On Movies | 'Rescue' star happy to show serious side

Steve Zahn

was set to deliver his usual rap when he went to meet

Werner Herzog

a few years ago. "It's the 'This-is-what-I'm-perceived-as- but-I-can-also-do-this' argument," explains the actor, whose goofball turns in films like

That Thing You Do!

and

Sahara

have left him typecast: the wacky sidekick, the second banana.

"So I was prepared to make my speech, but I didn't even have to get to that point," says Zahn.

Instead, Herzog, director of Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo, cooked him a steak. "In his kitchen, in a pan." Herzog was planning to turn his 1997 doc Little Dieter Needs to Fly - about Dieter Dengler, a U.S. pilot downed over Laos during the Vietnam War, and his escape from a Viet Cong prison - into a feature called Rescue Dawn. Zahn was a huge Herzog fan; he kept copies of Little Dieter to give to friends.

"And we had dinner and it was great, and I told him about my passion, and he got it," recalls Zahn. "And then he saw a bunch of my movies that he hadn't seen, and I came in and we had another dinner. And he said, 'I don't think you're Dieter; I'd really like you to play Duane.' And I said, 'Just tell me when and I'll show up.' "

Duane Martin was a fellow POW in the camp. He became a close friend of Dieter's. Much of Rescue Dawn, which opened at the Ritz Five, AMC Neshaminy and Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ on Friday, tracks Dieter and Duane as they hack through the jungle, fleeing, foraging. The two men - bearded, emaciated - look like scared animals.

"It's a survival movie," says Zahn, who lives on a farm in Kentucky with his wife and two children. "It's in this category with Never Cry Wolf and Jeremiah Johnson. I love those movies. And that's why I love Werner's movies. The main character, in all his movies, is nature."

Zahn lost 40 pounds for the role before heading to Thailand for the shoot last summer. Herzog cast Christian Bale as Dieter and Jeremy Davies as another American POW. "I was excited more than I'd ever been for any movie, on an artistic level," says Zahn, who dropped into Philadelphia recently. "This was the whole package: Werner, Christian, Thailand, the genre I love, a script that means so much to me, a character that's so rich, and something that people haven't seen me do before."

Zahn has a lot in the hopper: Comanche Moon, the final piece of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series, on TV in November; Strange Wilderness, an indie ensemble comedy; Sunshine Cleaning, with Amy Adams and Alan Arkin; and The Great Buck Howard, in which Zahn plays a crazy limo driver to a washed-up magician - John Malkovich.

But Zahn last worked in August. It was been a long stretch - until this month, in fact, when he set off to Romania for a project with Danny Glover - when Zahn was just playing with his kids, and his horses, worrying about paying the bills.

That's part of an actor's job description: the times when there are no jobs.

"You bet there's anxiety," he says. "That never goes away."

Still, Zahn, who turns 40 in November, is realistic.

"I've never seen myself breaking out and becoming 'a star,' he says. "Maybe I could have if I didn't live on my farm, and maybe if I was a little more involved. I kick myself sometimes, thinking I'm lazy, that I should write my own scripts, I should produce my own movies, I should demand that I direct.

"And maybe I'll do that some day. But, I don't know, I like to fish."

Psycho in short pants. "There's nothing supernatural about it. The horror is in the everyday," explains George Ratliff about his first feature, Joshua, a deft, unsettling thriller in which the 9-year-old title character (Jacob Kogan) scares the bejesus out of his hedge-fund-manager dad (Sam Rockwell) and on-the-edge-of-despair mom (Vera Farmiga).

"It's one of those terrifying things, becoming a parent," says Ratliff, 39, with a laugh. In Joshua, Farmiga's character has just had a baby, tumbling into what is essentially postpartum psychosis. The manner in which the older brother responds to the wailing newborn makes things especially creepy. Joshua opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse and Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ.

"The Exorcist, for me as a kid, was the scariest thing I'd ever seen," says Ratliff, a Texan transplanted to New York. With Joshua, which he cowrote with the novelist David Gilbert, Ratliff wanted "to combine that great '70s horror feeling - Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, The Exorcist - with some of the naturalism of the thrillers coming out of Europe right now, films like Read My Lips, With a Friend Like Harry, and Cache."

This he has done, in spades.

"I think this movie is going to be a population-control device," cracks the director.

Introducing the costars. Emma Booth plays the love object, and Brenda Blethyn's de facto nemesis, in the down-under dysfunctional family comedy, Introducing the Dwights.

Richard Wilson plays Blethyn's mentally challenged son, brother to the young man smitten with Booth. Booth and Wilson blew into town this week, talking up the pic.

Booth, 25, used to be a model. "No one wanted to use me in the modeling game anymore, I'm too old. I had to find something else."

Wilson, 22, English-born and Aussie-raised, has been acting since he was 15. He started in TV, then did features. He was Guy Pearce's youngest brother in the great Australian western The Proposition. Wilson first read for the part of Booth's boyfriend, auditioning one of the sex scenes with the actress.

"Obviously, I didn't get it" - Khan Chittenden did - "but I'm happy to be involved," he says. "Originally I was quite skeptical when they told me. . . . But I came around."