A sequel and a new version of a comic book character go toe-to-toe at the British box office this weekend, with most critics expecting to see the Matt (Damon) in Bourne Supremacy quite a few million up on the Cat (Woman) starring Halle Berry. Steve Pratt talks to the two stars of the rival action movies.

HALLE Berry isn't the first actress to play Catwoman on the screen but was determined not to give a copycat performance as the feisty feline in her new movie. Michelle Pfeiffer put on a catsuit for Batman Returns, while Lee Meriwether was the masked moggy in the TV series. Now Halle, a Bond girl in Die Another Day and Oscar winner for Monsters Ball, squeezes into a skintight leather outfit in the latest Catwoman movie to battle a cosmetics queen played by Sharon Stone.

"I have some sporadic images of the various Catwomen in my mind," admits Berry, "but what I really didn't want to do was to revisit their performances because the worst thing an actor can do is mimic or copy someone else.

"So I have Michelle Pfeiffer very present in my mind because she was the last one I saw, but really wanted to take the script we had before us. In my film she wasn't in Gotham City, there was no Batman, there was no Joker.

"I wanted to figure out who this version of Catwoman would be in this universe and bring my own self to it. Certainly, I didn't want to copy or mimic anyone else."

She studied cat movements to perfect a feline walk, while the revealing costume was designed to show not just the skin, but also muscle and movement. "So the walk was derived from studying hours and hours of tapes of cats and trying to move the way a cat would actually move," she says.

When she's not in her catsuit, Berry is looking dowdy and downtrodden as Patience Philips, who's transformed into Catwoman. So does the actress possess natural feline grace or is she a bit of a klutz? A mix of the two, is her reply. "That's why this is the perfect choice for me as far as a character," she says.

"There are times in my life when I can very much relate to what Patience is feeling - that I don't quite fit in, feeling less than sure of myself. And there have been times when I've felt as fierce as a tiger and held my ground when I stood up for what I believed it."

As the feline crimefighter, she had to learn to crack a whip and fight the baddies. Everyone wanted to try the whip, she says. "When you get the crack that's when the whip is moving faster than the speed of sound. That fact alone makes you want to see if you can make something move that fast. Everybody gave it a shot. It's very elusive. You think you can just crack it but it really doesn't work that way, there's a little technique that goes along with it."

She and Stone spent nine days shooting the final catfight. "It was pretty intense. We worked a lot with our doubles because I really didn't want to kick Sharon's teeth out," she says.

"She and I both welcomed the idea of working with each other's stunt doubles so we felt free to do the best we could. We realised we were working with a professional and not another actor, that freed me up to go harder and try harder."

When it comes to the film's depiction of the cosmetics industry - which shows the corporation's bosses willing to do anything to sell their potentially lethal anti-aging cream - Berry realises she must tread carefully as an international spokesperson for a major cosmetics company.

She believes we've become obsessed with looking younger. "I am really saddened by the way that women start to mutilate their faces today," she says.

"I see women in their thirties get plastic surgery, pulling this up and nipping that back. It's like a slippery slope. You pull something one way and then, 'Oh God, I've got to do the other side'.

"There's this plastic copycat face that's evolving and that's frightening to me. I try to use my voice in any way I can to say what's I've said right now. It's really insane, and I feel sad, that's what society is doing to women.

"Our movie sort of addressed that in a subtle way. It was a popcorn-eating, hopefully rip-roaring visual spectacle but there were little messages if you choose to see them."

She had no problems working with the dozens of real cats on the set, although they tended to upstage everyone and get all the attention. She's an animal lover and adopted one of the kittens from the movie.

As a child, she didn't really read comic books, only becoming more aware of them in her adult life. "I have to say I doubt I will do another comic book film. After Storm in X-Men and now Catwoman, my comic book hero days are probably over - unless I am lucky enough to play Catwoman again," says Berry.

* Catwoman (12A) opens in cinemas today

OF all the summer's sequels, The Bourne Supremacy has proved the most surprising. It was a shock that the thriller sneaked in under the radar and confounded expectations by beating the week's other opener, Catwoman, to the top of the box-office chart with a $50m-plus opening weekend.

A bigger surprise, perhaps, was that Matt Damon returned to play secret agent and assassin Jason Bourne, a character created in Robert Ludlum's books.

Although The Bourne Identity did well at the cinema and even better on DVD, Damon had said originally that he wouldn't do a sequel because he knew it was hard to make a good sequel.

He's fond of quoting a friend as saying there are only three sequels in history that are better than the originals - the New Testament is better than the Old Testament, Huck Finn is better than Tom Sawyer and The Godfather 2 is better than The Godfather.

What changed his mind was British film-maker Paul Greengrass signing to direct the sequel. He's best-known for controversial dramatised films Bloody Sunday, The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence and Omagh.

"He's one of my favourite directors. Bloody Sunday is one of my favourite films in recent years," says Damon. "Once I started to talk to him about his vision for the movie and heard his enthusiasm, I just felt like I couldn't say, 'No'.

"He had such a definite idea of what he wanted to do: a bold sequel that wasn't going to shy away from the darker stuff. I liked the idea of taking a revenge story and kind of turning it on its head."

Damon has always made careful choices, since he and best friend Ben Affleck took home an Oscar for their screenplay for Good Will Hunting, in which he also starred. Some have been hits, some have been misses. They've ranged from the classy thriller The Talented Mr Ripley to the crazy conjoined twins comedy Stuck On You.

He's been quoted as saying he doesn't see himself as a romantic lead - he tried that in The Legend Of Bagger Vance and didn't like it - and was something of a reluctant action man too. The Bourne Identity helped show that despite his youthful looks he could carry a movie as an action hero.

He did a lot of training to play Bourne again. "I enjoy it. It really helps, the boxing especially. I started boxing three months before shooting started," he says.

"That came from the first one where the director said, 'I want you to walk like a boxer, there's a directness and efficiency to the way they walk'.

"So I went to a gym and started taking boxing lessons. It changed my body but it also changed my bearing, the way I carried myself. We had to do it because in the book Jason Bourne is ten years older than me and I already look young for my age. We needed to do everything we could to make me as believable as possible."

More difficult was having to speak German and Russian in the sequel, after speaking French in the first one. He's not very good at languages, he feels.

"I can speak a bit of Spanish and that's it. The way we did it was that I stood there with a dialect coach and they made me say the lines over and over until they sound remotely German or Russian. But French was the hardest. I have the worse French accent in the world," he says.

And will there be a third Bourne film in the light of the success of The Bourne Supremacy? Damon is keeping his options open. "I'm considering it, but I really feel like I did at the end of the first one. I'm very happy to leave it at this," he says.

"It was a lot of pressure and now that's gone because I'm very happy with the way the movie has turned out. To go and do the third one, we'd have to get a great script and it's hard because, personally, I don't have an idea about where to go with it. But who knows? Maybe there's a rocket scientist out there who can figure it out."

He's not exactly short of work having made The Bourne Supremacy along with two other movies, Brothers Grimm and Ocean's Twelve, over the past year.

"I swore I was going to take a break after Ocean's Twelve but now I'm going to do The Informant with Steven Soderbergh and then a thriller called Syriana," he says.

"They're really well-written scripts and I feel like I'd regret saying, 'No' just because I'm ready for a break. So I don't know if it's as much about being a workaholic as it is about using my common sense and feeling like these movies are really good."

* The Bourne Supremacy (12A) opens in cinemas today

Published: 12/08/2004