Camilla Belle offers a girlish laugh when asked what her costumes were made from in the film “10,000 B.C.”: Real or faux fur?
“I don’t know; I think it was some kind of cloth,” says Belle. “I do know they didn’t smell very good by the time we were done.”
In “10,000 B.C.,” which opened Friday, Belle plays Evolet, a member of a primitive tribe of woolly mammoth hunters who is kidnapped into slavery. Even as she struggles to survive and escape, she is being tracked by her true love, D’Leh (Steven Strait), who must rescue her against impossible odds while confronting a more advanced civilization.
The lavish production blends live action with elaborate computer-generated graphics of prehistoric beasts, from sabre-tooth tigers to predatory birds - part buzzard, part pterodactyl - which chase Belle at one point.
The movie also took Belle, 21, from New Zealand to South Africa to Namibia. Each location was chosen for unique physical characteristics: New Zealand for its snowy mountains, South Africa for its jungle, Namibia for its desert.
“That’s what made the experience quite fulfilling,” says Belle. “Africa was someplace I’d dreamed about seeing, and then I got to go there for four months.”
Belle, whose mother is Brazilian, speaks Portuguese and Spanish, as well as English. She worked from childhood until she was 13, appearing in, among other things, Alfonso Cuaron’s “A Little Princess.”
Then she took three years off to focus on school, returning to film at 16 to play Daniel Day-Lewis’ daughter in “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.”
Accepted at Columbia University, she postponed college to pursue her career. “It’s something you have to grasp while you have the moment. You have to grab it full force and hope it doesn’t go away.”
Having finished another film to be released this year (”Push,” opposite Djimon Hounsou, Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning), Belle doesn’t have another movie that’s set to go. She takes pride in her ability to pull back from her career between films and live a normal life.
“Work isn’t reality,” she says. “Luckily, my personal life is so fulfilling that I’ve never felt that I have to have another job lined up.
“Don’t get me wrong - I want to work again. But to me it’s fun not to know what I’m going to do next.”
Tags: , 000 B.C., 10, camilla belle, movie, movie news
