Tagline: How far will you go to keep a secret?
“Perfect Stranger” focuses on Rowena Price (Halle Berry), a reporter for a major New York City newspaper who goes undercover to investigate the unsolved murder of one of her childhood friends. The path leads her directly into the office and the personal life of multi-millionaire Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), CEO of a powerful advertising agency. Investigating him from all angles, Rowena assumes new identities in life and on line. She then harnesses the devastatingly effective tools of cyberspace in an attempt to bring her victim to justice.
Revolution Studios’ sexy thriller “Perfect Stranger” asks the question: how far would you go to keep a secret? When investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) learns that her friend’s murder might be connected to powerful ad executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), she goes undercover with the help of her associate, Miles Hailey (Giovanni Ribisi).
Posing as Katherine, a temp at Hill’s agency, and Veronica, a girl Hill flirts with online, Rowena surrounds her prey from all sides, only to discover that she isn’t the only one changing identities. The closer Rowena gets to finding the truth, the more we see how far people will go to protect it.
About the Story
This is a movie about secrets. Those we have. Those we share. And those we’ll do anything to protect. Rowena Price (Halle Berry) is an investigative reporter who has perfected the art of exposing other people’s secrets. So when childhood friend Grace Clayton, who was having an affair with married advertising executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), turns up murdered, Rowena is determined to find the truth.
Thanks to her associate, tech-savvy Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi), Rowena gains access to Grace’s e-mail and learns that Grace was threatening to go to Hill’s wife. Armed with that knowledge, Rowena goes undercover and becomes the perfect stranger – first as a temp, Katherine, in Hill’s advertising agency, and then as Rocketgirl aka Veronica, another one of his online paramours. She watches the unsuspecting Hill from all sides, taking note of his wife doing the same. This is a man with an appetite for power, a weakness for women, and a wife on alert.
But in exposing Hill’s secrets Ro unwittingly discovers a connection between Grace and two significant people in her life; her boyfriend, Cameron (Gary Dourdan) and her best friend, Miles, leaving her feeling confused, betrayed, and with no one to trust on this journey. The closer Ro gets to the truth, the more we begin to ask: What was this secret Grace had? And why would someone kill to protect it? In a film about secrets and advertising, not everything is as it seems.
About the Film
“To a certain extent, everybody lives a double life,” says Academy Award®-winner Halle Berry, star of Revolution Studios’ sexy new thriller, Perfect Stranger. “We’re all complicated beings; we’re different people all the time – for example, a woman might act differently at work than she does at home. We all hide something, even from our best friends. This movie highlights that and takes it to the next level, showing what we’re capable of when we’re forced to come to terms with it.”
For director James Foley, who has previously explored such territory in the psychological thrillers At Close Range, Fear, and Glengarry Glen Ross, the idea goes even further. “Everybody lies; it just depends on how big the lie is and what the consequences of the lie are,” says the director. “I’m fascinated by the idea that people sometimes act in ways that they don’t realize what they’re doing – the audience understands the character’s behavior, but the character himself does not. In addition, a character’s double life lends itself to something that the cinema is uniquely designed to do: you can see and hear a character saying or doing something and realize that they’re thinking something completely different.”
“We live in a world in which nothing is as it seems,” says producer Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas. “We believe things at face value, but we are living in an age in which we ought to be more cautious. We should ask questions about the world around us, whether we’re receiving a diagnosis from a doctor or buying a product at the supermarket or meeting a person online.
“It’s not coincidental that this film is set in an advertising agency,” Goldsmith-Thomas continues. “Things are packaged as the perfect product, but we know that nothing is perfect, most especially strangers, who can present one face but can hide so many others.”
According to Goldsmith-Thomas, the idea for Perfect Stranger came out of a conversation with her husband, co-producer Daniel A. Thomas. “We thought that the idea of online anonymity where anyone can be anyone was a provocative theme to explore. It’s a dangerous gamble to presume that the person we’re speaking to online is who they say they are. So, we started kicking around stories about what would happen when a person’s virtual world collides with his real world. And Perfect Stranger was born.”
From the early stages, Berry saw the possibilities in Perfect Stranger and jumped on board. “We couldn’t imagine anyone else in this role,” says Goldsmith- Thomas. “She loved what we wanted to do, where we wanted to take it. Knowing that she was playing a character who was playing a character, she looked at scenes from every angle to make sure there were no loose ends. We were blessed to have her as our partner.”
Berry found herself attracted to the character, which, she says, is unlike any she’s ever played before – except for one common thread. “I love playing tortured characters,” says the Academy Award-winning actress. “I don’t know what that says about me, but I really love getting into the mind of someone who’s a bit buffeted, a bit battered. This character is very vulnerable, but she’s also very alive, and she finds her power little by little throughout the course of the movie. That’s something wonderful to play.”
“You can’t fully appreciate the complexity of Halle’s performance,” says Goldsmith-Thomas, “until you go back and watch the film a second time. When you do, you realize that there were clues all along and reactions you might have missed the first go round. Essentially, she had to play this character on three different levels: one as Rowena Price, one as Katherine Pogue, and another as Veronica. We would watch her alter each performance based on which mask she was putting on. It was nothing short of remarkable.”
“I think Ro is a really good actress,” Berry continues. “Because of her job as an investigative reporter, Ro has become very good at pretending, wearing different faces, chameleon-like. For her, it’s a way to survive; she’s a woman on a mission.”
As a result, Berry feels that, in a way, she is playing three different characters in the film. “There’s the Ro she is when she’s with Miles, her ‘guy Friday,’ which is really an act. Miles has a crush on her that she doesn’t return, but she knows how to work it to get what she wants. Second, there’s Katherine – the temp she poses as at Harrison Hill’s advertising agency; she dresses differently, talks differently, has a whole different feeling to her. Finally, there’s the real Ro – the Ro she rarely shows, who’s in maybe five scenes in the movie.”
Foley praises Berry’s ability to portray the character’s double (or triple) life. “Halle is playing a character, and the character is acting,” he points out. “We have to believe the character’s performance as well as Halle’s performance as the character. The way she was able to flip back and forth between the different aspects of her character amazed me.”
Then, of course, there’s the Ro that she is with Harrison Hill – the Ro that is trying to prove that the advertising exec killed her friend. “Harrison Hill will do anything to succeed,” Berry says, “and Ro will do anything to survive. The needs of one are based purely on ambition, and the needs of the other are based on our primal need to stay alive.”
Berry says that working with Bruce Willis, who plays Hill, was an inspiring experience. “Bruce likes to improvise a lot – flying by the seat of his pants,” she says. “That was a new element for me, but really great. He had a real handle on and what motivates him.”
“Bruce is not only an international movie star, he’s also a great actor,” says Goldsmith-Thomas. “He grounds our movie by layering his performance with humanity. On the surface, Hill’s an operator,” she says, “a bully, a womanizer, but Bruce plays this character with such integrity and honesty that Hill becomes the one you root for. We admire the fact that he lives out loud, unapologetic with his passions and emotions.”
“There’s a complex contradiction to this character that appeals to me,” says Goldsmith-Thomas. “Hill’s an ad man, adept at glossy packaging and persuasive spin, and yet, ironically, he accepts people at face value, and is shocked when their image differs from reality. So when his colleague betrays him, or when he discovers Katherine’s (Ro’s) ulterior motive, he is morally hurt, never realizing the hypocrisy. There is such an honesty to his reaction that we quickly forgive him his own lies and instead share his outrage. That is what makes Bruce’s performance so brilliant.”
Although Willis is probably best-known as an action star, Foley says he has always had an affinity for the actor’s work in thrillers. “When Bruce is doing straight dramatic acting, he’s very effective,” says Foley. “He came in, put on the right clothes, and became this character – the powerful, arrogant, lustful head of an ad agency.”
“I don’t think any guy ever thinks of himself as a womanizer,” says Willis. “I think he loves women, he’s at the height of his career as a captain of the advertising industry, and he doesn’t judge himself. I’m in my own middle age now, and I still get a big kick out of life; I think Harrison Hill also gets a big kick out of his life.”
Part of that kick was the chance to work alongside Halle Berry. “I seldom get parts where I get to flirt so unabashedly,” laughs Willis. “Not a hard day at the office – go to work and flirt with Halle Berry.”
“I think it’s easy to come into this movie and say, ‘This character’s a womanizer, this character’s a sycophant, this character’s an upwardly mobile young woman.’ But everybody has something to hide,” concludes Willis.
“Bruce Willis is seductive and charming as Harrison Hill,” says Goldsmith-Thomas.
Rounding out the cast is Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Rowena’s techie Man Friday, Miles, who clearly has a crush on his boss – one that Ro is all too happy to exploit. “The way Giovanni plays the character, he’s just happy to be in Halle’s presence,” says Foley. “I can understand that – I’d be Halle’s intern, too.”
Ribisi considers Miles, like the other characters in Perfect Stranger, to be living a double life – or, at least, wearing a mask. “He’s the Iago character – he’s titillated by being manipulative,” says the actor. “Like Halle’s and Bruce’s characters, there’s a dark underside to him, and I think that’s universal; I don’t think that’s to be criticized.”
“Every character in this film has a secret and a different motivation that drives them to find truth,” says Goldsmith-Thomas. “Miles is a puzzler – he won’t stop until all the pieces fit. Interestingly enough, Giovanni is the same way. He worked on his character tirelessly, adding dimension, humanity, and pathos. I loved watching him become Miles. I loved working with him.”
Ribisi was attracted to the role by the screenplay’s morally ambiguous storyline. “In movies,” Ribisi says, “we’ve historically tended to focus on what’s good and what’s evil, but that becomes so black and white. In the rehearsal process for this film, we were talking about the fact that we’re trying to get away from that – people are more complicated. Everybody has their demons.”
“Giovanni’s character, in a way, is the everyman,” says Goldsmith-Thomas. “He wouldn’t say he has secrets, he would say he has fantasies. In some ways, this movie is about the justification we give ourselves that our actions are acceptable. It’s about how we go about our lives without being appalled by our own actions,” says Goldsmith-Thomas.
For screenwriter Todd Komarnicki, that disquieting subject matter formed the backbone of Perfect Stranger. “Someone once said,” he explains, “that the beauty of honesty is that you don’t have to remember what you said – if you’ve told the truth, you don’t remember your cover. I don’t think people are afraid enough of the cost of dishonesty. This movie is an immorality tale; it’s about the cost of these little compromises we make with ourselves that we don’t think about, but add up to an ultimate punishment.”
According to Goldsmith-Thomas, director James Foley was the perfect choice to bring the film to the screen. “He understands the intricacy of the world of shadows,” she says. “He gets that we all present only a certain face to the world. This is a movie about duality – the face we present and the face we keep hidden.”
“This movie tries to explore the limits of human behavior – the lengths that people will go to keep the truth hidden,” says Foley. “The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said something like, ‘The director’s job is to make visible that which you might never have seen.’ That’s always stuck with me – each human being has an insight into what it is to be human that other human beings don’t. To make a film is to reveal what it is to be human. When somebody else gets it and thinks about that in a new way – that’s the ultimate thrill for me.”
“The great thing about James Foley, from an actor’s perspective, is that he’s so intuitive about when a performance is working,” says Berry. “When you do something real, something good, something organic, he has a real, good, organic response. That’s inspiring – it makes you feel like you’ll go wherever he wants to go because he’s so enthusiastic about it. When it’s not right, he doesn’t have that reaction – he’ll say, ‘Okay, that was good. But let’s do it again,’ and you’ll know.”
About the Production
“New York is very much a character in Perfect Stranger, and it lends itself perfectly to the voyeuristic themes of the movie,” says Goldsmith-Thomas. “The film is about what we see and what we oversee – and what better place to do that than a city where you live on top of each other. In many instances, people’s lives become your view.”
Goldsmith-Thomas continues, “Harrison Hill’s ad agency, H2A, is above it all – it looks down on the city and wants everyone to look up at it. Ro’s apartment is in the middle of the world – as she looks out, others look in. Miles’s apartment is underground – it’s the place you bury your secrets.”
According to co-producer Daniel A. Thomas, “We came to a place of such energy and that energy comes through in the film. New York is a place where anything goes, where almost anything is believable. The city has its own eroticism that’s palpable in its look, its feel, its light.”
Director James Foley found filming in New York to be “blissful. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Staten Island, and twenty years ago I thought I’d be going to NYU Film School but instead I went to U.S.C. and I stayed in California. But the whole time I was growing up in Staten Island, although I didn’t know I was going to be a filmmaker, I knew I would leave the island, and that I’d move into the city to do something. It was unexpectedly thrilling to spend a year in New York shooting and editing this movie. I felt more ‘me’ as a director than I ever have because I was born there and my siblings were there; they’d come to the set and see me filming, not some guy who’d grown up in California.”
Foley even enjoyed the crowds of paparazzi who flocked to the set for outdoor scenes. During a sequence taking place in front of the venerable Ansonia Hotel apartments, where Halle Berry’s character lives, he exited the building and saw a swarm of paparazzi. Wondering what celebrity was in the immediate vicinity, he suddenly realized—it was the star of his movie they had shown up for.
Hill’s spare, cutting-edge offices are mirrored in the chic restaurants where he and Ro meet, which include the stylish Manhattan watering holes Asia de Cuba and Sapa. Ro’s sphere is an earthier one, as seen in her older, rambling Upper West Side apartment, the cluttered newspaper office where she works, and the neighborhood bars and cafés where she hangs out with Miles and her editor. Meanwhile, Miles occupies another world entirely: a seedy, cramped West Village apartment in chaotic disarray.
Production designer Bill Groom wanted to depict Miles’s surroundings as seen through Ro’s eyes when she visits him. “You start with the script,” says Groom. “For me, it’s really sort of imagining the journey that Ro makes from the top of the stairs into the common hallway, into Miles’s apartment – all the way to the back. I tried to divide that look into three looks: first, the sort of landlord look, the area that the landlord decorated and painted, or didn’t paint, as the case may be; then the area that Miles creates where he might have friends over, and then the more private areas where he works on his computer and keeps to himself. So each area has a different look and reveals itself as Ro walks through the apartment.”
The most striking location of all was surely the newly-completed 7 World Trade Center, the company’s home base for three weeks as the site of Harrison Hill’s offices. Designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and developed and owned by Silverstein Properties, it is the first of the new buildings on the former World Trade Center site to have been be completed. In fact, it was only barely finished by the time the Perfect Stranger production moved in to take over its 25th floor.
The site’s wraparound views of Lower Manhattan, the Hudson River, and New Jersey, all of which are visible in the finished film, were stunning. In addition, Groom created an opulent, angular, highly contemporary look for the offices and their furnishings.
“This beautiful new building, with its highly refined character, seemed to us to be just right for Harrison Hill,” says the production designer. “The original décor on that floor was kind of slick, white, with almost futuristic detailing to it. We added contrasting textures which I would certainly describe as industrial chic – found objects, old factory objects, very raw and natural material like steel and concrete. And, in fact, we exposed some of the existing surfaces in the building, surfaces that will eventually be covered over once more. We had visited a lot of advertising agencies, and we took elements from all of those ideas that we found in all of those places. We tried to create something that was very much an open office plan, something that would encourage free-flowing creative ideas. And you see that in a lot of the ad agencies today.”
Ro’s own apartment, filmed on a huge sound stage at Hollywood East studios in Brooklyn, was another matter entirely. Spacious and grand, it was nonetheless dark and many-layered, typifying the kind of elegant, 1900’s-era living spaces within the landmark Ansonia Hotel that served as its exterior. “Ro’s apartment stands in stark contrast to Harrison Hill’s offices,” says Groom, “which is something James Foley wanted to emphasize right from the start.”
Among the many New York City locations used in Perfect Stranger were the ornate Cipriani catering space on 42nd St. across from Grand Central Station (originally a huge 1920s bank), the Hotel Gansevoort in the trendy Meatpacking District, the historic bar Chumley’s in Greenwich Village; Riverside Park, Queens Supreme Civil Court, Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and the massive meeting rooms and corridors of such downtown municipal buildings as One Centre Street and the original U.S. Customs House (now the Museum of the American Indian). For Ro’s newspaper offices, an entire floor of New York’s Spanish-language daily El Diario was utilized.
For Halle Berry, one key contributor was costume designer Renée Kalfus, who had the challenge of creating looks for the three facets of Ro’s character: her public persona, her private self, and the invented facade of Katherine, the temp assistant she claims to be when working in Harrison Hill’s agency. “We chose her clothes to reflect those different layers of character,” says Kalfus. “We wanted to illuminate those heightened levels of reality, but we also wanted Halle to look good—we want people to look at this film decades from now and still think she looks great in her costumes, the way you feel when you see Audrey Hepburn in Charade or Eva Marie Saint in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.”
“The clothes that Renée came up with really were the staples,” says Halle Berry. “They helped me keep it clear in my mind who I was at what point in the story, and if ever I got confused, all I had to do was just look down and see what I had on and that would tell me. Clothes are such an important tool for me, always. I don’t feel like my character until I arrive on the set in the morning and put the clothes on.”
In addition to the city of New York, of course, there is another world that provides a setting for Perfect Stranger – the online world of chat rooms in which everyone can be anyone. “Perfect Stranger is about what I think is becoming a near-crisis of how human beings interact with each other,” says Foley. “Essentially, we’ve become strangers to each other. Families have broken up; they don’t talk to each other; members move away to other parts of the country. So people don’t have much of a support group around them. The internet has become a potential connecting thread for strangers to meet each other. It’s very attractive in that way; it’s much easier to meet someone by typing on a computer than to do it face to face. That need to connect is what really fuels Perfect Stranger’s story all the way through. The inherent danger and drama of it all is that these are real strangers. You don’t know who anybody really is on the Net, and they may turn out to be someone you didn’t suspect.”
According to Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, “The anonymity of the Internet is a very seductive narcotic. The rules are different online. Truth is different online. And ‘normal’ behavior is redefined. The more we interconnect the world, the more disconnected we become. And sometimes, when our real world intersects with our virtual world, the result can be dangerous.”
Production notes provided by Columbia Pictures.
Perfect Stranger
Starring: Halle Berry, Bruce Willis, Giovanni Ribisi, Gary Dourdan, Patti D’Arbanville, Clea Lewis
Directed by: James Foley
Screenplay by: Todd Komarnicki
Release Date: April 13th, 2007
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, some disturbing violent images, language.
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $23,984,949 (32.8%)
Foreign: $49,105,662 (67.2%)
Total: $73,090,611 (Worldwide)