Scorsese, DiCaprio and Lehane navigate 'Shutter Island's' rocky shoals

To many -- movie fans, film theorists and the dozens of young directors who've sought to emulate his two-fisted early style -- Martin Scorsese is the consummate American auteur. He's a filmmaker, that is, with a profound and distinctive personal vision and the clout and courage to put it on screen.

But when Scorsese, 67, was working to adapt a tightly constructed thriller by author Dennis Lehane -- a novel that pulls the rug out from under its premise several times -- the director was suddenly in a very un-auteur-like straitjacket. Not only did the book's twist-driven structure preclude reinterpretation or personal moments, "Shutter Island," which reaches theaters Feb. 19, sent him on an exhausting emotional journey as well.

"When I got to it I said, 'Oh, my, this has to be exactly right,' " a compact-and-dapper-looking Scorsese says of the film's hair-trigger plotting. And the actual filmmaking made him feel he was trapped inside a Hitchcock movie: "When I got to the shooting and editing of it," he says, "it was like being thrown down a spiral [staircase].

"I just don't know how to do it any other way," the director says, sitting in the bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel as torrential rains assault the city. "I tried to pull back a few times and not get so emotionally and psychologically involved. . . . But this story, these characters -- it was a very unsettling experience."

"Shutter Island" takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in the 1950s, in and around a hospital for the criminally insane run by an eccentric and possibly dangerous doctor (Ben Kingsley). The film begins with the arrival of Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), who have been sent to investigate the disappearance of a homicidal patient. But before long, a hurricane begins closing in, putting everyone on the island in imminent danger.

"Shutter Island" (shot mostly in and around Boston Harbor, including Peddocks Island) may most closely resemble Scorsese's 1991 "Cape Fear" remake. Like that film, "Shutter" is also a singular piece of work featuring some spectacular performances, but one that could face some inherent commercial challenges. Ostensibly, it could be too sophisticated and complex for younger audiences and too intense and genre-driven for many of the adults who support cinema by serious directors.

Although "Shutter Island" might have seemed like a slam dunk -- bestselling novel by well-regarded author, the director's first feature since the four Oscars that greeted "The Departed," top-tier cast -- adapting it for the screen ended up being trickier than expected. And Scorsese wasn't the only one who found the production to be a particularly wrenching experience.

"There were moments on set where I definitely felt like we were going into uncharted territory," says DiCaprio, whose marshal is also a World War II veteran haunted by what he saw at Nazi concentration camps. "It was draining. It got to the point where it became more and more realistic the deeper it got -- swerving away from anything stylistic and becoming more about human nature."

And a late-inning schedule change by Paramount, pushing the film's opening date from Oscar-rich territory in October to the no-man's land of mid-February, has only made matters more complicated.

Seed of an idea

The project was born of nightmare -- literally.

Lehane, esteemed for his series of South-Boston based mysteries featuring detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, had just watched his novel "Mystic River" shoot up bestseller lists. The book had not yet been made into an Oscar-winning film by Clint Eastwood, but this story of bloody revenge in Irish Boston had already become his breakthrough novel.

"I was faced with the possibility of writing a certain kind of book," Lehane, 44, recalls by phone. "A blue-collar literary mystery. I didn't want to be writing 'Mystic River 2,' '3' and '4.' "

So while Lehane was walking on a Florida beach, he got the glimmer of a setting for his next novel.

"I'm loathe to tell this," Lehane says, laughing. "But I had this dream one night -- and it was the whole novel. There was some stuff that I wouldn't have come up with."

Lehane had not been partaking of the opiates that inspired certain English poets but credits stress and his mother's illness with producing his visions. He scrawled it down upon waking the next morning. "Once I got all the plot points down, I had to write it as fast as humanly possible."

The resulting novel was both a real departure for Lehane and a kitchen-sink of genres: anagrams that come from Poe, Brontës-style dark-and-stormy-night, B-movie psych-ward thriller, hard-boiled detective story, Golden Age "locked room" mystery, and a little Hitchcock to wash it all down.

"I was surprised, as I read the script, how it kept shifting from one genre to another," says Scorsese of the screenplay from Laeta Kalogridis, who also worked with James Cameron on "Avatar." "And how I was in total acceptance of those shifts. It didn't feel artificial."

The fact that the book's tight, house-of-cards storytelling allowed for no deviation didn't bother Scorsese -- except for one thing: "I'm not very strong on plot," he admits. "I prefer character and mood and atmosphere -- and music. I find it a little difficult to visualize, to make clear to an audience what's going on . . . which is not good for a director! I never really quite know the extent to which I'll be challenged to tell a story -- I never know until I'm there."

Ultimately, Scorsese looks to cinema's past for inspiration (see sidebar). For shots of the mental hospital, he thought of the trapped, claustrophobic spirit of "The Trial," Orson Welles' often overlooked 1962 adaptation of Kafka. He also had in mind Sam Fuller's "Shock Corridor," a classic of twisted pulp he knew he couldn't exactly emulate. "You can't beat 'Shock Corridor.' The super-low-budget added to the horror, the sense of tension, the sense that somebody behind the camera was unbalanced -- in a good way."