From the fertile imagination of visionary filmmaker Scott Stewart comes a fantasy adventure set in an alternate world in which humans have been battling vampires for ages. Inspired by the Korean manga comic books, Columbia Pictures’ “Priest” transports us to a dark post-apocalyptic future where a warrior priest (Paul Bettany) decides to abandon the obscurity of his existence, oblivious to the advice of his superiors who believe the hostilities have ended, embarking on a quest to investigate what he believes is a new attack from their long-time archenemies.

“Paul Bettany was on board first,” says Stewart. “We had such a great time working on “Legion” that there really wasn’t much debate on who should play Priest. Paul enjoys his job and sees it as a blessing, and he understands the process of filmmaking; which is why I think he would also make a great filmmaker, as he is good at telling the story through what he is doing. His character speaks very little, but when he does it is important.”

Bettany was excited to work with Stewart again: “I thought the script was already in very good shape when I first read it, but then the drawings I got sent were just spectacular! A film like `Priest’ could go really wrong without the right director, but the amount of love Scott feels for this kind of genre and the ambition to shoot his second movie with his first big budget made him the right man for the job. He poured all of himself and his energy into it. Primarily, as a director, Scott is very visual. He talks absolutely in terms of story -which I like- and he seems to be without ego. So, he has all the spirit and hopes of a young director, but without any of the potential pitfalls. He has worked on movies for a long time as a visual effects guy analyzing shots and knows what everything is going to look like, which is why he has much more experience than you would expect from somebody on his second movie.”

“I loved doing the action too,” recalls Bettany. “It was a lot of fun and very challenging. Also, as I don’t often play the stoic, it’s been nice to be the quiet hero for a change.” Nevertheless, his character is certainly not the average priest. “Our job is not to dispense communion,” chuckles the Bristish actor, “rather to dispense a lot of violence…”

“Paul is very courageous and an incredible professional,” says co-star Karl Urban, who plays the villain Black Hat. “It has been a very physical shoot, with a lot of wirework and stunts. And we have had some tough times! For instance, for a couple of weeks we shot this fight sequence on top of a moving train and on two occasions I injured him pretty badly. He screamed and I thought he was such a good actor, and then I realized that I had really hurt him. I felt terrible… And the second time was when we were rehearsing a fight and I elbowed his lip by mistake.”

“We all had such a great time making this movie,” shares Bettany. “I hope it’s successful so that we get to be together again, and that includes the whole crew because there has been a great camaraderie with everyone in a way that often doesn’t happen. I like the film process to be fun, and on this set I can say there hasn’t been one person that has made it miserable. I would love to be in a sequel!”

Opening across the Philippines on May 11, “Priest” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit www.sonypictures.com.phto get the latest movie news, video clips, games and free downloads. Find us on Facebook www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

For our entertainment, Paul Bettany will be waging his own personal battle between heaven and earth.

The handsome Brit’s image as the assault-rifle-toting archangel Michael in the doomsday fantasy “Legion” has been inescapable of late. In the intelligent, emotional “Creation,” meanwhile, he plays Charles Darwin over a span of crucial years. As Bettany raids a hotel suite’s mini-bar for a vodka tonic, he delights in the irony of simultaneously manifesting as an angel and as the man who, as one “Creation” character says, “killed God.”

“I was making ‘Legion’ and the script for ‘Creation’ came up — it was written by [director] Jon Amiel and John Collee, who’s a great writer, he wrote ‘Master and Commander.’ I had been reading Darwin’s diaries from the Beagle when I was making ‘Master and Commander’ as research [for his Darwinesque character, Dr. Stephen Maturin], and I had been interested in playing him,” he says. “I loved the script, and I thought it would be really fun, going from a big action movie to this small, heartfelt movie about something I care deeply about.”

Bettany’s immense respect for Darwin made him reluctant to judge his own performance.

“I don’t know if I was successful; that will be for other people to decide. I’m a glass-is-half-empty kind of human being — I’m already thinking about the next vodka tonic,” he says, punctuating the riff with a tap of the literally half-empty glass.

“I kept thinking, how am I going to produce a human being who has arguably the greatest single idea that any human being has ever had? And I slowly realized I couldn’t. Because he was the grandfather of evolution and I’m an actor. But I do know about loss and madness. Those are the things I share in common with Charles Darwin. I know what it feels like to lose people.”

The film is less about the revolutionary theory itself than the naturalist’s decision, after 20 years, to share his findings with the world.

“There are a lot of reasons for that procrastination we can guess at, and one is the death of their child,” Bettany says. “His wife was a fervent Christian and got an incredible amount of solace from the idea of heaven and God being there, and that they would all meet again. And he’s about to potentially rob her of that solace.”

To play a celestial creature in “Legion,” which is now showing, Bettany could seek only earthly references.

“It’s a similar problem in that I can’t be an angel. Ask my wife,” archly adds the husband of actress Jennifer Connelly, who plays Darwin’s wife in “Creation.”

“I can’t interview an angel and say, ‘What’s it like?’ So I went to museums. What I noticed about angels, often they have swords and spears, and they’re ripped,” he says, laughing. “I mean, actually, all we’re doing is changing the weapon — he’s got an M-16. What I need to do is go to the gymnasium. In postproduction they’re going to put 8-foot wings on me, and I can get on with the sort of human bit, which is fun.”

His archangel Michael joins forces with mankind after God, having lost all hope for humanity, sends in his angels to bring on the apocalypse.

“He has the courage of his convictions. Now to defy your boss in any walk of life is a traumatic, frightening and courageous thing to do. But when your boss is God…”

The multiple-award-winning actor gets no vertigo when fluttering from the lofty goals of art films to what some might sniff at as the lower aims of genre movies.

“I love all sorts of movies. I love ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ I love ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ I love ‘Brief Encounter.’ But I also love ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ and I’d be lying if I tried to cover that up and pretend I had more sort of educated tastes.

“I don’t want people to go to ‘Creation’ and eat popcorn throughout, but I absolutely want to go to ‘Legion’ and see people’s popcorn go up in the air when they get scared.”

(Now playing across the Philippines, “Legion” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.  Visit www.sonypictures.com.ph to see the latest trailers, get free downloads and play free movie games.)

Paul Bettany, perhaps best known for his powerful performance as the assassin Silas in “The Da Vinci Code,” is back in the big screen, this time as the Archangel Michael in Columbia Pictures’ supernatural action-thriller “Legion.”

In the film, as mankind destroys itself in a savage fury, a small group of people (led by Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black and Tyrese Gibson) trapped on the edge of nowhere prepare to make a last stand—with the help of a mysterious and powerful stranger – the Archangel Michael.

Convincing Bettany to play Michael seemed an audacious goal for the filmmakers. “Paul has the authority we needed, but given his pedigree, we weren’t sure he would be interested,” says writer-director Scott Stewart.

The catalyst for the action of the film is Michael, a larger-than-life figure who seems to appear out of nowhere. “Michael has such conviction that the other characters follow him without question,” says Stewart. “I didn’t want him to be an enigma. He is the Archangel Michael, but you can’t play that abstraction.”

Stewart had planned his presentation meticulously in an all-out effort to capture Bettany’s imagination. The actor was as intrigued by Stewart’s vision as he was by the film’s premise. “Scott pitched his movie better than anybody has ever pitched a movie to me before,” the actor says. “He had all kinds of visual aids. He’s a very impressive human being.”

The unusual thematic elements were icing on the cake for the actor. “It’s a really slick, fast-paced movie that is in no way stupid,” he says. “Traditionally Michael is the defender of mankind. He is known as the first in all heaven to bow down before mankind and he still has faith in humanity despite all the war and horror he sees. So he’s having a massive crisis of allegiance.”

Bettany’s unique qualities as an actor made him an ideal choice to play the conflicted archangel, says the director. “Paul has an incredible stillness that only the greatest actors possess. His work is almost surgical in its exactness and specificity. That helped make Michael a commanding, mysterious figure you immediately trust, even if you don’t fully understand why. He turned out to be the most tremendous partner a filmmaker could have, because he cared a lot about the film and about his character—but he also wanted to shoot a machine gun and have a good time.”

Though a veteran of numerous films, “Legion” provided Bettany his first essentially action hero role.  And he calls the stunts he did in the movie “an embarrassing amount of fun.” “The first time on the wire was a rush unlike anything legal that I know of,” Bettany says. “The fights were like being 10 years old with friends who don’t mind you hit them. If you’re making an action movie and you’re not doing the action, then you’re not making an action movie.”

Opening across the Philippines on Friday, Jan. 22, “Legion” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.  Visit www.sonypictures.com.ph to see the latest trailers, get free downloads and play free movie games.