Interview with star Katherine Heigl and review of the sexy chick comedy The Ugly Truth from Columbia Pictures **** 4 Stars

By Gabrielle Pantera

Katherine Heigl in The Ugly Truth

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 7/23/09 – “I love physical comedy,” says The Ugly Truth star Katherine Heigl. “I’ve never had a chance to do a scene as elaborately physical as this one. We did that scene 37 times. I left the set so tired.” That scene is Heigl’s big-O scene, a scene reminiscent but bigger than the big-O restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Mike (Butler) is a loud mouth shock jock added to an advice show to increase ratings over the objection of sexually repressed producer Abby. Determined not to blow it when the man of her dreams moves in next door, Abby allows Mike to make her over into a female Don Juan, an irresistible seductress. That makes it a romantic comedy and a buddy movie. While on her date at a baseball game, Mike uses a hidden ear prompter to give Abby secret Cyrano-like advice of exactly what to say.

“It was a very difficult scene to shoot,” says The Ugly Truth director Robert Luketic. “There was no real baseball game in town that we could film, so we used a local field in Long Beach and put together our own team. Then we had to coordinate all that with the crowd and with what Katherine and Gerry are doing. It was so challenging I wasn’t laughing much at all while we were doing it. Later it turned out to be one of the scenes that makes people laugh the most.”

“The beauty of the story is that it gets to both sides of the argument,” says Heigl. “Abby is rightfully frustrated by her relationships with men and rightfully confused and thrown for a loop when she starts to fall for a guy like Mike who doesn’t appear to have a romantic bone in his body.”

“In his own way, Mike rocks Abby’s world,” Heigl explains. “All her love of order and peaceful calm and being on top of things, he just throws out the window. She can’t predict what he’s gonna say or what he’s gonna do next. Since she is used to always being one step ahead of things, he puts her in this place where she finally has to throw her hands up and go with the flow. There’s something secretly exhilarating for her in all that.”

“I have a real love of that sort of old Hollywood repartee that you don’t really see much anymore,” she says. “Gerry and I found that fast-paced, sparring dialogue so much fun. Even in your regular life, if you’re out with another couple and they’ve got that great witty thing going, it’s the most entertaining thing to be a part of. And it kind of just happened seamlessly between us.”

Unable to find the grand, romantic space she was looking for the nightclub where Abby and Mike first dance, production designer Missy Stewart built it in the entrance of the historic Union Station. “I’m in love with historical Los Angeles and I had been wanting to use Union Station for some time in a film,” says Stewart. “For me, it was like being on ‘Dancing With The Stars’ for a day,” says Heigl. “It was really fun.”

“The restaurant there is this vast, giant space with these great bones of arches and a dance floor that I knew would look wonderful and jazzy in a crane shot,” says Stewart. “It was one of the first locations I picked.” Stewart transformed a stage at Los Angeles public television station KCET into a typically bright and cheery morning news set and used a defunct Glendale police station to create the network administrative offices seen in The Ugly Truth.

“We’ve all seen the standard romantic comedies,” says Heigl. “I think there’s always a place for them because I’m a big romantic comedy fan. I like that The Ugly Truth takes that and brings a new edge to it. There’s a lot of raw honesty in the story but instead of taking it too seriously, it lets you laugh and enjoy the absurdity of the dynamic that goes on between men and women.”

Heigl is not afraid to make fun of her characters and take chances. Like Carol Lombard, she’s willing to take chances with roles and be funny for the fun of it.

Written by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, The Ugly Truth takes the raunchy guy comedy and turns it on its head. Does it work? Yes. Seeing Heigl’s character behave in a way typically reserved for men in movies is a refreshing look at a date movie. The Ugly Truth is the female version of a Judd Apatow guy movie. Sexual innuendos abound. Although it’s a comedy for woman by women, your guy will enjoy the movie, too.

The Ugly Truth
Release Date: July 24th, 2009 (USA)
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and language.
Running Time: 1 hr. 35 min.
Distributor: Sony Pictures