They pooled their talents

"I'M A NATURAL athlete."

"Actually, she's a natural competitor."

Sitting in a booth at Jerry's Deli in Studio City, actor-writer-director Chris Eigeman and his current leading lady, the strikingly tall, Dutch-born actress Famke Janssen, weren't trading opinions on Janssen's sporting prowess. Rather, they were discussing her recently acquired skills at billiards -- skills that are on abundant display in Eigeman's debut as a bona-fide filmmaker with "Turn the River." The feature opened last week in New York and comes to Los Angeles today.

In it, Janssen plays Kailey Sullivan, a troubled gambler and pool hustler -- a tough woman in a man's world -- who drifts between upstate New York and the city. Kailey is an exceptionally well realized example of a distinctive personality in the rarefied world of high-stakes money games, the idiot savant who's capable of doing one thing astonishingly well but can't handle the normal side of life. In Kailey's case, a youthful fling with a Catholic seminarian led to a son she is forbidden to see. The brittle, traumatized shell that Kailey has become as the boy enters his early teens provided Janssen, 42, with the ideal raw material to craft a performance that she said is completely uncontrived -- and one that earned her a special-jury best actress prize at the 2007 Hamptons International Film Festival.

"I don't always know what I'm doing," she said, sipping water and adjusting a large pair of Dior sunglasses atop her head, "but I try to be in the moment 100%. The happiest moments are when I'm truly in my life, and that's how Kailey is with her pool game."

Janssen has more than a dozen movies to her credit, including the James Bond installment "GoldenEye," a trilogy of "X-Men" films and a notorious arc on cable as a transsexual in "Nip/Tuck," but Kailey is a breakout performance. After secretly communicating with her son, Gulley, played by newcomer Jaymie Dornan, Kailey hatches a plan -- with his cooperation -- to spirit him away from his angry, alcoholic and quite possibly abusive lapsed-Catholic father (Matt Ross), passive stepmother (Marin Hinkle) and imperious, hard-core Catholic grandmother (Lois Smith). The pair will strike out for Canada with fake passports. Pool hustling will fund their exodus. So Kailey heads for New York City to seek the assistance of her mentor and father figure, Teddy "Quinn" Quinette, portrayed with crusty glee by Rip Torn.