By Joel Stratte-McClure

How many young male moviegoers would cross the world to hook up with Camilla Belle?

Probably all of them.  That's precisely why writer/director Roland Emmerich cast the 21-year-old brunette beauty as the lead in "10,000 B.C."

"The script called for the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen -- and this is actually what she is," Emmerich said about the Marlborough School grad before Wednesday’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. "People almost stop breathing when she steps into a room."

Belle considers the film a prehistoric Romeo and Juliet love story. And after six months of arduous shooting in New Zealand and Namibia, during terrible snowstorms and in blistering heat, she really bonded with co-star Steven Strait.

"We really were roughing it, so it was as if our personal lives were marrying our characters," Belle explained as she greeted Maria Sharapova, Aimee Teagarden, Garcelle Beauvais, Michelle Trachtenberg, James Woods and other guests. “Because of hand-painted contact lenses, I had no peripheral vision so, with the sand and the snow, the boys always had to help me walk, or I’d fall on my face!"
 
Nice job if a guy can get it.

---

Photo of Camilla Belle at the "10,000 B.C." premiere by Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images.