Sarah Michelle Gellar

LOCATION: San Diego, CA

THE SKINNY: SOUTHLAND TALES is an ensemble sci-fi musical set in the futuristic landscape of Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, as it stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster in the years following a nuclear attack that destroys most of Texas. Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock) is an actor famous for his role in action films, and he’s trying to secure financing for a new project, but reality keeps mirroring the events in his script and he struggles to hold on to his identity following a bout with amnesia. Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a porn star who is reinventing herself as a television pundit offering her views on politics, contemporary culture, and teenage sex. And Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) is an L.A. police officer whose identity has mysteriously split in two and he struggles to track down his other half.

Director/writer Richard Kelly (DONNIE DARKO), who adapted the movie from his series of novels, took a few moments out of his extremely busy schedule at Comic-Con to talk about the movie’s release date and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character in it:

“We’re about four weeks away from our final mix,” says Kelly. “We’re laying in about 90 new visual effects shots that we’ve been working on, and the film will be completely finished and ready to be screened for the first time the second week of September. The studio will look at the finished version and then it’ll come out November 9th. The trailer will be out mid-August. So it’s all finally happening; I’m not the boy who cried wolf anymore.- -‘The movie is coming out, I promise! I promise!’ It’s printed on a poster!.”

He goes on to talk about his star: “Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a character called Krysta Now in this film, and she is Jenna Jameson meets Ariana Huffington. She’s a porn star, but she’s also branching out into music, she has a talk show similar to THE VIEW, only with porn stars talking about politics, she has an energy drink, a jewelry line and she’s very political. She has a very strong political opinion. Sarah plays the character in a way that plays upon, I think, her image as a young actress and as a starlet, growing up and starting in soap operas and becoming this kind of icon from BUFFY - she plays off her own image, in a way. She’s a very smart girl and she’s very political herself; when you talk politics or religion with her, she can hold her own. So playing a porn star - her film noir-femme fatale icon is very interesting. So it’s a long winded answer, but I know how big Sarah is in your world, and you can’t talk about the character without talking about her.”

The film is set for release November 9th.