Josh Hartnett has had a busy career since his big-screen debut in Halloween H20 in 1998. With 30 Days of Night, out now in cinemas, he marks horror book-ends to his career, nine years of experience transforming him from a vulnerable son in Halloween to a bona-fide protector in 30 Days.

Along the way he's played a variety of roles in films as diverse as Black Hawk Down, Sin City and The Black Dahlia. He'd prefer if you didn't mention Pearl Harbor.

Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Hartnett to find out more about his career, and his time on the vampire flick.

It seems that you have a passion for horror movies; this is not your first one. The Faculty, Halloween...

Josh Hartnett: I's say The Faculty is kind of a spoof. Out of the 23 films that I have done, only two of them are really horror movies. I wouldn't say that it's my genre but I would say that this film was something that I thought would be an interesting project. I'm not limited by genre and it doesn't really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity. This was a good group of people to work with.

We haven't seen vampires like this on screen for a long time.

JH: Yeah, it kind of harkens back to the original concept of vampires, maybe more the silent area, the Nosferatu types, but more the Nosferatu that can actually move. It's more about it's more about these creatures being creatures and less about them being humanised.

I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last few years where they're all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it's not really all that scary.

First of all I liked the way that Ben Templesmith drew the vampires and I liked the way that David Slade kind of brought that to the screen. I think Danny Huston really flushes it out and makes it a fully-fledged character and half the reason that this film works because Danny plays Marlow.



Eben's kind of an unlikely hero as well in the sense that he's a good deal more reluctant than your usual vampire movie heroes.

JH: We made him more like that than he was in the comic book. We spent a little bit of time before we started filming, rewriting and trying to figure out how to adapt this. The type of film that this was for me was a Western with supernatural overtones. The character is, I think, more interesting when he is isolated so I wanted him emotionally isolated. We took the relationship he has in the comic book with his wife, where they're kind of this dynamic duo and we separated them and then had that have a major effect on how he related to his younger brother.

So basically he is someone who is not letting a lot of people in when the movie starts and nor is he capable of relating to a lot of people. And, obviously, the physical isolation of being in the middle of nowhere in the Great North adds to that.