Kate Bosworth is, oddly enough, the beauty of the pair. Perhaps best known as Lois Lane in the unfairly maligned “Superman Returns,” Bosworth has appeared in a number of films, including a solid appearance as Sandra Dee in Kevin Spacey‘s offbeat Bobby Darin biopic, “Beyond the Sea.” She also played porn star John Holmes’ teenage girlfriend in the fact-based “Wonderland” and was the female lead in the gambling-themed hit, “21.” Bosworth launched her career starring in the short-lived “Dawson’s Creek” spin-off, “Young Americans,” which wrapped in 2000 and followed that up with the lead role in the surfing-themed “Blue Crush” in 2002.

Danny Huston is often cast in the role of beastly types and authority figures, and usually a combination of both. He was the leader of the cold weather vampires in “30 Days of Night,” a memorably creepy power broker in “Children of Men,” and the mutant hating Col. William Stryker in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” He was also the despicably ultra-vicious desperado/gangleader brother of Guy Pearce in the 2005 mega-grime Australian western, “The Proposition.”

It’s also mandatory that I mention that Huston is about as “Hollywood royalty” as people get, being the son of acting and directing great John Huston, whose best remembered acting role remains as the deeply evil Noah Cross of “Chinatown” and whose iconic films included “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” and, still going strong decades later, “Wise Blood” and “Prizzi’s Honor.” That additionally means that Danny Huston’s grandfather was the early Hollywood star and character actor Walter Huston and his half-sister is Oscar-winner Angelica Huston. Still in his forties, he also was a director early on in his career, helming 1988’s “Mr. North.”

Bosworth and Huston were there to promote their roles in “The Warrior’s Way,” which was released this last weekend in a modest wide release. In the film, the first English language starring vehicle for Korean superstar Jang Dong-gun, Bosworth plays Lynne, a knife-thrower in training bent on revenge against the man who killed her family and attacked her. Naturally, that man is the Colonel (Huston), a mask-wearing evildoer who was badly disfigured by Lynne as a young girl, so it’s clear these two just aren’t going to get along.

Off screen, however, the two got along just fine as they sang the praises of the film which none of us entertainment journalist types had actually seen. About 10-15 minutes worth of clips had been shown to us the night before, prior to a very pleasant reception with some really delicious sushi and yakitori treats. The next day we got more American style fare at the Beverly Hilton. Did I mention that the food is often the best part of a press day?

The conversation started around some of the costumes used in the film. One journalist asked Kate Bosworth if she enjoyed the costuming aspect of movie-making. This might have turned into a very interesting piece if she’d said, “God, no, I hate it!” But, of course, that’s not how she feels.

“Yes, it is fun. I love fashion. I think we all know that there are certain times of the time when you say, ‘I wanna take my heels off,’ and be barefoot. and sometimes I do in these junkets. So, don’t be surprised if that happens.”

Quizzed about the style of “The Warrior’s Way,” Danny Huston, who in person speaks in a theatrical-sounding mid-Atlantic accent, kept to the topic of clothes.

“Well, talking about dressing up, I must say I enjoyed dressing up for this film in regards to all my regalia: my mask, my coat, my guns, my sword, my hair…the costumes were big in creating this film and, in a way, what grounded me somewhat as far as working with green screen and having very little else to relate to. The costumes were something that one could cling on to.”

“I felt the exact same way,” Kate Bosworth agreed, “In fact, I was saying in other interviews that the costumes were the grounding force, often. Because we’re living in this sort of fantasy world…it was really very nice to have such amazing costumes, to have that kind of visual aid.”

The next questioner actually asked if Bosworth had been “a great knife thrower before this.”

“Yeah. Just like all the time at home. On a Saturday night, that’s we do in the Bosworth household,” the actress joked. “No, I had never knife-thrown in my life but, you know, I’d never touched a surfboard before ‘Blue Crush.” I take on new skills in films pretty excitedly. [I] embrace it.”

Was there a lot of training involved?

There was, but it was hurried. “Because the film happened so quickly, as soon as everyone signed on it felt like it went very, very quickly,” Bosworth answered. “I would have loved to have had a little bit more training, but often we would learn a specific move and shoot it either that day or the next day. They really kept us on our toes, I’ll tell you that much. We were constantly going on adrenalin with the physicality, and that meant that we had to trust each other quite a bit,” she said with a bit of a laugh, adding that it especially applied to her scenes with Huston.

“I had a stunt girl who I was practicing the sword fights with,” Huston added. “Kate had a stunt man to fight with, but practically the first time we worked on the scenes together were on-set. In a way I wished for more training because I wasn’t sure how it was going to work but also the anticipation made me nervous and kept a certain amount of adrenalin going. It was a lot of fun for me. There’s this thing where you swing the sword and you kind of look over one shoulder and make sure that Kate was aware that that was what I was going to do. There’s this momentary connection and then you just go for it, you swing it. Maybe not at 100 percent but try to push above the 80s to make it work. It’s exciting for actors to feel that they’re doing their own stunts. That part isn’t a gimmick…We got tousled, we got bruised and it felt like an honest day’s work.”

“It would have helped to have had a dance or a ballet background with this because it was so specific with the footwork and balance,” Bosworth added. “More so than just slashing each other with big knives, it was really so much more like an intricate dance.”

What about the dirty-grungy aspect of being made to look as if one is living in a godforsaken frontier town?

“I was constantly asking for more dirt and more dust. I feel like as the girl I get the short end of the stick with that. They were like, ‘No, you need to be pretty’ and [said] ‘No, I want to be covered in dirt!’ and looking grimy and real…I was really into make sure my fingernails were very dirty and was constantly saying ‘put my yellow on my teeth.”

What about working with Geoffrey Rush, cast as the obligatory town drunkard and good friend to Bosworth’s character?

“I loved working with Geoffrey,” Bosworth said. “I’d known him a few years before that so it was really nice to work together. He’s so lovely and so much fun. He had such a ball being a drunkard on the movie. Sometimes you’d look around — there’d be a really intense moment happening — and Geoffrey would just be having a conservation with a statue [or other inanimate object].”

And what about the appeal of doing “The Warrior’s Way”?

“It was very similar to a Sergio Leone type film — those films belong to my childhood,” Danny Huston said. “I could almost imagine a Morricone score presenting my character. It had a fable aspect to it and a wonderful kaleidoscope of different influences.” Huston went on to praise star Jang Dong-gun as a sort of Clint Eastwood type, capable of expressing a lot with very little action. He also lauded the film as a whole and first time writer-director Sngmoo Lee, saying he was “just delighted” with how how the film turned out.

“There was lot of layers that went into that weren’t there when we were filming. I remember aiming up at the sky with my gun and I remember saying to Sngmoo, ‘Well, what am I shooting at?’ He said, ‘Light 27.’ I said, ‘I know, but what is Light 27?’ He said, ‘It’s a ninja.’ I said, ‘I see, are there other ninjas?’ ‘Yes, there are hundreds! They’re all around you!’ ‘Oh my God!’ I was also, in a way, visiting this world created by him, a very particular world.”

Kate Bosworth’s response to the question also put her at odds with most of the critics who bought tickets and did manage to review “The Warrior’s Way.” “I’m sure you can all imagine how many formulaic things cross the desk every day. To get something original and thoughtful and profound and beautiful and poetic — I didn’t see how I could say ‘no’ — and [not get to] sword fight.”

The next questioner was a journalist who, doing many roundtables, I’ve noticed always asks the same question: How does X role relate to an actor’s personal life? In this case, the question was for Kate Bosworth. The writer noticed that her love interest in the movie is a foreigner (the heroic Jang Dong-gun, of course) and that her real-life boyfriend, who happens to be Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgard (HBO’s “True Blood” and “Generation Kill“), is also a foreigner. Gossip mongers will remember that her prior boyfriend was reportedly Orlando Bloom, of England, the high seas, and Middle Earth.

“I was thinking to myself, as she was asking this question, I think the last three boyfriends have been foreigners. It’s an obvious habitual trait of mine. Dong-gun is so lovely and so it’s very easy for me to organically form a relationship with him even if it is just in a look…I suppose we were lucky in a way that there was just an easy between us from the very beginning. The relationship was very well formed on the page.”

However, she admitted, it might have been more difficult for her costar because of language issues. “The Warrior’s Way” is his first Western film and Jang Dong-gun, though able to speak some English very well, uses a translator in interviews. She acknowledged that for him it was a matter of “the challenge of mastering the English language and putting the emotion to it as well…We rehearsed a lot, for that reason.”

The next question was about Bosworth’s next film, Rod Lurie’s upcoming remake of Sam Peckinpah’s still hugely controversial 1971 thriller/psycho-sexual drama, “Straw Dogs.” Her character in the original film, portrayed by Susan George, figures in one of the most notorious and widely argued-over rape sequences in film history. The scene led to the film being banned in the UK for decades.

“Do you know what? I actually had never seen ‘Straw Dogs.’ I read the script before I watched the movie. I knew of the movie. So, I thought, ‘I’ll read the script and see how it holds up as a screenplay and see if that holds my interest. I didn’t really want to be too influenced by the film because I thought, ‘Of course the film is going to be interesting and wonderful.’ I didn’t want that to influence my decision.”

“So, I read the script first and it was great. I love Rod Lurie. He’s a very talented man…I watched the film and that was when I was [realized] that this was going to be quite a ride, quite a journey.” She noted that reading screenplays it will often leave out the emotional details of scenes and that seeing the Peckinpah film made it hit home what she’d be in for in the remake of the film. “I’m most attracted to material when I have a certain sense of fear…I think a certain amount of fear is a good thing. You certainly grow a lot and learn a lot. I suppose that’s why I love doing what I do. I’m not really in it to just sort of flat-line.”

Some questions followed about what a sequel to “Superman Returns” might have been like, now that the Ur-superhero is on his way to a full-on reboot, (she has no idea), and her health/exercise regimen/preferences (she particularly likes horseback riding but studios don’t approve). That led to a question about Bosworth’s surfing in “Blue Crush.”

“I feel like I was paid to become a full-on athlete. More so than anything else, it was five or six hours of training every day. I got a little bit of an overload of that at the time.”

Then there was a question about Danny Huston’s next role. He’ll be playing prosecutor Joseph Holt in Robert Redford‘s “The Conspirator.” In the film, which has been screened at festivals but won’t be coming out until next April. Holt is pushing for the execution of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright Penn) for her role in the successful plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in the aftermath of the American Civil War. How did Huston view his character?

“…He’s a man who suffered a great loss, a great president. The conspirators are, I suppose, in today’s terms, terrorists, but there’s a witch-hunt element to it. One can relate it directly to what’s happening at Guantanamo and trials that are going on now. There’s no black and white, but an interesting point in history that relates very much to today.”

But, though actors routinely say they don’t like “judging” their characters, no matter how poor their behavior, how does Huston play such heavies as the Colonel and Marlow, the vampire?

“What a nasty trick God plays on vampires. It’s quite a difficult existence. You can’t survive in daylight. You need human blood…So, the character in ’30 Days of Night’ is angry at God. Here, the character is scarred by Kate Bosworth’s character on the face, and he’s quite a vain character. He heart is somewhat scarred [also]. There’s a romantic desire, however perverse that might sound, that he wants to satisfy.”

That talk of perverse desires reminded me of something. Genetics notwithstanding and despite some physical resemblance, Danny Huston is very much his own man as an actor. The night before, however, I thought I maybe caught a bit of Noah Cross. Was I on to anything?

“You know, the tightness of the mask, and the way that it forced me to speak with a certain precision, and occasionally I heard my father’s voice kind of bleed into my voice. It was a surprise when saw it, but I kind of see what you mean. I mean, Noah Cross is probably the best baddie — if baddie is the way to describe the character of Noah Cross — I think in film history.”

* Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts may star, and Stephen Daldry might direct, an adaptation of a 9/11 themed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Lou Loumenick is, I’m sure, not the only one to hope the project never happens. The backlash against author Foer seems to be going full-steam. Since I”ve never read anything by him and missed the movie version of his “Everything is Illuminated,” I’m completely in the dark on this one.

* I mentioned in a tongue-in-cheek way on Sunday that, despite a fairly disappointing $10 million showing for “Piranha 3D” over the weekend, given the modest $24 million, I thought a sequel a possibility. I certainly didn’t expect this quick a turn-around, but there you go. Seems the foreign returns, combined with an okay take domestically on the famished fish tale were sufficient to justify another go-round at this price level.

* One person who I know for a fact to be delighted by the “Piranha” news is film blogger and devoted horror dad Dennis Cozzalio who reviewed — and kind of loved — the movie for the Bullz-Eye team this week, doing us all a solid as everyone in the staff was indisposed in one way or another. (My infamous gorephobia wasn’t helping any, either.) Coincidentally, Dennis’s excellent and already world-famous cinephile blog — Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule — got a little more world famous today through the attention from the lofty likes of Richard Brody of The New Yorker today. The topic, strangely enough, was the work of the late action director Sergio Leone. The infield fly rule will have to take care of itself for now.

* Oh, and if you reaction to the idea of a sequel to the aforementioned silly horror flick was “when pigs fly!” the great Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki has a planned sequel for you.

* It’s too sad to mention in this silly context, but it also seems wrong to ignore it and I don’t know how else to handle this. Sincere condolences to comic actor Martin Short and his family. Extremely tragic news regarding his wife.

* Apparently, unlike most /Film commenters, I actually do care that there’s may be a “Fantastic Four” reboot as they’ve always been my favorite Marvel characters, but I couldn’t even make it past the oh-so-thin first half-hour of the first movie. Why not reclaim a lost opportunity? Casting rumors, however, I never care about. Actual casting news gets really old sometimes.

* If movies are making you sick, it might not be just the content. Nah, it’s probably the content.

* The Playlist is correct. Pedro Almodovar’s new film is definitely high up on my list of highly anticipated movies for next year. It’s nice to see the Spanish director reteam with Antonio Banderas, who appeared in four of the director’s early successes starting with “Matador” in 1986 and wrapping with the controversial “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” in 1991.

However, they’ll forgive us for anticipating even more the next film from Winnipeg’s own resident eccentric cine-genius Guy Madden, which will feature Isabella Rosellini, Jason Patric, and Sir Simon Milligan himself, Kevin McDonald of The Kids in the Hall comedy troupe. No insult to Mr. Patric, but his costars appear to be two of the coolest humans extant as far as we’re concerned here at PH. Ms. Rosellini gave a great interview to Will Harris some time back, and Mr. MacDonald has a terrific career-spanning chat over at the Onion which brings up the fact that, in drag, MacDonald has a small visual similarity to the luminous Ms. R.

* The end of one of modern journalism’s greatest hates? Sharon Waxman extends an olive branch to Nikki Finke. This could be interesting.

* Capone at AICN has a great interview with thinking geeks’ favorite Guillermo del Toro. A couple of items that were new to me, anyway: it’s far from a sure thing he’ll be directing “The Haunted Mansion” though he’s definitely producing and cowriting. Also, del Toro is now openly hoping that Peter Jackson will wind up as helming “The Hobbit” after all.

Korean cinema has really flourished over the last five years under the guidance of directors like Chan-wook Park and Joon-hoo Bong, and you could probably add Ji-woon Kim to that list as well. Though his last two movies (the horror thriller “A Tale of Two Sisters” and the crime drama “A Bittersweet Life”) haven’t had much of an impact overseas, his latest film is a fresh and fun action comedy that transcends its midnight movie façade to succeed as a true cult classic in the making. Unlike Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django,” which failed to make the most of its East-meets-West potential, “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” actually has a solid story and some great acting to go along with its flashy set pieces.

Clearly inspired by Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Kim’s film takes place in 1930s Manchuria where three strangers – a bounty hunter (Woo-sung Jung), an assassin (Byung-hun Lee), and a clumsy thief (Kang-ho Song) – face off for possession of a stolen treasure map while being pursued by a group of bandits and the Japanese army. Though it’s a bit long at 130 minutes, Kim does well to keep the story moving along as we learn more about the characters and how they’re connected to one another. Granted, the supposed Good of the film isn’t really all that good considering he kills the most people, and Jung makes him so mysterious that he’s also the least identifiable, but the other two actors are perfect in their respective roles – particularly Song, who’s so amusing as the comic relief that it’s hard to imagine the movie working as well as it does without him in the mix. The film also features a handful of incredible action sequences that underscore everything that’s great about “The Good, the Bad, the Weird,” and although it might not appeal to everyone, it’s one of the most wildly entertaining movies that I’ve seen all year.

Click to buy “The Good, the Bad, the Weird”

* Our very sincere condolences to the friends, family, and avid readers of writer and horror/gore maven Chas Balun, who died of cancer on December 18th. Probably mostly because of my phobia of the kind of movies he championed, Balun’s name wasn’t immediately familiar to me before this, but clearly the author and longtime contributor to Fangoria and Gorezone was a writer whose work meant a great deal to genre fans as well as a very sincere film geek/cinephile, and for that he has my respect. The Fangoria blog has a very good obituary.

* Sony has not been including a screener DVD for Duncan Jones’ highly regarded science fiction film, “Moon,” in its pre-Oscar promotional package. The result: “Twitter storm“!

* It’s now Sir Peter Jackson to you.  Considering the positive impact his LOTR tour de force must have had on the New Zealand economy, they might have considered making him king. Okay, New Zealand doesn’t have one. Also, I gather it’s more of a British Commonwealthy kind of a thing.

* Netflix recently expanded its list of “Play Instantly” films recently via a deal with Starz. This has made the studios a bit antsy, though Netflix content chief Richard Sarandos is a valued customer. This BusinessWeek article is worth a look if you’re interested in the future of home movie viewing which, like it or not, is how most of us — even a purist like me — see most of our movies now.

* The process DisneyPixar is using for it’s next princess movie, “Rapunzel,” sounds like a blending of CGI/3-D and with more of a 2-D hand-drawn look, if that’s possible and I’m sure if anyone can make it possible, it’s these folks. Anyhow, I’m convinced that ordinary Pixar-style animation won’t work for this kind of story, so I’ll be very interested to see how it turns out. The art /film has is quite pretty, however.

* Following it’s fairly lame box office performance over last weekend, “Nine” is being yanked out of about five hundred theaters, with 890 screens remaining. [UPDATE: The key word in the report I linked to was, it turns out, “likely” as in “not certain”. Here’s the updated news.]  Earlier this year, the Weinstein Company enjoyed a break with the solid success of “Inglourious Basterds,” which was something of a surprise at the time, given the mixed response the first cut of the film had at Cannes and the fact that a large percentage of the dialogue-heavy movie is subtitled. This surprise lack of success (less surprising if you look at the reviews and the vague marketing), however, is not good news for the brothers Weinstein and their employees, I’m guessing.

* The numbers aren’t as astronomical as for the Hollywood, but Bollywood and China’s studios are doing well right at the moment. Topping it off for South Asia is the comedy-musical-melodrama hit, “Three Idiots.” Coincidentally, Anne Thompson has seen the film and liked it quite a bit. I haven’t seen a Bollywood film I’ve liked much since 2002’s hugely fun “Lagaan,” but this one sounds promising to me. I mean, how can I not have at least some affection for a national film industry where musicals are actually the default format?

* The annual ritual in which the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry picks 25 significant films to be given special status regarding preservation has occurred. It’s not a “best of” list but a “most culturally important” grouping, though there’s obviously some crossover there. For many of us, I’m sure, the most obviously overdo title is Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in the West,” which was homaged very directly in the opening sequence of “Inglourious Basterds,”

The great cinephile blogger, the Self-Styled Siren, notably did not care for that film but, as if the to compensate her, a Siren favorite was added, William Wyler’s 1938 “Jezebel.” Also included was Sidney Lumet’s 1975 “Dog Day Afternoon”; Rouben Mamoulian’s 1940 swashbuckler, “The Mark of Zorro” (a personal favorite of mine since childhood, and not only because it’ s the only period sword-fight movie set entirely in L.A., though long before freeways and the Chinese Theater); “Mrs. Miniver,” a classic piece of soapy, entertaining World War II Hollywood propaganda from, once again, the great and greatly underrated William Wyler; 1979’s wonderful “The Muppet Movie”; “Pillow Talk” the Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedy that started a whole cycle of giggly innuendo-fests; the well-regarded 1957 sci-fi hit written by Richard Matheson, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” and the John Landis-directed 1983 Michael Jackson video, “Thriller,” which certainly was culturally significant, no getting around that. You can see the complete details on the official press release. H/t Cinematical.

Like many in the film blogosphere, I owe a lot to the cite’s proprietor and sole contributor, Dennis Cozzalio, for his support and encouragement when pretty much no one was paying attention. And the weird part came when we both figured out that we’d actually probably met about ??? years back through some kind of bizarre web of L.A.-based film nerd synchronicity. But, who cares.

Really, this is a day to celebrate that great site where the seemingly inexhaustible Dennis, whose subject matter really does include baseball and the great director of Italian-made westerns but also genre films (with an emphasis on the grungier side of the street, particularly horror but also, because he’s a family man, the cleaner and brighter side of things as well) and thoughtful exploration on this thing we call cinema in pretty much every single one of its facets.If you’ve never been over to his place before, now’s as good a time as any to start. Much good film-geek reading awaits you there.

In the meantime, just a few movie moments with a twist of SLIFR. (Okay, this is mainly just because I’m in a Roger Corman mood at the moment.)

Two more after the flip.

And in celebration of perhaps Dennis most famed and controversial cinematic defense.

Damn. That actually doesn’t look half-bad. I know it’s on my Netflix queue somewhere….