Jungle Love

Morse, whose character suffers a months long ordeal at a remote terrorist hideout, had another challenge: to drop enough weight to look like a convincingly malnourished hostage, then gain it back again in order to film ''Proof'''s opening scenes just weeks later. To do it, he consulted the same weight loss M.D. as his ''Green Mile'' costar (and ''Cast Away'' lead) Tom Hanks. Surviving on a severely restricted diet and performing action scenes at high altitudes helped Morse shed the weight quickly -- too quickly. ''I wanted to lose 40 pounds, but I lost the weight so fast both my doctor and the producer told me to stop,'' says Morse. ''Enough people were saying, 'You look bad; let's cut it out here.'''

When the cast and crew moved to lower altitudes during rainy season, new dangers arose. ''The location changed a lot, meaning that some days the hillside would be there, and sometimes it wouldn't be,'' says costar David Caruso, who shares some high action scenes with Crowe. ''And every day, the landscape would become more and more unstable.'' Then, on April 9, a truck carrying six crew members rolled off a 150 foot cliff. Five of the occupants survived, but Will Gaffney, an American teacher who was working as a stand in for Morse, died at the scene. ''It was a crushing blow of reality,'' says Caruso. ''To see grown men crying, it's scary.'' (Morse, who had returned to the U.S. when the accident occurred, says, ''I don't feel it is appropriate to comment on [the tragedy].'')

Not surprisingly, Hackford eventually melted down under the pressure. ''There were days when he just lost it,'' Morse remembers. ''And then one day he lost it really badly.'' The director, desperate to complete filming before a thick fog rolled in, needed a novice Ecuadorian actress to slap another actor in a key scene. ''The weather had lifted for the first time in six days, and this girl wouldn't slap him,'' recalls Hackford. ''I told her to hit me, because it's an acting moment, but she didn't understand that. So I slap her on the face. It was a screen slap. Does it sting for a second? Yes. But does it hurt anybody? No.'' Hackford ultimately apologized, but he defends his actions. ''Sometimes you screw up. Sometimes you go too far,'' he says. ''But you do whatever you have to to get the scene, and I cop to that.''

Well, at least one A list lover found the grueling shoot in Ecuador partly a relief. Crowe says he was sad to leave the location behind, since constant attention from the tabloids awaited him when the shoot moved to London. ''When we were in Ecuador for four months, we didn't have to worry about paparazzi,'' Crowe says. ''So basically I was under a complete... I was going to say under a blanket, but you'd all f---in' use that the wrong way. Come on, you can laugh if you want.''