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This Issue 11/30/2006

Also in this issue

• Ego of the Week: Queen of Couture
• Child stalking: A good thing?
• I want blow now, daddy!
• A User's guide to Fetish fun

Like his emotionally explosive films (The Notebook and John Q among them), Nick Cassavetes's mere appearance demands attention. The 47-year-old writer-director stands well over six feet tall, and his young face and silver hair contrast with the elaborate tattoos on his neck and arms. Sitting down in a conference room at the Four Seasons hotel downtown, he begins to doodle shapes and names on a notepad.

"Oh, this is my phone list. I have to call people back," he explains.

Indeed, Cassavetes is a busy man these days: he's currently promoting January's new Alpha Dog, a biopic of Jesse James Hollywood, the youngest fugitive ever to appear on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list (names and locations were changed due to an ongoing lawsuit ). A jarring look at Southern Californian twentysomethings with too much money and not enough parental guidance, Dog stars The Girl Next Door's Emile Hirsch as a 20-year-old drug dealer who kidnaps the teenage brother of an addict who owes him money.

"He made a very, very bad decision. He hadn't watched enough CSI," Cassavetes says of Hirsch's Johnny Truelove, for whom the basis was Mr. Hollywood. The story begins with a lengthy study of Truelove's hard-partying crew, which includes Justin Timberlake as a loopy pot smoker. The intense second half examines the group's infighting over whether they should return the kidnapped kid (Anton Yelchin), with Truelove growing desperate as the bullets start flying.

"I'm not looking for shock value. The story in itself is plenty of shock value. As a filmmaker, you kind of inherently know what the audience wants to see, you know how they want it to resolve. They want the bad guy to get theirs, and the good guy to be okay, and everybody having their own point of view and having lots of motivating actions. But that pesky little thing called the truth keeps popping up."

The peskiness, in this case, comes when events force Truelove to flee to South America to escape arrest. As in Cassavetes's other films, the father figure, Sonny Truelove (Bruce Willis), does what he must to keep his son safe, allegedly orchestrating Johnny's getaway. "At the end of the day, there's a kind of a jailhouse nobility in that," Cassavetes says. "I'd do the same damn thing. I don't care what my kid does, I'm gonna take care of him. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and I believe in that - except when it comes to my kid."