Roadkill: Drive Time.

Roadkill opens in cinemas on Thursday.

What starts out as a cross country road trip with the girl of his dreams soon turns into a nightmare for Lewis Thomas. On the way from California to pick up Venna from her Colorado college, Lewis makes a detour to bail his brother Fuller out of jail. Fuller pushes Lewis into playing a practical joke on a lonely truck driver, and he begins to hunt them in a dangerous cross country game of cat and mouse. Welcome to Roadkill.

"Venna is a nice, smart, strong young college student and she thinks she's gonna go on a, you know, really fun ride with her friend Lewis,” explains LeeLee Sobieski of her role. “She thinks she's gonna have a really fun uh road trip with him and all of a sudden she realizes that there was this whole adventure before she even got there that happened."

It’s the characters in Roadkill as much as it is the circumstances that bring the story to a head.

"Usually in a thriller the story is very complicated,” explains Steve Zahn, who plays the role of Fuller, the elder delinquent brother. “You know, where there's ‘who is the guy?’ ‘Wait a second did the girl talk to the guy and the guy had the candlestick and he hid it under his chair?!’ But this one is the characters are a lot more complicated than the story. The story is somewhat simple - road, truck, guy, dark, CB - you know what I mean? There's these kind of boundaries where the characters are the ones that kind of make this thing evolve which is unique."

"I think it's just one of those things you really just go 'wow' there are people out there that are nuts that could do something this crazy and maybe it makes you think twice,” continues Paul Walker, who plays the role of Lewis. “It’s just one of those things, its all so bizarre what happens, I mean it's like hey, look we were just mucking around. It's really not that big a deal, you know, this guy is obviously completely insane and he's got way carried away with it and it's like, where's it going to end."

The production, obviously enough, involved a lot of in car sequences, and the scenes being shot were fairly arduous.

"You know, you're in a car and you're really tense. So you're just trying to kind of form this tension and you think, ‘Oh my god there's something behind me. There's this big truck behind me. There's something and it's gonna come and get me.” Leelee explains. “And then at the same time, there's Steve Zahn who just cracks you up and you're sitting there like (makes a face) you know, ‘oh I just want to laugh. I just want to laugh.’ And ‘O.k. I'm tense. I'm tense. There's this big truck behind me.’ And then you turn around and you see Tommy and he's moving the light to make it look like the car is moving and there's no big truck and so you're kind of going through all these things and you just kind of have to build up the tension."

Paul Walker gives his take.

"A lot of the time we were literally trapped in the car, I mean the way they have to light it around the set. It's like; look we're in this car until we get this shot off. It's like Steve has to go to the bathroom really I have to go, but I'm blaming it on Steve. It's like well we gotta go one more time, you know."

The role of Lewis may well have been written with Paul Walker in mind.

"You know I'm a practical joker, I like messing around with people, I mean its one of my biggest thrills, I mean, I just get a kick out of scarring people senseless."

"You know reading the script I was scared the first time, but after you know everything that's gonna happen it's, you know what I mean, it's different,” Paul explains. “It's hard to be objective so, you know the only way I could know as to whether it was scary was to ask some friends of mine to come and watch one of the screenings because they are brutally honest. I asked them at the end of the movie ‘is it scary?’ and they said YAAAAAA!!!!!"