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Labor of Love
By Liane Bonin Entertainment Weekly February 8, 1999

'Mod Squad' star Giovanni Ribisi tells EW Online how making a movie with Juliette Lewis' brother led to a wife and a baby

With starring roles in Oscar fave "Saving Private Ryan" and the upcoming silver-screen version of "The Mod Squad" (opening March 26), Giovanni Ribisi's career is clearly in overdrive. But the 23-year-old actor says there's one movie that's really changed his life -- and you may never get to see it. Actress Juliette Lewis ("Natural Born Killers") and her brother Lightfield are longtime friends of Ribisi's, so when Lightfield decided to shoot a video short, Ribisi signed up for the job, thinking it might be a fun diversion between films. Little did he realize he'd still be working on the shoot three years later.

"What started out as a demo reel has become a feature film," and a bare-bones one at that, Ribisi tells EW Online. "Lightfield's a one-person crew with a video camera, and you just work until you get it. We did one scene on fifty different occasions."