“It’s really all because of Madonna,” says James D’Arcy. “She cast me when nobody else really wanted to.” The movie the shaggy haired British actor is talking about is W.E., in which he played Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor. And he seems to be right. Since then he’s appeared in Cloud Atlas and, most recently, playing Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock, which opens in select cities this Friday.

And as for Madge, the two are good friends which seems to shock a lot of people.

“I’m good friends with most of the directors I work with,” he explained to Celebuzz. “People are only amazed because it’s Madonna, like because she’s Madonna she doesn’t have friends which is ridiculous if you start to think about it.”

D’Arcy caught Madonna’s latest show in London and is actually featured quite prominently in the concert.

“On the screens she plays four minutes of outtakes from the movie of me and Andrea rolling around on the beach while she sings ‘Masterpiece,’ her song from the film,” he says. “After the show I went to a party at her house.”

The 37-year-old actor gives a brilliant performance as Perkins in ‘Hitchcock,’ which explores the relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his influential wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) during the making of his 1960 horror masterpiece Psycho.

He prepared by watching interviews of Perkins done around that time.

“Perkins did share several characteristics with Norman Bates (his Psycho character). They were both shy and had a boyish quality. I don’t want to sound disrespectful but looking at a few of his other films from that time, he wasn’t the most wildly versatile actor around. He had the same mannerisms. The studios were trying to mold him into the next James Dean or Marlon Brando, which seems absurd now when you think about it.

“It’s interesting that he’s so confused with Norman Bates. He became so synonymous with the role that he was condemned by it. He had so little freedom in that people didn’t know Perkins very well. People know Norman Bates very well maybe, not Anthony Perkins.”  Although he adds, “Who’s to say what his career would have been like without Psycho?” (Indeed, Perkins went onto to play Bates another three times in three sequels to Hitchcock’s film).

D’Arcy clearly had a wonderful time working with icons like Hopkins and Mirren.

“It was a wonderful set and it all starts from the top,” he explains. “If the leading man doesn’t f..k around then no one else will. [Hopkins] is the nicest, kindest most professional man. It was just a lovely set. I mean look at the cast involved. It wasn’t an expensive movie to make. Everyone really wanted to do it.”

And which is his favorite Hitchcock movie?

“I feel like the answer is always the last one I watched,” he said. “For instance, I just saw Foreign Correspondent, a 1940 propaganda film and it was utterly mesmerizing.”

Hitchcock is open nationwide now. Watch the film’s theatrical trailer below.

Of the few directors to achieve celebrity status, the biggest among them, both literally and figuratively, is Alfred Hitchcock, whose career spanned fifty years and 66 movies including Rear Window, Vertigo and finally North by Northwest as the fifties were winding down.

It is here where Sacha Gervasi begins his new movie, Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins as the maestro, and the equally captivating Helen Mirren as his longtime wife and collaborator, Alma Reville.

Hitchcock is an occasionally enjoyable, though uneven look, at the making of Psycho, an unlikely triumph that changed the face of horror.

As the new movie begins, Hitchcock is coming off North by Northwest, a critical and commercial triumph which leaves him inundated with offers — including Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, which he passes on because Cary Grant won’t play James Bond.

Instead, against the advice of his agent, Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg), and mostly every studio in Hollywood, Hitch decides to adapt a new book, Psycho, Paul Bloch’s thriller about Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein.

With no one to back the movie, Hitchcock mortgages his Bel Air mansion for the $800 thousand budget, choosing to work lean and mean as with his popular TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Hitchcock is most engaging when Hopkins and Mirren share the screen as a durable old couple straining under 33 years of marriage.

While Hitchcock was a cinematic genius, he didn’t make a move without first consulting Alma, and no screenplay went in front of cameras before being subject to her pen.

Hitchcock is known to have obsessed over his blonde leading ladies, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren, but such blustery fantasies are believed to have been nothing more than that.

When he hires Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) as the latest to join the pantheon of ‘Hitchcock Blondes,’ Alma can only roll her eyes.

In the meantime, she’s begun a collaboration away from Psycho, which she derides as “cheap horror claptrap.”

Her partner is a dashing younger writer named Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), whom she regularly meets at a secluded beach house.

Not quite a romance, Hitchcock might have been a mildly engaging movie but is immeasurably elevated by the presence of Hopkins and Mirren, who provide the story’s emotional core.

Donning a fat suit and prosthetics, Hopkins, who bears little resemblance to Hitchcock, fully embodies the director, protruding lower lip and all, adapting his distinctive and deliberate accent as well as his droll and arid wit.

Mirren, who looks nothing like Alma, delivers an emotionally honest performance as a mid-century wife who, in a later era, would have no doubt forged a successful career of her own, given her storytelling talents.

In Hitchcock, (as in life, no doubt) she is his anchor both at home and, after a lackluster early screening of Psycho, at work.

On her recommendation, Hitch, who insisted the movie’s infamous shower scene play without music, was persuaded to lay in Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking chords, raising the scene’s tension to an unbearable level.

Director Sacha Gervasi, who holds a writing credit on The Terminal and directed the memorable documentary, Anvil:  The Story of Anvil, left script duties to John McLaughlin (Black Swan).

While his characterizations of Hitch and Alma are vividly rendered, minor roles like Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), Tony Perkins (James D’Arcy) and Janet Leigh are sketched in much more lightly. And the subplot involving Alma and Whitfield feels like a halfhearted attempt to inject the material with much-needed tension.

While some of his dialogue is snappy, McLaughlin struggles to find the right balance between humor and drama, and occasionally missteps with ‘fantasy’ sequences in which Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) visits Hitchcock providing helpful hints on murder.

The production was barred from using footage from Psycho, an obstacle Gervasi gracefully eludes in the film’s finest moment – a scene where Hitchcock stands in the lobby on opening night, listening to the audience reaction as the shower scene unspools.

Most of us, having seen the movie numerous times, hear Herrmann’s music and the image of poor Janet Leigh being butchered jumps starkly to mind as Hitch swings his arm to and fro, stabbing the air like a maestro conducting a symphony.

Hopkins is among the best actors of his generation and is being talked about for awards season. Should he win an Oscar, it would be his second Best Actor win, with five nominations.

Hitchcock, on the other hand, reinvented the thriller genre and remains one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Although he was nominated for the Oscar six times, he never took home a statuette.

Hitchcock opens in theaters November 21. Watch its theatrical trailer below.

Alfred Hitchcock may have been the man of the hour at the New York City premiere of Hitchcock, but all anyone could talk about was the film’s star, Anthony Hopkins.

“I actually worked with Tony on my first film,” actress Toni Collette told Celebuzz on the red carpet. “It was an Australian film called The Efficiency Expert. I was 17, and I was petrified. I’m very lucky to have another opportunity to work with him again.”

Hitchcock — which also stars Helen Mirren (as Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville), Scarlett Johansson (as Janet Leigh),  Jessica Biel (as Vera Miles) and James D’Arcy (as Anthony Perkins) — centers on the making of the acclaimed filmmaker’s most groundbreaking film, Psycho.

 For the actors involved in the project, it was the chance of a lifetime to work alongside industry legends Hopkins and Mirren.

“I want to be Helen when I grow up,” Collette said.

As for first-time director Sacha Gervasi, the experience was life-changing. “I got the best actors in the world!” he said. “I got so lucky but for me it really was Tony Hopkins telling me, as a first-time filmmaker, ‘Listen, you’re not experienced. You’re completely crazy, but I want to make this movie with you. I feel it in my gut.’ And it was his decision that really enabled the film to happen.”

For more interviews from the Hitchcock premiere, including chats with D’Arcy and Michael Stuhlbarg (who plays Universal studio chief Lew Wasserman), watch the video, above.

Cloud Atlas feels like the movie that Lana and Andy Wachowski were born (or perhaps reborn) to make. Few commercial filmmakers ask questions as big as they repeatedly do, but their intellectual tenacity (much less ability to communicate them with such visceral intensity) is virtually unparalleled, even if the end result is sometimes as imperfect as it is ambitious.

A stunner of an opus that isn’t just admirable but thought-provoking and moving, Cloud Atlas is the Wachowskis’ most personal film to date, a hugely successful examination of identity only occasionally undermined by the duo’s historic predisposition to discuss their ideas rather than explore them visually.

An ensemble cast led by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess and Jim Broadbent, the film follows a variety of characters at different points in their “karmic timeline” (my phrase, not the Wachowskis’) as they make decisions that not only affect those around them but reverberate through the rest of their incarnations.

How effective are Hanks and Berry as their past, present and future selves?

In one scenario, for example, Hanks plays a doctor in 1850 caring for his sick colleague (Sturgess) as they make a dangerous journey across the sea; in another, he’s a scientist in the American 1970s who finds himself strangely drawn to a journalist (Berry) investigating his company’s shady business practices; and in a third he’s a tribesman in a retro-futuristic landscape who partners with a member of a technologically-advanced civilization (Berry again) to recover information about the great man-made disaster that led to the planet’s devastation.

Broadbent plays a greedy composer in one time period and a feckless publisher in another; other than his turn as an ailing doctor, Sturgess plays a Korean soldier who rescues a genetically-engineered “fabricant” (Doona Bae) from extermination after she begins to express humanlike feelings; and Hugo Weaving plays a Nurse Ratched-like nursing home adminstrator, a hired gun for a corporation trying to cover its tracks, and a futuristic executioner.

It remains to be seen how effectively audiences think that the filmmakers transformed their actors into so many different characters, but suffice it to say that the question of identity looms large over all of the stories. What makes us who we are — how we look? Where (and when) we are? What we do? Lana Wachowski’s own journey of self-discovery feels like a palpable influence over every frame of the film, and she and Andy successfully merged that with the tapestry of novelist David Mitchell’s source material to create something that’s at once sweeping and incredibly personal.

It’s hard to say whether the star wattage of actors like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry reinforces or undermines the film’s themes — as good actors as they are, they’re always themselves, so their physical transformations never disguise the fact that, well, they’re them. But the repetition (if not consistency) of their appearances is pointed, and it speaks to the idea that choices we make in one life have repercussions in others — whether they’re rewards, punishments, fulfillments or yearnings.

That said, not all of the characters have a consistent sort of identity throughout the various time periods, and while it legitimizes the idea of free will and choice, it works at cross purposes with the throughlines of some of the characters. In one Hanks plot line, he’s a sensitive hero; in another, a violent criminal. Which is meant to be his core identity? The film never quite answers this, and as a result there doesn’t seem to be a coherent arc to his character’s (characters’?) story.

Further, there’s a truly beautiful narrative woven into the film’s tapestry about two lovers (James D’Arcy and Ben Whishaw), but of all of the various plot lines, its outcome and larger purpose is less well-defined. As Robert Frobisher, Whishaw is one of the most interesting and admirable characters in the film — completely confident in his sexuality, assured of his own talents and remarkably insightful about himself and those around him — but his eventual fate seems more like a display of loyalty to the novel than a complement to the rest of the stories.

Structurally, the film is very complex, and its dervishlike introduction of the various characters and time periods will almost certainly confuse viewers at first. But the Wachowskis’ storytelling has never been as dexterous as it is here, and they more successfully than ever merge big ideas with even bigger visual sequences, where in the past their staccato combination of character pontificating and action set pieces has failed to create a consistent dramatic momentum.

Once the Wachowskis have introduced their various worlds, however, the story settles into a comfortable rhythm that builds naturally to a moving and emotional crescendo, and pays off most of the film’s ideas. And even if, say, the prosthetics worn by the white actors fails to convince you that one iteration of them is Asian, the filmmakers still successfully communicate the emotion beneath that make-up, and make you care about both the ideas and the characters themselves.

Ultimately, what feels most impressive is that the movie exists at all — it seems far too challenging to have the money to make it and the support of a studio like Warner Bros. behind it. But the duo’s proven track record at combining lofty concepts and populist thrills has deservedly earned them to goodwill that Warner extended to them here, and it paid off handsomely in one of the most ambitious mainstream movies in recent years.

Will it strike a chord with moviegoers? Who knows. But Cloud Atlas is smart, moving and inspiring, both cinematically and personally — a Brokeback Mountain for the sci-fi set, perhaps. Because even if you’re not quite sure who or what you are, thinking about those questions at all is the first step to answering them. And most amazingly, it says that not only with the story that it tells, but in the very process of telling of it.