Alice Eve crosses the pond in tense immigration drama

The City of Angels that’s depicted in Wayne Kramer’s intersecting tale of immigrants trying to gain and secure status in a post-9/11 America, and the deportation officials on the other side, is as far removed from heavenly as one can get.

Los Angeles serves as the urban backdrop in Crossing Over, a film that explores uncomfortable truths about racial profiling, the visible and invisible barriers preventing immigrants from feeling like “real” Americans and culture clashes that can sometimes turn lethal. British newcomer Alice Eve stars as a struggling Aussie starlet alongside heavy-hitters Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd in this unflinching drama.

The radiant U.K. native, whose previous credits include Stage Beauty and Starter for 10, portrays Claire Shepard, a transplanted wannabe-actress who is willing to do anything – truly – to stay in the States and achieve her dream of becoming the next Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts. A fateful car crash sets up the meet-cute between Claire and Liotta’s opportunistic immigration bureaucrat Cole Frankel, who promises her a green card in exchange for bedroom trysts at his every whim. Eve reveals that creating Claire, and making her believable, involved considerable legwork before the cameras even started rolling.

“It was tough. It was really tough,” she told Cineplex.com while in Toronto promoting the film. “I approached it quite precisely, probably more meticulously than I would have….I mean, I just did a romantic comedy, but I didn’t approach that character with the same attention to detail. I just wanted to make sure I got her right. I really looked at the background of immigration and how to obtain visas and how that works. And then obviously the accent, and I wanted to learn about where she was from and what her dilemmas were.”

Dividing her time between the U.S. and the U.K., Eve doesn’t have any comparable immigration horror stories but says Kramer, who serves as both writer and director on the film, filled in the blanks.

“Wayne had a very similar situation in his life so he was the source of all knowledge. He’s South African – and now he’s an American citizen – but I think to get his citizenship was a struggle, as the film explores. I think his character was shadowed by Jim Sturgess’ character [Gavin] and the relationship that Claire and Gavin had in the movie, I think, was echoing something Wayne had experienced in his life.”

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In the film, Gavin, Claire’s sometimes-beau and avowed Atheist, relies on his previously snubbed faith and its teachings as a means to get status legally, though largely dishonestly. Claire, however, has made a deal with the devil and shares many afternoons with Liotta’s handsy agent that leaves her physically and emotionally exposed, which Eve admits left a lasting impression.

“It was difficult because of the nature of a lot of the scenes. Ray was fantastic and very professional to work and we very much had a positive bond on-set but we didn’t necessarily hang out off-set. I mean, I’m not me in the role, but I’d still come away having put my body to that. So you come away with the pain of it, for sure. When you play someone like that, it really does take its toll. And that’s no small price.”

Even though Claire has arrived at a desperate place where she’s turned to prostituting herself for a legal document, effectively sacrificing any future she has with Gavin, not to mention dealing with the inherent shame, Eve does see a few similarities between herself and the troubled performer.

“I can relate to her as a woman who’s asked to use sex as a currency because I don’t think that’s alien to any woman. I think every woman has experienced something like that. Not necessarily propositioned to [have sex] for a green card, but whether it’s a smile at a restaurant to get the waiter’s attention, there’s always that at play for women. I can also relate to her as an actress because that struggle is immense.”

With Crossing Over, her North American film debut, Eve seems to have overcome the struggle rather nicely and is set to take the stage as Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac in England and star alongside that adorably awkward Canuck Jay Baruchel in She’s Out of My League.

But before she switches back to rom-com gear, Eve considers what a film like Crossing Over, with its interlaced themes of identity, belonging, racism and subsequent family trauma, can offer to audiences.

“I think that the film opens the forum for discussion, rather than it being a pedagogic exercise. I don’t think people need to be told, one way is right, one way is wrong. All of these stories are borne from truisms so I think that if people take them at their value, it creates an important space to talk about where the world stands on immigration and how we’re gonna deal with it in an ever-increasing, more transient, borderless world. And I think we really need to face that.”

Crossing Over opens exclusively at the Cineplex Odeon Varsity March 13.