February 7, 2001

BERLIN (Reuters) - Jude Law has made a name playing beautiful, witty but troubled young men. But the new Stalingrad epic Enemy at the Gates gave him a chance to show he can do silent, square-jawed wholesome too - and he learned to shoot.

"To be offered to play a kind of character I hadn't played before was a challenge, to play someone who expresses himself better physically than verbally," Law said after Wednesday's premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, in which he plays Vasily Zaitsev, a Soviet sniper dueling with a German amid the battle.

"There was something I liked about Vasily, a simplicity, a kind of salt-of-the-earth, straightforward, no-nonsense approach to life," said the 28-year-old Londoner, known for slicker, darker parts in the likes of The Talented Mr Ripley or the 1997 sci-fi thriller Gattaca that made his name in Hollywood.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud said he chose Law not just for his brains but for the sheer sex appeal that has made him one of cinema's hottest properties. In doing so, Annaud was exploiting the same basic rule as the Soviet propagandists who made Law's real-life character a hero in the first place.

"Beauty sells," Annaud told a news conference. "That's why the Russians picked Vasily too."

With Law and Joseph Fiennes, whose Red commissar turns Law's shepherd boy into a Soviet hero through propaganda and competes with him for the love of Rachel Weisz's woman soldier, Annaud said he picked "the two sexiest young men available today."

Sex In The Trenches

As to the sex-in-the-trenches theme in the big-budget, German-made film, Annaud insisted he was being faithful to historical fact, as recorded in personal Russian and German memories collated in the 1970s book Enemy at the Gates.

He had even recently met a Russian who said he was born in Stalingrad in 1943 after being conceived in the heat of battle the previous winter in just the way depicted by Law and Weisz, grappling with thermal underwear amid the blood and mud.

The British cast, which also included veteran Bob Hoskins as Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev, brought a better feel for continental European characters to the English-language film than Americans would have, Annaud felt, explaining why the only big-name American is Ed Harris, who plays Law's German enemy.

That may please some Britons upset at what some see as a trend in Hollywood to reserve English accents for the bad guys.

The Germans and Russians were extras from Berlin, where the film was made. The German capital has a big Russian community.

That mixture gave the proceedings an emotional edge as cast members swapped family histories of the war.

"It was very resonant to be in Germany," Weisz said.

"It was an experience I won't ever forget," Law said of filming the terrifying opening scenes of mayhem at the Babelsberg studios. "It was incredibly harrowing and only underlined my belief that war doesn't really work, does it?"

But should he ever need to, he also learned to shoot.

"I'd never fired a rifle or a gun before I did this film," he said.

Long days with an ex-SAS special forces officer changed that. "You learned to sleep with it, eat with it, everything else with it," Law said.