`GIFT' WRAPPING CAST AND CREW WORKED HARD TO CREATE A NICELY PRESENTED PACKAGE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Although they have gone on to bigger, maybe better things, many of the talents involved in ``The Gift'' still view making that small, unusual film as, well, what the title says.

Shot a year ago in and around Savannah, Ga., the picture is part supernatural thriller, part social study of a small Southern community.

The cast is an odd but impressive mixture of world-class thespians and pop-culture icons: Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank and Katie Holmes, among others. The script is by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson. And the director, Sam Raimi, is himself the kind of filmmaker who is equally at home with excessive genre entertainment (he made the speed-horror ``Evil Dead'' movies) and observant character studies (``A Simple Plan'').

Although they are each in the process of making much higher-profile projects - three ``Lord of the Rings'' films, two ``Matrix'' sequels and the long-anticipated ``Spider-Man'' feature, respectively - Blanchett, Reeves and Raimi still relish the glow of the familial, creatively rewarding Georgia production.

``Billy Bob gave me a draft of the script after we made 'Pushing Tin' together,'' explains Blanchett, who stars as the psychically gifted, widowed young mother Annie Wilson, who was partially modeled on Thornton's own mom. ``I really was fascinated by it, because I'd never seen a film that dealt with psychic abilities in such a commonplace way. It's like living with diabetes, in a way, for those people. You just learn to deal with it, you learn to harness the energy, you learn to conceal it and to channel it in the right way, so that it doesn't overpower your everyday existence.''

While Australian actress Blanchett has repeatedly demonstrated her chameleonlike ability to blend into any English-speaking setting the world has ever known, superstar Reeves is thought of, fairly or not, in a narrower range of contexts: goofy young dude, reticent action hero and sensitive sports jock. Beyond that, the most recognizable quality in many of his film roles has been an irrepressible sweetness.

Not only, then, does ``The Gift'' contain one of Reeves' finest screen performances; it's also his most uncharacteristically alarming. As wife- beater Donnie Barksdale, the Toronto-raised Reeves nails a sheerly menacing quality as effectively as he does a swampland accent. More impressively, he locates the human frailty in the all-but-unrepentant brute.

``Donnie is quite a scary presence,'' Reeves acknowledges. ``But I tried to flesh him out. I went to Savannah three weeks before I was scheduled to begin filming. I guess the mission for me was to try to find out what Donnie Barksdale is thinking and feeling. So I tried to meet local guys and find out what they think about women, what it's like to grow up around there and be this person.

``So I found some rednecks and hung out; I met so many great people,'' says the handsome star of such blockbusters as ``Speed,'' ``The Devil's Advocate'' and the ``Bill & Ted'' comedies. ``Specifically, I remember one time just having this kind of town hall meeting in a bar with 15 people, just talking about what it was like to grow up in this one locale, speaking about voodoo and religion and husbands and wives, and with that concurrently working on the accent and just being there.''

Uh, OK. Guess folks are just used to opening up to curious movie stars in those parts.

``I had good fortune,'' Reeves admits. ``I met some cool people. Once in awhile, I'd get recognized, but after saying hello, they were really accepting.''

Raimi's attraction to the piece reflected the eclectic makeup of his cast and shared the same careful, behavior-based approach to the material that the actors employed.

``It was more difficult than I thought, because I had to delve into my old bag of tricks without using any of them,'' says Raimi, a past master of sidewinding camera moves and comically grotesque shock effects. ``I was back in familiar territory, but I couldn't rely on any of the tools that I had developed because the goal of this film was, for me, to present these great, realistic characters and to realize to the fullest potential the great performances that these actors were capable of.

``So I could not create some fantastic world that would throw the audience out of it, but rather make them accept the supernatural as just an extension of what had already been performed by the actors. If such a thing can be done, I wanted to present the supernatural in a realistic way, and I tried to do it through cinematography and production design in more subtle ways than I had in the past.''

It worked for Reeves.

``I wasn't just playing a special effect,'' the actor, who often does exactly that, says gratefully. ``And it was kind of fun for me, in the character, to be confronting everybody. In an odd way, that was liberating.''

As for ``Elizabeth'' and ``An Ideal Husband'' star Blanchett, Raimi's reality-grounded approach actually had the effect he hopes it will on an audience.

``I've always been fascinated by psychic phenomena,'' she says. ``I've always wanted to be the person who stays in the haunted house and has the face-to-face with the ghost. But it's eluded me; I think the more you try to create that stuff, the more elusive it is. But I did meet some people, in doing research for this film, that definitely seemed to have something.''

From everyday manifestations of ESP, Blanchett went on to the entirely manufactured fantasy world of Middle Earth. As the elf queen Lady Galadriel in Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's ``Lord of the Rings'' trilogy, Blanchett has worked against special-effects blue screens for the first time in her career, interacted with all manner of outlandish creatures and worn what she describes as some pretty amazing ears.

``There's this one battle with 30,000 Orcs,'' she says, impressing even those ignorant of the exact nature of Orcism. ``It's this whole prosthetics, animatronics workshop thing, they're building all of these scale models ... It's really fantastic.

``But people are so passionate about those books that, no matter how it's done, there will always be critics,'' she notes, voicing the main concern looming over the huge, triple-feature investment that will be spent well before the first film opens at the end of the year. ``I think it's really important to remember that, if you want the book experience, read the books. There has to be a filmic reason, a personal reason why a filmmaker would turn those stories into great films, and I think Peter is the right person to do it. He's into this savage world view, the dark underbelly.''

Almost as risky are the tandem ``Matrix'' sequels Reeves is now making. Even though they follow-up a proven box-office commodity, the 16-month shooting and post-production schedule for the two films encompasses the potential summer actors' strike, which could mean multimillion-dollar delays in the already costly project.

``I hope there's no strike, but I think they'll work on special effects if it does happen, and we're going to do principle filming before the contract comes up,'' says Reeves, who has undergone three months of seven-hour-a-day training sessions in preparation for the sci-fi spectaculars' martial arts stunts. ``In the first film, the fights were one-on-one; now there are going to be multifights with weapons involved. There'll be lots of surprises and, really, just that ambition to continue to reinvent cinema to the potential of what actors and what the camera can do.''

Raimi is facing a similar challenge on his recently begun production of ``Spider-Man,'' the long-awaited adaptation of the popular Marvel superhero comic which stars Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe and Kirsten Dunst.

``I'm scared,'' the director says with a laugh. ``It's a big job and I've got to find the right approach. I think there's got to be a lot of excitement and visceral quality to the camera's presentation of Spider-Man. At the same time, I don't think there should be a lot of 'cool shots' in the picture. I don't want for it to be about me rather than Spider-Man, the hero. I'm going to have to find the line.''

With all that to face, no wonder ``The Gift'' looks like a rare island of art for art's sake in retrospect.

``It was a very intense shoot; often, just because of budget and time constraints, we only got one take,'' Blanchett notes. ``But when a director demands a lot of you and asks you to do something that you haven't yet done, that makes me want to give that director the Earth.''

``Sam Raimi really cultivated a situation that all of us could do great work in,'' Reeves adds. ``For someone who has such a strong sense of cinema, he really didn't make it feel like you were acting for the camera, but that the camera was there to capture what you were portraying.''

``I am really impressed with the number of great actors I had a chance to work with on 'The Gift,' '' Raimi says. ``They were as taken as I was with the high quality of the screenplay, and I learned so much about working with actors. It was an exhilarating and exciting journey.''

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Photo:

(1 -- 4 -- cover -- color) Clockwise from top left: Katie Holmes, Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves and Greg Kinner

(5 -- 7) In the supernatural thriller, ``The Gift,'' Cate Blanchett, left, plays a widowed psychic who offers readings to the residents of her town, only to have visions about the hidden, dark side of her neighbors, including Giovanni Ribisi, centr and Hillary Swank, right.