Dennis Michael, CNN Entertainment Correspondent
August 9, 1995
Los Angeles
It's still early August, but school is back in session for Michelle Pfeiffer. She plays a teacher at a tough inner-city school in "Dangerous Minds," opening nationwide Friday.
Pfeiffer portrays a real person, LuAnn Johnson, an ex-Marine who turned to teaching in a Palo Alto high school and waged a personal war to keep her students alive and learning. The film is based on her book. Click here for preview (600K movie)
Pfeiffer spent hours with the real LuAnn Johnson, not studying superfluous mannerisms but rather the educator's core personality. "It was important for me to retain the integrity of who she is and the essence of who she is," Pfeiffer said. "And if we had to take dramatic license here and there, I always checked with her to make sure that it was something that she would have done, given, you know, she was presented with the same set of circumstances."
The part is a distance from some of her more glamorous roles, but Pfeiffer says she reveled in the fact that it was a film about something. Another reward was unexpected: the rapport she felt with the large, largely inexperienced young supporting cast. "They were so responsive and so open. ... It completely disarmed me in the beginning, because I'm not used to it," she said. "It's one thing to work with, you know, one person who is that kind of open and vulnerable, but to look out into this sea of faces and to have 30 of them kind of looking back at you, it's pretty powerful."
Pfeiffer got involved in the film project early in development, but very nearly lost the picture because of a sudden change in her schedule. "I got pregnant," she said, "and I knew that if I didn't do it now, that the ship would sail and I wouldn't be able to do it, so I called up John and said, `Guess what? How do you feel about doing a film -- about doing this tomorrow?' He was kind of playing catch-up the whole way as a result of that -- my fault. But the end result was we made a pretty good movie." A movie that is about something and a movie that she hopes will leave something valuable behind for those who see it. (300K sound)
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