‘The Box’ boasts philosophical undertone

Thousands of miles separated the student reporters participating in a college conference call with actress Cameron Diaz, actor James Marsden and director Richard Kelly of the film "The Box." Yet most students' voices seemed to quake and stumble through sentences as if the three were mere feet away.

About halfway through the more than 30-minute interview, the nervousness turned to genuine concern. As the next journalist introduced himself from the British Columbia Institute of Technology, a fit of coughing broke through the line.

"Hello?"

Marsden replies with a somewhat strained public service announcement, "Oh, Cameron's choking."

"Should we wait?" the reporter asks.

Diaz stifles the cough and apologizes, then breaks out into laughter.

The reporter responds, "It's OK, it's OK. People choke." More laughter.

"Maybe someone pushed a button somewhere," Diaz says.

The button she speaks of is the film's central point. Set in 1976, Marsden and Diaz play a married couple in Virginia, extended beyond their means, who are presented with an ultimatum: Would they push a button that earned them $1 million if it also took the life of someone they didn't know?

It's an existential quandary that transcends time and place, a philosophical undertone the likes of which past films Diaz has worked on, such as "What Happens in Vegas," the Shrek series and "The Holiday," find themselves unable to boast. Still, soon after collecting herself from the fit with a sip of water, Diaz showed her investment in the film's theme by listing off real-life parallels to the button.

"In today's society, I think we are already proving that we're pushing the button more than ever by taking out credit cards and mortgages, dumping stuff into the ocean and doing all these things that we think we aren't going to have to be held accountable for," Diaz said. "But ultimately, it does have an effect, and we do have to suffer the consequences of that."

At the same time, while the main crux resonates with the present day, Kelly noted there were definite time constraints in terms of setting. While writing the screenplay – based off the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson – Kelly reached the conclusion that "The Box" must be set before the era of globalization was in full-swing.

"It became a necessary decision to set it in the ‘70s because the concept of someone you don't know, which is inherent to the premise, doesn't really exist anymore with modern social networking sites and Google satellite maps and all the surveillance technology that we have today," Kelly said. "I realized that if I set it in present day, I was going to have to write that scene where Norma sits down and Googles the name Arlington Steward, and she's just sitting in front of her laptop for half of the movie."

Steward is played by Frank Langella, well-known for his role as Richard Nixon in last year's "Frost/Nixon." In "The Box," Langella is a mysterious man who's part of an organization that's international (at the very least) in scope. He shows up at the couple's doorstep with a horribly disfigured face and the box, giving them 24 hours to decide whether to push the button or not.

Not surprisingly, a supernatural element does come along with this proposition, though Marsden said the element was more evident in the screenplay than on the set.

"It was less of something that I was aware of on a daily basis when we were shooting it and more about the script we were shooting, the characters we were playing because these characters were very human, although surrounded by some supernatural elements," Marsden said. "So in many ways, it was like you were doing a real-life drama and not a science fiction film."