Yep, it was cold. What else?

Enlarge Image

Renee Zellweger: 'Every four months ... new in town. Wherever the next location is and wherever you get sent.

Enlarge Image

It has become commonplace to see high-profile actors and actresses coming to the city to make movies like Shall We Dance?, Capote and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

But it was unusual to see Zellweger and co-stars Harry Connick Jr., J.K. Simmons and former Saturday Night Live cast member Siobhan Fallon Hogan make the trip smack in the middle of a particularly chilling Winnipeg winter.

The plot of the film simply required frigid cold as a means of scoring comic mileage out of extreme weather conditions. Zellweger plays Lucy Hill, a posh, ambitious Miami executive who suffers both culture and climate shock when she is sent to the town of New Ulm, Minn., to restructure (read: downsize) a food-manufacturing plant.

Shooting the film in Winnipeg in winter should provide lots of talk-show fodder for the stars in the coming days, with New Orleans-born Harry Connick Jr. particularly hilarious on the subject of Winnipeg's weather.

"Why do you live in that town?" Connick asked me. "Let's just be real, it's not human to live in a town like that, you know what I'm saying? That's just crazy cold."

"(It's) colder than you can even believe," Connick said, addressing the press at the W. Hotel in Los Angeles. "Don't go to Winnipeg between October and March."

But even in Winnipeg, there's more to talk about than the weather. For example:

The movie's plot was inspired by a pick-up attempt by Minneapolis-born screenwriter Kenneth Rance 16 years ago.

"I was in a nightclub and I saw a really attractive woman dancing like there was no tomorrow," Rance says.

"I asked her, 'Where are you from, what are you doing here?' She said she lived in New Ulm, Minn.

Her story, it turned out, was pretty much the same as the story of Lucy Hill's character. Rance heard it and thought: That's a movie.

"It just took 16 years for it to actually come to the silver screen."

The movie was originally supposed to feature an African-American in the Zellweger role.

In the press notes for the film, producer Paul Hill burbles that Renee Zellweger "was absolutely our first choice for the role of Lucy Hill."

But in fact, the entire movie was conceived as a comedic vehicle for a black actress.

Rance, who is black, says that changed in the development process, when the movie changed hands from a Universal studio film to a property of the independent production company Gold Circle.

For his part, Rance was OK with it, given that Zellweger is a powerful force in the realm of the rom-com.

"That was always a secondary facet and so it I thought it was very easy to make that transition," Rance says.

"So little about what made the script work was about race, about this woman being in the whitest town in America," says Rance's co-writer C. Jay Cox says. "Very little of it had to be changed from the idea that it was written with, say, Halle Berry in mind as opposed to Renée....

"Basically, it was a story about our assumptions about city versus small town, and about beliefs and the way that they function in our lives."

The film has Christian characters, but it doesn't make fun of them.

At one point in the comedy, Hogan's small-town secretary Blanche Gunderson asks Zellweger's character Lucy, "Have you found Jesus?"

Lucy's response is funny ("I didn't know he was missing," she says). But the treatment of the Christian character in a Christian community is handled with respect, a fact that pleased Hogan especially.

"When I got it and my character talks about Jesus, it's not done disrespectfully and it's not politically correct or politically incorrect," she says.

"I'm a Catholic and I have three children and I raise my children in the Catholic faith. And it's clearly a Christian character.

"This is such a huge part of the United States that it seems like Hollywood veers away from because it's not hip," she says. "And I just thought it was a gift that ... the producers were brave enough to do it, and I am so proud to speak about Jesus three times in it and have it not be a weird thing."

"But didn't you deny him the first time?" Connick interjects.

During the shoot, Zellweger and Hogan got around town. Connick ... not so much.

Zellweger says the experience of being "new in town" is a constant in the actor's life.

"Every four months ... new in town," she says. "Wherever the next location is and wherever you get sent,"

Her usual process, she says, is to "hoof it around and find out what's going to be home for the next four to six months and what your pattern's going to be and what your surroundings are going to be."

And indeed, Zellweger could be seen on occasion taking in the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Winnipeg Art Gallery or shopping.

Hogan, too, made a point of leaving the hotel to visit The Forks or attend church services at St. Mary's Cathedral downtown, although she had to adjust her usual walking style, she says.

"The one thing I learned was you have to bend your knees when you walk because it's so icy you don't want to fall and break something."

But Connick, who segued into acting from a career as a singer-pianist, admits he didn't go looking for venues to play, or jam sessions to join.

"I really didn't. I was there to do the work and I tried to prepare as much as I could," he says. "There wasn't a whole lot going on. I don't remember there being a lot of opportunities to play."

New in Town opens next Friday, Jan. 30.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 24, 2009 C1