'Beautiful Boy': No frills, no waste

When you make a movie in 18 days on a shoestring budget, you're green by default. So says Shawn Ku, who directed his film "Beautiful Boy" in 18 days, "almost entirely on practical locations. Nothing was built. Our crew was really small — you can hire only so many people on a dime. Our talent worked for scale because they wanted to do the project."

The drama, opening June 3, is set in the aftermath of a school shooting, but focuses not on the gunman or his victims but the boy's parents, whose already shaky marriage is tested by the horrific tragedy. "They don't have any satisfactory answer so they blame themselves and each other. They're left with this emptiness, and that makes it that much more tragic and complex for them," says Michael Armbruster, who wrote the script with Ku. "They're not hideous, they're not perfect, they're certainly flawed, and they navigate through it to end in a hopeful place."

As parents, Michael Sheen and Maria Bello couldn't fathom what it would be like to experience what their characters endure. "To be able to wrap your head around that sort of tragedy and what a parent must feel, you could never get over that," believes Bello, the mother of a ten-year-old son. "There's no way you could ever get over something like this." Both actors signed on based on the excellent script, not the paycheck. For Sheen, what's on the page, and a variety in projects and characters, is what counts. Currently on screen in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," with parts one and two of "Breaking Dawn," the last two "Twilight Saga" movies, coming up as well as a production of "Hamlet" on the London stage later this year, he says that the diversity of the roles he chooses in myriad venues "allows me to challenge myself as an actor and stops me from having to wait on the other end of a phone."

Bello, whose resumé includes dramas like "A History of Violence" and the forthcoming "Abduction," comedies like "Grown Ups," and TV series like "ER," will return to television this fall in NBC's new version of the BBC series "Prime Suspect," playing a detective heretofore associated with Helen Mirren. "It's very different in that it takes place in New York City," she compares. "It has a real dark New York sense of humor. She's a very strong woman character and she's still, unfortunately, having to fight in this man's world to be respected as the great detective that she is." She'd turned the job offer down twice, but changed her mind when she learned the series would shoot in Los Angeles and wouldn't require her to "work 16 hour days and not see my kid."