A strange new world

“HARD CANDY” is a film about what happens when a teenage girl takes it upon herself to teach an online predator a lesson. The result is a disturbing, occasionally extremely violent interior drama played out between Patrick Wilson as Jeff, the mild-mannered predator, and Ellen Page as Hayley, his “victim” turned Grand Inquisitor. In the end, it is very much Hayley’s movie.

Small, dark and intense, it is an unlikely vehicle for an ingenue, but then Ellen Page is an unlikely ingenue. At 19, the Canadian may have an impressive list of local film and television roles, but her IMDB bio still reads like a high school jock’s: “Loves playing basketball, soccer, downhill skiing, track and field, cycling, snowboarding, running and swimming.”

In her inevitable jeans and hoodie, Page would seem a better fit at a local skate park or antiwar rally than in the land of gift bags and catered lunches -- during a recent press junket, when a publicist asked her if she wanted a cappuccino, she stared at him.

“It’s all very strange,” she says of her experience in Los Angeles promoting “Hard Candy,” which is distributed by Lionsgate, making it her first real American studio film. “I’m very intimidated by the mind-set down here. People seem to be making very strange choices ... “ She trails off with a polite smile and a refusal to elaborate.

It is a mind-set she will have to learn to accommodate. Scant months after the opening of “Hard Candy,” a true indie film with requisite Sundance cred and Internet-heavy marketing, Page will be back in town promoting the billboard-blazing “X-Men: The Last Stand,” in which she plays the tightly leathered, atom-rearranging Kitty Pryde. Between the two, she is guaranteed much “faces to watch” coverage, a prospect that leaves Page ambivalent at best; when she got the call about “X-Men,” her initial response was no.

“The film was too big; I wasn’t ready to take that step,” she says. “But there was no denying that it opened a lot of doors for me careerwise, that it might make it possible for me to do more and different sorts of movies.”

Movies like “Hard Candy.”

On screen and off, Page shares many of the film’s characteristics. She too is small, dark and intense, with a wariness about entering “the Big Time” -- the world of Four Seasons junkets and red carpet premieres. Seventeen when she shot “Hard Candy,” Page could still easily pass for a younger adolescent.

It was Page’s air of intelligence that caused her to stand out amid the precocious sexuality David Slade had seen in the almost 300 young women he had auditioned for the part.

“You have to understand, I had been in a room with hundreds of 15-, 16-, 19-, even 30-year-olds reading for the part,” he says. “And maybe it’s because I’m British, but the girls in L.A. all seem so sexualized, and these actresses kept going sexy, making Hayley flirtatious. Ellen was just passionate,” he adds. “Not sexy, not sexual, just passionate. It was like stumbling on a young Jodie Foster. Because Ellen’s going to be a huge star.”

A star who might want to turn to Foster for some career advice. It’s tough enough to be an actress these days when leading roles are few. And the domain of the ingenue has long been a misty, treacherous place, where emotion is given a much higher premium than intelligence and the innocence so valued on screen is often beset in real life by all manner of demands and distractions that have left scars on many a young actress, from Judy Garland to Patty Duke to Winona Ryder. Some -- Julia Stiles, Kirsten Dunst and, of course, Julia Roberts -- manage to navigate the waters successfully, but the tabloidized antics of Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff and the Olsen twins are certainly red flags. Scarlett Johansson has moved from art-house darling to full-blown bombshell, albeit with the rumor that she’s Woody Allen’s new muse.

Yet if there was an anti-ingenue archetype, Page would embody it.

“I really feel like the point of film is to provoke thought, provoke conversation,” she says when discussing the controversial nature of “Hard Candy.” “The idea that I could make films that would say something, even change something, how great is that?”

So, probably no plans for a “Herbie” remake or a half-naked Vanity Fair cover in her near future. Not that Page is some revolutionary accidental actress. The native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, has been acting steadily since she was 10, when a talent scout came to her school looking for young people to star in the Canadian film “Pit Pony.” Page had always liked to act, though she had never thought of it as a career.

“When you grow up in Halifax,” she says with a wry smile, “you don’t know what that even means.”

She got a supporting part in the film, which then became a television series. “I received a certain amount of recognition,” she says. Does that mean the TV show made her famous?

Again the small smile. “Fame doesn’t exist in Canada,” she says. “It’s not like here.” Still, Page spent much of her adolescence on television and movie sets, usually away from home in the company of a paid chaperone, which could account for that sense of longtime independence underlying her demeanor -- she may have just moved into her own apartment in Brooklyn, but it’s been a long while since she lived full-time with her parents.

“When I was 12, I realized I was very uncomfortable having my parents on the set,” she says matter-of-factly. “So I told them that, and they understood. I am lucky to have just amazing parents.”

Self-possessed in the extreme, Page seems about as far from the stereotype of a child star as you can get. She speaks in complete paragraphs utterly free of “likes” and “you knows.” Although she is clear about her love of acting, she says she has had moments when she wonders if she is choosing the most useful path.

“Hard Candy,” she thinks, will help, because it not only addresses a serious, timely issue, it also portrays a teenage girl as an intelligent, capable being. A girl who may not be likable but is certainly memorable. When Page got the script through her agent, she was, she says, “totally blown away by it. I could not believe there was such an intelligent, passionate character written for a teenager.”

Unfortunately, she had just finished making “Mouth to Mouth,” a film that will be released next month, in which she plays a girl who joins a cult. The kind of cult that requires members to shave their heads.

Page sent an audition tape to L.A., but there wasn’t much she could do about her baldness.

“I think it kind of freaked them out,” she says. “I guess that’s something Natalie Portman can get away with but not me.”

“We had to convince the producers that she could do it,” says Slade. First, he had a long conversation with her, in part to assure himself that she could handle the emotional strains of the role.

“Part of this was humanistic,” he says. “I mean, I think I’m a pretty nice guy. But part of it was also very practical -- if she fell apart one day, we still had to shoot the next.”

It only took a few minutes to convince Slade, and once he got Page in the room with the producers, they agreed.

“One of the guys asked her, what historic character does Hayley remind you of,” Slade says. “And without missing a beat, Ellen said, ‘Joan of Arc.’ That was it.”

In the film, Hayley is a young girl who falls into an online relationship with Jeff, an older man played by Patrick Wilson. When they meet, and he takes her to his house, the tables quickly turn -- in an “Extremities”-like plot twist, Hayley takes the upper hand, and to shocking extremes. She uses torture, both physical and mental, to impress upon Jeff the harm and hypocrisy that has made his life both possible and unacceptable.

It is not an easy movie to watch, but still Page says she has been surprised by the reactions to Hayley, and to her.

“Men sit in interviews and tell me they feel like they should cross their legs” to protect themselves, she says. “One woman came up to me and told me I was sadistic.” Page shakes her head. “It’s really quite upsetting when you consider the images of violence against women we see every day on television. So many people want to justify Jeff’s actions, both men and women -- like somehow it’s OK that he has brought a 14-year-old home.”

Still, she says, the movie was made to provoke emotions, and it seems to be succeeding in that.

“Which is really the best thing you can do,” she says. “In this film, there are no safe answers. The audience sympathies shift, and they are intended to.... Hayley and Jeff are very real and complicated people.”

Which is why Page was more than a little surprised when, after seeing “Hard Candy” at Sundance, director Brett Ratner wanted her to take the role of Kitty in “X3.” And even more surprised when Ratner wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“He was so enthusiastic,” she says, “and I read the comic books, which I really liked, and so I thought, well, when else am I going to have a chance to wear a leather suit and run through exploding things? Why not be a superhero for a change?”

For all her on-set experience, she was unprepared for “X-Men.” Every aspect of the production blew her mind -- the sets, the makeup, the special effects, the star-studded cast. Fortunately Kitty’s role didn’t require the hours in makeup that other actors had to endure.

Although Page is looking forward to the Cannes Film Festival, where “X3” will premiere in noncompetition, she remains concerned about the hype that precedes, and follows, a blockbuster. To provide herself a little ballast, she followed “X3” with another small, dark film called “The Tracy Fragments.”

“It opens with a girl naked in the back of a bus under a shower curtain explaining, in a nonlinear narrative, how she got there,” Page explains. “It’s very dark and so much what my heart needed after ‘X-Men.’

“You can’t believe what some people said to me about doing that film,” she adds. “I was visiting a friend at Sarah Lawrence [College], and there was this guy there who was into French New Wave and he kept making these sly remarks about how terrible Hollywood is and how I had sold out.

“Judging people you don’t know for things you don’t understand,” she says, collecting herself again with a cool shrug, “is just really stupid.”