Basketball Star Elton Brand Not Playing Around in Hollywood

Doing business in Hollywood can create some strange bedfellows. My favorite pairing as of late is Los Angeles Clippers power forward Elton Brand and acclaimed German director Werner Herzog, whose beautifully contemplative and emotionally complex Vietnam War movie Rescue Dawn (based on his documentary Little Deiter Needs to Fly) opened on July 4th and goes wide on July 13th. This was by far my favorite film to play the Toronto Film Fest last year and I highly recommend checking it out. The 28-year-old Brand produced the $10 million movie through his Gibraltar Films (which he started with nightclub mogul Steve Marlton) and spent a month on location in Thailand during the shoot. Not quite the subject matter you'd expect from a hoops star, which makes me an even bigger fan of Brand (who I guess has varied tastes--he's also producing a movie called Bottoms Up starring Paris Hilton). From AP:

AP: A lot of athletes make an album, make a movie, do a TV show, and it can seem like dabbling. How do you convince the world that this is something you take seriously?

Brand: I think I took the right step in convincing the world that this is something I take seriously by doing a serious movie. It's an intense film. You know, it's action and it's exciting but it's very intense and very current. It's about a POW in Laos getting shot down, and he's at a POW camp, and how they survive, and the bravery and kinship that was formed, the bond that was formed. And it portrays Dieter Dengler -- that's who Christian Bale plays -- as he was. His son actually told me, like, "That's my Dad," after he saw the movie.

AP: What else would you want to do, movie-wise?

Brand: I like character-driven movies and I want to tell a good story. You know, we're independent so we don't have a big budget for special effects and things like that anyway, and that's why I really liked "Rescue Dawn." We wanted to make it real -- feel real, seem real. When Christian Bale eats maggots, those were real maggots.

Photo: CHARLOTTE, NC - MARCH 16: Elton Brand #42 of the Los Angeles Clippers drives against Jake Voskuhl #43 of the Charlotte Bobcats during the game at Charlotte Bobcats Arena on March 16, 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Clippers won 102-93]