Science Fiction Thriller Solaris Features George Clooney in 'Difficult' Role
Alan Silverman
Hollywood
28 Nov 2002, 20:08 UTC

Chris Kelvin is a psychiatrist with personal issues of his own: notably the suicide death of his wife 10 years earlier. Summoned by a friend's urgent message, he travels to the spacecraft Prometheus, in orbit around the planet "Solaris," where mysterious goings-on threaten to destroy the mission and its crew. Onboard he is startled to awake in the warm embrace of his long-gone wife, Rheya: a flesh-and-blood hallucination created by the planet from Kelvin's memories.

At first skeptical, Kelvin comes to believe he's been offered a second chance; but among the philosophical questions in Solaris is whether, given that new opportunity, can anything really change?

"In your memory, you get to control everything. So even if you remember something wrong, I am pre-determined to carry it out."

"I don't believe that we are predetermined to live our past. I think that we can choose to do it differently."

"What I like about it was that these people are all intelligent. They're well aware that she is not alive and doesn't exist, but willing to forego that at some point because the sensation is so good."

George Clooney stars as Kelvin and calls it the most difficult role he's ever played, because of the enigmatic and ambiguous nature of the story.

"We had so many different arguments about if you're given a second chance to do things over or you destined to repeat all of the exact same mistakes. There are other questions like does God exist? Are we a part of just random cells firing off each other, Adams, exploding, or is there a plan? What I liked about the film again was that it doesn't really take a point of view. It just says the questions are all that you get. You don't get the answers. It's a film that everybody goes home from saying 'I'm not sure what I just saw.' But they talk about it and discuss it. Questions come up and answers come up.... and they're all right."

"It asks questions and it's provocative and challenging. And some of it incomprehensible at first, And I love that. I don't like being given things on a plate and told what I must feel and what I must think."

Natascha McElhone, co-stars as Rheya and the British actress embraced that ambiguity, but she says it made the finished film a surprise, even to the cast members.

"I had no idea how it was going to be so I was surprised, but I expected to be surprised. Because there are so many options and so many different ways it could have gone, from one take to another we play it differently and it would mean the story could kind of go that way or that way. How nerve I came to have to actually make the decision of which way it was going to go and that would impact upon the next. "

Solaris is based on a 1961 novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. A decade later, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made it a landmark Soviet film; but writer/director Steven Soderbergh prefers that this film n-o-t be called a remake.

"I thought retty clear about the thematic elements that I wanted to discuss, which is slightly different than those in the book and certainly different from those in the Tarkovsky film. My feeling it is really about two things. One is, I think most people have experienced some sort of loss in their lives or been in a situation where they were not able to express what they wanted to express to someone who is no longer around. The other is about realizing at a certain point and reconciling that you can't know someone else the way you know yourself. It's just impossible and how frustrating that is. It's the difference between romantic love and real love."

Solaris is produced by James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of Titanic. The cast includes Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies; and the ethereal musical score for Solaris is by longtime Steven Soderberg collaborator Cliff Martinez.