Charlize Theron is an actress who traverses between the mainstream (The Italian Job, Aeon Flux) and the independent (The Yards, Monster) with ease, and now she wears another hat: in Sleepwalking, she both co-stars and produces.

It’s not the first time she’s worked as a producer – that would be Monster, the little movie that could for which she won the Best Actress Oscar.

“That’s the job I signed up for,” she says when asked about her nonstop busy schedule during filming. “When people are going to give you millions and millions of dollars to go make a film, you’re responsible for them. So I spent six weeks up there before anybody came up, doing the location scouting and meeting with the film community out there and figuring out our incentives and how we were going to work our budget out. And if we didn’t make a day or were behind schedule, I was the one who had to answer those questions.”

She insists, however, that the experience was more than worthwhile. “You know, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. There’s a creative thread about it, there’s something incredibly creative about creating that world that you’re very passionate about. I like the problem solving of it, I like the business side of it, I think independent filmmaking and financing is really fascinating right now. I’m a circus clown, you know? I like taking the circus on the road.”

She says what drew her to the project was simple. “You either tap into something or you don’t. I read it and thought it was a great script. It wasn’t necessarily the most incredibly original idea – I think that we’ve seen the dysfunctional family before – but in the manner it was told, it felt like real people. I think the writer was really brave in not trying to water anything down, and at the same time not trying to make anything soap-opera-y or melodramatic. I liked that there was a sense of hope, and I like that it had a nice kick in the ass. Wake up, be responsible for your life.”

The film chronicles a road trip between a troubled young girl, Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) and her uncle James (Nick Stahl) after her mother (Theron) temporarily abandons her. “The challenge in that is to create a very pure relationship,” Theron says. “What [screenwriter Zac Stanford] did, I liked that it never went in a sexual relationship, either with my character’s father [played by Dennis Hopper] or with James. Even if that’s not the intent of the writer, sometimes, unintentionally, that can somehow come across on film: when you put a twelve-year-old girl in a car with a young guy. That was a real concern of ours.”

The lower-class, blue collar world of the story is something that Theron has done before, in both Monster and North Country.

Still, “that’s three movies out of close to thirty films,” she gently reminds us. “It’s hard when people make those correlations, because we just want to make good stories. I’m not going to turn down a film just because the social conditions of the film are similar to the last movie I did or a movie I did four years ago.”

Beyond that, though, there is undoubtedly something about lower-class struggles that appeals to Theron’s instincts. “We all know that life is hard. If you get to travel a little bit through America, you’ll see a lot of people living in very different circumstances than a lot of us, and a lot of that influences the decisions they make. I think that’s where humanity comes from: understanding circumstance. Not just judging it or labeling it, but having some kind of empathy for understanding what certain events or surroundings in your life might cause you to end up being. And a lot of people out there deal with not necessarily a great hand of cards.”

Next up for Theron is this summer’s satirical Hancock, starring Will Smith as a drunk and homeless superhero. After that, it’s the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling novel The Road, about less fortunate people of a different sort: a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son as two of the last people alive in a post-apocalyptic America.

“It’s actually very hopeful,” Theron says about the seemingly bleak story, in which she’ll appear in flashbacks as Mortensen’s wife. “I think it’s probably the most hopeful thing I’ve ever read on us, as the human species. The circumstances of the story are real and dark and sad, but not necessarily grim and hopeless. I don’t want to make movies like that, because I just don’t believe that. If you don’t have hope, you’re not alive. And if you’re alive you have hope, and that’s really what The Road is about. And that’s what this is about: that there’s hope no matter what.”

Source: Dan @ TheCinemaSource.com