"I experimented with a thousand things about Duddits," Wahlberg reveals, "but I really found him in the other characters, in the way that they speak about him. It’s very easy to get trapped into wanting to do a grand performance, because Duddits is very ill – you could easily set yourself up. But I always went back to what everyone said, how sweet Duddits was and how lovable he was and how much they cared about him, and that his heart was the greatest heart in the world."
The film also stars renowned actor Morgan Freeman as the alien hunter Colonel Abraham Curtis, commander of an elite, top-secret military task force known as Blue Unit, whose purpose is the eradication of all alien invaders and the containment of the contagion that they spread. A vigilante who works independently of the regular Armed Forces, Curtis is more than a little crazy after twenty-five years of obsessive pursuit of extraterrestrials.
"Curtis is king, he’s a very powerful guy in his group," says Freeman. "It’s his own personal army, and whatever he needs, he gets – all the money, the manpower and weaponry. He’s a little burnt out, but he’s a dedicated soldier. He is a man who, if the job needs to be done, he gets it done; people call that ruthlessness, but he thinks of it as dedication to purpose."
"Morgan Freeman has been a god to me for a long time," says Kasdan. "He’s one of those extraordinary, monumental actors who I don’t think has ever given a bad performance or had a false moment. There’s never a point in a Morgan Freeman performance where you feel it’s false or manufactured. And in this movie he plays a very dark character and he does it wonderfully. He embraced it beautifully and was happy, I think, to get away from his more saintly performances. Because people like to use his incredible charisma for goodness, and this is a much more sinister character."
Tom Sizemore plays Owen Underhill, Colonel Curtis’s second in command and dedicated protégé, whom Curtis has been grooming to eventually take over command of Blue Unit.
"I’d cast Tom before, in my film Wyatt Earp," says Kasdan. "He is an incredibly convincing performer and he did excellent work in Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. He’s just a terrific actor."
"The relationship between Owen and Curtis is a father-son relationship in the truest sense of the term," says Sizemore. "Owen is looking for his approval too much. Curtis talks to him in too loving a way, and then when he’s aggressive, it’s too aggressive. He can hurt Owen the way a father can deeply hurt a son just by saying something, whereas someone who is only your boss can’t hurt you in the same way. In this movie, Owen can be hurt that way."
Dreamcatcher is an unusual film in that it encompasses many different genres, and Kasdan used rehearsal time to get his cast on the same page with regard to the tone of the movie. "Larry likes trying to figure out characters more than most writers," says Jason Lee. "Half of the filmmaking process is actually shooting the movie, but the other half is the fun and the challenge of figuring out characters, and he does that so well. When we shot Mumford we talked and talked and talked as a group for days, and from that comes the development of these characters. And it’s amazing that even in an effects-filled action movie like this, he still takes the same approach. I don’t care if you’re Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, every actor has to have a director. It’s like a conductor – the conductor walks off stage, the music just falls apart."
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