The Last Glimmer

"They loved it. They supported me. I'd never painted on a canvas this big before. And I certainly wasn't chic."

Right.

"This business is so about what have you done for me lately, and my answer was, well, nothing."

But there was the longing for what Bobby Kennedy and his words represented, Estevez says. And there was the script, which has big moments for the actors to chew up some scenery.

One of the first to enlist was Hopkins, Estevez says, "and once Anthony agreed, everything feel into place."

In a telephone interview, Christian Slater recalls Estevez calling him personally "and I was like, where do I show up?" Slater says that Estevez "just had this tremendous passion for it." Demi Moore, still a friend, read the script back in 2001, and then had her now-husband Kutcher read it. "I think Emilio has been on a long journey to get this opportunity," Moore says.

And La Lohan?

"I got a call from Lindsay's agent, saying Lindsay wants to change the direction of her career, she wants to mature on film, will you sit down with her?" recalls Estevez. "Of course, I called Elijah Wood, his scenes are all with her, to join me, and we had a three-hour lunch. Looked at each other, wow, she's passionate."

He says this without the slightest trace of irony. Estevez thinks that in part, his fellow actors rallied round him because of his very obscurity. "What happened to me could happen to any actor," he says. "This business is cruel."

He adds: "Unforgiving."

And you're not even a woman.

"And here I am writing a piece that addresses that, with three roles for women over 40 and so that was also a check mark against it."

But you got Sharon Stone? Stone plays the hotel beautician who is married to William H. Macy, the hotel manager, who is having an affair with Heather Graham, the hotel operator.

During the news conference, Stone spoke of her charity work arranging for clothing for the poor children of Louisiana who, she said, must share shoes to go to school. "That's what's really happening in America today." Stone also praised Lohan for using her celebrity to "raise social consciousness," for "being powerful by example, the way Bobby Kennedy did."

Lohan asked for a tissue and dabbed her eyes.

Estevez says the actors, who each worked on the film for only two or three days, shot their scenes without time for rehearsal. "They just showed such courage, and their performances are so brave. I'm humbled every time I see this film. I'm knocked out. I weep," he says, "as if someone else had made it."