Beckinsale plays Selene, a vampire warrior who patrols the streets of an unnamed European city. Bedecked in form-fitting black PVC body armor and toting a pair of Glock semiautomatic handguns, Selene spends her nights hunting down the remaining few Lycans (werewolves), members of the race she believes was responsible for the murder of her family. The film co-stars Scott Speedman (late of the canceled television series Felicity) as Michael, a human caught in the middle of the vampire-werewolf conflict.

The set of the film—in Budapest, Hungary—was also the setting for a budding romance between Beckinsale and the film's director, Len Wiseman. Shortly after filming wrapped, the two became engaged.

Speedman, Beckinsale, Wiseman and associate-producer/writer/actor Kevin Grevioux spoke with SF Weekly at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film premiered.

(Note: The interviews occurred before news came out of a lawsuit by White Wolf Games and author Nancy A. Collins against the producers of Underworld, alleging that 17 counts of copyright infringement occurred against the role-playing games Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade, and Collins' short story "Love of Monsters.").

Kate Beckinsale, Underworld doesn't seem like a typical film for you.

Beckinsale: I don't think I've got [a typical film]. I'm really lucky. I've done a bunch of period stuff and romantic comedies. I'm glad I've never been too successful doing any one thing.

Are you a fan of this kind of movie?

Beckinsale: I'm a fan of action movies, yes. I love Aliens, The Terminator, Die Hard. I'll go and see any action movie.

And yet you very nearly turned this movie down.

Beckinsale: I didn't turn it down. I just didn't feel like reading it. As soon as I read it, I thought it was great. I really have loved action movies, but if you get sent a good script for an action movie you want to play the boy part. I don't want to be sitting on an airplane making calls. I want to be blowing up the elevator shaft. And it doesn't very happen very often, and when it does happen in American movies, it's a bit camp and sort of wonky.

I was sent eight or nine scripts to read, and I didn't want to read this one because I thought it would be a schlocky B horror movie with vampires. I didn't fancy running about in a white nightgown screaming. But the director had sent along drawings with the script. And I thought, "Oh, OK, that's interesting."

How was it stepping into an action role?

Beckinsale: I was reading the script through a veil of tears. I thought you had to do every single thing, and if an actor in a movie looks like he's doing 15 backflips, then you have to do it. But you go there and they have a stunt double to do those things. But legally, if I was allowed to do it, they'd make me do it.

Which was great, because I think as an adult you rarely have to suddenly get good at something in a short time. It's quite a tricky feeling, because I'd never held a gun and in three months' time I had to do it like I'd been using one for several hundred years.

Len Wiseman, this is your first feature film following a career in working props on film sets and directing music videos. How did you manage to get to direct a picture of this size the first time out?

Wiseman: You back up your chair, you kneel down on the ground and you beg and plead and scream like a 6-year-old. I did everything I possibly could to convince everybody I could do it. I did a lot of drawing. I started in storyboards and production designs that I could use and I went to town on the drawing.

How did you finally pitch it?

Wiseman: My pitch at the time, to get everybody on the same page, was really The Matrix meets Interview with the Vampire. I wanted to make a classic action movie—I wanted the vampires to feel a bit more classic, like an Anne Rice movie—I wanted them to have an older-world feel about them than, say, Blade. And at the same time, I wanted it to be a modern fun flick, an action film. It's tough, because you have to give the studios two films. You sit with your agent and he says, "Go in there, and the studio needs to hear 'This meets this.'" What you want to say is Underworld meets Underworld.

Visually, the film is certainly striking, with its blue-tinted color palette and brooding, gothic setting. What were your design influences?

Wiseman: I was out to make a living, breathing graphic novel. I wanted it to feel like a comic book. That was the intention—that was why the color tone. I wanted the audience to sit down and, with the exception of turning the pages themselves, watch a comic book play out.

Are you a big fan of the genre?

Wiseman: You slice me open, this stuff flows out of my veins.

What about horror?

Wiseman: I haven't really gone back into the classic stuff. A lot of people say, because I'm doing a movie with vampires and werewolves, "You must be into Hammer horror films." But I am just an idiot when it comes to that stuff. My film background is Raiders of the Lost Ark. That got me going, and I haven't looked back. Underworld is more of an action film than a horror film.

You brought this film in under $20 million—a ludicrously low sum for a movie with as much action and special effects as Underworld needs. How did you do it?

Wiseman: We all knew that we had a $60 million movie on the page, and we were doing it for twenty. It was quite ambitious to try that. But because I'd worked in background and props, I was used to seeing where the background was showing and not showing. And it's something that I did in the music video world. I kind of build my career off of the word of mouth that said, "Oh, this is the guy. You could give him $100,000 and make it look like $600,000."

Getting this film made has been a big moment in your life in more ways than one. Your career as a feature film director seems well under way, with another supernatural thriller, Black Chapter, in development. And you and Kate Beckinsale are engaged to be married. How did the relationship evolve?

Wiseman: You get to know somebody over the course of working on a movie, and right upon meeting Kate [I found] we got along immediately. We find the same things important, the same things cheesy, the same things cool. We realized we're in the same frame of mind. We ended up liking the same movies and having the same sense of humor. You spend 15 hours a day working with somebody on a movie, and after a while you find out you're the same person.

Kate Beckinsale, you started this relationship not even willing to read Len's script. When did you know it was love?

Beckinsale: I have such a great regard for him. He's brilliant; he really is amazing, and I was so impressed with what a great director he was—and we did have similar taste in everything. It was such a great working relationship. And I did all these interviews on the set saying that, and in retrospect it must have seemed like I was simply infatuated. Now, I'm kind of annoyed at that impression, because it undermines how good I really think he is.

Scott Speedman, were you surprised when after filming wrapped Len and Kate decided to tie the knot?

Speedman: Was I surprised? No. Len is one of the nicest guys I ever met in Hollywood, and she's a cool girl. People work close together in those situations—stuff happens. They were getting along very well.

Your role in this film is a bit of a departure for you, too. After a successful run as a major character on Felicity and a burgeoning feature film career, did you pressure to take on an action role at this point?

Speedman: I didn't feel pressure. I've had my opportunity to do big movies. I haven't taken those opportunities because they weren't right for the time. But this one was right for the time. And the script came to me with Kate attached. It made it legitimate for me. She's a good actor, and she chooses well. That was the hook for me. Working with her is very, very good. Very fun. We had a laugh. A very good time.

What about the fight scenes—particularly your fight with Bill Nighy at the film's climax? Were they a good time?

Speedman: I was terrified. Because for this type of movie, it was not a big budget. The factory it was shot in was closed down because the roof had caved in. We had three days to choreograph it, and it wasn't like these lavish movies where you have months to get ready. I had never been in a fight in my life, and was just trying to make it work.

Kevin Grevioux, you have a background in microbiology and genetics. Did that background inform the film's nominally biological explanation for the existence of vampires and werewolves—creatures that have traditionally been understood as supernatural?

Grevioux: I had a really hard time getting my head around certain mystical elements. And I actually think mysticism is a cheat in storytelling. With this I wanted to figure out a reason why they appeared in the world. So I said, "Let's base this in real pseudo-science. Have it based on a virus back in antiquity, like a super-rabies of sorts." So if you were bitten by a bat with the disease, you would become a vampire, or a wolf with the disease, you would become a werewolf.

We did keep some of the legends. But there was a scientific explanation for the vampires being photosensitive. And with werewolves it was silver, which is a heavy metal. And heavy metals are already dangerous to humans. Like your leads, your arsenics, some people are allergic to gold. I think the reason why you jettison the old mythology is that your audiences are more specific and more sophisticated now.

Given that bent, how do you feel about movies like Lord of the Rings, which is more purely mystical?

Grevioux: You know I love fantasy—I don't hate it—but I have a hard time getting my head around elves and big mushrooms and things like that. Lord of the Rings was pretty good.

In addition to science, you're also an actor. And in Underworld, you play the role of the werewolf Raze, that seems to have been written with you in mind.

Grevioux: In everything I write, I write myself a part, because it's so hard to get work.

This film is drawing a lot of comparisons with The Matrix. Are you comfortable with that?

Grevioux: That's OK. I think a movie like The Matrix—what the Wachowski brothers did was brilliant. What they did and were allowed to do. The sci-fi guys, the geek guys, said, "It's about time." Because we've had all of this in our heads for years, but none of the producers ever got it because they aren't geeks like we are.

You're at work on a sequel to Underworld now. Any hints about what we can expect?

Grevioux: I can't tell you. The war continues. Let's just leave it at that.

Len Wiseman? Can you tell us any more?

Wiseman: It's funny—just to do this movie, we did have a sequel and a prequel in mind, just because there's so much we had worked out that dealt with how the war started. We decided to just map out the whole story and we'll focus on this movie. But right now, we're thinking that the first 15 minutes of the sequel would contain the prequel. I'm obsessed with seeing this medieval battle between werewolves and vampires in black shiny armor.

Tell us about the new movie you're working on.

Wiseman: It's a movie called Black Chapter, which we sold the same week we made the deal for Underworld—which was a great week. Once Underworld was out there, we [Wiseman, Grevioux and screenwriter Danny McBride] were able to get in and pitch this other idea to Disney. We pitched it as The Sixth Sense meets La Femme Nikita. We've never seen a ghost movie done as a high-energy action movie. We've seen ghost movies as suspense and horror and comedy. But imagine if in the Sixth Sense, you saw Bruce Willis pick up a gun and shoot a human being—and the CIA got wind of it. It's another dark, serious action film.