On Movies: A loving look at Philadelphia's underside

There's that old saw, write what you know.

And that's exactly what Philadelphia actor Mark Webber did when he decided to put pen to paper, digits to laptop, and write Explicit Ills.

The film, which debuted last spring at the South by Southwest Film Festival and opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse, takes place around Webber's old neighborhoods - Northern Liberties, Kensington, Fishtown. The low-budget indie - with Paul Dano, Rosario Dawson, Naomie Harris, Lou Taylor Pucci, Frankie Shaw, the Roots' Tariq Trotter, and newcomer Francisco Burgos - tracks a group of Philadelphians as they struggle with poverty, addiction, love, and hope.

"I wanted to make a film that was about my life experiences, and about people I have known," says Webber, 28, of his directing debut. "And I wanted to shoot in my hometown. But I wasn't setting out to make a gritty, documentary-style film. . . . I wanted to really find my voice as a filmmaker esthetically and visually."

For a time when he was little, Webber and his mother, Cheri Honkala, lived out of a car and stayed in abandoned buildings. She went on to found the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a homeless advocacy organization, and then a national umbrella group called the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. Those experiences and issues inform Webber's movie, which works best when his characters are allowed to be themselves, not walking signposts for a cause.

"There's a little bit of me in every character, really," says Webber, who attended the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, and made his screen debut in Eugene Martin's 1998 homegrown Edge City. Since then, Webber has worked in a string of adventurous low-budget pics, and played opposite Bill Murray in director Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers. Jarmusch is Explicit Ills' executive producer.

"Jim served as godfather to the film," says Webber, who showed early cuts of the film to the indie pioneer, using Jarmusch as a sounding board and advisor. "He was one of the very first people that I took the script to, and he read the film and I asked him to do this. . . . He's a filmmaker who makes the films he wants to make, the way he wants to make them. Which is how I feel all films, or all art, really should be."

Webber now lives in Los Angeles. "If you had talked to me a year ago and told me, I'd have said, 'That's never going to happen,' " he jokes.

In making Explicit Ills, he was determined to show the Philadelphia that he loves, and determined to avoid the cliches. The film was shot here - in North Philadelphia, and in Center City's Fitler Square - in just 25 days, in the fall of 2007.

"Philadelphia was very much a character to me, just as much as any of the cast were," he says. "And I wanted to photograph Philadelphia without resorting to a shot of the Art Museum steps, you know what I mean?

"Philadelphia is just such a beautiful city on so many levels. When I was writing the movie I wrote for very specific locations, and was very fortunate to be able to go and shoot in those exact places. . . . Our production office was right across the street from one of the apartments I lived in growing up, at Fifth Street right off of Girard. That sense of home just made it that much easier to make a film."

Cliff notes. If you've seen the box- office behemoths Live Free or Die Hard and 10,000 B.C., or Training Day and The Insider, or Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, David O. Russell's Three Kings, or Jane Campion's The Piano. . . well, then you've seen Cliff Curtis.

And right now the native New Zealander, of Maori heritage, is in theaters with the psychic action thriller Push, and Wayne Kramer's immigration melodrama Crossing Over. In the latter, which opened Friday, Curtis plays a Homeland Security agent of Iranian background, partnered with Harrison Ford. The plot gets crazy, and Curtis gets the movie's biggest and most intense scene, a virtual monologue about crime and forgiveness, the immigrant experience and citizenship, delivered while waving a gun.

"It's a very tough scene," says Curtis. "It was a really good challenge. He's a good man caught in a really bad situation . . . trying to figure out what to do."

Curtis, 40, has played many a Middle Eastern type, and he's played cops, feds and bad guys. It's work he's happy to do.

"I'm a person of color of no specific ethnicity - well, I'm a Polynesian," he explains. "I'm not black, I'm not Middle Eastern, and I'm certainly not a WASP, so it's like the roles available to me are limited. . . . I'll either be the antagonist of the piece, or I'll be the partner, the cop partner."

Within those limits, though, Curtis has been selective. "I try to make choices by looking who the director is, and who I am working with, and then the material - if it's got substance."

But ask Curtis, who is still based in New Zealand even though the majority of his work comes out of Hollywood, if he feels like he's being pigeonholed, and he shrugs it off.

"Do I have aspirations of other sorts of things? I don't know. I've worked with huge movie stars, and one thing that impresses me about them is they do have an incredible level of focus about what they want in life. I don't know whether I fit in that category. I like to think more romantically. You know: life is an adventure that takes you down different roads, and I'll see where they lead."

These days, the road leads to Philadelphia. Curtis was just here to meet and do a read-through with his fellow castmates on The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation of the Nickelodeon series. Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel, Twilight's Jackson Rathbone, and newcomer Noah Ringer also star. Shooting begins in a few weeks, with production in Greenland as well as here, in Shyamalanland.

The fantasy story, with elements of anime and Asian martial arts, is an epic tale that, if all goes according to plan, will be a trilogy of films.

Curtis wouldn't say who he plays. "I don't know if I'm allowed, actually. But I can say this much: the film is going to be huge, and it's conceptually really sound. . . . I think M. Night's got a really strong take on it, he's got a whole mythology that he's working in. It's impressive."