`RISING' TO THE OCCASION OF COMPUTER AS CO-STAR.

Byline: - Valerie Kuklenski

In light of all the computer-generated stuff now making it to the big screen, maybe there should be a new category at film awards shows: best performance by an actor or actress playing opposite a being who wasn't even there.

Bob Hoskins did it in ``Who Framed Roger Rabbit,'' Robin Williams did it in ``Flubber'' and now Treat Williams and Famke Janssen have done it in ``Deep Rising.''

The new action movie deals with some incredibly fierce and massive ocean dwellers, possibly a cross between a giant squid and an octopus, that have taken over a cruise ship and have been sucking the lifeblood out of every human they encounter.

What were the actors given to play off of while the computer effects wizards were creating a horrifying sea specimen on their floppy disks?

``Absolutely nothing,'' says Janssen. ``It was a dot on the wall, a piece of tape.''

She says it was similar to some of her scenes in ``The Gingerbread Man,'' in which she plays Kenneth Branagh's bitter ex-wife. She spent a lot of time yelling and grumbling to a nonexistent co-star on the telephone.

Janssen says ``Deep Rising'' writer-director Stephen Sommers didn't volunteer many specifics in telling the cast what the beasts looked like.

``He kept saying `bigger, bigger' in terms of our reaction to things,'' she says. ``We were all hesitant to do that because we didn't want to look like overacting fools, but he said, `Trust me. It's really scary.' ''

Janssen, who went eye to eye with Pierce Brosnan as the villainess in ``GoldenEye,'' says the ``Deep Rising'' cast endured nearly five months of shooting in Vancouver under difficult circumstances. While filming exterior scenes in the late fall, Janssen became ill and lost her voice, meaning all those lines had to be ``looped'' - rerecorded in a studio - later.

``It was a long movie and, as you can see from watching it, we were wet a lot,'' the 31-year-old actress says. ``And in action films, as opposed to drama, there's not much dialogue, so you sit around all day and wait and then, say, run down a hallway.''

The up side of making the movie came from everyone having fun with it, from Sommers to the whole cast and crew.

``That was the tone we really wanted to have in this film, because we've all seen what happens when these films take themselves too seriously,'' she says. ``You want to bring it to the set with you.''

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Photo: ``In action films, as opposed to drama,'' says Famke Janssen, ``There's not much dialogue, so you sit around all day and wait and then, say, run down a hallway.''