An adventure of epic proportions

In person, 21-year-old Camilla Belle looks like the furthest thing from Evolet, the dread-locked, blue-eyed cave woman she plays in Roland Emmerich’s prehistoric epic “10,000 BC.” Her long hair and geometric bangs are flat-ironed smooth, her eyes are a deep chocolate, and she certainly wouldn’t be able to trudge across continents in the teetering patent-leather high heels that she’s chosen to wear today.

She’s also recently contracted a bad cold, so before the interview begins, a small coterie of conscientious helpers drape her in a navy sweater to protect her against the overcast afternoon. Her mother, a Brazilian fashion designer who manages Belle’s career and wardrobe, swoops in to wrap her only child’s throat in a clashing but cozy scarf.

In spite of Belle’s youth and delicate appearance, she isn’t the slightest bit phased by illness or the whirling vortex of concern that surrounds her. A native of Los Angeles, she’s been in front of the camera since she was 9 months old, modeling, doing commercials and performing small roles in high-profile films like 1995’s “A Little Princess” and 1997’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.”

After these early successes, Belle attended the all-girls Marlborough School in Hancock Park and took three years off from her career between the ages of 13 and 16 to focus on her studies. “That was probably the best time in my life,” she says. “I was in the drama program. I was in the choir and the dance program. And I really got to experience being a normal person, just a normal student, which I’d never really done before. It was a really different experience for me, but it was a fulfilling one.”

At age 16, Belle was offered the lead in the father-daughter drama “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” opposite Daniel Day-Lewis and directed by his wife Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur Miller), and she decided it was time to go back to work. “He was just so disciplined,” she says of her Oscar-winning costar. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And his preparation is so deep. He doesn’t have to act. He knows the way that character walks, talks, eats. Once he gets to set, he really is that person.”

With “Ballad” and a role in the ensemble film “Chumscrubber,” Belle became a Sundance darling in 2005. The following year, she made a play for the mainstream by headlining the hit remake of the 1979 thriller “When a Stranger Calls.”

Despite her frequent absences from the classroom, Belle’s best girlfriends are still her chums from Marlborough, even though they’re away at college. Belle was accepted at Columbia University, but had to defer her enrollment yet again when the shoot of “10,000 BC.” went a month over schedule.

On the set of the prehistoric tale of a mammoth hunter (Steven Strait) who crosses the uncharted Earth to rescue his true love Evolet from a warlord, Belle had to brave a lot more than term papers or the occasional hangover. From the Waiorau Snow Farm in New Zealand to the sand dunes of Namibia, Belle and her fellow cast members trekked through harsh weather while shackled to the horses of their captors.

Because of the striking, hand-painted blue contact lenses Belle had to wear, she undertook this journey nearly blind. “I had no peripheral vision whatsoever,” she says. “So I was constantly falling over, and the boys had to help me walk up the mountains in New Zealand, or I would just fall flat on my face!” The rest of her costume -- which included a complicated array of tied-on antelope fur and hides, a patina of dirt and grime, and fake tan applied twice weekly -- took two to three hours each day to don.

In Belle’s most physically taxing scene, she was pursued by “terror birds,” which appear in the film as gigantic, ostrich-like CGI creatures. “It took two months to shoot that sequence,” she recalls. “Roland would always call them ‘the blue chickens,’ if you can imagine him saying it in his German accent. Really masculine, muscular guys were dressed in bright blue unitards holding sticks with the blue chicken heads on the top chasing us, and they looked so stupid. And we would just be laughing at them the entire time.”

In earlier drafts of the script, Evolet wasn’t always such a feisty dame. “We had a new rewrite when Camilla came on the set, and she felt her character was not as strong as it was before,” Emmerich says. “And she was really right about that. So we actually did one rewrite only for her, and she was then very happy with what we did.”

Adds Belle: “I’m determined to never play a weak female character. And they rewrote many scenes and actually put some in, so you could really get a sense that she was strong.”

One major source of strength for Belle in portraying Evolet was the presence of her mother on set. “For a lot of the boys in our tribe, it was their first movie,” Belle says. “A lot of us were 19, 20 years old. And we were away from home for so long. We would cook all the time, and the boys would come over, and she kind of became everyone’s mom.”

After her adventures with “10,000 BC.” Belle shot a sci-fi thriller called “Push” for three months in Hong Kong with Djimon Hounsou, Chris Evans and 14-year-old Dakota Fanning. “I just saw so much of myself in her, which is really bizarre,” says Belle of Fanning. “And we really bonded. We had some dinner dates together, and I felt like a kid next to her.”

Belle coughs and retrieves her composure with a sip of green tea. “I loved working with her,” she continues. “I saw a lot of myself in her maturity.”