Films that explore individual ways of coping with a distressed world mark the lineup of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, which unspools Jan. 17-27 in Park City, Utah. Eighty-one world premieres are among the 121 feature films set for the nation’s premier indie fest, which received 2,051 narrative features and 1,573 documentaries submitted from around the world this year, an all-time high.

CHOKE (Director and Screenwriter: Clark Gregg)–An adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s (Fight Club) novel, Choke is the sardonic story about mother and son relationship, fear of aging, sexual addiction, and the dark side of historical theme parks. Cast: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad Henke. World Premiere

THE MERRY GENTLEMAN (Director: Michael Keaton, Screenwriter: Ron Lazzeretti) — After fleeing an abusive marriage, a young woman sets off to start a new life. When she finds herself an unwitting witness to a murder she stumbles into a curious friendship with a depressed hit man. Cast: Kelly Macdonald, Michael Keaton. World Premiere

Source: Variety

The Coen Brothers filmed No Country For Old Men on location in New Mexico, using mostly southwestern actors like Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones. They did excuse Spaniard Javier Bardem and Scot Kelly MacDonald. She does such an impeccable southern accent, you’d never know unless you saw Trainspotting.

“Talking, really, in the accent, that helped,” said MacDonald. “Their only concern was about keeping it going but by doing a few scenes, they could hear that I could. I worked on it before I went in for the audition. Before I met with them, there were a couple of hoops I had to go through. Ellen Chenowith the casting director, I worked with on the accent before I’d go and see her. Like 45 minutes on the phone to my friend who’s a dialogue coach in my hotel bathroom because I happened to be in New York not for any film reasons. I was there for a friend’s wedding and my agents asked me if I was available. So I phoned her up, went in and then when she said I could meet Joel and Ethan, then I talked to her again. From the dialogue, from the script, [author] Cormac [McCarthy]’s writing is just so specific. So from just reading the dialogue, I was already in kind of the right ballpark. You can’t help but know what these people sound like.”

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“I don’t want to be famous,” Kelly Macdonald, part of the ensemble cast of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, says in her thick Glaswegian accent. “I don’t think I’d be OK with that.”

The 31-year-old Scottish actress, five months pregnant with her first child, is sitting on the edge of a couch in the sort of empty Beverly Hills Four Seasons suites actors are shuffled into and out of on press days. She’s as shy and timid as just about every role she’s taken on screen, from a neglected girlfriend in Tristram Shandy, to the politically conscious girl in HBO’s The Girl in the CafĂ©, to her Texan wife of a man on the run in No Country. But as fragile as she appears while professing her disinterest in celebrity, she’s also got one of the bubbliest, most infectious laughs you’ll ever encounter. She laughs not only at herself but also at the absurdity of all the hoopla that surrounds her chosen vocation.

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Kelly Macdonald, a Scottish actress whose career ignited at 19 when she starred opposite Ewan McGregor in the cult hit “Trainspotting” 11 years ago, lives in London and finds being outside the Hollywood maelstrom refreshing. Disappearing into character, she says, is a refuge for introverts, which is what she considers herself.

“The moment I saw that someone could do that, I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” she says. Macdonald — currently co-starring in the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” — has kept busy since her “Trainspotting” role and didn’t get caught up in the party scene while growing up in the U.K. She remains optimistic that staying on the straight and narrow track will lead to a long career.

“It’s not like there is a retirement age,” she says.

Read full article over at Variety. The rest of it profiles other young actresses.

Carla Jean is a Texas trailer girl married to a cowboy who likes to hunt.

So, of course, she’s played by a Scottish woman with a thick but lilting accent that sounds a million miles from Texas.

“I know — there was no one else for the part!” Kelly Macdonald says with a laugh about her unlikely casting in the new Coen brothers film, “No Country for Old Men.”

So how did she land the role?

“My agent just badgered and badgered the casting director to put me on tape,” she says while sitting in a hotel room at September’s Toronto International Film Festival.

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