The Calgary Sun has posted and article on Loverboy (with a short segment on Sandy)

Kevin Bacon steps behind the camera

By KEVIN WILLIAMSON -- Calgary Sun

PARK CITY, Utah -- Hollywood's renaissance man has shown a lot of his dark side lately.

But Kevin Bacon, who portrays a child molester in The Woodsman and is at Sundance this year for his disturbing directorial effort Loverboy, says he isn't ready yet to come into the light.

"With Mystic River and The Woodsman and now this, it's been a little dark," he admits following his movie's premiere at the Eccles Center. "So sometimes I'll read something nice and light and then I think, 'I can't do this.' "

For now the actor, who segued from pop stardom in the '80s with Footloose, to respectability with character roles in such '90s fare as Apollo 13 and JFK, is content to choose versatility over commercialism. Along with being an actor and filmmaker, Bacon continues to be one half of the musical duo The Bacon Brothers with his brother Michael (who scored Loverboy).

"They're all satisfying in different ways. I get asked (which I prefer) and I can't choose. I've been very lucky to be able to do all three. With this project I got a chance to work with my brother. I had a lot of ideas musically and being a musician myself, I think that helped (the film). And I got to act in it a bit, which was a lot of fun. It was a blast."

In addition to directing, Loverboy also gave Bacon the opportunity to work again with his wife, Kyra Sedgwick. She stars as one of the most deranged mothers in recent movie memory. It was Sedgwick, in fact, who discovered the novel the film is based upon in a bookstore on the Upper West Side of New York.

"I could relate a little bit," she says. "There are those little moments where you have to let go, or your child walks away from you. It's excruciatingly painful. The thing about the book was for the first three quarters, I thought (her character) was the most amazing, idealistic mother and why couldn't I be like that? Then you find out she's not so awesome."

She brought the book to Bacon, who set about hiring a writer to pen a screenplay. With a script in place, he and his producers started assembling "a dream cast" that includes Matt Dillon, Oliver Platt, Marisa Tomei, Campbell Scott, Bacon himself as the father of Sedgwick's character, and, in an unbilled role, Sandra Bullock.

"We thought of (Bullock's character) Mrs. Harker as being this larger-than-life character. And with this movie, with so many members of the cast, from Marisa to Matt to Sandy, we didn't think we'd get any of them, but we thought, 'It doesn't hurt to ask.'

"I fell off my chair when she said she'd do the movie and would do it for nothing ... She wanted to just sneak into the movie and I thought she was fantastic ... There's this kind of perception that directors say these special little things to actors to get their performance. But really how it works is, you get somebody who's great and then watch them do their thing."

With Sedgwick and both Bacon siblings on-board, Loverboy became a greater family affair when Bacon cast their daughter, Sosie Ruth, as a younger version of Sedgwick's character in the movie's many flashback sequences. The couple, who have been married for 17 years, have two children, Sosie Ruth and son Travis.

"We've always told our kids 'Don't become actors, it's a horrible job, get a normal job, and you're not doing it anyway until you're 18 because we want you to have a childhood.' My son is more of a musician than an actor, but he's still not allowed to go on the road until he's 18. But we had this role that was Kyra as a 10-year-old and she's supposed to be my daughter and I thought, 'This is too perfect.' And Kyra said, 'But this goes against everything we've been telling them' and I said, 'Yeah, but she's perfect and I knew she'd do a great job.' "

Bacon, of course, follows in a long tradition of thespians turned directors.

Despite being a Hollywood veteran, Bacon says he still marvels at those performers who can move so effortlessly from behind, to in front of the camera.

"It's so hard to act and direct. I wanted to be there (for Marisa in their scenes), but then I felt torn between that and the movie itself. I don't know how Clint (Eastwood, his Mystic River director) does that -- it's freakish for me that he can do that."

Besides, which, he adds, "It's so much harder to come (to Sundance) as a director than as an actor because if it doesn't go well, I'll just blame the director."

Sundance mainstays as they are, Bacon and Sedgwick will probably be back again -- but not before Bacon returns to the Eccles with his band. "Hopefully (our concert) will sell out like this," he says, noting the standing-room-only crowd that turned out for Loverboy's debut.

Maybe Sedgwick could join them? "There was a time when I sang with the Bacon Brothers," she says, "but then people started paying for tickets."

grabbed from Sandra Bullock Online