteen or twenty minutes. The film was just about what they talked about waiting for the results. Bridget Fonda was in it. It related to THE CRAFT because the girls were about the same age, and each of the characters had a correlative to new characters: there was a kind of cynical, manipulative girl; then there was a kind of shy, naive, virginal girl; a sensible, moral girl; and there was a self-loathing girl. It sort of worked as a dialogue, four girls dealing with the same problem in different ways."
The production company for THE CRAFT hired a witchcraft consultant, and Fleming acknowledges her contribution: "Pat Devin had a lot of effect on this movie. Apart from giving us a lot of the details, she basically wrote all of the spells in the movie. And there were several things she talked about that we incorporated as plot lines. Like the idea of doing a binding to stop somebody, which is in the script; it ended up being an important plot point in the third act. Most of the information for the film I got from her; most of the books on witchcraft are inscrutably written, neither scholarly or approachable. And Pat was good because she's also knowledgeable about all forms of theology and life in general, and is able to put everything in context. She's a lapsed Catholic, and that was helpful because the girls in the movie are at a Catholic school."
Fairuza Balk (THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD) is very knowledgeable about Wicca, with a real interest in it. A good adjective for her is powerful. Even though she's been in kind of marginal roles before (except for maybe IMAGINARY CRIMES), in this she really gets a chance to spread her wings. She's very very good."
Gale Anne Hurd produced Fleming's earlier film, the psychological thriller BAD DREAMS, and was a big influence on his work: "She's one of my heroines. If there's one person that made my professional life happen, it's her. I just had some student films and a script - and she had just done ALIENS, and on the basis of one meeting she said, okay, let's make the movie - that was BAD DREAMS; about nine months later we were shooting it."
He notes it has taken a long time to get this movie made: "Next month I think I will have been working on it pretty much exclusively for two years. It was a very long journey, and something I was always a little bit frightened of: there were myriad ways it could go wrong. It's like this real tightrope: it can't be too serious, but it can't be too funny; it can't be too real, but not too fantastical. Just recently I've seen a cut of it - and there's so much more in it than THREESOME, more sound, music, effects - and I'm happy with it. I'm actually a little happier with it than I thought I would be. But it was really a balancing act. The music is very exciting, almost another character. We commissioned a number of new songs, and some new versions of old ones, like the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows."
Fleming wanted to keep the paranormal actions believable: "I thought it was important to feel as though, if something magical was going to happen, and you really believed it was happening, that it happened that way - rather than it being kind of a fantastical flourish" he says. "There are these four girls and you've heard a story about how they were actually able to levitate last night: what would that have looked like, if you really believed that? It was always about the actresses believing in it, going along with it. Whenever it became too "comic book" I said the whole thing would fall apart. All the horror movies I like, such as THE SHINING, work that way - keep you believing. And the ones that don't work look like comic books come to life.
"It was a real adventure, making the movie. I came out the other side a very different person than I went in, for a lot of reasons. It was the hardest movie I've done; way more work than THREESOME. With effects, it's like making an entire other movie, with a crew that's as large or larger working on all those things. You can have a meeting just about one effects shot that's as long as a meeting about a whole live action scene. And you might have five meetings about that shot."
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Rachel True ("Rochelle") says about her group of high school friends in the film: "We're into - I can't even say witchcraft, because it's not not even witchcraft - they're just into gaining their power, so they start off doing little chants. In any other world, they'd be prayers, but they take it three steps further. Their friendship strengthens as their power grows, but we know what happens when people corrupt power, right? To me, that's kind of the lesson in the film, because one of the lessons of witchcraft is that whatever you put out comes back times three, so if you're putting out flowers and love, that's what you're going to get back, and if you're putting out 'I hate you - Die' that might come back as well.
"We're talking about four girls who don't have any power in school - they are the misfits, the outcasts that everyone makes fun of and nobody wants to talk to, so in the beginning it is them just trying to say to the world, hey, I'm here and I'm okay - and nobody listens, so they take it ten steps further: 'I'm really here. I'm going to show you I'm okay!' Not to make it sound pat, but each of the characters has a problem. Mine - Rochelle's - is that she has an overbearing Dad, and she's the only black student at this school, so it's a little more subtle than some of the other characters; Bonnie, for example, was burned in a car accident, so she's dealing with scars in the outside world, whereas my character's dealing with scars that are on the inside world, and how she deals with that. And I can relate to that, because I went to an all white school, so I knew what that was like. And it was hard at the time, but anything that's difficult you learn from, don't you?"
There are some scenes involving "the largest quantity of reptiles that will be seen on screen in years" according to animal wrangler Boone Narr, but True was not in those scenes, to her relief: "I got off really lucky. I'm fascinated and repelled by insects and reptiles, so I was kind of looking forward to working with them, but when I found out I didn't have to, I was perfectly okay. That was just fine with me. The character Sarah, who is the fourth girl in the group, runs into problems and she's the one who ends up covered in snakes: poor Sarah!"
Before doing this film she had always been interested in mythology: "ever since I was a kid, and when I was young I focused on Greek and Roman myths, because that's what you learn, and then I sort of opened it up and started reading Robert Graves and certain other books that weren't so much about witchcraft, as much as Goddess mythology, and I find that really interesting. Once I got the role, they had a Wiccan priestess as an advisor for us, Pat Devin, and she was very helpful in recommending books on the subject. And of course to her, it's truth and it's religion, it's not four little made-up girls doing fantasy chants, so it was interesting trying to put the two together, to bring her truth to making a movie in Hollywood.
"I think the producers were interested in making it truthful. You're going to bend some stuff - it's a Hollywood movie - but, at the same time, having Pat Devin there was really great on their part, and a lot of the chants are true chants, which was a little freaky to me at certain points, because you think 'Oh well, you know, I'm not really into this but I am conjuring up something here'. We filmed one scene on the beach and there was definitely weird energy around, and we were followed around by a white owl to several different locations, and little things like that, or certain mishaps would happen and you'd have to wonder what that was about. So I'm not going to say anything was following us around, but I definitely felt like there was energy. I think some Wiccan groups are going to be thrilled this film is being made, and some not."
True's stepmother, Verona Barnes, is no longer working, but was a theater actress, and performed in New York in "The Great White Hope" with James Earl Jones. True recalls "She was absolutely an inspiration to me, because when I was a little kid the first time I saw her on stage when I was five or six, all I could think was that is so much power, seeing her onstage was just the most powerful image, and that's always stuck with me, even when I wasn't necessarily thinking I was going to be an actress.
"The first work I did was three "Cosby" shows in New York, those were the first actual on-camera things I did. Then I did the movie CB4, a rap parody in the SPINAL TAP vein. Then once I moved here, I did a lot of television, a lot of sitcoms - any black sitcom you can name, I've probably done. Then I did a Movie of the Week called STALKING BACK, which was a really good experience. Doing EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE was actually a blast, because I was working with a really good director named Anne Goursaud. She was an editor for Francis Ford Coppola - she edited DRACULA and a lot of his films.
"So it was great working with a good director, doing guerrilla filmmaking - shooting a feature in two weeks, mostly on night shoots (which I thought was perfect, because it was a vampire movie). I think everyone probably has a horror movie tucked away. The director was just going to have the vampire break my neck, and I said 'No - no way. If I'm in a vampire movie, the man is biting my neck. I will not be in this movie if I can't get my neck bitten!' I mean, isn't that the whole point of being in a vampire movie? Well, I got my wish. And I got to work with good people like Alyssa Milano and Jordan Ladd."
Her new film is called NOWHERE, directed by famed indie director Greg Araki. True has the lead, and "was kind of thrilled to get to work with him. It's sort of like a "90210" on acid. That would be my description."
She just saw a roughcut of THE CRAFT, which she really liked: "When you work on a movie, you just have no idea how it's going to come out; you hope it's good, but you don't really know, and you don't see it until about six or nine months afterward, and I saw it and was pretty pleased. I was happy."
Developing her career as an actress, True feels is "a fine balance between trying to just work, and also be true to yourself. If you're fortunate enough, you get to a position where you can be a little pickier about your roles. Which is not to discount everything I've done in my past - everything I have learned tremendously from. So now I feel I'm lucky in the respect that I can sort of pick a little more carefully, which is tricky because as a black actress, there aren't that many roles to pick from. Which is why I felt I was truly blessed this year, with leads in two nice films, and also the luxury of being able to do a studio film and an independent afterwards was fantastic."
True thinks there is more opportunity now for black actresses: "It must be said to the credit of a lot of the people I read for, I do get to read for roles that are not specifically black. That's double-edged: it's amazing that they're bringing me in and showing people new ideas, and at the same time it's a little hard because seventy percent of the time or even higher I'm not going to get those roles. But I do feel it's worth it to go in. In fact, EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE was not written as a black role at all; I think I was one of the only black girls to read for it, but the director and I connected, and she like my reading, and I got the part.
"And that was amazing, that here's someone who's willing to take a chance, and change something a little bit. Also with a movie like THE CRAFT: that could easily have been done with four white girls; I was actually amazed when I got the script - here's a regular little high school script, and there's a black character in it, and she's not selling drugs, she's not selling her body, she's just a high school student, and a middle class high school student at that, which I think is an area that does need to be represented in film and television."
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Robin Tunney plays Sarah, the newcomer to the group who becomes the needed fourth member to make the witchcraft circle have some real power. She says that what attracted her to do THE CRAFT was that they wanted her for it, and "it was a lead girl, and nobody's ever thought of me as that; I'm usually "the strange best friend", or "the really troubled one"; I hate the leading girl in movies usually, especially in teen movies, like "the ingenue" - I want to stuff her in a locker."
But she feels THE CRAFT is going to work: "I've seen the film with most of the special effects in - they're really intense, they're great special effects; that's what's going to sell the movie, just because it doesn't have a lot of the other parts of horror films. You never want to admit you're doing a horror film when you're doing one; you like to think it's a psychological thriller, just because everybody associates horror films with bad acting. But THE CRAFT really has no genre: the acting is not over the top, and the dialogue is very real, and it's not campy so the special effects had to be impeccable, or it would just be hokey.
"In a way the film is magic, but it explores things that are very real. Adolescence is really a horrible time, and these girls come into themselves through magic and through these abilities, and learn lessons that have nothing to do with magic, that girls go through all the time. And It's about time that girls took over in a movie, and are not just the girlfriend or the object of someone's desire; they're taking control, and they're sort of the underdogs of the school, and they come into their own through magic.
"It starts off like a teen film, like SIXTEEN CANDLES or something, only more eery, and then all of a sudden they're witches, and it's full-blown special effects. It's classy. Doug Wick is so classy, and that's part of the reason I trusted him. When you hear the theme, you go Oh God - they could do it totally campy, which I'm not interested in as an acting style, I like real films. And Andy is just fantastic too. So I knew it wouldn't be girls running down alleys with their breasts hanging out and stuff. I'm sick of that. Girls are about so much more than that. I think people are going to want to go see a film where the women are strong, and it's about them."
Tunney was the only one who is Catholic in the film; she attended St. Ignatius College Prep (with a motto of "where modesty is our policy"). She took a year off after high school: "because I wanted to act, and I didn't want to study drama in a college atmosphere; drama in big doses always drove me nuts: they were always so dramatic, and I thought acting is about real people - why do they surround themselves with all actors. So it's been a few years now since I graduated and I love acting. I regret parts of going to college because I think it's a marvelous time to find your peer group, and discover things.
"I really like being able to play different characters; I'm nothing like Sara in THE CRAFT, and I'm nothing like Deborah, that I did in EMPIRE, or like the girl I was in ENCINO MAN. It's fun to play different people, and when you have that separateness from someone, it's easier for me to play them, because you look at the person from an outsider point of view, and you know the things they do. If you're just playing yourself, somehow it just seems too easy.
"My first professional job was in a CBS School Break Special, and I'm glad I did stuff like that, because I've learned how to hit my mark and how to find my light, and how to match, without there being tons of risk, so on THE CRAFT I really got to work, and all that stuff wasn't in the way, it's just second nature. And I was working a lot of seventeen hour days, in almost every scene, and I don't think I could have kept that up if it was my first job."
A prior film, EMPIRE RECORDS, gave her a lot of acting experience: "It was the first movie or first acting work where I really liked my performance. I took a lot of chances and I learned a lot of lessons about working in film and having an opinion, and that it's okay to say maybe I should try this, or I think she would do this, or I don't think she'd say that. Before, I always felt like a kid, and felt like I was so lucky to be there, that I just said their lines and did whatever, and I didn't really feel it was collaborative. But on EMPIRE I learned that was okay, and I got to make all these crazy choices. I shaved my head in a scene, and that was my idea, and it really helped the performance; I learned that making solid acting choices is important.
"I was very young doing ENCINO MAN, and it was fun. It was a comedy, and I haven't done one since, it's just nice to know you can. I was really campy and over the top in it as a mall girl - but you're supposed to be. One thing I like about it is nobody can label you when you do parts like that, or doing the "Depressed Gothic Girl" - and that's something Hollywood loves to do, putting somebody in a category because it's safe. And I just want to keep on surprising people; I don't want them to know what I really look like, or what I really sound like.
"The movie I did with Ed Harris after that was such a blast: RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE. I've done a lot of teen ensemble things, so it was nice to work with a lot of adults. It was actually the highest rated TNT original movie of all time, which is so great for Ed and Amy, because they worked their butts off. Ed is just the coolest; he's as good as it gets."
Tunney realizes the intent of THE CRAFT is entertainment: "Some of the ritual and ideology of Wicca got lost, but it's a movie, and I think it will have general audiences be interested, and the lovely thing about it is that it does introduce Wicca as a religion, and we do follow some of the things, but I think people have to put their foot in one toe at a time, in order to understand it. But it's a film, and you want people from ages of thirteen to twenty five who have never heard of witchcraft to understand, so you have to speak in general terms. If people get more interested, they will read up on it and will understand about the Goddess.
"I read a number of books about Wicca when I got the role, but I didn't want to do too much, because Sarah, my character, knows nothing about it; she's sort of a natural witch, she's had this ability since she was a little girl. And she finds out slowly about it. I had a world religions class in high school, and I've been interested in different religions, mostly in Buddhism and Hinduism. But I had never known anyone who practiced Wicca, and still had that stereotypical thought of it being someone in a pointy hat and a green face, and it was interesting to meet Pat [the witchcraft consultant].
Tunney notes that some "weird things have happened during Pagan ceremonies on Leo Carrillo Beach, where we were shooting. There was an altar we had built, and we end up invoking this spirit, but at the beginning it was to give thanks, and we all brought things to sacrifice, according to whatever element we represented. But the altar got washed up and then Fairuza got very ill, which was weird.
"It was a lot of hard work, but I;m happy with the way it turned out. I think it's going to make people laugh, and I think it's everything it's supposed to be. It's exciting. It's the first time I've ever done a movie where it turned out better than the script, and it was better than my expectations, which is just great.
Tunney feels her life offstage is very important: "I think when someone is up on the screen and you're watching them, there's something behind their eyes that makes them interesting, there's a life there. A lot of your career as an actor is having a rich life, going out and having experiences that are real so you have something to draw on. If you're constantly in the cycle of work, work, work that it's really hard to grow. Actors and actresses that take time off to lead interesting lives are much more interesting to watch.
"I think in order to be happy doing films - and live away from home for three months, and be uprooted, and have a hundred and fifty people in the crew that are your new best friends - you really have to have a good idea of who you are. And the only way you learn about who you are is just through having life experiences and having good relationships. If you just surround yourself with make-believe all the time, you're going to be sort of empty when you're up there on the screen; those are not the people you're compelled to watch."
"Being in THE CRAFT was a huge growth for me as an actor. It was terrifying to be a lead. It wasn't like being in a small part where you're trying to figure how to stuff a whole character into a short screen time, and make the audience know everything about her. In the lead you have to be there more often, and you can't be as clever, because when the audience sees you up there all the time, they'll see you thinking and they get to know you, so you have to be real every moment, not think about anything but the situation that you're in. It's also a matter of subtlety: you can't act too much when you're playing a lead, because you're up there and they'll see you acting."
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Neve Campbell plays Bonnie, who has suffered for years from a childhood tragedy, being badly burned in a fire, and Campbell notes she "has become a victim not only of the burns and people's unmoral ways - young kids can be very evil - she went through a lot of that in her childhood, and as she went into her teens she was more and more insecure; she's become somewhat of a freak, she has no concept of how to communicate with people or fit in with people, or what it is she wants to be. So Bonnie has been through tragedy, and created her own tragedy, too, by not understanding other people. But she basically goes through a huge transition in the film, which is one of the things that really attracted me to the character, and to the film; she changes from terrible freaky burn victim, taking out her anger.
"I had a lot of prosthetic makeup for her burns, which were mainly on her arms and back and neck, but some facial scarring as well. The story is basically these four girls, none of them fitting into whatever it is they're supposed to fit into in life, and being angry - and discovering witchcraft, but abusing it somewhat. But they use it to heal Bonnie."
Campbell feels "Bonnie is a very different character than my character on PARTY OF FIVE, thankfully. I've been concentrating on taking roles that are not similar to Julia, that's something I want to keep away from. It's already hard to move from television into film. Luckily on PARTY OF FIVE we've had it a little easier than other shows (and it's been picked up for another season), but I still don't want to be caught up as Julia; I don't want people to think I can only do one thing. I think it's going to be good for audiences to see me in a feature. A lot of fans have written me to say they want that. My hiatus just started and I've been offered a couple of features. On my last hiatus I only really had two and a half weeks off, because I went straight to England to start on THE CANTERVILLE GHOST."
Campbell is from Toronto, Canada, has extensive training in classical dance, and has performed with the National Ballet of Canada. Dance is still important to her, she notes: "I take classes on my days off, when I can. I do jazz, ballet, hip hop, modern, contemporary. But it's really hard: in dance you have to be fully committed; you have to be able to do it at least three hours a day, every day, to consider yourself in shape enough to be in a company. But that's still my passion, and always will be. That's how I sort of heal myself; if I have any problems, I just go to a class. I'm also taking guitar lessons, and I sing as well.
"As far as acting, I had private coaching for a while when I was in Toronto, but a lot of my training came through my parents: my father is a drama and media teacher at a high school, and my mother used to own a dinner theater and performed there, and my father used to direct. So my whole training was sitting and watching them and learning from them. That's how I've continued it: a lot of it has been on the job; I haven't done as much training as most people would have. I've just been performing since I was a child."
Campbell feels drawn to past films and stars: "I always swear I was born in the wrong era; I should have been born in the thirties, when I could have been dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and singing and acting as well. But I'm still happiest when I feel I'm keeping up all of my talents; it's so much more creative and interesting."
Though the film is not finished and there are a lot of effects still to be added, she says "I have a feeling THE CRAFT will be interesting to people; they're really sick of seeing the same old same old. And this puts an interesting twist on it, where these girls really are abusing their power. We see so many films of women not being powerful at all, and we've seen films where women have been powerful, and in this film women have too much power.
"When we started the films we each received in our trailers this bag that had candles and incense and witchcraft books; I put them around and immediately felt all witchy. I did read some books, and listening to Pat [Devin] talk about witchcraft was a wonderful thing. Inspiring."
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[originally published in Cinefantastique magazine]
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