In Law Abiding Citizen, DA Jonas Cantrell, played by Bruce McGill (Obsessed), acts as the mentor for ADA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx). McGill and Foxx’s previous experience working together (Collateral and Ali) gives them a natural on-screen camaraderie that brings some relief to the serious matter at hand -- loosing diabolical vigilante Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) on the fair city of Philadelphia. Actress Regina Hall (Scary Movie) plays Nick Rice’s wife, Kelly, who is in terrible danger along with their daughter as they are Shelton’s last targets.

Working with F. Gary and your co-stars, did they elicit particular performances from the two of you, were there different expectations?
Regina Hall: Just for me, you don’t want to be the weak link in any project. I think in the beginning, when we first rehearsed, they had thought of the wife as being really tough and strong, but I thought, you know it would be kind of wonderful if she were vulnerable because Jamie’s tough and Viola’s tough. So I thought it might be nice to see a wife vulnerable and loving and nurturing, even though she’s independent -- and then trying to achieve that in such small segments. But I always think when there’s certain people involved in a movie, present company included, you know they are going to be great and you want to--

Bruce McGill: Step up.

RH: Yeah, you want to step up. I find it makes me want to do better.

BM: When I was in college, I had a wonderful Polish acting teacher. Her English was not great. Her content was spectacular but her English was funny and we were talking about ensemble acting, where you don’t make it all about me and my part. She said, and I quote, “No. As more you help her, it more helps you.” Let the scene live between us. And when the scene exists between us, it’s like, if you’re in Rittenhouse Square and you see something going on between two people that looks intense, man that’s riveting. You can’t even hear them but you know they’re talking about something and that is so compelling. And this to me, whether it’s a comedy and especially in a movie like this, if it’s happening between the two characters you are pulled in and you want to know. What’s he doing? What’s going happen? And if you can get the human animal’s curiosity engaged and do your best not to lose it, you've got a movie that works.

F. Gary Gray said there were moments of improvisation in the film. Do the two of you mind speaking on those moments?
BM: You know, dialogue is not always improvised but behavior is always improvised because you don’t know until the moment you start to shoot what the desk is going be like, what prop [you’re] going to have. Sometimes, at the beginning of a film, when I have key props, I go to the prop department and I say ‘What is this going to look like, feel like, what can I do with it?’ And I go to the sound department if I’m going to have a scene where my volume is going to vary greatly, I’m thinking of a film called The Insider. In the only main scene I had, in a courtroom, it started with my whispered advice to Russell Crowe about what we were going to do, almost as low as I could be understood and ended with operatic vocal production, “Wipe that smirk off your face.” So, in other words, improvisation is part of it because it’s not a play that you can rehearse over and over and get it to where it’s exactly the same every time, so you have such consistency. It’s all improvisation but we did a lot of dialogue re-writes, I would call them, even though they were right before we shot the scene. I wouldn’t count that as improvisation but improvisation just means spontaneous, really, and it should always feel like that. If I know my stuff really, really well, I like to forget it. Actually, when I’m really inside it,  ‘cause you always have the little judging yourself,  but whatever you’re doing as the character, there’s the artist back there going ‘Oh, you did that too loud, oh, you did that too fast.’ Basically, your mind’s always saying, ‘you screwed that up, you screwed that up. That was good. You screwed that up. That was good.’ So, you want to keep it alive and the best thing to do is to certainly not have it look like you know what you’re going to say next. Because you can’t know until the other person says what they say.

RH: It’s true. Right, you anticipate.

BM: So, it’s as John Wayne used to say, “I’m not an actor. I’m a reactor." And that’s what I was talking about earlier, about the scene living between the characters rather than her turn, my turn.

RH: I think I’m going to start referring to myself as a reactor. Yeah. I like that.

BM: That’s a good one. A nuclear reactor.

Read our review of Law Abiding Citizen