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On a rainy night a few weeks ago outside the Great Hall, Toronto was pretending to be Minneapolis -- where, it goes without saying, it never rains in December. To that end, a production assistant on the romance feature film Aurora Borealis was holding an umbrella over the head of Juliette Lewis, as she prepared to kiss Joshua Jackson for the fourth time in 20 minutes. A rain-soaked parka would tend to kill the illusion of a subzero canoodle. This is about as close as Juliette Lewis gets to having an entourage. The 30-year-old actress, of Cape Fear and Natural Born Killers and Christmas Vacation fame, is the daughter of character actor Geoffrey Lewis and grew up on movie sets. "I didn't read about movies in a magazine," she says. "My dad did westerns and Clint Eastwood movies. So from an early age I knew it as a job, with long hours, waiting and dust." The upside? "I only work six months of the year," says Lewis, who has worked in Toronto before on the 2003 thriller Cold Creek Manor, a TV movie called My Louisiana Sky and Bruce McDonald's Picture Claire. She might have the face of an ingénue (though she's convinced she takes "kind of weird" pictures), but she disavows the rest of the package. "I wasn't cut out to be an ingénue," Lewis says in her odd, dreamlike West Coast drawl. "An ingénue is coy and very pretty and not very complex. That's not my description. And she's always the girlfriend or the love interest. I get to be a love interest in this movie, but she's very proactive, very strong and funny." In Aurora Borealis, Lewis's co-star Jackson plays Duncan, an aimless Minnesota twentysomething who pays off an emotional debt to his late grandmother by working as a caretaker at the seniors' home, where his grandfather (Donald Sutherland) lives. There he strikes up a relationship with his grandpa's homecare worker, Kate (Lewis). "It's one of those slice-of-life movies where it's all about the little lives of characters," Lewis says. "Joshua Jackson is stuck in this town, and I'm kind of the inspiration, or I'm trying to be, to get him to leave or open up his horizons a bit. People evolve and grow a bit by the end of the movie. It's beautifully written and unsentimental."