"Never before Scene" Elektra clips at MTV.com
A nifty Elektra movie article along with some exclusive clips can be had over at MTV.com...
"Elektra," a spinoff of 2003's "Daredevil" movie, finds the deadly assassin (Jennifer Garner) hired by the Order of the Hand to kill a widower (Goran Visnjic) who must pay for
Damien: I was kind of hoping you would show up in that red outfit you've got. What do your parents think of that?
Jennifer: I think they've just given up on me in general. I'm pretty much the black sheep; at this point they just turn the other way.
Damien: I know our audience has some questions for you, so let's take our first question from the audience members right here, and her name is Shauna.
Shauna: How has Elektra changed since we last saw her in "Daredevil," and how does she change through the course of this movie?
Jennifer: Ooh, that's a good question. Well, she was dead last time we saw her, so there's that. Then she's brought back to life, and when she's brought back to life she no longer has Daredevil and her father has been killed, and so she was kind of a dark chick before, but now she's bad dark. She has ice around her heart. There's nothing warm and fuzzy about this person at all, and the way she keeps herself isolated from humans is by killing for money, and the way that she kills for money is by keeping herself isolated from humans. So she can go along like this for a while. But then eventually in the movie she meets this young girl and her father and she's actually sent to kill them. And she can't do it. There's something real in her that she forgot about, and so she teams up with the young girl and her father to save them from the bad force that's gonna get them. And it changes her personality slowly but surely.
Damien: All right. Someone did a little character study. Let's go to Joseph, who has a question. Joseph, what's up?
Joseph: You're usually associated with more good-girl rolls. Elektra's more morally conflicted. What did you enjoy about playing a darker character?
Jennifer: The whole point of being an actor is that you get to play everything. It's like you can't decide what you want to be when you grow up, so you're just somebody who's everything. I never anticipated being a killer, but, you know, hey, why not? I like it because everybody, even the most evil [character], there's something in their soul somewhere that at one point in time was for real, and I like it because sometimes you see people go from being good and whole and happy to being a completely miserable person. And in this case, she is a killer for money, she is a mercenary, she is an assassin, and we see her against her own will, her heart kind of warms up and she remembers or realizes for the first time maybe that she has a soul and she has a heart.
Damien: Very nice. All right, Melanie is next.
Melanie: How much did you have to train for this role, and did the physical work you did for "Alias" and "Daredevil" help you?
Jennifer: Oh, totally. Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? Yeah.
Damien: Was this movie easy for you?
Jennifer: Uh, no! No, there's nothing easy about it. No, but I couldn't have taken the steps I needed to take to do Elektra if I hadn't done "Daredevil" and three years of "Alias." So a big part of my training was just kind of on the job for the last three years nonstop all the time. And then for this movie I learned how to use the bow stick, which was that thing you guys saw. I worked more with the sais than I had before. You know what those are, right? They're her weapons that are the three-pronged sword things.
Damien: The ones you spin around.
Jennifer: The ones that you stab yourself with and have to get stitches. And I did a lot more boxing and stuff which I had done a little bit of [before], but this time I got a little grittier with it. And then I fought with big swords, which I had never done before. So I did a lot of training, but what I would do is I would go to work and my trainer would meet me at work to do just a workout, and then the fight guys would meet me after that and I would fight with them, and then I would work however long. And then that night I would see the fight guys again, and then five hours on Saturday and five hours on Sunday.
Damien: So within a 24-hour period, how long were you training?
Jennifer: All together it probably wasn't more than two hours, because I was working 16 hours a night. So sometimes we would train a half an hour and I would just be like, "OK, I'm so fried. I'm so done, I have to eat. I have to go home and go to bed right now."
Damien: Let's move on to John.
John: What was the most difficult stunt or scene that you had to do?
Jennifer: The most difficult one was against this actor Will Yun Lee. He's an actor that does his own fights as well, and I'm just kind of learning as I go. The only way I stay alive is that I rehearse nonstop, because you know, I'm not really somebody who goes out and fights on the street. He grew up ... his dad was one of the first tae kwon do masters in the United States, and he grew up with his dad as his sensei, so he is wicked good. He is out-of-control good. So he had these two huge katana swords, these Japanese swords that are heavy steel, and we fought each other in the fastest, nastiest fight. It's at the end of the movie and there's all this wind blowing, and I have all this hair in the movie and it kept being in my eyes and I would just hear the clank, clank, clank of my sais hitting his sword. And, you know, his swords would be coming full-on as hard as they could at my head, and it's just kind of like you'd better know where to block, because if you don't block you're gonna lose your noggin. So that was the scariest thing.
Damien: So you memorized the moves even though you couldn't see?
Jennifer: Memorized them, yeah. We had drilled them for so many hours, I can't even tell you. I mean, thank God, because I couldn't see, so if I hadn't just been able to trust that he knew exactly where I was and I knew exactly where he was and, you know, you get yourself all pumped up. I mean, I'm a girl, I'm kind of a girly girl, and so to get myself all grrrrr, you know, I have to get in there and grrrrr. I remember in high school, the guys before a football game, that's what I feel like. I feel like this crazy person, like growling at myself in the mirror, and then he and I were just dukin' it out, 'cause he wasn't kidding around — he had no trouble going there, you know, he's not a girl.
Damien: Well, it's good to have your head here and not just a torso, that's nice.
Jennifer: I did lose a little blood, but we made it out OK.
Damien: I can't believe you did all your own stunts like that, that's absolutely insane.
Jennifer: That's the fun stuff. Why do the movie if you're not going to get to do all the fun? I mean, you saw me on the tree, we were in the middle of the forest and they stuck me on the top of this eight-foot tree. Where was I? No, I wasn't on the top of it, I was on the middle, but it was straight up, and we built it — it was a fake tree — we built it on some kind of springy thing, and as it started to fall, I had to climb up on to the top and run down the tree, and right before I hit the camera that was at the end of the tree, they yanked me off with a wire. It was so terrifying, I screamed for my mama. I almost peed my pants.
Nicole: I just wanted to know, do you start looking at other action films differently?
Jennifer: I do, I'm kind of a snob.
Damien: What do you think of Jackie Chan and all them?
Jennifer: Oh, Jackie's incredible. Look, I'm going to tell you the truth. If something's going to hurt enough and it's something I don't know how to do without breaking my leg, if it's like gymnas