Neve Campbell curls up on the hotel couch, cuddling with its faux-fur covering. It's only a few days before Christmas, and though, in just a few hours she's off to somewhere else on her whirlwind PR tour—Texas, perhaps, but she's not sure—she still appears totally relaxed and at home.
Like Hollywood royalty of old, she's vividly intelligent, but delightfully polite, talking neither too much nor too little. When her cell phone rings in the middle of our conversation, she reaches for it and shuts it off. "That's so rude," she says. "I'm sorry."
Wearing a pair of expensive blue jeans and classic, navy-blue, '40s-style jacket with white piping, she's as astonishingly beautiful in person as she is on screen. Her deep, liquid eyes reveal a kind of classic movie-star glamour, but she easily disarms you with her freckly girl-next-door look.
Campbell probably charmed the legendary filmmaker Robert Altman with the same effortlessness when she first approached him about directing her ballet movie, The Company.
So far, every Robert Altman film has been quintessentially Altman's, despite having worked with some of the most brilliant and larger-than-life collaborators in the world, from legendary screenwriters and cinematographers to scene-stealing stars like Warren Beatty and Robin Williams. But The Company breaks rank for the first time; it belongs to Altman and Campbell equally.
Conceiving the story along with screenwriter Barbara Turner (Georgia, Pollock) ,Campbell put together The Company as a dream project, a movie that captured the day-to-day life of a ballet company without sinking into Flashdance territory. Wearing her second hat as producer, she approached Altman to direct and cast herself in a centerpiece, but discreet, role.
"I didn't want to do the story of the girl in the chorus who wants to become a pro dancer and gets there," Campbell says. "That story's kinda boring. As soon as you have a lead character in any film it has to be about them and you have to have the A-B-C plotline."
Instead, Campbell plays Loretta "Ry" Ryan, a dancer with Chicago's Joffrey Ballet who works nights and tries to make ends meet in an atmosphere where emotions run high and everyone yearns for attention. Altman's camera just as often settles on the other dancers as it does on Campbell.
The 30-year-old, Canadian-born Campbell began her career at age 9, joining the National Ballet School of Canada. After five years of training, she became the youngest cast member ever to perform in Phantom of the Opera. She danced with various Toronto choreographers before falling prey to several injuries and slowly phasing into acting, hitting the big time with TV's Party of Five and the Scream films.
Returning to dance after so many years off was not easy. "Most dancers would say that it's virtually impossible," Campbell says. "You can't take a week off without setting yourself back at least two months, especially in classical ballet. Your body will start to go back to its normal state. Your leg will start turning in and your muscles are no longer in line in the way that they should be."
To get back into shape, Campbell trained 8 1/2 hours a day for six months, working with a physical therapist, taking classes, doing yoga and pilates, and training with a private coach and the Joffrey Ballet. Not to mention that she had spent the previous four years visiting the company and getting to know the members—many of whom appear in the film.
"There was no way this film would have worked if it seemed like I was the actor in the film," she says. "Because it's almost like a documentary, it would make no sense if I wasn't up to par, but also if it seemed like there wasn't a natural camaraderie with the other dancers. I just didn't want them to feel that I should be treated any differently. From Day One, I was in the studio at 8 in the morning, on the floor with all the dancers, working as much as they were—sometimes more because I needed extra coaching."
If nothing else, Campbell has the injuries to prove that she's a real dancer. In addition to arthritis in her neck, hips and feet, she played her most demanding scene in The Company, a dazzling outdoor performance of "My Funny Valentine," with a broken rib.
"It's just part of the process for dancers," she says. "I had a really hard time with my body. But you get through it. It is what it is."
That performance was shot over a cold, autumn weekend in Chicago's Grant Park in front of an actual audience. The producers took out a newspaper ad inviting people to see a free Joffrey Ballet performance and asking them if they wouldn't mind being filmed. The audience knew Campbell would be there, but didn't know she would be dancing.
"It was my first time performing in front of an audience in 11 years," she says. "It was a really phenomenal experience, terrifying and overwhelming."
In addition to the actual dancing, Altman and Campbell attempted to present the rest of the film as a kind of symbolic dance. When Ry meets and begins a romance with a cook (James Franco), the film looks at simple moments from their relationship without depicting its rise and fall.
"It allows you so much freedom when you don't have to go for a beginning or an ending to a scene. You get to live in the moment," she says. "That [Altman] chose to have 'My Funny Valentine' play through all of my scenes with James made it feel more like a dance. I thought that was a really lovely idea."
The movie's other major element comes in the form of Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange), who plays the company's director, a fickle, scatterbrained egomaniac with a lot of charm. In addition to his many other duties, he must stage elaborate ballets with very little money, something Altman can definitely relate to.
"I think most artists are familiar with that," Campbell says. "You don't create your true art in order to make tons of money."
With The Company, Campbell has not only done herself proud, but she has also fulfilled a lifelong ambition. "I used to watch The Red Shoes and all the Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire movies. I used to swear, when I was moving up in the business, that I was born in the wrong era. I really wanted to be able to dance on film." And so she has.