Hudson in vogue as fashion writer in ‘Nine’

For Kate Hudson, working on “Nine” brought back a lot of childhood memories.

She plays Stephanie, an American Vogue fashion writer obsessed with Italian director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis).

The movie is set in Rome in the 1960s, and the clothes were designed by two-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood.

Hudson, 30, flashed back to her childhood watching “Bob Mackie make my mother (Goldie Hawn) these phenomenal costumes. I mean dresses, gowns, couture beads everywhere. As a little girl, your eyes are sparkling like Wow! Amazing! Amazing to look at.”

Her “Nine” costumes were “like a throwback to me being a little girl. With these beads that were the real deal. I remember putting on the Swarovski crystal number and it weighed like 15 pounds. And I thought to myself, ‘This is awesome. This is what costuming is about.’ ”

This fan of musical theater and musicals “was obsessed with them as a kid,” she explained at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

And Hudson’s also a fan of Rob Marshall, the “Nine” director who made “Chicago” a Best Picture Oscar winner.

“There’s very few people who can put a musical on film and make it seamless. Very few. When you’re seeing a number live you get that energy and then when you put it on screen, you’re missing a dimension and it’s very difficult to bring it to life. Rob has this incredible ability to take that so you can feel it in a movie theater,” said Hudson.

So for Hudson, “Nine” “was basically: I just would like to go sing for Rob Marshall. That was the first thing, ‘Please get me in the room so I can just hit one note and see if he bites.’ ”

Marshall did, and Hudson’s number “Cinema Italiano,” a new song written for the film, salutes ’60s dance styles while showing younger moviegoers what made Italian cinema so electric.

INTERVIEW - Rob Marshall on TODAY SHOW (12/23)

EVENT : Variety Screening Series 2009 NINE (12/16)

EXCLUSIVE : The Overture sequence of 'NINE'

On cloud ‘Nine,’ Fergie makes perfect pitch for musical role

Though “Nine” boasts a cast of Oscar winners - Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard - it’sBlack Eyed Peas vocalist Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson who steals the movie musical.

As the prostitute Saraghina, Fergie’s solo “Be Italian” is a showstopper.

“We expected several people to come audition and walk away with the role,” said producer Joseph DeLuca. “But it was Fergie who surprised us.”

“You know I’m definitely the singer coming into this A-list acting world so it was intimidating for me,” Fergie said at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

“I was just very hungry for this role,” she said. “I really wanted it and went after it like a really good student.”

Fergie watched the source for the movie, Federico Fellini’s 1965 “8” several times and studied “old Italian actresses, how they walked, how they spoke with their hands.”

For her screen test, “I’ve learned since I was a little girl when you want something, you walk in as that character,” she said.

As she dressed, “I’m doing the hair and making everything look bigger. I tried to make my lips look fuller and red and more Italian, to contour my nose to make it look more Italian.”

As for the song’s “extroverted style,” that came “naturally.”

“What was intimidating is that when I’m doing the number I’m not moving like myself. During this film whenever I would sit down I would never cross my legs because that’s not how Saraghina would sit. She wasn’t a lady.”

Singing her solo took preparation.

“I say ‘Be Italian’ many times in the song. It’s important for me to have every time I say ‘Be Italian’ for it to have a different meaning. Because there are so many different things about being Italian: There’s love of life, love of food, of sex, drink, dancing, singing, you know? And every one is different.”

St. Louis Fim Critics Winners

The Winners were announced, and NINE was rewarded twice. Mo'nique won the award for best supporting actress but Marion Cotillard is her runner-up.

PREVIEW : 'Press Conference' - Guido Contini

Nine queens share their crown

AS I walk in to meet Nicole Kidman it seems appropriate that the temperature in the room feels like it has dropped several degrees.Kidman has always had a reputation as a bit of an ice queen, but this is ridiculous. Surely she isn't so cold that the air around her begins to freeze as a result of her very presence?

As it turns out, she is anything but. In fact, the very first thing she expresses is concern that I'm going to be too cold wearing just a shirt. It's not only Kidman who is in the room today but also Judi Dench, another slightly fearsome character, who is one of her many co-stars inNine, the new musical from Chicago director Rob Marshall.

Dench, too, is feeling the cold and so they grab a blanket and drape it over their legs as they sit huddled next to each other on the couch. They almost look like a mother and daughter on a park bench feeding the ducks.

As the interview progresses, it teeters dangerously close to farce for much of the time.Kidman and Dench finish each other's sentences, ask each other questions and Kidman seems consistently amused by whatever Dench has to say. And she has a point.

For Dench, Nine is the first time she has performed a musical on film. "I hadn't sung on film ever before, although I had in the theatre," Dench explains. "But I found that whole business easier because you can do it over and over again until you get what [Marshall] wants. Unlike the theatre where you can get off on the wrong foot one night and you never get back on the other one. Or you're like me and you fall over. I've fallen over in everything I've been in except three things."

"Have you?" Kidman interjects with an air of comic concern.

"Yes," Dench deadpans in return.

For someone who is frequently accused of having had Botox, Kidman, in fact, has a remarkably expressive face. She's extremely funny, not only in what she is saying, but in her facial expressions. Maybe it's because the attention is focused on her blue eyes, which she rolls and manipulates like a hypnotist.

She jokes that they will take Nine to the stage for a one-off performance. She then calls for aNine float at Sydney Mardi Gras. "I loved seeing Satine [her character in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge] on a float. It would be really good this year to see if they do a Nine float. I'm proposing it."

I tell her that's the second official proposal of the first five minutes of the interview. "I've got a lot of ideas," she responds. She's 42, but looks much younger. She has always denied having any sort of cosmetic surgery. "I am completely natural," she told Marie Claire in 2007. The thing is, people find this hard to accept. The day after our meeting, the papers of full of articles wondering how she looks so great at her age. It's not hard to read between the lines. A musical like Nine, of course, is all about looking good. I

I tell Kidman that I found it one of the least camp musicals I've ever seen, and as far as I was concerned it was all the better for it. Having starred in Moulin Rouge, a film at the other end of this spectrum, Kidman knows what it takes to make a camp musical ("feathers" is Dench's hunch).

"It's interesting that you say you enjoyed it because my husband is not a fan of musicals. He can take them or leave them, but he said after that he loved it. He sat and said that there were things in it that he could relate to as a man and he did not expect that at all. He said: 'I thought I was going to be sitting accompanying you and I would be glad when it was all over'." At this, she breaks into hysterics of laughter, just about managing to compose herself to continue.

"Instead he really had a good time. There's a few people in my life whose opinion I value and as long as they say it's good then it doesn't matter how the film is received or what happens; I just feel that it achieved what I wanted it to achieve. My mother hasn't seen it yet and she is the other person."

Of course, Kidman was joined in the cast by another of Tom Cruise's exes, Penelope Cruz, but she is adamant that despite the presence of so many headstrong women they lived in harmony as they filmed together in London. "There were no cat-fights and no diamonds flying everywhere," Kidman says.

"How many times have we been asked this? Dench interrupts. "You'd love to find out that somebody gave Sophia a great big push."

Then, of course, there's Daniel Day-Lewis, giving a performance that will surely lead to yet another Oscar nomination next year. The previous evening at the premiere Marshall described him as "the greatest actor alive today". I ask Dench, one of the few who could take Day-Lewis on toe-to-toe, what his secret is.

"He will work and work and work, without anybody seeing, so he totally knows how that person walks, sleeps, eats, looks, puts his hand down. Every single detail he has worked out. How he does that I don't know, but he does it and it doesn't interfere with any of us and he doesn't suddenly become somebody you don't know. He suddenly becomes the person when you're playing a scene. Suddenly there is Guido in front of you and not Daniel. He's pretty unique."

Though they are all only on stage at the same time in the film's opening number, the cast spent six weeks together prior to filming their dance routines -- a period that is brilliantly revealed in the film's closing credits. "That was a luxury and necessity too," Dench says. "We were all together from the beginning for about six weeks. It was actually like being a theatre company."

"We could probably have done it as a show, right?" Kidman chips in. "We could have done it as a revue."

"And we still might," says Dench.

I'm not sure if it's a threat or merely something to get Kidman laughing. Whatever its intention, it succeeds.

By Evan Fanning

INTERVIEW - the cast on Larry King (12/15)

It's just an extract, I didn't find the whole show.

The Cast of Nine Sings Its Praises!

8 1/2 challenged viewers by making them FEEL in a uniquely experiential way what it is like to BE a film director, and what goes on in said person's head. With the new motion picture Nine, director Rob Marshall, who won an Oscar for Chicago, creates a new interpretation of Fellini's most famous work. Adapted from a 1982 musical of the same name, Nine weaves the tale of a burnt-out, middle-aged director named Guido (Daniel Day Lewis as the Fellini stand-in) who is stuck in the chaotic position of beginning production on a lavish new film without a clue of what it's about. With hundreds of people, from press to costume designers, from actors to anxious producers, all hounding him with questions he does not have the answers to, he begins to slip into a series of musical fantasies revolving around the many women in his life, both past and present.

Although best known for his serious, award-winning turns in films likeMy Left Foot and There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day Lewis is not known for his skills as a singer, and was himself skeptical when he took on the project.

"I was nervous as hell, like everyone else," he said. "I didn't really ask myself initially why I was drawn so much to it. Anthony Minghella's script was so beautiful, but I could have appreciated that from the outside without necessarily being drawn into the world he was describing. I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work at some time in their life, and it tends to happen as you grow into middle age, you come to a time when you really question more and more frequently whether you have anything else to offer. At its very worst you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work. I suppose I was interested in that dilemma for a man who's about to shoot a film in five days and he's living in a wasteland of his own making."

Part of that out-of-control life stems from his mercurial mistress Carla, played with sensuous vitality by Penélope Cruz. The Spanish actress was equally awed and humbled by Day Lewis' dedication to the role.

Said Cruz, "I was a little bit nervous about meeting him because he's really one of my favorite actors and I think he's one of the masters of acting of all time. I've heard all these stories about the way he works, and I tried not to listen, to see for myself. I arrived and I went into the stage and they were rehearsing a number and he was not part of that number. I saw this man dressed in a suit in a corner just watching. For two hours I was there and did not recognize him, and they said, 'No that's Daniel. He's always here watching the others. He's always on the set.' I went and said hello, and he was really one of the greatest partners to work with. Really kind, really generous. I tried to make him part of my game of self-criticism after a take. 'Daniel! I think I was terrible, what do you think?' He said, 'I will never engage in that game with you, let's go and do the next take.' That was a huge lesson for me, someone who never looks at the monitor, is always in the present. 'What's next?' In that way Daniel has no ego, he's always moving forward."

Playing another one of Guido's potential romantic conquests is Kate Hudson, for whom the filmmakers tailored a new character and musical number called "Cinema Italiano" unique to the film version specifically with her in mind.

According to Hudson, "The thing about Daniel is that his dedication and passion for what he does reminds you how blessed and lucky we are to be able to do this. It puts you back in that place, his ability… it's inspiring, makes you really love it. As a man in-character off-set he's present. He sees you. He's not lost. He brings you into it. He writes you notes as his character. It's not coming from a place of ego, it's just his process."

"For me, I look at everything on a project-by-project basis," Hudson continued, "and for this film it was about, 'I would like to go sing for Rob Marshall.' The first thing for me in this was, 'Please get me in the room so I can hit one note, and see if he bites!' I'm a spontaneous person. When I approach anything I try not to think too much. There's days when I feel I have to be a little more in it, but I approach things with my instinct."

Another famous female castmember stretching herself for this film wasStacy Ann Ferguson, also known as Fergie. Unlike Hudson, Fergie is famous as a vocalist for pop group the Black Eyed Peas, but had very little experience as an actress, and found being surrounded by such a cast daunting.

"Going into this musical," Fergie recalled, "I'm definitely the singer going into this A-List acting world. It was intimidating for me, flying over and knowing I was going to be amongst these people who were at the top of their game in their field. I really just thought, 'You know, maybe I'll just sit in a corner and kinda be a sponge and not speak unless spoken to.' Kinda just watch what these people do and how they hone their craft. The first person I met there was Daniel, and I think it was 15-minutes later I was standing by a piano and I had to belt out the song right in front of him. I'd admired his work for years and I had to push through it and just say, 'What the hell?' This is what I do. That's kinda how I handled the audition. I was hungry for this role, I really wanted it, and I was a really good student. I came to London with all my tools, all the Fellini films, studying old Italian actresses and how they walked and spoke with their hands. Really studying this character from that period."

Someone who actually represents that period in cinema is legendary actress Sophia Loren, who became the first person to win a Best Actress Academy Award for a non-English-speaking role in Vittorio De Sica's 1960 film Two Women. In Nine she plays the role of Guido's mother.

"The story of Fellini is a magical story in the movies that Italy has done," Loren commented. "I was very happy when Rob Marshall called me up and said, 'We are going to do this play about the story of Fellini and I would like you to be in it.' I was very proud of it because I was the only Italian in the film! The film says that Italian movies are still wonderful all over the world. I accepted in a very nice way. Rob told me that he was not going to do the film if I was not going to be in it, so for the sake of his career, I said, 'It's okay, I'm going to be in it.' (laughs)"

Another veteran actress on the roster is Dame Judi Dench, who plays Guido's longtime costume designer and closest confidant. As it turned out, Dench's own history tied nicely into the role, which required her to sing perhaps the show's most famous number, "Folies Bergere" in full nightclub attire.

"I trained as a costume designer before I trained as an actress," saidDench, "so I know how important it is to have a costume that empowers you. Colleen Atwood designs something quite organically on you. She will perhaps do a drawing, but when it comes to actually seeing you in it certain things will change and she will ask you how you feel. Getting into that costume I felt that I might, in fact, be part of a nightclub in Paris at some time. That is unbelievably empowering and does half the work for you. Then you've got to do the rest of it, and that isn't easy!"

Megastar Nicole Kidman stretches herself as well, playing… a megastar, and the lead in Guido's proposed new film. Kidman was very aware of being just one part of a massive ensemble, and insisted that such a meeting of superstars did not cause friction on set.

"It was interesting being around this cast," said Kidman. "People asked us about the egos and everything, and I think when you're working egos are not a part of it because when you love what you do you're just so glad to be around other people who love what they do. I came into the rehearsal room and saw Kate dancing up a storm, and said, 'Wow! That's amazing. I can't wait for people to see that part of her, and maybe she'll get a Broadway show out of this because she so deserves the lead in a show, whether she wants it or not.' I think that's what it is, and you see that with our director, he's just in the trenches, working everyday, and he still does not want to give the film up. That's what you need to be around to do good work, because it's contagious."

The only actress among the cast to have more than one solo number is French darling Marion Cotillard. Here she plays Guido's long-suffering and cheated-on wife Luisa, who still loves him but feels her own spirit being suffocated by her marriage to this adulterous, self-absorbed man.

"What was interesting with Luisa is you have many layers, many faces of her in the movie," said Cotillard. "She's someone who keeps things inside because she doesn't really know at that moment in her life how she feels. It takes courage to end a love story, to tell the man you love that you can't take anymore, that you can't be so empty anymore. What is very interesting with Luisa is you have the face of this woman who is handling things, and when the disrespect is too much to take… she's an actress too, she has things inside of her that need to come out. The anger is everything that's sexy. Anger is fierce, it's sad. My reference was her pain."