Jason Lee, who plays Beaver in Lawrence Kasdan’s upcoming SF film Dreamcatcher, told SCI FI Wire that he had to contend with unaccustomed special effects while shooting the Stephen King adaptation. “I worked mainly on stages in Vancouver,” Lee said in an interview at Comic-Con International in San Diego. “I was already used to being up there, because I was working on another movie right before that. It was pretty easy, except for the bathroom scene, because I get all sorts of attacked and bloodied up. And that was kind of brutal. That was a few days of that. But it was great. It was a good time. … I had lots of fake stuff being puppeteered and lots of fake blood running down my body all the time, and it would harden, and I’d have to eat lunch, you know, very robotically. They did a really good job.”

In Dreamcatcher, Lee (Almost Famous) plays a member of a group of Maine small-town friends who get together once a year for a hunting reunion, only to encounter a sinister force in the woods. “I play Joe Clarendon, aka Beaver, a little bit like my character in Mumford, but possibly a little bit slower,” Lee said. “Not too slow, but big-hearted, has his own sayings, doesn’t really get upset, loves everyone and loves Buddy Holly. Hence the glasses and hair and toothpick in the mouth at all times. Good character. He was supposed to have long hair, but I had the idea that I thought he would be into the ’50s and like that kind of music, and so I e-mailed [director] Larry Kasdan, and I said, ‘I want to go with a Buddy Holly thing.’ And he said, ‘OK.’ And it worked. So it was kind of fun.”

While his cast mates, including Morgan Freeman, Timothy Olyphant and Tom Sizemore, had to shoot outdoors in midwinter in Prince George, B.C., Lee managed to escape the Canadian snow. “Fortunately, I didn’t have to work up in Prince George,” he said. “It was a nightmare. It was minus a lot [laughs].”

Lee promised that Dreamcatcher would please both fans of Kasdan (The Big Chill) and King. “Larry Kasdan is a great writer, and William Goldman. … Yeah, it was solid. And I think Larry kind of needed to do a movie like that. Because it had the friendship plot line to it, and it had that level realism to it, in the midst of chaos and bluescreens and puppets and things. So I think he’s the exception of someone who can do a big kind of special-effects movie, but maintain the humanity … with the characters. It’s like directing two different movies. It’s like directing a Big Chill in the midst of directing a big, suspense effects movie, and he can handle both very well, so it was impressive.” Dreamcatcher is slated for a 2003 release.

Another big summer blockbuster is making its way to DVD this fall is the latest Jack Ryan Cold War thriller The Sum of All Fears. Debuting on 10/29, this one includes a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, English 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby surround tracks, two audio commentaries by director Phil Alden Robinson and cinematographer John Lindley, and Robinson again with novelist Tom Clancy, the “Making-Of The Sum Of All Fears” and “Creating Reality: the Visual Effects of The Sum Of All Fears” featurettes, and the trailer. Retail is $29.95.