What attracted you to this part?
When I read the script, the whole thing was just really good. I felt like I hadn’t read and certainly haven’t played this character before. She’s a young woman who is thrown into emotionally gray areas and deals with them in a very human way, which is imperfectly. I didn’t want her to be a scapegoat or a kind of jezebel character. We talked a lot about her sexuality. We didn’t want it to be overt—we didn’t want her to be oozing sex—but we definitely wanted to show that there was something about her that men really liked.

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But moment to moment, smile to smile—there are an uncommon number of gentle smiles, and many of them are Thirlby’s—from emphatic sound design to precise framings, Nobody Walks is decidedly a movie about variations (and variables) of feeling and sensation. It leaves a bittersweet bruise.

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But Thirlby’s Martine is more of an enigma, seemingly untouched and blasé about what she has wrought on the family. Perhaps that’s the point. And her vagueness as a character is a result of the fact that she doesn’t yet know who she is either. But if Nobody Walks is also her story, viewers might appreciate getting to know her a little better.

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So things get pretty physical with your character in ‘The Darkest Hour.’ I heard you did all your own stunts.
I did. I got banged up with a lot of gnarly bruises, but it was fun. It was interesting. It took a lot of endurance.

I’ve always been curious if doing your own stunts is actually fun.
It’s a kind of a matter of necessity, like some things they can’t use a double for because they need to be able to see my face. It’s also a matter of what kinds of stunts there are, like there’s certain stunts that I wouldn’t have been capable of doing, but all of our stuff for ‘Darkest Hour’ was me on the rig hooked up to wires. It was mostly just falling and being dragged.

All the aliens in this film are computer generated. Is it tough to elicit that type of emotion when what you’re supposed to be freaked out about isn’t even in front of you in the first place?
It is difficult to shoot in that respect, because a lot of the time the things that you’re supposed to be reacting to don’t exist yet, so it can be a challenge in that regard, because you do really have to use your imagination to convincingly seem like you’re terrified of something, which at the time the camera is rolling, it is completely not there. When we were filming ‘The Darkest Hour,’ we didn’t even know what the aliens were going to look like, we didn’t even have a graphic reference. So it was defnitely a big challenge to sell those kind of extreme moments when you’re just generating them from your own imagination.

So you’ve got ‘The Darkest Hour’ and the ‘Dredd’ coming out. Were you a big sci-fi geek growing up?
To be honest, I wasn’t a sci-fi geek at all. But I do love a good sci-fi film, especially one that can really take you away. And I read some reality-bending novels growing up, like stuff by [Kurt] Vonngeut, so I already had one part my brain open to the unnatural and unusual, and it’s generally fun to venture into that world and film in it.

Did you even bother watching the original ‘Judge Dredd’ movie with Sylvester Stallone, or did you want to go in with a clean slate?
I actually didn’t watch the original one intentionally, and I still haven’t. But I think that at this point, it’s not an intentional choice. I am excited to see [the original], and whenever I have the chance [I will]. But during shooting, I decided not to watch it, just because the film we were making really has nothing to do with it, and I didn’t want to get influenced by it at all.

With ‘Dredd’ — and to a certain extent, ‘Being Flynn,’ based on ‘Another Bullshit Night in Suck City’ by Nick Flynn — do you feel more pressure because both of them have an established fan base?
Yeah, definitely. Of course, the Nick Flynn fan base is very different from the ’2000 AD’ fan base [laughs]. It’s a little daunting [for 'Dredd'], where I am personifying a character which already exists very firmly in people’s minds, and that people have an attachment to and have an affection for. But my hope is that people respond to it and they feel that it’s something that complements their imaginations and the ideas that they already had built up, instead of conflicting with them. All I can do is hope and pray that I won’t be disappointing anyone.

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n a bit of gutsy counterprogramming, Summit Entertainment is opening The Darkest Hour on Christmas Day, giving moviegoers a 3-D sci-fi thriller to check out at their multiplex instead of the Oscar bait and family fare.
“We are so different than those, I’m confident it’ll find its audience,” says director Chris Gorak. “So many years I’ve wanted to go to theaters over the holiday just looking for that fun, entertaining action thriller.”
Destroying the world is right in the director’s wheelhouse. He set off a dirty bomb in downtown Los Angeles in his 2006 feature debut, Right at Your Door, and lets loose a horde of invisible aliens on downtown Moscow in his follow-up.
In The Darkest Hour, two Internet entrepreneurs (Emile Hirsch and Max Minghella) travel to Russia to close a business deal and get bamboozled. They go to a nightclub to drown their sorrows and meet another pair of young friends (Olivia Thirlby and Rachael Taylor).
And that’s when things go wrong, as strange lights come from the sky and extraterrestrials invade the city and begin devouring all the power. After hiding underground for a few days, the survivors return to the surface and discover a city that’s almost devoid of life.
Gorak wanted everybody to feel an alien environment, from his actors to his audience, which is why filming in Moscow was appealing.
He and his team, including Russian producer Timur Bekmambetov, emptied Red Square and other Russian landmarks for the otherworldly apocalypse, although Gorak ran into the natural headaches of getting permissions and trying to make a big film in a big city.
“Like any film, there were hiccups — these were just hiccups in another language,” he says.
Venturing into sci-fi was also unusual for Hirsch and Minghella, actors known for their art-house dramatic leanings.
“Emile and I have maybe been guilty for being in films that sometimes can be too much about ideas,” Minghella says. “To do something so completely unpretentious is a really fun thing.”
Minghella still hasn’t been privy to what the malevolent visitors look like — “They’re pretty freaky,” Gorak promises — but he and other actors spent a good amount of time running from tennis balls on sticks, which stood in for the visual effects of the invaders. Electricity is their primary weakness and a key to the survivors’ strategy, but they will shred any living thing that gets in their way.
However, there’s no gore or blood, which allowed the film to get a PG-13 rating and a broader reach for youngsters, says Richie Fay, Summit’s president of domestic distribution.
“It plays to that younger group who will be looking to do something other than have dessert with Grandpa and Grandma at dinner,” Fay says.
Opening concurrently with Oscar hopefuls War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close— neither of which stars aliens —The Darkest Hour is one of several sci-fi/horror movies that have been released on Christmas Day, including The Faculty in 1998 and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem in 2007.
The Darkest Hour and its ilk “are hit-and-miss,” says Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “I don’t think it will be able to propel to $100 million, but anytime you’re in the marketplace and there’s no other film in your genre, that’s a good thing.”
“There’s a load of movies coming out in December, but there are very few for teenagers,” Minghella says. “It’s nice there’s going to be something out that’s apocalyptic.”

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Nobody Walks / U.S.A. (Director: Ry Russo-Young, Screenwriters: Lena Dunham, Ry Russo-Young) — Martine, a young artist from New York, is invited into the home of a hip, liberal LA family for a week. Her presence unravels the family’s carefully maintained status quo, and a mess of sexual and emotional entanglements ensues. Cast: John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Rosemarie DeWitt, India Ennenga, Justin Kirk.