Neve finds new company

The Company, Neve Campbell’s seven-years-in-the-making dream project, is currently in theaters after making the festival rounds in the fall. Directed by Robert Altman, The Company is a dreamy, plotless series of vignettes following a season in the life of Chicago’s famed Joffrey Ballet.

Campbell stars as Ry, one of the ballerinas, but she’s really just part of the ensemble. Altman’s camera trains its eye on the whole company in faux-documentary style, and while occasional mini-dramas pop into the edges of the frame (injuries, professional jealousy, stage parents, love affairs), they just as quickly evaporate.

A dancer since age 6, Campbell fought hard to get the project off the ground.

“They wanted a movie with Neve Campbell in it that happened to be about dance instead of a movie about dance that happened to have Neve Campbell in it,” the actress said in September at her suite at The Lenox, looking younger than her 30 years.

Campbell enlisted screenwriter Barbara Turner (Georgia) to fashion a script, albeit one without a proper story.

Campbell said she envisioned “a movie about dance itself, not a movie with dance pieces in it that’s the story of a girl who wants to get there and does.” In short, The Company is not your typical dancer-rises-to-fame story.

Turner and Campbell approached Altman to direct, enticed by the director’s unmatched ability to direct large ensembles (Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park).

“Bob told me that he’d prefer to direct 70 people rather than three at once,” Campbell said. “He’s more like a choreographer.”

Campbell, who hadn’t danced professionally for nearly a decade before working on the film (she spent six seasons on FOX’s “Party of Five” and made the smash Scream trilogy during that decade), endured grueling training to join the Joffrey ensemble and ended up shooting the movie with a broken rib.

“The first time you try to do a triple pirouette and can’t, when you could 10 years ago – that’s hard,” she said.

For Campbell, however, the effort has paid off, and she seems completely satisfied with the result of her labor of love.

“It ended up being exactly what I wanted, which is a really difficult thing to accomplish in this business,” she said.

Campbell also speculated that The Company may change her status as a Scream queen and teen drama star.

“You don’t get to choose what you do at the beginning of your career,” she said. “You’re getting judged for your choice of a horror film, and that’s seen as who you are as an artist … Perhaps directors who had this preconceived notion that I’m only known for Scream and ‘Party of Five’ and think that I’m shoved down their throats by studios will take another look at me now.”