On Movies: 'Like Crazy' a star-making turn for Felicity Jones

In Like Crazy, the roller-coaster love story that opened the Philadelphia Film Festival and begins its theatrical run at the Ritz East on Friday, Felicity Jones is a young Brit studying at a Los Angeles college.

She meets a fellow student, an American played by Anton Yelchin. They throw longing looks at each other in class. She writes a mash note. They meet at a cafe, and they're off: Intense, can't-get-you-out-of-my-mind love.

"There's an obsessional quality to their relationship," Jones agrees. "When they first meet, they can't exist without each other, without feeling painfully sick."

And then Jones' Anna violates her student visa and is summarily sent home to the U.K. A painful, long-distance relationship ensues.

Shot in 22 days, mostly in L.A. and then in London, Like Crazy arrived at the Sundance Film Festival in January under everybody's radar. It left, after an all-night bidding war, with a distribution deal with Paramount. The film, a sophomore effort by Drake Doremus (his debut: the highly dissimilar but equally likable Douchebag), won the Grand Jury Prize for best drama. And Jones won a special jury prize for her performance.

In short, it wowed 'em in Park City. It's sweet. It's funny. And it's a heartbreaker.

"I think there's something melancholy about it," Jones said while in town for Like Crazy's festival premiere. "It is very much a film about memory, and looking back . . . . There's always an element of sadness in doing that.

"But it should be funny and lighthearted as well, because to get to the sadness you have to have the relief in between, the happy times."

Jones is 27, Oxford-educated, with a couple of British TV series (Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, The Diary of Anne Frank - she was older sister Margot) to her credit. She won the role in Like Crazy almost literally at the last minute.

"I was cast very late on, a week before shooting," she says, sitting in an empty room high atop Liberty Place, with the morning sun pouring in. "I spoke to Drake on the Friday and was cast on the Wednesday of the next week. And we didn't ever meet. . . . I made a tape for him and sent it - and you make tapes and you always think no one ever sees them, so I was surprised someone actually saw it, let alone cast me from it, without doing - you know, usually people like to do chemistry tests, things like that."

In fact, Doremus, in a separate interview, acknowledges that he had been doing "chemistry reads" in L.A. with Yelchin and various twentysomething actresses.

"Nothing was quite clicking," he explains, "so I talked to Felicity on the phone - she was one of the last actresses in London in that age range that hadn't sent me a tape yet . . . .

"She sent me the scenes, and it was apparent that she was the one.

"But I had never met her in person, didn't know what I was getting. It was like purchasing a piece of equipment and hoping that it works. You don't know - you're taking a shot. And you cannot send her back."

Happily, he didn't have to. Like Crazy works for a lot of reasons, but Jones' Anna is clearly one of them.

"In order for her character to work, I knew that the level of her affection to [Yelchin's] Jacob had to be almost on the borderline of insanity," the actress explains. "There was a mania to it. I'd watched Breaking the Waves and I loved Emily Watson's portrayal of that character. And obviously the two films are very different on the spectrum of intensity, but the way the character becomes completely obsessed, heart, body, and soul, with another human being - I wanted that to be in Anna, even though it's a much more everyday story and the people are a lot more . . . familiar to our own experiences.

"But I still wanted there to be a quality of everything being turned up - this heightened obsession."

Jones has done a couple of supporting roles since she, Doremus, and Yelchin shot Like Crazy. In Hysteria, she plays alongside star Maggie Gyllenhaal.

"It's about the invention of the vibrator in the Victorian period. Such a great idea: that a Victorian English gentleman invented the vibrator! You can't get too more opposing ideas - female sexual gratification and uptight Victorian England - brought together."

And in Page Eight, a David Hare-scripted espionage piece that premieres next Sunday on PBS, the young actress is "a tortured artist," working opposite Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz.

"I had two scenes with her," Jones says of Weisz. "She had just flown in, she was starting and I was just finishing. And I actually had horrendous tonsillitis. So I was talking like" - here she mimics a duck, or a frog (she rerecorded her lines in post production) - "and I thought here I am, working with Rachel Weisz whom I'd admired for so long, and I can't even talk to her because my tonsils are so swollen. I couldn't stop laughing."

Melissa Fitzgerald in town, in doc. Actress Melissa Fitzgerald (The West Wing ) brings Staging Hope: Acts of Peace in Northern Uganda to the Philadelphia Film Festival Tuesday and Wednesday. Fitzgerald, a Philly native, traveled to the strife-torn African nation with a group of actors to collaborate with Ugandan teens on a theater program drawn from their experiences in refugee camps. The doc, from Bil Yoelin, captures the cross-cultural exchange and the Ugandan kids' tales of struggle and woe. Fitzgerald calls herself an "actorist" - actor and activist. For information on the screenings and other Philadelphia Film Festival events: filmadelphia.org.