On Movies | New director learns from Lynch: Be cool

Hey,

Justin Theroux

knew what he was getting into. As an actor these last dozen years, he'd worked with plenty of directors. And then, in

David Lynch's

Mulholland Drive

, Theroux got to play one: A crazed, ego-mad filmmaker forced into some nasty casting compromises.

So when it came time to don the director's cap for Dedication, Theroux was all set, right?

"I had no idea. Had I known, I would have played it very differently in Mulholland Drive," says the actor, offering an ironic cackle.

"Actually, there are similarities. Maybe a few things I got right - the casting pressures and all that."

Dedication, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse, stars Theroux's friend and colleague Billy Crudup, chanteuse-turned-thespian Mandy Moore, and killer Brit Tom Wilkinson. (The supporting cast is nothing to sneeze at, either: Dianne Wiest, Bob Balaban, Amy Sedaris, Bobby Cannavale.) It's about a xenophobic nutcase children's book author (Crudup) whose illustrator/best buddy (Wilkinson) passes away. Enter a new artist collaborator (Moore), and a bipolar love story ensues.

With an edgy indie soundtrack (courtesy, in large part, of the band Deerhoof) and offbeat, artsy but effective shooting and editing, Dedication is a moving, funny, occasionally maddening affair.

Theroux, 36, says that, seriously, he did pick up a few things from working with the surreally bent Lynch on Mulholland Drive - and again on Lynch's latest, Inland Empire (see below).

"I gleaned a lot from him. Probably first and foremost, that he is the calmest man on Earth, and that is invaluable to actors and crew, as far as getting work done," Theroux notes, on the phone from his home in New York.

"The more tyrannical directors I've worked for usually find themselves getting less good material. He's so calm and so lovely that the work sort of comes effortlessly out of people. In that sense, he's very inspiring."

So the novice Theroux tried to emulate that laid-back serenity on his own 23-day, all-over-New York shoot. "One thing that I tried to make triply sure of was that I was able to create a work environment that felt unrushed. . . . I was not calm inside, but I had done so much advance work on the movie that when we actually hit the ground running it wasn't a shock. I was pretty well prepared for the day's work. . . . It wasn't as strenuous or as taxing as I thought."

Theroux has known Crudup forever, and when the soon-to-be director got the Dedication script and was looking for a lead, he sent it over.

"I just knew that he would murder the part," Theroux says. "So with trepidation, as a friend, I gave it to him and said, 'What do you think?' And he really liked it. I said, 'Would you do it?' and he said yes.

"It was incredibly fortunate, because he's not the type to do me any favors - if he didn't like it."

And how did Moore - not most people's idea of the romantic lead in a jittery, profane New York indie - fit into the picture?

"Someone suggested her and I thought, who is she again? And I took a look at some of the work that she had done. I remembered her from Saved!, and I watched another movie called A Walk to Remember - some sort of bizarre movie about a girl who had cancer, that she did when she was like zero years old.

"But I really liked her. She has this kind of inner light that pours out of her, and a rooted, stable quality which I knew I would need to counterweight Billy's frantic, frenetic character. . . . She seemed exactly the right thing for what I needed in that part, which is someone who could just dig in on the other side of the table from Billy, and seem sound and truthful."

Theroux, who had a small part in Zoe Cassavetes' smart debut, Broken English (he's the movie star with the Mohawk who beds Parker Posey), is spending a lot of time in Hawaii right now. He's written the script for Tropic Thunder, the $100 million DreamWorks production shooting there. It's a dark comedy about a bunch of actors in a Vietnam War picture who end up fighting for their lives, for real. Theroux's buddy Ben Stiller is directing, and the cast includes Stiller, Matthew McConaughey (replacing the hospitalized Owen Wilson), Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black.

"I'm producing as well, and I do a couple of bit parts," Theroux reports. "It's a big fat studio movie. . . . It's basically a riff on Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now."

"The Evil was born and followed the boy . . . " Speaking of the supernaturally serene David Lynch, Inland Empire, the director's three-hour, in-Polish and in-English excursion into the far reaches of somebody's wonderfully messed-up head, is out on DVD.

Starring Laura Dern as an actress whose whole world unravels, and featuring a bevy of dancing hookers, guest turns from Jeremy Irons, Julia Ormond, Diane Ladd, and Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie, Inland Empire never made it to theaters in Philly, even though it made a number of critics' Top 10 lists at the end of last year.

Check it out, and check out that strange sitcom clan that reappears here and there through the digital video epic - a kind of Ozzie and Harriet family, neatly attired, doing the ironing, coming and going, and all wearing giant rabbit heads.

Punctuation. My keenly observant editor has noted a new and troubling Hollywood trend. The colon, that one-dot-above-the-other punctuation mark, is showing up in an alarming number of movie titles coming soon to a marquee near you. Here's a list:

Resident Evil: Extinction

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song

Kurt Cobain: About a Son

Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

And coming up in 2008: Funk & Wagnalls vs. Strunk and White: The Ultimate Grammarian Smack Down.