Shannyn Sossamon co-stars with Edward Burns in the Warner Bros Pictures thriller, One Missed Call, directed by Eric Valette. The film's not set to hit theaters until 2008, but Sossamon and Burns made their way to San Diego to participate in the 2007 Comic Con. The event is attended by comic book and movie fanatics and is one of the best places for studios to show off their upcoming releases. Following a Q&A with the Comic Con crowd, Sossamon sat down for this one on one to talk about working on One Missed Call.

What attracted you to this film?
“Well, a couple things. I love the director Eric Valette’s first film. It was called Maléfique.”

Why did you like Maléfique ?
“It was just delicious. It was beautiful. Stylish, scary, twisted, subtle. I mean it was amazing and when you do a horror film, I’d had a couple of bad experiences with horror films before that.”

Do you mean bad experiences on the sets or the way the films turned out?
“The way they turned out…everything. And so I was a little apprehensive, just a little. But, you know, really it’s good to work. It’s good to practice. You need the work; you can’t complain. The elements of this one were so okay, better than okay because I love Ed Burns. And like I said, I loved the director’s first movie. I loved meeting with him and I knew that the studio would have enough money to put it all up on the screen.”

Do you think his first film and this one are stylistically the same or did he change his approach?
“Okay, no, we have to be serious, really real about this because it’s a frustrating thing.

This is PG-13, unfortunately. His first one wasn’t, and it cuts out so much of the tone. It cuts so much of tone. You can’t stay on things for as long. You can’t. It cuts so much of tone. It’s more formula. I saw a version, the latest version that’s going to come out in theaters. I can see how he sort of snuck in his style enough, but it’s definitely like why does it have to be PG-13?"

Why did it have to be? That’s what the studio wanted?
“What was The Ring? Was that rated R or PG-13?”

I think PG-13.
“What they’re probably doing is they’re just, they’re making it PG-13 because everyone’s looking at ones that have been successful. Actually, the director is going to show me… He said he was so mad that I got to see the screening of it last week. He said, ‘I wanted to show you my version first,’ and I just know it’s going to be so different.”

Will that version come out on DVD?
“Yeah.”

How does it change?
“Oh, the first [one is] probably R, and I think it’s everything his way. He doesn’t have to answer to anyone so you actually are seeing an artistic presentation.”

The script you read, was it the R rated version or already cut down to PG-13?
“It was kind of PG. It was in between. It was in between, yeah, it was in between. But it was definitely, it was a little heavier than what I saw on the screen. I thought the PG-13 was a last minute decision, too. But I’m not sure.”

Who do you play?
“I play one of the lead characters. Her name is Beth Raymond. She’s a college student and she basically is dealing with the fact that her three friends, well, one at a time, all of these friends are like getting phone calls. They’re hearing their deaths on the machine and then they’re actually really dying. She’s hearing the messages because they’re saying listen and they’re letting her in on it. It’s a head trip and nobody really believes her but this one person, a detective, played by Ed Burns. His sister died in a similarly strange way so he’s like, ‘I’m kind of with you here.’ So we go ahead and figure it out.”

Was it hard to get into her head?
“No, I kind of understood her. She’s real guarded and really focused in this one way. Like in a way that I never have been before, but I can at least transfer ways that I’m focused into sort of that. She’s very like concentrated on school and, you know, afraid of intimacy. There’s like a little bit of chemistry and kind of a little bit of spark between her and the detective. He sort of gets through to her just a teeny bit, but I think that would even be more played up on in the R version, too.”

So in the PG-13 we’re not going to see that relationship build up as much?
“It’s very little. Not too much. There wasn’t much material, yeah.”