NIU students make Hollywood dream a reality

Local college students working on Anthony Hopkins' new film learned a fundamental truth about movie-making: It's all about illusion.

But it was no illusion as student Michael Gentile sat near Hopkins, Christian Slater and other stars at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in January for a screening of "Slipstream," the film he helped make.

And it's no illusion that four of the six Northern Illinois University students already are working in the film industry in Los Angeles.

Gentile, a 26-year-old graduate student from Lindenhurst, was the only student able to make it to Sundance after flying out on a lark with no ticket and running into the cast.

The film fest was great, Gentile said, but he called working on the film "a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

Associate professor Laura Vasquez used her connections with the film co-producer, 1987 NIU graduate Robert Katz, to arrange the project.

With temperatures topping 117 degrees on a set in California's Mojave Desert, the students worked on everything from lighting to props.

On the camera crew, Gentile got to work with a high-definition digital camera that few professionals have used, and he played a bit part as a camera operator in a scene with John Turturro.

As for Hopkins, Gentile called him a genuine, grandfatherly guy, who learned the students' names and encouraged everyone to have fun.

As the students found out, the work on the set aimed to create a certain effect for each scene.

For instance, one scene called for Hopkins to have dappled light on his face from the shade of a leafy tree. There are no such trees in the desert, so an assistant held a pole with fake leaves to shade the star.

"It's all about the shot," Vazquez said, "not the reality behind the shot."

-- Robert McCoppin