Priest

Question: What do you enjoy about working with Paul Bettany?

SCOTT STEWART: He’s really such a generous soul. We are really close friends now, after having worked together for awhile, and we like to geek out on the same stuff. We’re interested in the same stuff. He’s a really great filmmaker, in addition to being a really good actor, so he just makes your job a lot easier. Legion was an ensemble movie, and I just this was an opportunity to put the whole movie on his shoulders, given that it’s called Priest. He looked like a young [Clint] Eastwood to me. He has that really chiseled, haunted look with his thousand-yard stare that he’s really good at conveying. It’s so interesting because he’s really warm and funny, and yet he comes across as really cold and timeless. He really fits well into a science fiction world, just visually. There are certain actors that you just believe in this fantastic settings. Some actors are really wonderful, but they just feel very contemporary and you want to do a romantic comedy with them. Some actors are great and they can just do everything.

Paul and I had a discussion pretty early on, before we started shooting, about being co-heads, in a way. We wanted to set a tone for the making of the film. Making films, no matter what, is really, really, really hard. It’s just a grueling grind, so we didn’t want it to be a miserable grind, any more than it needed to be. We actually wrapped a couple hours early on our last day, and everyone stayed. It was the weirdest thing in the world. Usually, people just disappear like rats on a sinking ship, but Maggie had food brought in and everybody just hung out. We had a really, really good time actually making the movie. We had a tremendous crew and everybody was really wonderful on the film.