Here’s my whole Ryan Reynolds interview. WAY longer than in the paper. If you’re passionate about this guy, this is my Valentine to you. And yes, he is that cute.

In the Valentine’s Day release “Definitely, Maybe,” Ryan Reynolds plays a newly divorced advertising executive who finds himself on an extended flashback to his youth when his 10-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin) demands an unusual bedtime story, the tale of how he met and married her mother (yes, like the TV show, but much shorter). The candidates are played by Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks and Isla Fisher.

Whose first name, by the way, is definitely pronounced Eye-La. Reynolds corrected us when we said Is-La. We also learned a few things about him: He’s an admirer of Jimmy Stewart; he wears a vintage pocket watch on a chain that looks like something Stewart would have owned; spending half his life acting has killed his visual reflexes to the point where he barely seems to squint in the sun. Also, if you are going to ask about Scarlett Johansson, his alleged fiancée – replacing Alanis Morissette, his former fiancee – try to slip her in subtlety because this guy would rather talk politics than the personal.

Q: My nephew loves “Van Wilder” so much he demanded I watch it with him. I kept thinking about him during “Definitely, Maybe.”
A: (Laughing) He’d be so horrified
Q: It’s definitely more of woman’s movie.
A: I thought that too when I was shooting it, but now I’ve seen the reactions from men and they are so incredible. It’s ostensibly romantic comedy but told from a male perspective, so I think it’s something that a lot of guys can relate to. I think it explores an interesting topic which is that for a lot of men, when it comes to meeting the one, it’s a question of When, and for women it’s a question of Who. And for a lot of guys I think they’re finding it fascinating, to be watching the movie thinking that’s me, I went through this.
Q: I don’t think I’ve ever heard a guy articulate that, although we women sit around talking about that all the time. It’s like a switch goes off for men. Did the film help you develop this theory or did you have it before?
A: Oh, in every act of the film there’s something about this. That was one of its drawing points, definitely. The other was the fact that it was a romantic comedy but it was completely unpredictable, something I had never seen or heard about before. Its this romantic whodunit kind of film.
Q: But have you seen ‘How I Met Your Mother?’
A: I’ve heard about but I’ve never seen it.
Q: The movie opens in 1992, with your character playing an idealistic young volunteer working for the Clinton campaign, and as his life unfolds, so does the Clinton era, with particular emphasis on the negatives. I seriously kept thinking the Hillary Clinton campaign will be toast if this movie is big.
A: I’m sure they would be upset if it was coming out before Super Tuesday. But yeah, we relive that in the film like no one’s business. It’s right there in all of its horrifying glory.
Q: It was indeed horrifying to revisit. So much so it might make even a Hillary supporter want to run out and vote for Barack.
A: I didn’t think it vilified the Clintons as much as it examined the disillusionment of young people, young idealistic people who really felt like that was their President. I think it really makes you want to run out and vote for true change. For me the scariest thing in politics right now is two families running the white house for three decades.
Q: But at least one of them came from nothing
A: Oh yeah, he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Listen, I think Bill Clinton was a fantastic president. Did he handle the scandal well? No, not at all. But if you look at his track record, if you look at the economy, he went miles, not inches, leaving a surplus like that.
Q: On set did you discuss what impact this movie might have?
A: We were shooting it a year ago, and Barack Obama wasn’t even on the radar, it was really kind of a Hillary question. We shot in Brooklyn and we set up this building to look like in 1992, the Bill Clinton headquarters and people would walk in off the street to volunteer thinking it was Hillary’s campaign. So it was definitely something very much within our consciousness. But we had no idea that life would imitate art in this way. We have this character in the movie who wants to be first black president as well, Derek Luke’s character. Now we’re all sitting around going wow, this is a well timed film.
Q: Now can you vote here?
A: No, I’m Canadian, I can’t vote. I’ve got residency, just not citizenship. It’s not a question of if, it is a question of when. I’m eligible for it as of this year. So this coming summer I’ll apply for it.
Q: Do you still spend much time in Canada?
A: I used to go back and forth a lot more than I do now. I had a house there up until about a year ago, but now I’m exclusively in Los Angeles and New York.
Q: It’s probably silly, but I always feel kind of sorry for celebrities, being just nomads, seemingly without a home base. It seems like you’re all always selling houses you’ve barely lived in.
A: There is that. But celebrities are a certain type of people. They are probably a bit more restless. They are also exposed to a tremendous amount of stimuli, like flashing light bulbs, the paparazzi issue and just the amount of attention they get. It’s got to be a pretty weird type of scene to try to navigate your way through in a healthy way. I really try to stay away from that stuff as much as possible.
Q: I do see stuff about you on the trashy web sites I visit though. You are a presence.
A: I guess so, yeah, you can’t avoid it. But not to the extent, when someone has that crush of media out in front of their house all day. Where you have 14, 15, even 50 paparazzi teeming away outside your house, I think there is something to be said about that person, to some degree, welcoming that into their lives. If you don’t want to be photographed eating lunch, don’t go to the [expletive] Ivy. I think there’s a way to curb some of that. But to a certain degree you can’t avoid it, it’s a celebrity obsessed culture, the news media is kind of infotainment now. It’s pervasive, everywhere, it’s inescapable. I’ll be on my motorcycle and stop somewhere to pick up something at the store and I’ll look up and I can’t believe that there are four guys in the shooting me from across the street. I just can’t believe that someone does that for a living. These people survey you. You’re under surveillance. It’s pretty violent.
Q: It feels more frenzied now than ever before. Like our culture is actually driving Britney Spears crazy.
A: I think a lot of that has to do with the emergence of the Internet, allowing people to not just be a voyeur but to take part in it now. it’s a much more interactive blood sport now than it used to be. Also you’re dealing with psychological issues. A lot of people are projecting good and bad on celebrities and it’s very easy to do that. To make yourself feel better because you can tear down a celebrity really easily, in print or you can write a blog about them. You can do anything you want.
Q: I’ve seen pictures of you, very grainy ones, from the set of the latest Woody Allen movie, alongside a certain starlet who recently dodged the question of whether she was engaged to you by saying she was engaged to Barack Obama.
A: I’m actually engaged to Mike Huckabee. We’re taking things really slowly right now.
Q: Is it only because he lost the weight?
A: Yeah, he’s looking good. He’s fit as a fiddle. He’s generous with his time and affection
Q: But do you think he’s a fan of ‘Van Wilder?’
A: Oh yes, he’s told me so.
Q: So in a situation like that, when you’re on the lunch line in Spain, are you even aware you’re being photographed?
A: I’m not aware of anything. I don’t pay attention to any of those things. I mean, if I see something while I’m standing in line at the grocery store, then so be it.
I don’t actively seek that stuff out. And certainly not on the Internet, you can go out at night and then the next day if you really want to, be a voyeur to your own life. It’s weird.
Q: I’d say tragic.
A: Well I’m not speaking to the fact that they seek it out, I’m speaking more to the possibility that you can, go out to dinner go have a drink somewhere, do whatever it is that normal people do, and then the next day you can actually log on to the Internet and see where you went. It’s kinda sad.
Q: So all this celebrity stuff seems exhausting. Where is the joy?
A: I love finding a script where some element of it scares me to a certain degree. I love reading a script and finding something that speaks to a side of me I’ve really tried to avoid. I also try to focus on living a full, balanced life outside of show business.
Q: What do you in you real life?
A: I do a lot of trips, a lot of solo motorcycle trips. Like I went across Australia by myself. And this year I was in Africa for three weeks with my friend John August who directed a movie I did called ‘The Nines.’ We went to Malawi TK and spent three weeks there. It was amazing. A friend of mine started this organization called FOMO, which is Friends of Malanje Orphans and she single-handled saved 4,000 kids herself. I went and volunteered at her orphanage. Dug holes and made wells and painted nurseries. They don’t need us to do that necessarily, but it emotionally invests you in it and you leave with kind of feeling that you’re really a part of this and you have an unshakeable care for these people.
Q: I don’t remember seeing photos of you with a paint brush in your hand.
A: But this wasn’t done as one of those benevolent peace keeping missions. I write on Huffington Post sometimes, but I haven’t yet to publish anything on there about this. I love sharing my experience, but it was such a personal experience. And I’m very wary of actors in particular airing out their laundry. I’m very sensitive to that stuff. You see so many actors and you don’t want to know what their religious preference is or who they are dating, you just want to see them on screen. I’m still trying to reconcile that before I do anything with that particularly piece.
Q: Okay, it’s cheesy, but what’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done? I read on imdb.com that when you first started dating Rachel Leigh Cook, you left the set of some movie to surprise her on her set.
A: Oh that imdb is so wily. Hmmm. Most romantic thing I’ve ever done…
Q: Or that someone has done for you?
A: It’s so hard to say…
Q: Without revealing secret parts of your life? You could change the names when you tell the story, the way your character does in ‘Definitely, Maybe.’
A: Okay, I do have one. I was once on a motorcycle trip in the middle of nowhere in Australia and someone sent a Chinese food dinner, I couldn’t believe this, to the only motel around, which they guessed that I would be staying in. It was the only restaurant around, a Chinese restaurant in the Outback. And they had called ahead and got them to deliver to this seedy little motel on the side of the road. It was there waiting for me in my room and it was still warm. I thought it was pretty romantic.
Q: But if that was the only restaurant in town, presumably you might have made it there on your own?
A: I would have had to, yes, so either way I would ended up throwing up that night.

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I admit to getting suckered into buying Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue every year, and reading every word very closely, including those little behind the cover-shoot scenes captions about who chitchatted with who or admired each other’s boobs, or shared carrot sticks. And yet, this year, they are definitely giving us too much information. Check out this link to the behind-the-scenes of the Hitchcock themed photo shoot, which I was steered to by some site during my refreshing post deadline round of procrastination (defamer.com I think). Renee Zellweger, Jodie Foster (doing The Birds), Naomi Watts (as Marnie) and Charlize Theron (Dial M for Murder) are all fine actresses, (Scarlett, I’m choosing to say nothing rather than something mean) and I have no doubt that the final still photos will be fabulous. But after watching Zellweger pull a lot of scared Kim Novak faces in her homage to Vertigo, I’ll have trouble taking her seriously again. I know the Internet is supposed to get us up close and personal 24/7, but for God’s sake, webmasters, please keep in mind that the sausage making process is not pretty to watch!

I just read this statement from actress Michelle Williams on the Jan. 22 death of Heath Ledger, her ex-boyfriend (husband? who knows, it’s mysterious) and father of her 2-year-old daughter Matilda. I’m posting it here not just because it made me cry but because it is one of the classiest requests for privacy I’ve ever seen from a celebrity. I hope people listen and that the paparazzi stand down. The idea that anyone could read these words and still go stake out her house in Brooklyn, waiting for to “show” the grief she’s so eloquently shared here, is appalling.

Via Ledger’s rep to Reuters apparently: “Please respect our need to grieve privately. My heart is broken,” Williams, 27, said. “I am the mother of the most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl who is the spitting image of her father. All that I can cling to is his presence inside her that reveals itself every day. His family and I watch Matilda as she whispers to trees, hugs animals, and takes steps two at a time, and we know that he is with us still. She will be brought up with the best memories of him.”

The first time I saw Heath Ledger act was in The Patriot, Mel Gibson’s Revolutionary War epic, released in late June 2000. He played Gibson’s bold young son, eager to go to war. Coincidentally, it was my first week as a movie critic. I don’t remember much about the movie except for how bloody it was. But I do remember noticing Ledger’s leonine good looks, the ready smile and warm eyes and thinking, “That guy is going to be a major movie star.”

It hardly took a rocket scientist to hazard that guess; indeed many others had made that same assessment earlier, after his breakthrough role in the 1999 teen flick 10 Things I Hate About You. And all of us were right. At the time of his mysterious, apparently drug-related death at 28 on Tuesday, Ledger had been Oscar-nominated, linked to various starlets and stalked by paparazzi and gossip hounds, all the usual trappings of movie stardom.

But we were also wrong. His body of work doesn’t look much like that of a movie star. There’s no high grossing romantic comedy set in Manhattan, co-starring an It girl. Nor an action flick where he showed off his pecs. The closest thing to a franchise on his resume is The Dark Knight, the next Batman movie from director Christopher Nolan, due out this spring, but in that, Ledger plays an iconic villain – the Joker – not the leading man.

In his career, he made off-beat choices, the choices of an actor who wanted to work, but seemed more interested in being challenged by what he did than in cashing in on his own extreme physical beauty. There are many reasons why his sudden, shocking death matters within the world of pop culture: He was young and famous. He leaves behind an ex-girlfriend, Michelle Williams, another innate acting talent, and the child they had together. Matilda Rose, who is just 2, looks startlingly like her father, and he seemed utterly devoted to her (Have you seen the photo of him tenderly wiping her face at a London café from last fall? That’ll get you crying if nothing else does.)

But within the world of film, the question of why Heath Ledger mattered has a lot more to do with integrity of choice and sincerity of execution than with glamour. His end is tinged with the possibility of something sordid, but his quality of performance, right up through his last films, never suggested anyone on the decline. Even just glimpsing a still photograph of him in full Joker regalia is enough to make The Dark Knight look like a winner.

He famously didn’t work for a year after 10 Things, turning down roles that were cut from the same bolt of cloth until The Patriot came along. Then he appeared in A Knight’s Tale, a frivolous but fun medieval tale with a twist; a very loud and very contemporary musical score. Briefly, he appeared to be headed into the business of being professionally adorable.

But the next role he took was in Monster’s Ball, in which he had the demeanor of a whipped dog. He played Billy Bob Thornton’s son, who had gone into the family business of guarding death row inmates but was clearly too sensitive for it. His Sonny was the kind of lonely boy who, quite sweetly, asked the prostitute he’d just finished with if she wanted to go get something to eat. He’s not in the film long — his last scene is a quick, sobering punch to the audience’s gut – but what he does with the role makes the rest of the story plausible.

That was his style, seeking out each new role almost as if trying to erase the memory of the last one. He navigated his own career not like a man trying to get from point A to point B, but like an adventurer poking around in an archipelago. The mainstream failed him more often than not – think of the visually sumptuous but ultimately forgettable Four Feathers – but he never seemed inclined to rule anything out. He made one less than spectacular movie with Terry Gilliam (the goofy mess The Brothers Grimm), but still signed up for another, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which was in production when he died.

He showed the same loyalty to his homeland, going back to Australia to make Ned Kelly, about that country’s legendary outlaw (and beginning a relationship with his co-star Naomi Watts that lasted a couple of years). It was then that he had his first real taste of being tabloid fodder. As if to negate the image of himself as a romantic lead, he signed on for Lords of Dogtown, the skateboarding saga based on Stacy Peralta’s 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. He plays a surf shop owner half-way between The Big Lebowski’s The Dude and Val Kilmer’s version of Jim Morrison and he’s barely recognizable: bearded, with strange teeth and wild hair. He plays what we used to call a complete “waste product.” But he’s convincing, funny and there is that trademark sincerity visible in his character, even drunk and mumbling.

In 2005, he had three films premiere at the Venice Film Festival, one of them Brokeback Mountain, the Ang Lee film that cemented Ledger as an acting force, turning him into “Oscar-nominee Heath Ledger.” Doing publicity at the festival, he described the process of making Brokeback as lonely and tortuous. The light and frothy Casanova, in which he played the legendary lover opposite Sienna Miller, was the pasta-eating, merriment-making holiday he gave himself as a reward. He told reporters he liked to switch back and forth between types of projects., not because he had a master plan, but because he liked to “flip the scale” on jobs, alternating between using different parts of his brain.

The physicality of his Brokeback performance was particularly brilliant; through body language, he pulled off aging decades while his co-star Jake Gyllenhaal just looked like a guy wearing a fake moustache. Some complained about his rumbling delivery, but I hung on every word. What really sold me on him as an actor was the way his eyes told us everything, even when Ennis was obviously hiding behind his wall of reticence. It was almost disconcertingly real, like having someone you love tell you everything’s fine when you know different.

He wanted, he said, to scare himself with new challenges. Playing a heroin addict in “Candy,” another Australian production, must have done that. And as he revealed in that now-much-referred-to New York Times profile timed for the release of I’m Not There, in which he played the least likeable of director Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylans, the The Dark Knight definitely did. Playing the Joker had made him unable to sleep, he told the Times’ Sarah Lyall, even after he’d popped multiple Ambiens. If he’d been your friend, telling you that, it would have raised alarm bells. But we’re so unused to celebrities opening up about real problems – unless maybe they’re on Barbara Walter’s couch – that it passed right by the public consciousness. I took away from that story only a liking for his frankness, although clearly, he needed help. (And a doctor who would do something other than throw more pills at him.)

People have compared his death to James Dean’s, as a robbery of potential. Dean is so long gone he’s more a postcard to me than anything else. But another Oscar-nominee, River Phoenix, dead at 23 from an overdose? That’s who I’m reminded of. Phoenix has been dead 14 years, but I still get sad, thinking about him, and I suspect I’ll still feel the same way about Ledger in another 14 years. I hope someday his daughter finds solace from watching his films, from looking into those eyes of his, and seeing a sincerity that no role seemed able to mask, no matter how deeply he vanished into it.

With it being a day of Oscar nominations and reviews to write, I barely have time to think, but this was just terribly tragic news to get: Australian actor Heath Ledger, who was so good in Brokeback Mountain, was found dead today in a New York apartment owned by Mary-Kate Olsen (okay, that’s just weird) according to reports in the New York Times. (Update: the actresses rep has said it wasn’t her apartment.) Pills found near the body reportedly, which certainly makes it sound like suicide. It’s stupid to make flash judgments, but of course, my first reaction is, how can someone who so clearly found such great joy from his beautiful little girl Matilda — who can’t be more than 2 — have been so careless with his life? And what about the cautionary tale about two heroin addicts, Candy, he starred in a few years back?

Depressing. And this just as we’ve been hearing how fantastic he is in the Batman sequel The Dark Knight, playing the joker. And on the heels of his work in I’m Not There? I can’t even think about this anymore, it is just such a waste of talent and life and potential and most important, parenthood.

UPDATE: the video was removed from defamer’s site, although it can be found other places, including dlisted. but not for long, i’m sure.

Yesterday gawker.com posted a video interview with Tom Cruise talking about Scientology, supposedly put together for a “church” event a couple of years ago at which Cruise was honored. It disappeared so fast I never had a chance to click on it, but it resurfaced Monday afternoon on YouTube and linked on defamer and popsugar. It’s jaw droppingly weird, especially the last three minutes. If anyone knows what “spectators” are, please comment. Enjoy.

We’re tight for space in the paper these days, but I wanted to post my entire Francis Ford Coppola here for anyone who is interested. (And with a correction, I stupidly misspelled Jean-Luc Godard’s name in the version that ran in the paper, which a smart reader pointed out.) I’ve got to say, in my days as a movie writer I’ve interviewed some big names — Ridley Scott, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank, Oliver Stone — and a lot of people I particularly admire, like Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. But when the phone rang at my house on Dec. 14th and it was FFC calling, I realized that my hands were shaking so much it was hard to transcribe. And the great director might have only had 15 minutes for me, but they were thoughtful ones. So here it is:

15 Minutes With: Francis Ford Coppola

It’s been 10 years since Francis Ford Coppola directed a feature film (1997’s “Rainmaker”). Now comes “Youth Without Youth,” the story of an old professor (Tim Roth) who is struck by lightning in 1939 and miraculously restored to youth — and agelessness. A time-tripping romantic odyssey intertwined with science fiction, the movie explores philosophical questions about everything from the birth of language to the nature of dreams versus reality.

Coppola, 68, funded “Youth Without Youth” on his own, using profits from his lucrative Napa Valley wine business, and as a result, he’s dubbed it his independent film. But don’t expect jarring camera work and poor lighting; “Youth Without Youth” was made on less than $20 million but it still has Coppola’s lush visual style. But it’s also defiantly challenging and more off-beat than anything he’s made since 1982’s “One From the Heart.” Movie critic Mary Pols talked to Coppola via telephone last week and found that this project is also very much from the master filmmaker’s heart.

Q: Like most Bay Area journalists, I harbor a fantasy about interviewing you at your vineyard in Napa. Where are you?
A: I’m in a hotel in New York, and it is snowing outside.

Q: In all the advance press I’ve read about “Youth Without Youth,” you sound so eager and almost anxious to please audiences with this film. Is that a fair characterization?
A: When you make a film it’s not a lot of different than when you cook a dinner for people and you hope that they enjoy it and that you are giving them a new and enjoyable experience. There are lots of different kinds of films, including the ones that you go to with your family that are fun but you might not remember much about two weeks later. But there are also the kind of films that inspired me when I was 18, like films by Ingmar Bergman and [Michelangelo] Antonioni, that after I saw them I wanted to think about and see again. I wanted to make a film like that. Films can be multi-leveled. The themes in them can be themes from our lives, like what is reality? And maybe the answers aren’t necessarily there, laid out easy. When I was 9 years old and went to camp, we would all look up at the stars at night and we thought, ‘Are they really real? What is real?’

Q: The inspiration was a novella by a Romanian philosopher named Mircea Eliade. It’s not exactly something you’d pick up at an airport bookstore.
A: He [Eliade] was a philosopher who wrote many serious works, but then he would write these little fairy tales that incorporated things he’d derived from Buddhism and other philosophies. And he did it for fun. A lot of times I came to something in his story and said, ‘Should I include this, what would a 14 year old kid think, would they understand it?’ And then I would think, I don’t want to lose it.

Q: If you’d made this film within the confines of a studio, they would have had you dump that stuff, right?
A: When you work in that system and you get the notes pretty much everything is about clarity and simplicity. Basically you are supposed to dumb it down so it can have the widest possibly audience. I actually think some 14-year-olds would be able to explain this movie to their parents. But audiences get conditioned about what a movie is supposed to be. There is this idea that after 40 years of watching television, that movies are supposed to go down fast and easy and then they are over. Even people who might be reading Stendhal at night tend to say, ‘Well that is fine for the book, but a movie ought to go down fast.’ But I think there is room for movies that can operate on other levels. Movies that make you think about different themes just for the fun of it. Like what if you had the chance to live your life again or be with a lost love again?

Q: If you could time travel, the way Tim Roth’s character in “Youth Without Youth” does, what age would you return to?
A: Well I guess I did it with this film. I became 18 again and went back and made an art film. I had the career of a 50-year-old man when I was in my 20s. I was always a little sad that the guy who wanted to make films like his idols, like Fellini, Pasolini and Godard never got the chance to because I became so famous and successful that it caused me to turn another way. But what is to stop me from making a student film again?

Q: So much has been made of this being an indie film that I expected something less formal and old-fashioned looking.
A: Since the story starts in 1939, I wanted you to get back in that mood and I wanted you to get back into the life of that philosopher.

Q: Vanity Fair called this “the strangest mainstream movie of the year.”
A: That’s interesting. Years ago they would have called it an art film but you are not allowed to say that any more, because that will make people think it’s something they can’t understand. This is an art film on one hand, but on the other, it’s ‘The Twilight Zone’ with a crazy fable worked in.

Q: How have your children, both filmmakers [Both Sofia and Roman are writer/directors] influenced you as an artist?
A: Well I influenced them by asking them to try to only make personal films, and it came back to me. I realized, if I am going to tell them that, I should do the same myself. You know, you learn as much from your kids as you teach them.

Q: What should we tell your “Godfather” fans to prepare them for “Youth Without Youth”?
A: Well again, when people make a film or dinner, you do want with all your heart to please them but you also want to give them something of quality, you don’t want to give them fast food. They might like McDonald’s but you want to give them something thoroughly enjoyable that you’ve put more care into.

Q: So is this the Slow Food version of a movie?
A: (Laughs) That’s a good way of looking at it.

Q: What holiday movie are you most excited to see?
A:. I want to see the Frank Langella film [“Starting Out in the Evening”] and “The Savages.” And I want to see Julian Schnabel’s film [“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”].