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- FORCE FIELD Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor prepare to defend themselves in Attack of the Clones
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They all have a flair for being able to toss off sharp lines. You can find very good actors, actresses who are wonderful, but they don't have any flair for dealing with those lines in a very off-handed, light way. A comic actor who could really do that -- although you don't know it from most of his movies because they were silly movies -- was Bob Hope. And some of the older women, like Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, in addition to being great actresses, could score with those one-liners.
Do you think there's some common self-effacing quality that you look for in your performers?
I always respect people more -- that's what I always loved about Diane Keaton or Tea Leoni, they're like the girls in school who were like, "I did so badly on that test," and then the test marks come back and they're always 100 or 99. That self-effacing quality is always appealing. It's so much more appealing than ones who come on strong and sell themselves and push themselves.
Those are the moments I most responded to in Hollywood Ending, the slapstick elements, because you were physically self-effacing.
I have a tendency to be self-effacing, but I deserve it [laughs]. I always start off with such grand expectations and great hopes and they always come out so disappointing to me at the end. *
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