Paul Giamatti searches for his soul in 'Cold Souls'

In "Cold Souls," opening Friday in limited release, the actor Paul Giamatti plays an actor named . . . Paul Giamatti. The on-screen Giamatti is struggling through rehearsals for a New York stage production of Chekov's tragicomedy "Uncle Vanya" when he finds out about a medical facility that can extract and store his soul. Desperate to lose himself in the role as completely as possible, he undergoes the procedure and afterward is shocked to learn that his soul is only the size of a chickpea. Later, after his soul has been smuggled to Russia to be sold on the black market, he travels abroad to get it back.

"The whole idea that it was me, or that it was my name, didn't really strike me at first," the actual Paul Giamatti said recently. "The penny didn't really drop on me that I was playing myself in some way until much later in the process."

The deadpan comedy is the feature debut for 34-year-old French-born writer-director Sophie Barthes, who currently lives in New York City. The idea for the film came to her, quite literally, in a dream. One night a few years ago she watched the Woody Allen film "Sleeper" and then was reading Carl Jung's "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" before going to bed. That night she had a particularly vibrant dream, in which a "Sleeper"-era Woody Allen was ahead of her in a line as they both held white boxes that contained their souls. Allen protested greatly when told his soul was just the size of a chickpea. Barthes awoke before finding out what her own soul looked like.

She wrote down the dream the next morning and began teasing out the ideas contained within it. Figuring she would be unable to entreat Woody Allen to appear in her debut feature, and having just seen Giamatti in "American Splendor," she wrote the script with Giamatti in mind. Her script would go on to win a screenwriting competition sponsored by the Nantucket Film Festival, and as luck would have it, Giamatti himself was at the ceremony to present an award to the "Sideways" writing team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Barthes seized the opportunity to tell the actor about her script.

"That was an interesting moment, to sit there and think, 'Do I have a persona that's concrete in people's minds?' " Giamatti recalled of his response to reading the script for the first time, and the idea someone would write a role specifically for him to play a variation on himself. "Ultimately I guess in her mind I did."