CelebSpice

Drew Barrymore badly bruised her leg while filming 'Whip It'.

The Hollywood actress - who makes her directorial debut and stars in the movie about a roller derby team - was left black and blue when a training session with Detroit Derby Girls star Racer McChasHer went wrong.

Drew explained: "We were wrestling and rolling around on the track, one of our skates and both our body weights were on my thigh. I had a bruise that was a foot long and a foot wide. My entire leg was covered."

However, the 34-year-old star has joked she didn't mind rolling around with the professional skater.

She added: "I don't think there's anything hotter or more fun to do than a girl fight!"

Drew is not the only actress to suffer an injury while making the movie.

Juliette Lewis recently revealed the co-stars constantly compared their "bad a*s" injuries on set.

She said: "Learning to skate, roller derby style, was a challenging task. But we all became bad a**es comparing bruises. Drew had one about eight inches long and five inches wide on the hip. I got some hip knots and a scraped chin, but thankfully no busted teeth. Bruises and scrapes are cool, busted teeth - not cool!"

With "Whip It," her remarkable debut as a director, Drew Barrymore proves that she is just as perky, quirky and talented behind the camera as in front of it.

Set in the exciting but less-familiar world of women's roller-derby racing, the film, which also stars the ever-delightful Ellen Page in her first role since "Juno," should perform exceptionally well for Fox Searchlight domestically and perhaps do even better overseas, given its exotic setting.

The fact that "Whip It" clicks on so many levels -- heartwarming family story, rough-and-tumble display of grrl power and a secondary but tender and convincing romance -- also can't hurt. The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, opens October 2.

Page is Bliss Cavendar, a pretty, intelligent girl from small-town Texas who longs for the freedom that beckons from the hip big city of Austin. Her mail-carrier mother (Marcia Gay Harden) entertains dreams of her carrying off huge trophies in local beauty pageants, and her Milquetoast father hides out watching football games to avoid his wife's wrath. One day, Bliss happens upon some fliers advertising an all-girl roller derby, and she's hooked. Knowing that her loving but strait-laced parents would never allow her to involve herself in such a dangerous, working-class and dead-end activity, she begins leading a double life that, after lots of complications, finally catches up with her. It probably won't be much of a spoiler if it's revealed that everything turns out well in the end.

This familiar yet simultaneously different heartwarming tale of misunderstandings, smothering love and ultimate triumph is loaded with cliches, as might be expected. But somehow writer Shauna Cross (adapting from her novel) manages to inflect the story with fresh twists, most of which come from showing girls do what only boys have been allowed to do onscreen in the past.

So, for example, when Bliss and her rock-band boyfriend reconcile after a series of misunderstandings, it's exactly what we expect, but newly empowered Bliss, no fool for love, makes sure the relationship is re-established on her terms, not his. And in this movie, the gross-out humor (vomiting, food fights and the like) is the newly won province of the girls, not the boys. The biggest surprise is the astonishing amount of violence that the girls wreak upon one another virtually nonstop in the many competitions that are brilliantly choreographed. They show off their bruises to one another like badges of honor. Of course, the film only is meant as an innocent entertainment, but somehow it seems more than that, like the start of some fundamental gender shift in the movies, especially when Bliss explicitly attacks her mother for trying to foist her "1950s idea of womanhood" on her. These are women who don't want to be corporate lawyers, they want to kick ass.

Page, whose derby moniker is Babe Ruthless, is predictably adorable and somehow seems more like a real person than the sometimes cartoonish, overly quippy smart-aleck she memorably played in "Juno." The acting is top notch throughout, again proving the old saw about actors who turn director being particularly attuned to performance. Barrymore and Juliette Lewis are especially delightful.

(Editing by DGoodman at Reuters)

Juliette Lewis thinks her ex-fiance Brad Pitt is a "super father".

The 'Starsky and Hutch' star is in awe of Brad's parenting skills and is amazed he manages to raise six children - Maddox, eight, Zahara, four, Shiloh, three, Pax, five, and one-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne - with his partner Angelina Jolie.

Juliette - who split from the actor in the early 90s - said: "When I run into him it's like running into an old comrade. Good vibes. He's grown into a fine man and father. Total super father. It's pretty impressive. Their family unit is inspiring."

Although she thinks Brad's family is wonderful, the 38-year-old actress - who has mostly been single since her divorce from skateboarder Steve Berra in 2005 - doesn't plan to be a mother until she settles down again because she doesn't want to raise children on her own.

Citing a desire to strike out in new directions, Lewis disbanded the group in 2009, forming the New Romantiques soon after. The resulting album, "Terra Incognita," produced by The Mars Volta's Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, is exhilarating and exhausting -- spacey, Latin-tinged, tribal, grungy, droney, occasionally bluesy and even, just for a second, a little country.

The sonic variance, though, is anchored by Lewis' gravelly, brazen yowl, which sounds like Patti Smith one minute and Kim Deal the next. Billboard caught up with Lewis by phone when she was in central Italy in the middle of a European tour.

Billboard: Where are you right now?

Juliette Lewis: Napoli. I've never been here. It's a time-table Rubik's Cube lining up press, but touring's great ... It's an endurance test on the senses. Yesterday was a 12-hour airport extravaganza. It was like serving prison time, but my band and I are so goofy, and we joke around and it's fine. We did it all on four hours' sleep -- but it's so great: You get onstage, you push yourself to the limit.

Billboard: The first noticeable thing about "Terra Incognita" is that it covers an incredible amount of sonic ground.

Lewis: It's a smorgasbord. It's filled with sonic contrast, and the sonic contrast represents human and my contradictions. I always call myself an emotionalist. I feel. When I wrote this album I felt disillusioned and optimistic. I felt innocent and vulnerable as much as I felt cynical and strong.

That's my emotional context, so the sonic contrast of (the record) fit. The heavy bottom -- the drum sounds are so f---ing meaty -- anchors it, and the guitar textures accentuate the story. Omar was the perfect producer for that.

Billboard: Rodriguez-Lopez has said he's meticulous and hard to work with. What was your experience like?

Lewis: He's not that way with me. With his own stuff he cracks the whip in a very particular way. He's a conductor, he's a mad conductor. He literally conducts with his hands and his mouth -- he beatboxes it. But in this case I was the artist, so I was hard to deal with. Not really!

Our union, though, was a match made in heaven. He's much more versed in music and he's a bit of a genius, but we speak similarly because he hears riffs and to him it's connected to everything else -- to the stars and people and cinema.

Billboard: So how did the recording process work then?

Lewis: I would talk my wacky language to him and he'd interpret it to the drummer. I'd say, "I want it to sound like Zeus woke up from a nap and he's pissed and there's an opening in the clouds and he starts handing out lightning bolts," which is crazy, but that's how I hear the rhythm. And Omar, he whispers some things to the drummer, and that's exactly what it sounds like. It really encouraged the songwriter within me.

Billboard: Do your acting and songwriting come from the same place?

Lewis: They're interrelated. It's like a painter who's painting with oil, then you decide, "I'm only going to make junk art." You're still an artist, your medium is different. Now I work with sounds but I still connect with that center. It's all a sense of surrender and an attempt to connect.

Acting is me, but music is even more me. It's everything. It's the bitch's brew. It's my past self, present and future, and then my imagination. Being an actor is like being a bass player, one of the component parts to the collective hole.

Billboard: And so fronting the New Romantiques is like being the writer-director?

Lewis: Yeah, it's the writer-director and ... (laughs) I don't know if the metaphor fully translates, but yeah, the writer and director -- and the emotionalist.

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)

(please visit our entertainment blog via www.reuters.com or on blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/)

We showed you some stills a few days ago, but now here's the full trailer for Drew Barrymore's Whip It!, starring Ellen Page, 

The plot, as previously reported, sees Page as spunky heroine Bliss Cavendar, who tires of entering her mother's beauty pageants and gets into roller derbies instead (an American contact sport kind of like Rollerball, but with rollerskates instead of the motorbikes and chainsaws). 

Page stars alongside Barrymore, Juliette Lewis, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig, and Jimmy Fallon. The US release date is October 9th.