Movie Serenity is a mystery thriller with an unusual twist

LOS ANGELES - The movie Serenity is a shape-shifter: What starts as a Moby Dick story about a man obsessed with catching a big fish changes with the arrival of a woman from his past, then morphs into a mystery thriller with an unusual twist.

This atypical narrative reeled in not one but two Oscar-winning actors - Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.

Along with writer and director Steven Knight, they sat down with The Straits Times and other media at a recent Los Angeles press day for the film, which opens in Singapore today.

McConaughey, 49, plays Baker Dill, a fishing-boat captain down on his luck, and Hathaway, 36, is a woman named Karen who suddenly walks back into his life.

Hathaway - who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the musical drama Les Miserables (2012) - was a long-time fan of Knight's writing, especially his acclaimed independent drama Locke (2013), whose gripping story is told entirely through speaker-phone conversations in a car.

"I was so excited to get a script written by Steven Knight. We had met a couple of years prior and I loved Locke," she says.

Knight's screenplay for Serenity was unusual as well: It initially presents her character as a classic film-noir female, then slowly undermines that stereotype.

"It was so amazing to get to explore the language of noir, which is so misogynistic, given all the waves of feminism that have happened between then and now," says the Brokeback Mountain (2005) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) star.

Here, she got "to play this woman who, in a typical noir film, would be described as no good, dangerous and all of these terms that have nothing to do with the most pressing reality of her life, which is that she is in a horribly abusive relationship - the situation of most women in noirs".

But unlike in those movies, her character is "not helpless in her helplessness", says Hathaway, who is married to actor and producer Adam Shulman, 31, and has a two-year-old son.

"And I just found that to be an incredible opportunity to subvert audience expectations, which is a big joy of mine (as) an actress at this stage in my career."

Knight, too, relished the chance to reinvent the fatalistic, cynical crime dramas of the 1940s and 1950s.

The film-maker's idea was to "set up a sort of noirish movie that appears to be just that, and then pull the rug out from under it completely".

The 59-year-old set himself the challenge of first "constructing a sort of surface story" - one where he would "tap the tradition of the American hero, going back as far as Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, where the hero often is adrift and a loner".

"Then at a very inconvenient moment", the story would "completely take everything away - completely remove the stakes and remake the stakes differently", he says.

Amid these twists and turns, however, the film's leading man found an emotional anchor: the relationship between Dill and his young son, whom he is separated from but still shares a powerful bond with.

Says McConaughey, who has three children aged six to 10 with wife and model Camila Alves, 37: "One of the things in it for me was that Baker Dill's only reality is his relationship with and love for his son.

"He's always having a dialogue with his son, no matter where his son is," says the star, who won the Best Actor Oscar for the Aids drama Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and an Emmy nomination for the television crime show True Detective (2014).

This film was a reunion of sorts for him and Hathaway - they appeared together in the science-fiction drama Interstellar (2014), another mind-bending, genre-blending tale.

"I knew from working with her the first time that she was a complete professional - that she's as good as there is between action and cut, and that she shows up and there's a very involved conversation about the scene, the relationship," says McConaughey.

"It's not a first-grade conversation - it's the conversation you can have only if you've done your work to get there. There's a trust there."

Hathaway returns the compliment. "Matthew, for me, is the gold standard," she says. "I learnt so much just from getting to be around him on Interstellar.

"I learnt so much about going straight into the heart of every moment and trying to mine everything you can from there."