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LOS ANGELES -- As they say, you can't make this stuff up. Hilary Swank was in the middle of filming The Reaping, a supernatural thriller about Biblical plagues hitting rural Louisiana, when the real thing showed up.
It was called Katrina, and it made a plague of locusts look like a thicket of crickets.
"It was weird and certainly a horrible event," Swank says of the city-destroying hurricane. "We were probably a little more than halfway done, and the great thing was the way the studio handled it. Instead of closing down the movie and filming somewhere else, they said, 'Let's let some time go by and keep people employed. People who'd lost their homes didn't have to lose their jobs too."
Before spiriting the entire 120-person crew out of Baton Rouge on a chartered jumbo jet (the last flight of any kind to leave the city before Katrina hit), the filmmakers kept things going until the 11th hour.
"At that point, we hardly had any equipment or lights. We'd had to give them all to FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). Lights, generators, Motorolas (cellphones), things that are hard to make a film without. You couldn't get e-mails, you couldn't make phone calls."
They returned 10 days later to find only minor damage to their sets (Baton Rouge was relatively unscathed compared to New Orleans).
"Then (the milder hurricane) Rita started and a roof caved in and the whole of Baton Rouge, all the lights went out.
"It's weird driving through a city with no lights on."
For Swank, it was just another odd turn in a place she found slightly weird.
"The hospitality down there is just fantastic. I moved into this great farmhouse, and the first thing a neighbour brought me over pecan pie. And as she's leaving, she said, 'And watch out for the ghosts.' I'm like, 'What?'
"And she's like, 'Yup, and you're in the middle of nowhere.' There's actually a haunted house down there (Myrtles Plantation) -- two miles from where I was living -- that's known to be the most haunted house in the world. Oprah Winfrey did a special on it and left at two in the morning and said, 'I am outta here.' "
The movie, in which Swank plays a professional debunker trying to solve a series of incidents that evoke the Ten Plagues of Egypt in Exodus, had its spooky moments onset, according to Swank. In an autopsy scene, in which a Devil worshippers' mark is seen on a dead boy's body, "the sound went out every time that symbol was revealed. It didn't go out when we were talking, but every time the camera pulled back ... The first time we were like, 'Sound problem, whatever.' But by the fifth time, we were all like, 'Oookay, what's going on here?' "
All this for a movie that is, frankly, unlikely to add to her total of two best actress Oscars. Swank, who is not above saying yes to a popcorn movie (remember The Core?) In fact, she said yes to The Reaping in the very weekend when she won her Oscar for Million Dollar Baby.
"The funny thing is Joel (action producer Joel Silver) sent this script to me the week before the Academy Awards when I won for Million Dollar Baby. And he said, 'I need you to read this script.' And I said, 'Can it wait until maybe next week?' And he was like, 'No, you need to read it now!'
"I never looked for movies to be Oscar-worthy. I want scripts I love and stories I want to be part of telling. This was a different movie, and it was fun."
The occasional plague aside, of course.
Director has weathered many storms
Not to softpedal Katrina, but in some ways, a natural disaster was just another day at the office for The Reaping director Stephen Hopkins.
"The world is not L.A.," the Jamaican-born, British-raised Hopkins says. "Other places have weather. We had terrible hurricanes and storms on The Ghost In The Darkness (shot in South African and Kenya with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer). We had two 40-foot bridges washed away. We had several people killed on that shoot, hit by lightning."
In fact, Hopkins suggests half-jokingly that he might be the one who's cursed. "I was born during a hurricane in Kingston, Jamaica, in the basement of (a hospital) with no power. I was nicknamed 'Hurricane Hopkins' for that reason."
He admits, however, that the Katrina experience straightened out some biases he had about the U.S. South.
"It's a part of the country where there's great poverty, overt racism, I think, and where it's very right wing. It's hard to get hold of information down there. So I was going, 'Okay, these people are religious fundamentalists, not very well educated.
"Then, after the hurricanes, I saw these people open their doors to all these refugees. It didn't matter how rich or poor, what colour they were.
"I was blown away. The administration literally did nothing, but the people reacted so wonderfully, they gave up everything.
"And it changes your reality. I said, 'Okay, I was looking down my nose at these people, and it's wrong to do that.' I was knocked out by their generosity."