Certainly Reindeer sounds commercial enough. An old-fashioned caper with modern-day sex appeal, it has Affleck playing a just-released ex-con who charms his way into Theron's heart (among other parts) only to get suckered into a Christmas-day casino heist that ends with a pile of dead bodies in Santa suits. It's got a sublimely sleazy bad guy ("I came up with the longhair look myself," boasts Sinise), a steamy love scene ("My most explicit," Theron promises), and a plot filled with more hairpin turns than a Frankenheimer car chase. In fact, about the only thing it's missing--at least at the moment--is a replacement tune for "Jingle Bells."
"What about 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'--do we have that?" Frankenheimer asks, sending his engineers dashing to and fro in their one-room editing bay. "Let's try that."
It looked like real sex," says Theron. "It wasn't pretty. We're falling all over the place. A lot of times we had no idea if the cameras were even rolling because the [crew] was laughing so hard."
"John didn't want it to be glamorous," Affleck adds, nodding in agreement. "He wanted it to be very raw. He had two cameras and he said, 'Do whatever you want.'"
The two stars are lounging in a Los Angeles photo studio, unwinding after a magazine shoot, and reminiscing about the filming of their clothes-ripping, lamp-breaking, table-smashing love scene. Turns out both actors were shockingly untutored in the art of on-camera nooky before making Reindeer: Affleck had tickled Liv Tyler's naked belly with animal crackers in Armageddon and Theron had that catfight with Teri Hatcher in 2 Days in the Valley, but otherwise...
"Oh, and I had a sex scene with Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate, but I turned into a different girl in the middle of it," Theron suddenly remembers. "The other [actress] had better breasts than I did. I was very upset about that."
At any rate, neither star was all that worried about Reindeer's randier scenes, but they did have other concerns. "I thought the script was great," Affleck recalls, "but it needed a masterful hand. Because in the hands of a lesser director, it could have been this terrible Scooby-Doo kind of thing. It was one of those fine-line situations."
"I had heard about the script," Theron says, "and I backed away from it. They were mentioning younger filmmakers at the time [like Little Odessa director James Gray] and that's when I started being afraid. The hipness of it scared me. I didn't want to go back and do 2 Days in the Valley again."
All doubts vanished when Frankenheimer signed on, particularly for Sinise, who had bonded with the director when he starred in his TNT biopic Wallace. "I wasn't looking to play a villain, but I wanted to work with John again," he says. "Especially in an action movie. The guy is 70 and making movies like a 35-year-old, the sort Michael Bay is making." (Funny he should mention it: Bay, the director responsible for Armageddon, has long been rumored to be the illegitimate son of Frankenheimer, who has publicly and emphatically denied the connection.)
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