Celebrity News:

The Washington correspondent for a newsweekly is assigned to interview a celebrity sex icon, to his disgust and eventually to hers. Pierre (Steve Buscemi) claims that he has never seen a performance by Katya (Sienna Miller) and has done so little homework that he hardly knows anything about her, except that he loathes the very idea of such a woman.

Katya has processed so many interviews that she’s sick of them, turns up an hour late, and is not so much surprised that Pierre knows nothing about her as astonished that he has the nerve to try to fake the interview.

Interview was directed and co-written by Buscemi, who plays the impatient newsman so well that you can almost sense his toes curling in his shoes. Katya is apparently intended to be a Paris Hilton type. She plays the dumb sex kitten to perfection, but has hidden levels of intelligence, insight and game-playing.

Pierre makes the mistake of condescending to Katya, insulting her and making it clear that he would rather be in Washington covering a breaking story. The interview crashes, they walk out and then paparazzi stalking Katya push Pierre into traffic, he gets a cut on his head, and she insists on taking him to her nearby apartment.

That’s Act 1. Act 2 turns into a two-hander with them talking, drinking, smoking, doing some cocaine, flirting, dueling, insulting and playing nasty head games. This formula is familiar enough; think of Neve Campbell and Dominic Chianese in James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved (2004) and Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman in Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001), not to mention the Burtons in Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Why did it need to be done again? The original director on this project was Theo van Gogh, a Dutch director murdered three years ago in the street by an Islamic assassin who disapproved of one of his films. Van Gogh had planned to remake the movie in English with Miller and Buscemi, so the film went ahead. Buscemi handles it skillfully, using van Gogh’s method of filming with three simultaneous video cameras.

If I have a problem with the movie, it’s the too-neat O. Henry ending. I would have rather plunged deeper into the fearful waters they tread.

Still, I found Interview kind of fascinating, especially in the ways that Buscemi and Miller make their performances into commentaries on the types of characters they play. When actors are really turned loose to play actors, they can achieve merciless accuracy; see Naomi Watts portray a day in the life of an actress in Scott Coffey’s Ellie Parker (2005). If all the world’s a stage for the rest of us, for them, it’s a backstage.