HOLLYWOOD -- It was a dirty job, but one young couple had to do it.

Cruel Intentions, opening Friday, is a Gothic, lurid, over-the-top teen remake of the grown-up classic Dangerous Liaisons, from the producers of I Know What You Did Last Summer. And it was the producers' brainstorm to cast a real-life Hollywood couple -- Ryan Philippe and Reese Witherspoon -- as modern-day high school versions of the characters once played by John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer.

So it is that when young, rich Manhattanite Sebastian Valmont (Philippe) wins a bet by deflowering sweet young Annette (Witherspoon) things come to a nasty conclusion.

Filming the scene in question did not turn out to be the finest moment in the lives of fiances and soon-to-be-parents Witherspoon and Philippe (their reps announced her pregnancy yesterday).

"I literally beat him up when we had to do the breakup scene," says Witherspoon. "We'd gotten so tired and we'd done the scene so many times. He was off camera giving me my lines and he started to ad lib -- which is a bad thing when you're doing this kind of scene, and talking like, 'I never loved you! You're not attractive!' Terrible things.

"I got so upset I just hauled off and socked him in the face. And everybody in the crew was like 'Gasp! Can you believe she did that?' And I'm screaming my lines and I just yelled 'Get out!' And he ran off and threw up in a stairwell. And I'm, like, sobbing, saying, 'I can't believe he said those things to me!'

"And the director (Roger Kumble) came in and said 'Oh God, I can't believe it, that was so great! Can you do it again?' "

And unfortunately, after all the angst, the scene got cut down considerably. "I think it was, finally, too intense," he says. "It would have shaken people up too much."

Philippe's heart was in the right place when he suggested Reese for the role of Annette. "A lot of things about (Reese) are so simple and pure, I knew she could play it easily," he says.

This is a marked contrast to the rest of the characters. Sarah Michelle Geller, of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame, plays the Glenn Close role of Kathryn Merteuil, Sebastian's coke-sniffing, scheming stepsister. Together they plot the deflowering of virgins (Witherspoon and Selma Blair) and revenge against enemies with the help of a gay teen drug dealer accomplice, played by Dawson Creek's Josh Jackson.

The challenge was to make Annette someone to whom Sebastian could actually lose his flinty heart.

"In the original script, Annette was much more like the original character in Les Liaisons Dangereuses -- timid, mousy, shy," says Witherspoon. "To me it didn't make sense putting that character in a contemporary situation. She just would be devoured immediately by these predatory people.

"So we decided to make her more of an intellectual woman, married to her principles, very strong-willed and self-assured. It made her seem more unattainable in a different sort of way."

Would they work together again? Both say yes. "If anything, our relationship in the film really benefits from our personal relationship," says Philippe.

Says Witherspoon: "We had chemistry, but we would also spend a lot of time working on the script. We'd wake up in the middle of the night and go, 'That's how we fix it!' and call Roger and bug him," she says, laughing. For his part, Kumble says, "I worried whether their relationship would be a problem. But it was my first time directing. I worried about everything."

But for now, Witherspoon and Philippe are back to a routine of flying out to where the other is working. In '97, she visited him in Toronto on the set of 54. This month, she's in Toronto filming American Psycho and he's coming in for visits.

T'was ever thus, even when they met.

"I got an invitation to a birthday party for her and I had to leave the next day to shoot a movie," he says, recounting how they met two years ago. "I ultimately went for the free drinks, 'cause I really didn't think she'd be interested in me.

"But we met that night and talked for about an hour. And we spent the next five weeks writing letters to each other and talking on the phone before we even had our first date."


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