LOS ANGELES — "My assistant wants me to quit —and these are his words — `this acting bull—t' so that we can go on the PGA tour together," Mark Wahlberg announces with a laugh. "He wants to be my caddie."

With an 18 handicap, the chisel-cut actor has no intentions of making another career change at age 31. But he does know a thing or two about self-reinvention. Jailed at 17 for assaulting a Vietnamese refugee during a botched liquor store robbery, Wahlberg rebounded and found fame in the early '90s as bad-boy rapper Marky Mark. He later became a popular underwear model for Calvin Klein and then a bona-fide movie star in Fear, Boogie Nights and Planet Of The Apes.

Now Wahlberg is returning to theatres with The Truth About Charlie, a remake of the 1963 Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn classic Charade that opens in Toronto on Friday. "This is the hip hop version," he smiles, kicking back in a hotel suite. "This is by no means a Cary Grant bio-pic, but if people want to make comparisons and say I'm doing the Cary Grant role, that's fine." 

In many ways, he is. 

The story goes like this: A young woman in Paris, Regina Lambert (Thandie Newton), is about to divorce her husband, Charlie, when she discovers he is dead and all their bank accounts have been emptied. Meanwhile, a mysterious man, Joshua Peters (Wahlberg), claims that the money was really his and he wants it back. He is convinced she is hiding the cash. So is a trio of Charlie's old cohorts. As she figures out whom to trust, more and more people end up dead.

"Mark has built a successful career by being unwilling to let people categorize him," says E! Online movie columnist Anderson Jones. "The key to his success in film was not letting people think of him as a white rapper —nothing can mean death to a career more than that. He had a little patience and that has really paid off for him."

The youngest of nine children born into a strict Irish Catholic family, Wahlberg spent much of his teen years dealing drugs and picking fights on the streets of Dorchester, Mass., a poor working class district on the outskirts of Boston. After dropping out of high school, the one-time bricklayer turned to a life of petty crime that landed him at the Deer Island Penitentiary for two months.

"Funny thing is, that's exactly what I had set out to accomplish," he sheepishly admits. "I wanted to be one of the guys. I wanted to be respected on the streets, have my stripes and have my time under my belt. Then when I got there I was like, `This is the worst place in the world.'"

So Wahlberg decided to turn things around. He credits much of his spiritual reawakening to one man — Father Flavin, a Catholic priest from St. William's Church in his old neighbourhood. 

"The first time I met him I was 12 years old and I was standing on a corner at 3 in the morning selling drugs," the actor remembers. "He has dedicated his entire life to doing God's work and helping people. Unfortunately, most of us didn't listen to him until it was too late. A lot of my friends are still in prison."

Wahlberg's hand begins to tremble slightly as he takes a sip of coffee. This is not a subject he likes to talk about. But he obliges, in the hopes his story may inspire others. Wahlberg's refreshing candor has already allowed Hollywood to be quite forgiving of his prior PR problems. "People will give you a break if you are willing to be honest," says Jones. "He has been upfront about the things that were obstacles in his past and when you do that, it allows people to collaborate with you instead of strategizing against you."

Director Jonathan Demme agrees. "One of the things that impressed me most when I met Mark — and I was very touched by this — was he told me he had done things in his past that he wasn't proud of," Demme recalls. "He told me he was devoting his energies in life to responding in a positive way to the bad things he has done in the past."

For starters, the actor recently established a charity — The Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation — which purchased a new gym for Flavin's church and created a teen centre in Boston. "I even brought some kids out here to L.A. to stay at my home for a while," he adds. "I'm just trying to show them that there is another world besides the corner of Dorchester Avenue."

Wahlberg draws much of his own inspiration from his older brother, Jim. He spent 10 years in prison and now helps run the foundation. "He has been sober for 17 years and a counsellor for 12," Wahlberg boasts. "He has made a miraculous change."

Jim Wahlberg says his brother has the power to change many lives with his own story: "His message is simple — `Do the right thing. I didn't do the right thing and I paid for it.' He's not trying to hammer anybody, and it has an impact."

Dressed neatly in a black blazer, powder blue button-down shirt and pink tie, Wahlberg radiates a combination of GQ style and hard-earned pride. He seems to have reconnected with his inner-altar boy and is already looking forward to his next movie, a remake of the British caper, The Italian Job. (He insists there is no truth to rumours about a sequel to Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights.)

"All the things that I set out to do from that first day I arrived in jail, I have accomplished," he beams. "Everything except for finding a wife and having children ... But I still have time. I've just been looking in the wrong places."

Or maybe he has just been concentrating on rebuilding a relationship with his older brother Donnie, a former member of the singing group New Kids On The Block and star of the NBC drama Boomtown. "We were kind of involved in business early on and it had a negative effect on our relationship for a while," he admits, declining to elaborate. "But we have both put that behind us. So we don't spend much time talking about work. Our conversation is usually more about his family or when I am gonna settle down."

For a while, some thought he might be headed down the aisle with longtime girlfriend Jordanna Brewster. That relationship ended abruptly in the spring of 2001 when Wahlberg arrived in Paris to film The Truth About Charlie. "I had a relationship of three years, but I was single after a week of being there," he confirms. "I fell in love four or four times."

Wahlberg also made the most of his new surrounding.

"One thing about working in France is that you are basically required to drink a bottle of wine at lunch," he says with a laugh. "The French are obviously used to that. For me, it took a while. I could probably drink two six packs of beer. But drinking wine during the day ... I wanted to go and lay down and take a nap."

And that's the truth. 

Mark Wahlberg and Cary Grant usually aren't mentioned in the same breath. Nonetheless, the Dorchester native nabbed the Grant role in ``The Truth About Charlie,'' a remake of 1963's ``Charade'' opening Friday.

Likewise, Thandie Newton (``Beloved'') probably isn't the first actress who comes to mind as the latter-day equivalent of Audrey Hepburn, Grant's ``Charade'' co-star. Yet that's whom director Jonathan Demme (``The Silence of the Lambs,'' ``Philadelphia,'' ``Beloved'') tapped to be Wahlberg's leading lady.

Clearly, Demme wanted to rework ``Charade'' from the top.

``Charade'' remains a fondly remembered movie because it knew what it was: champagne-fizzy entertainment. It's the story of a naive but very stylish woman named Regina ``Reggie'' Lampert (Hepburn) who discovers that her recently murdered husband supposedly had a hidden fortune and that three bad men will kill her to get it. Grant plays Reggie's mysterious ally, saving her from peril as the bodies pile up.

Demme's earlier films, such as ``Something Wild'' and ``Married to the Mob,'' display a riveting shift of tones, a mix of farcical comedy and gruesome violence. The director might have felt he was returning to his roots with ``Charlie,'' which shares with ``Charade'' a shaggy-dog story that blends murder, romance, espionage and stolen loot.

In Demme's version, the widow is much like Hepburn's character (she's still named Reggie), but the three bad guys are now two men and a woman. There are flashbacks to a Balkan war zone and there's a female French police inspector who sleeps with her aide. It's still Paris but not that Paris.

What Demme's ``The Truth About Charlie'' clearly demonstrates is how much movies, especially hits, are pieces not necessarily of enduring art but of their time and era.

When ``Charade'' opened in 1963, the world was a different place. Paris, which had escaped the World War II bombing and devastation that had torn London and Berlin apart, had become the movies' postwar poster city. With its dazzling monuments, big hats and tiny cars, it embodied onscreen all that was sophisticated, stylish and carefree.

In such '50s, Paris-based pictures as Hepburn's ``Funny Face'' and ``Love in the Afternoon,'' Elizabeth Taylor's weepie ``The Last Time I Saw Paris'' and the satirical musical ``Les Girls,'' Paris reigned as the most civilized, snobbish and desirable city in Europe. When the Francophile Jacqueline Kennedy became first lady, Paris' status was even more chic. It was a state of mind as well as geography.

Back then, Hepburn and Grant were more than stars - they were Hollywood royalty. Hepburn's swanlike grace and little-girl-lost appeal were spotlighted in a series of now-classic hits including ``Breakfast at Tiffany's'' and ``Roman Holiday.'' In an era obsessed with big bosomy types such as Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Kim Novak, Hepburn's rail-thin elegance distinguished her as a Hollywood anomaly.

Cary Grant began appearing in movies in the early 1930s opposite Mae West. By the '50s the poor Englishman (born Archibald Leach) had created ``Cary Grant,'' the elegant, ironic, dashing movie star who became known the world over, thanks to such films as Hitchcock's ``To Catch a Thief'' and ``North by Northwest.''

Musical veteran Stanley Donen, who had helmed Hepburn's Parisian musical ``Funny Face,'' cast these two stars in ``Charade.'' It was a pairing that tipped off moviegoers to what kind of movie awaited them: a stylish, fun but never self-parodying whodunit.

Four decades later, Demme's remake arrives in a world where the name Thandie Newton means very little at the world's box office. You have to be reminded she was the lead in ``Mission: Impossible 2.'' Likewise, Wahlberg might suggest a sexy vulnerability in the right role. But together, their presence hardly telegraphs what kind of movie ``Charlie'' is.

For Demme, going to Paris doesn't mean taking audiences on a nostalgic fantasy trip. It's getting down to the street level of a bustling European capital, with a cacophony of world music on the soundtrack.

Demme, perhaps to make the film more personal, uses the setting as a nod to the highly influential forces of the French New Wave, the '60s cinematic movement that informs his filmmaking. If you watch closely, you'll see Agnes Varda, the New Wave's lone female filmmaker (``Cleo From 5 to 7'') and, in a nightclub setting, Charles Aznavour, the French-Armenian singer who starred in Francois Truffaut's ``Shoot the Piano Player,'' as well as New Wave muse Anna Karina, former wife of director Jean-Luc Godard and star of some of his greatest movies (``Alphaville,'' ``Band of Outsiders'').

Demme perhaps realizes he can't capture the past and make magic with larger-than-life stars, so he downsizes ``Charade'' to a frenetic chase and a maybe romance. In doing so, he does manage to get a bit of Hepburn's glow from the lovely Newton. But he doesn't try to suggest anything other than an American in Paris with Wahlberg, even if he does wear a beret.

Philadelphia -- Benjamin Franklin sits in a room behind us, regaling a group of travel journalists. Maybe he's talking about his overseas excursions. Or maybe he's telling them what he's been buying with the royalties he gets from that electricity thing. Or maybe he's deciding between scallops or the hamburger.

Jonathan Demme has the best view of Franklin from our table, and the man who directed such myriad exercises in visual mischief as "Something Wild" (1986), "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) and "Beloved" (1998) can't help being amused with the juxtaposition. "He's right over your shoulder," he says with a laugh to one of his lunch companions.

"Is he singing?" Demme is asked.

The question is germane to the occasion, since we're gathered in this restaurant overlooking Rittenhouse Square to discuss Demme's latest project, which, among other things, is the kind of movie in which someone's playing a Charles Aznavour record on a hotel dresser and - voila! - Aznavour himself appears in the room singing along with his chanson. And, just as an aside, the characters can hear him without seeing him.

The film is "The Truth About Charlie," which opens nationwide Friday. Perhaps a more recognizable title would be "Jonathan Demme's Version of 'Charade,'" since that's pretty much what people have been calling the movie from the time it was conceived.

To generations of film lovers, "Charade," directed in 1963 by Stanley Donen, remains the only homage to Alfred Hitchcock that comes anywhere close to matching, if not exceeding, the Master of Suspense at his own stylish, devious gamesmanship. It starred Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and the city of Paris in what some would say is ascending order of importance.

Paris returns to its pivotal role in Demme's update, though, as the director notes, it's a "new, incredibly and overtly diverse Paris in terms of population." The cast reflects a more culturally diverse post-millennial world, especially in the interracial romantic leads, Mark Wahlberg in Grant's role as the slippery, enigmatic charmer and Thandie Newton in Hepburn's role of the young widow pursued by some thuggish acquaintances of her late husband.

Newton, whose first name is pronounced Tan-dee, joins us for this Rittenhouse Square lunch. Looking at her gamine features and listening to her vibrant, British-accented voice, one can easily imagine why this 29-year-old daughter of a Zimbabwean mother and an English father would be considered a mortal lock to inhabit an Audrey Hepburn role.

Demme and Newton have a history, going back to 1998's "Beloved," the daring and difficult adaptation of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Demme recalls, before lunch arrives at the table, how he and producer-star Oprah Winfrey were "just bowled over" by Newton's audition for the title role of a phantom daughter of a freed slave. "Thandie brought such a presence to our [audition] that Oprah and I scrambled off to a corner and said, 'That's it! Sign her up!' We never saw anyone else."

Newton, astonished, says, "Oh, no! I never knew that! Weren't you terrified?"

"No, no. You did this certain little broken-body thing, whether it was intentional or not, and we said, 'That's her! There was Beloved!'"

Even critics who didn't like the film were impressed with Newton's raw, intense performance. She received more kudos that same year with her passionate turn as an exiled African student in Bernardo Bertolucci's "Besieged." This led the onetime dance student - who says she saw her "Beloved" role as a kind of dance - to co-star with Tom Cruise in 2000's "Mission: Impossible 2."

"Weren't you more of an action hero in that?" Demme asks her. "That was my perception."

"I was kind of the faint heart beating in the distance," Newton says. "Not that I didn't enjoy working with Tom, and I'd always wanted to work with ["M:I 2" director] John Woo. But it wasn't the place to, well ... it was just ... kicking and screaming. That was the style. They knew what they were doing. But it was limiting."

"I liked that movie and I thought Thandie was really cute in it," Demme says. "But for someone who knew Thandie's myriad gifts and to watch how limited a palette she was provided, I wanted to scream, 'What's going on? You've got Thandie Newton up there!'"

Demme says that though he kept his directorial distance from Newton while filming "Beloved," his children got to play with her offscreen. Through them, "I found out what a delightful, dazzling and very, very funny woman Thandie really is."

"My down time on 'Beloved' was so important because I was just knocking myself about, physically and emotionally," Newton recalls. "And I separated myself from almost everybody, especially Jonathan. But his kids were constant presences in the production offices, and I started hanging out with them, going to the movies ..."

"Eventually, I got to know her better and I got to know her husband, Oliver [Parker, a screenwriter with whom she has a young child], as well. And I thought then and think now that when Thandie gets the right contemporary part, she's going to be greeted with the kind of appreciation that the Cameron Diazes get now."

Could "The Truth About Charlie" do that? It's possible, though one wonders how - or, more pertinently, why - Demme would compete with "Charade."

"Well," he says, "it's a schizophrenic thing. We wanted to remake 'Charade,' but we wanted to remake it as a new wave movie." Demme refers here to the romantic and influential French cinematic insurgency led by such Hollywood-besotted directors as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, whose "Shoot the Piano Player" (1960) starred Charles Aznavour. (That explains his on-camera appearances, no?) Godard's onetime leading lady, Anna Karina, also has a cameo in the new movie.

"And we also wanted to make our film into an entity unto itself," Demme says. "The central relationship [between Wahlberg and Newton] is played out in a completely different way ... from the original. And for people who had seen 'Charade' and now come to this thing, we have new dimensions of mind games, which not only tease audiences who don't know the original, but let audiences who do know and love 'Charade' to figure out what's the same. And what's different."

One suggests to Demme that "Charlie" also represents a return by the director to the insouciant, loose-limbed years when he regularly made such quirky comedies as "Something Wild," as well as "Married to the Mob" (1988) and the Talking Heads' concert film "Stop Making Sense" (1984).

"It's been fun to have fun again," Demme says.

"Does it feel like that?" Newton asks him. "There's definitely a thread there."

"I felt very privileged to be part of the pictures between 'Married to the Mob' and this one," he says, referring to the Academy Award-winning "Silence of the Lambs," and "Philadelphia" and "Beloved." "I wouldn't have exchanged those experiences for anything, and they had real emotional weight and heft. But this, yes, was a lighter-than-air experience."

He turns to Newton. "Not that 'Beloved' wasn't fun ... "

"No, no, 'Beloved' was a very happy time," she says. "It had its own peace and contentment..."

"Nonstop joy," Demme says.

"But the difference is that with 'Charlie,' we weren't taking ourselves as seriously. Like Jonathan, I had fun with 'Beloved.' I felt happy and gratified. And with 'Charlie' it was a different kind of happy. It edges into silly, but with brains behind it."

And what would she like to do next with Demme? After careful thought, she says, "Something even sillier." 

Might as well admit this cinematic sacrilege right up front: Yes, director Jonathan Demme thinks it would be OK to remake "Citizen Kane."

The question comes up because Demme, who won an Oscar for "The Silence of the Lambs," has a remake of his own hitting theaters Friday: a new version of the Audrey Hepburn/Cary Grant comedy, "Charade" (his stars Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg and is called "The Truth About Charlie"). Demme is ready for the dreaded remake question, and he responds with an enthusiasm that, even over the phone, could wake the apathetic.

"There are a lot of complaints about sequels and remakes," says Demme. "But there are only five or six basic stories, to begin with, so if there's a movie you can take and make a terrific new movie, go ahead, I say. And, of course, the thing people always say is, 'But would you remake a classic like "Citizen Kane?' Yes! Man, I would love to see Spike Lee's or Alexander Payne's 'Citizen Kane.' "

Surprisingly, Demme was not expecting the logical follow-up question: Which of his own movies should be remade?

"Golly, I don't know," he says. "In some ways, 'The Truth About Charlie' feels to me like a remake of 'Married to the Mob,' all gussied up. Oh, you know what? How about 'Last Embrace' [Demme's homage to Hitchcock]? That's the most eminently improvable one I've made. Oh, no. It's not. When you asked that question, I forgot about this one, because I don't think of it as my movie. It's 'Swing Shift,' because it got rethought and re-edited and they took something that was quite good and turned it into — something else."

Demme, one of the most notoriously kind filmmakers, doesn't mention that "Swing Shift" was re-edited by star Goldie Hawn, who hand-picked Demme to direct but changed her mind when she noticed that supporting actress Christine Lahti was stealing her thunder.

In "The Truth About Charlie," Demme hopes it's Newton who rumbles. The actress, who was the best thing in Demme's "Beloved," has been around for years but, as Demme notes, she usually plays slaves or weirdos. In "Charlie," "people will get a chance to see what a photogenic, great, contemporary young movie star she could be, in the tradition of Gwyneth Paltrow or Cameron Diaz."

Demme's kids befriended Newton on the "Beloved" set, and, captivated by her "imagination and liberation and fearlessness," Demme began to look for another movie to put her in. He found it when he and his staff sat down for one of their twice-monthly movie nights, where they open lots of wine and watch everything from Japanese classics to slice-and-dice trash. Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is "Charade," which they screened a couple of years ago.

"So we're watching this old movie, loving it, having a little food and wine and I'm thinking, 'This would be fantastic to remake, and Thandie would be terrific in it, and the script's a no-brainer. It's one great scene after another,' " says Demme.

But then he realized he wasn't interested in re-creating the first movie, the way Gus Van Sant did a few years ago with his disastrous "Psycho." So, Demme says, "I wound up very much wanting to connect with the spirit of 'Charade,' while having a fresh new take on it."

The result, "The Truth About Charlie," borrows the plot of "Charade" — a woman, recently widowed, learns her husband had a secret life and begins to fall in love with the shadowy spy who was investigating him — but steers as far as it can from the glittering repartee everyone remembers from "Charade." Says Demme, "I didn't want to try to duplicate that preposterously witty, sparkling thing that is Hepburn and Grant. We wanted to be fresh and original in our own way."

"Fresh" and "original" are good words to describe Demme's films, which are crammed with unique actors, quirky supporting characters and affection for the odd little details of life. Demme veered away from these qualities in his last two feature films, "Philadelphia" and "Beloved," but his resume includes some of the funniest, sweetest movies of the '70s and '80s: "Melvin and Howard," "Handle With Care," "Something Wild," "Married to the Mob" and the Talking Heads concert film, "Stop Making Sense," movies that are unambiguously aimed at giving audiences pleasure.

It's Demme's hope that "The Truth About Charlie" brings him back into that neighborhood, and nothing demonstrates that better than a beautifully wrapped package that appears throughout the film, the contents of which remain a mystery.

"It's absolutely a key to the playfulness of the movie," says Demme. "I thought it would be a lot of fun, that it could provide a key to all sorts of things, and we wonder about it; but then it vanishes, and we forget about it for a while. Then, toward the end, Good God, here's the package again! My hope is that the audience will find it kind of fun to wonder."

Chris Hewitt can be reached at chewitt@ pioneerpress.com or (651) 228-5552. 

Director Jonathan Demme pays tribute to his late nephew, director Ted Demme, in his new movie The Truth About Charlie. The younger Demme died suddenly of a massive heart attack in January of this year. He was 38. “In the flea market scene you will hear a reggae song,” Jonathan Demme notes. “That is Teddy. He wrote it and performed it.” Demme said he first heard the song titled “Bigger Man” at his nephew’s memorial service. It includes the following tongue-in-cheek lyrics: “I’ll steal your food and your woman/Tofu and sushi not for me/Give me Kentucky Fried Chicken, extra crispy.” “He consumed so much music from his days at MTV (he directed music videos for Bruce Springsteen and others) that he wound up spewing out this wonderful song,” says Demme. “Bigger Man” will be included on The Truth About Charlie soundtrack. 

Thandie Newton believed the whole process was casual and uncalculated. Newton has been invited to the home of director Jonathan Demme, to whom she had become close after playing the title role in his adaptation of "Beloved," for dinner and an old movie. Demme had chosen the 1963 Stanley Donen film "Charade," which Newton had never seen. 

"I just loved it," says Newton of Donen's romantic comedy-thriller, which is quite obviously inspired by Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief." Set in Paris, "Charade" stars Audrey Hepburn, who is aided by a gallant stranger played by Cary Grant after the mysterious death of her husband leaves her entangled in mystery and mayhem. 

"It was like this wonderful glass of champagne, and I just felt all bubbly after watching it,' says Newton in a lilting English accent. "And Jonathan said, 'You know what might be fun? We could remake this and you could play the lead!' He's such a lovely man, and his enthusiasm is so contagious, I remember saying, 'Oh, Jonathan, I don't know if I could do that, it's so not me.' And he said, 'Of course you could! It has you written all over it.' " 

Which, in fact, it did, admits Demme. 

"It wasn't technically a setup," says Demme, whose "Charade" remake, titled "The Truth About Charlie," opens in metro Detroit and other major markets Friday. Demme, having directed 16 feature films of nearly every conceivable variety, not to mention numerous shorts, TV shows and music videos, can now, at age 58, safely be ranked among the greatest of living American filmmakers. 

"But I had in fact watched 'Charade' for the first time in a long time shortly before that, and I thought it would be a great movie to remake in a contemporary setting. And I immediately thought of Thandie for the role of Reggie, mostly because she is a lot like Reggie, so I asked her over and afterward asked her to consider it, mostly on the basis that we would go to Paris and have a great deal of fun. Which we in fact finally did, although it took a long time to get there." 

Demme's original idea was to cast Will Smith in the Cary Grant role, because he thought it would be interesting to pair Smith, with his reputation as a seat-of-the-pants performer, with Newton, who he says "so totally immerses herself in a part that when her character in 'Beloved' had to drool, that was Thandie's real drool. She would accept no synthetic substitute. 

"So I hammered a script out with that dynamic in mind, and then 'Ali,' which was Will's dream project, was delayed, and he had to drop out." 

Demme says it was someone at Universal Studios who suggested Mark Wahlberg for the role of Joshua, a stranger who befriends Reggie when she becomes a suspect in her husband's killing and when three men begin trailing her wherever she goes. 

"I was skeptical (about Wahlberg) when his name came up," says Demme. "I had seen 'Boogie Nights' and thought he was terrific in that, but I wondered if he wasn't just playing someone a lot like himself. So I called P.T. Anderson (who directed "Boogie Nights"), and he reassured me Mark was a consummate pro and could do whatever we needed. So Mark and Thandie and I met, and they just talked and got to know each other, and I thought, 'Yeah, I like this pairing a lot. I just went with my gut, I guess.' " 

"I trust Jonathan implicitly when it comes to casting, and not just because he chose me for a role (in "Beloved") that a lot of better-known actresses wanted," says Newton, laughing. 

"Think about it: Tom Hanks in 'Philadelphia' or Michelle Pfeiffer in 'Married to the Mob,' or even Anthony Hopkins in 'The Silence of the Lambs.' Today, you can't imagine anyone else in those roles, but when Jonathan made them, they seemed like odd selections. So I was inclined to believe Mark was the right guy, though you wouldn't normally think of him to play this debonair gent in a fedora. Besides, it's a very mercurial character, in that you never know what his true intentions are." 

Newton says she didn't spend a lot of time with Wahlberg off the set and always felt slightly "off-kilter when I was around him, which I think ended up helping the film, because Reggie never really knows what to think about this guy, except that he's charming. But I can honestly say that I know no more about Mark Wahlberg today than I did when I started making the film." 

Demme says one of the hardest phone calls he ever made was to Stanley Donen, who broke into films as a choreographer in 1943 and directed his last film, a TV production of the play "Love Letters," in 1999. In between, he made many of the most beloved movie musicals of all time, including "On the Town," "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and "Singin' in the Rain," which he codirected with Gene Kelly. 

"I was stuttering, almost," Demme recalls. " 'Uh, Mr. Donen, I'm a great admirer of yours and I want to remake one of your greatest movies, 'Charade.' He was wonderfully gracious about it, especially considering I was making some pretty substantial changes." 

Though Demme always planned to set "The Truth About Charlie" in Paris, it was a very different Paris from the Eiffel Tower elegance of "Charade." 

"I still wanted to emphasize the romance of the city, but in a slightly more dangerous and far more diverse fashion. All these different cultures, including Arabic and African and Asian, come together there in a really beautiful, exotic way. Also, I had this idea of paying tribute to the French New Wave (filmmaking movement), which was just beginning to blossom when Stanley was there making this very American movie there in the early '60s." 

Before he began writing and directing drive-in movies for legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, Demme had a job as a publicist for United Artists. He was given the job of looking after Francois Truffaut when the French director came to the United States in 1968 for the premiere of his film "The Bride Wore Black." 

"By the end of his visit he had warmed to me, I think," says Demme of the notoriously irritable Truffaut. "But I remember thinking I was in the presence of someone who changed the rules of filmmaking, and meeting him was an enormous influence on me and my future endeavors. So when I began planning 'Charlie,' I wanted to acknowledge my debt to him and the rest of the New Wavers." 

Film buffs will delight in seeing that debt repaid in ways both amusing and touching. In one unforgettable scene, Charles Aznavour, the great boulevardier and star of Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player," appears on a balcony to serenade Reggie and Joshua, while Anna Karina, star of Jean-Luc Godard's greatest films, shows up as a nightclub chanteuse. Agnes Varda, a fine director in her own right and the wife of the late "Umbrellas of Cherbourg" director Jacques Demy, is cast in a crucial role as the late Charlie's mother. And the film concludes with a lingering shot of the grave of Truffaut, to whom -- along with Demme's nephew Ted, a producer and director who died earlier this year -- the film is dedicated. 

"Jonathan is just one of the sweetest, most thoughtful men I've ever met," says Newton, "and he just happens to be a great director. I had a lot of apprehension about doing this movie, because I knew I would be compared to Audrey Hepburn, but Jonathan assured me that, once we started making the movie, I would become Reggie and that I would never think about it again. 

"He was right. He made me feel so confident, because I knew he would always be there to support me and help me. You can trust him. That's the truth about Jonathan."

Contact TERRY LAWSON at 313-223-4524 or [email protected].