No one was more surprised to see how Frank Miller’s film, “The Spirit,” turned out than one of its stars, Sarah Paulson.

“When I saw it, I was surprised by everything,” Paulson says by telephone on a recent morning. “It was shot on green screen so the only thing I had to go off was Frank’s storyboards. I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but only from the artwork. My imagination couldn’t come up with the stuff Frank did.”

Paulson is in a car, being driven to the set of “Cupid,” a new (well, recast and revived, at least) comedy on ABC that will debut in March. She’s in New York; her partner, Cherry Jones, is on the West Coast, playing the new president of the United States for the upcoming season of “24”: “It certainly doesn’t make life simpler,” she understates about the bi-coastal separation.

No comic-book geek, the Florida-reared Paulson, 34, did her homework when Miller gave her copies of Will Eisner’s original comic book, “The Spirit,” as research for her role. She plays Dr. Ellen Dolan, once the lover of cop Denny Colt; when Colt was killed in the line of duty, he was injected by a mad scientist with a serum that brought him back to life. Now he wears a mask and roams the night as the Spirit, a crimefighter who can’t be killed. And though he is irresistible to women – and has a hard time resisting them – he always comes back to the tough-minded Dr. Dolan.

“Frank told me he had changed the character from the comic,” Paulson says. “I liked that she was this very strong-willed, career-minded woman in love with a man who could only love her back in a certain way. There’s a great deal of longing there. She’s the woman he always comes back to.” (More…)

To a lot of people, smart is sexy – but apparently not to the movies, at least not in terms of most of its leading actresses.

Exhibit A: double-Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, one of Great Britain’s most enchantingly brainy (and sexy) exports.

“I don’t think I strike people as a romantic lead,” she says in a whisper (laryngitis, exacerbated by a day of press-junket interviews). “I’m a character actress.”

Which is why “Last Chance Harvey” comes as such a welcome treat: It offers Thompson the opportunity – her first in ages – to play a lead in a romantic comedy.

You have to go back a dozen years or more – to “Sense and Sensibility,” “The Remains of the Day” or “Much Ado About Nothing” – to find one on her resume. And even then, the roles were muted by Jane Austen’s reticent sensibility or the blanket of Shakespearean language. For something even marginally close to “Last Chance Harvey,” well, it’s been almost 20 years since “The Tall Guy,” a Richard Curtis script that cast her as a pragmatic nurse who fell for Jeff Goldblum.

They aren’t the kind of roles that Thompson feels comfortable chasing. She’s more at home taking on something like Lady Marchmain in last summer’s “Brideshead Revisited” than in putting herself out there as a character of romantic interest.

“I just don’t have that kind of self-confidence,” Thompson, 49, says. “Or rather, my confidence doesn’t lie in that area.” (More…)

Marisa Tomei cocks her head slightly. After a couple of questions about the mechanics of stripping – of playing a stripper in “The Wrestler” – the interviewer has gone one question too far, asking whether she’s fielding a lot of questions about the film’s nudity.

“Not until you,” she says. Oops – time to change the subject. (More…)

The timing may have been fortuitous, with the explosion of complains and lawsuits about sexual abuse against the Catholic Church.

But writer-director John Patrick Shanley insists that “Doubt,” the film of his 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, isn’t about the abuse scandal. Despite the fact that it’s set in and around a Bronx parochial school, it’s barely about the Catholic Church, per se, he says.

“The sexual topic comes up maybe once,” Shanley says in a telephone interview. “And obviously it’s not about the Catholic Church and abuse. Rather, it’s about living with doubt. It’s about having your assumptions and prejudices exploded and having to live in the present tense. When your assumptions are overturned, what are you left with to look at?” (More…)

Playwright David Hare is calling, to talk about his adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader” – and what it’s like to collaborate with director Stephen Daldry again (they also adapted “The Hours”).

“This one was a relative quickie – only two years,” Hare says with a laugh. “We spent three years on ‘The Hours.’ He spent five years on ‘Billy Elliot.’ Stephen does about one thing every decade. There’s something in him that wants to take one piece and endlessly refine it.

“He’s the most collaborative and collegial person I’ve met in my life. I was there the whole two years. He wrestles everything to the ground, to the point that you want to throttle him. He goes on asking the most basic questions, about every single detail until you’re literally ready to kill yourself.

“But the result is that the film is completely thought through, so that everything is in the frame because it was meant to be. There are filmmakers for whom thoroughness means that it’s been chewed to death. But that’s not Stephen.” (More…)

Sir Ben Kingsley won’t cop to it: No, he says, there was never a moment during the filming of “Elegy”’s love scenes that he stopped and thought, “I’m lying here naked with Penelope Cruz, an incredibly beautiful and desirable woman.”

“No, I’m very much in character,” Sir Ben, 64 (he’ll be 65 on New Year’s Eve), says, sitting with perfect posture on a hotel couch. “Those moments could be catastrophic to the film if I was thinking that.

“The camera wants to see two people finding each other. There is a tentative quality, this curious dance they do around each other. I allowed my character to stay inside his terror of intimacy and that gives Penelope space to say, ‘I want him to be intimate with my Consuela.’ It’s that dance we’re fascinated by.”

Kingsley is in New York – if only briefly – to do end-of-the-year press for “Elegy,” the well-reviewed drama based on Philip Roth’s novel, “The Dying Animal.” The film was released in August; the idea is to remind voters for the Oscars and various critics’ groups that this film was also released this year, even if it wasn’t part of the raucous landslide of year-end releases. (More…)

Yes, “Nothing But the Holidays” focuses on a Hispanic family in Chicago at Christmas time – but that focus, says Freddie Rodriguez, is on two words: family and Christmas.

“The intention from Day One was to make an American holiday movie that revolved around a Latin family,” says Rodriguez, one of the film’s stars and executive producers. “The idea was to balance between being universal and being authentic – and not to swing one way or the other.”

So Rodriguez rounded up a big cast, layered the film with laughs and drama – and will launch the movie into theaters on Friday.

“There have been films about Latin families, but none that revolve around a holiday theme in a more universal, commercial way,” Rodriguez says, “Mainstream studios know that the majority of the movie-going audience is Latin. And really, I don’t think they necessarily look at movies as Latin or black or white – as long as they’re earning green.” (More…)

Nacho Vigalondo recoils as a ray of sunlight breaks through the cloud cover blanketing Manhattan and blasts through a window, striking him square in the eye.

“Oh my God, the sun,” he says, raising an arm to block it out, then smiling and adding, “I’m like a vampire.”

He gets up from his chair in the Magnolia Pictures conference room on Manhattan’s West 27^th Street where he is being interviewed and begins to pace.

“Do you mind if I stand up? My English is much better when I walk around, for some reason” he says in Spanish-accented English. So he begins pacing, occasionally reseating himself, or cruising the fruit platter near the window, as he talks about his tricky first film, “Time Crimes,” which opens Friday. (More…)

It’s hard to find two more dissimilar role models for Darnell Martin’s new film, “Cadillac Records,” than the ones she mentions in describing the film: “Goodfellas” and “Lady Sings the Blues.”

Diana Ross’ Billie Holliday movie? OK, that makes sense. But Scorsese’s gangster classic? (More…)

Looking like the cat who swallowed the canary – in one bite, no less – actor Alan Rickman smiles and pauses to consider the question: What words are the most fun to wrap his mouth around with an American accent?

Finally he gives a heavy-lidded grin – one that cautions against being put off-guard by his sleepy-eyed look – and says, with clear enunciation, “Barack Obama.”

He offers a dramatic pause, then adds with satisfaction, “Followed by, ‘Thank God.’” (More…)