Law's cross-dressing project goes straight to cellphone

Jude Law's quirky turn as a drag artist in experimental movie Rage is to be released on cellphones.

Law plays Minx in writer/director Sally Potter's film, which is set to break records as the world's smallest big film.

Potter tells WENN, "When I first wrote the part I was imagining it would be played by a woman and I suddenly realised one day it would be infinitely more interesting to be played by a man, because it's so much about the construction of a persona, somebody who is pretending to be Russian with multiple disguises.

"When I thought of it being a man I immediately thought of Jude because he has been accused, so to speak, of being too beautiful. That gave us incredible material to work with and we had discussions about that when we were working on it. We worked together on the looks and spent quite a bit of time with make-up, hair and costume tests until we found the character."

But the director still has no idea how successful the straight-to-phone venture will be.

She adds, "We don't know how this is going to work, especially since it is the first ever feature on cellphones. We're making it up as we go along and taking the plunge and the risk.

"There's so much terror in the film industry at the moment about piracy, people stealing your idea and making money off of it; and the only way I found of dealing with that is to say, 'Here, have it.' If you keep looking over your shoulder, you don't trailblaze.

"It's not necessarily a great money spinner. At the moment I'm in debt but the great advantage of being in debt means you've got nothing to lose."

Rage will launch in London later this week (24Sep09) with an interactive press conference, which will be beamed live to 40 screens all over the world and film fans will be able to text in their questions.

Potter explains, "The world begins to have the technology to serve us rather than the other way around. I'm looking forward to the chaos of it, which is inevitable. We will deal with someone who says something weird and we're not afraid of something going wrong."

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