With 'Our Family Wedding' currently out in theaters, Oscar winner Forest Whitaker is switching gears and going from being in a romantic comedy to starring in a futuristic action-thriller with Jude Law in 'Repo Men.'

Humans have extended and improved our lives through highly sophisticated and expensive mechanical organs created by a company called The Union. The dark side of these medical breakthroughs is that if you don't pay your bill, The Union sends its highly skilled repo men to take back its property... with no concern for your comfort or survival.

Law plays Remy, one of the best organ repo men in the business. But when he suffers a cardiac failure on the job, he awakens to find himself fitted with the company's top-of-the-line heart-replacement... as well as a hefty debt. But a side effect of the procedure is that his heart's no longer in the job. When he can't make the payments, The Union sends its toughest enforcer, Remy's former partner Jake (played by Whitaker), to track him down.

Now that the hunter has become the hunted, Remy joins Beth (played by Alice Braga), another debtor who teaches him how to vanish from the system. And as he and Jake embark on a chase across a landscape populated by maniacal friends and foes, one man will become a reluctant champion for thousands on the run.

In speaking with Black Voices, both Whitaker and Law spoke about the films and the roles they play.

Did you know anyone who had to deal with an actual repossession?

Forest Whitaker: Oh, yeah, I've had friends who've had cars repossessed, and I've known people who've had their homes taken.

Jude Law: You said something really interesting earlier, to take it further, to lose your home, you should say it, to lose your home, people can lose belongings, you lose your car, you lose your job, you lose your home, but this idea of taking it further, I am myself, I own myself, the idea that they own you, too, and they're coming to take it.

FW: They have emotional questions too; when you lose everything, when someone takes everything, your house, your home, and then a part of yourself, you feel a loss, the emotional loss is so powerful.

In creating your characters back-stories how much did you two work it out and inform each other in developing your interactions?

FW: Jude worked on the script for awhile with Miguel (Sapochinick, the director) at the beginning of the film. I came on towards the end, and there was just discussions, little discussions about these markers, what scenes we were going to shoot, what scenes we weren't going to shot, and what was necessary to make sure we told the simple backstory of our characters to bond us, to complete the world, and to create this weird universe that we were going to live in.

Once we realized the bonds they had since they were children, and when they went into the army -- how these things would affect them -- in being able to be members of society and in how the Union, and the government (gave them a place in society). That was really important to the movement of our characters, and to the human part of the movie -- about their friendship, and separation, and about people who were growing in different directions. It was all a part of it in some way. We didn't have long, hour-long discussion.

JL: No, it's funny, we really didn't... [but] it's thrilling when people watch your performances and can say what worked and what didn't. It's not something you sit around and create or orchestrate, because that's like dissecting a friendship, which seems unhelpful, or unhealthy. But a lot of it was on paper. We did both have our filmmaker hats on to fight for certain scenes, in flashbacks, but an awful lot did get cut in the end.

Little bits like coming back and little bits that we knew were worth fighting for, rather than talking about, let's see a little of those moments, we particularly thought it was important to see them in combat together.

Did you have to hide your director's hat to work on this?

FW: The whole thing was to create a universe, a world. Every great movie is its own universe, its own world, with its own rules and stuff. I can't say that I would do it that way, but what (Miguel) did was create a universe that allows you to fall into it, and believe and trust in what we're doing, and we were committed to those motives, we would do anything, as far as we needed to, to get inside the truth of what this universe was.

JL: One of the scenes I found the most important was when Beth (played by Braga, she is his fellow fugitive) and Remy repossess each other. To get that far there had to be a sort of embrace of the violence in a way; two people coming together physically like that it could almost be lovemaking, a sharing of something, a sharing of agony rather than sharing pleasure.

FW: It was a bit bleak to do things that broadly, to go so far out, like 'A Clockwork Orange'-y or 'Monty Python'-y, because you have the chance to fall on your face.

JL: 'A Clockwork Orange' was a big influence on Miguel.

Did you do any research on the proper way to do the removal of organs?

JL: I worked with a surgeon in London. I bought a half side of a pig, because pig flesh is very like human flesh, and he taught me how to cut through that with scalpels, and then we worked with a guy in Toronto.

FW: A surgeon. For my characte is not a neat kind of guy; he just is into retrieval, so I watched that and discarded that and went with the knife and fork concept.

Is there more theater or independent films underway for either of you?

JL: Maybe later this year.

FW: I'm going to go very shortly to Shanghai to do this movie, 'Little Treasure,' about adoption, my character, his friend and his wife go to adopt a child, and they start to question her sense of cultural identity, they start to question her sense of being able to raise a child, and issues like that--that's the next film I'll do.

JL: I don't know actually what I'm going to do next. Hit a bump with a hammer? It's quite hard to read scripts after you've done 'Hamlet' So I'm not really sure, I don't know. I may be doing another Sherlock Holmes, but that's not certain.

I'm working with a wonderful writer/director team in London, they're going to do a play in summer or winter of next year, they're writing that now. And 'Contagion' (directed by Steven Soderbergh) is not until the end of the year. I'm one of a large number of people in a big ensemble, so I'll be doing my 10 days in San Francisco.