For Pakula, It’s Falling in Love With Love and Being in Love : New film reflects optimism about second marriages

Love and action have always run a close race as the prime ingredients of the movies. The earliest artifacts of the form include both a famous flickering kiss and “The Great Train Robbery.” Over the decades, scripts more often than not have been a mixture of the two: A little romance to top off the action, a little action to spell the romantically talking heads.

Marital comedies flourished in the ‘30s, functioning as escapist fare in those Depression years because whatever problems the couples had they seldom involved a shortage of money. But films that contemplate and concentrate on the love of man and woman have grown surprisingly rare these days. The corruption of love in “Dangerous Liaisons” is about as close as any of the Oscar contenders come to being about marital love.

Alan Pakula is on the verge of invading this underpopulated field with “See You in the Morning,” a highly personal celebration of love the second time around. It will open in early April and is about a divorced man who marries a widow with children. Pakula, a then-divorced man, married a widow with children and has lived happily ever after, so the film is closely autobiographical in its inspiration although not, he says, in its specifics.

On a late winter morning, Pakula sits in his suite of offices in midtown Manhattan, not far from the theater district. He is in preproduction on Scott Turow’s best seller, “Presumed Innocent,” on which Frank Pierson is doing the adaptation. “See You in the Morning” is finished and poised to go. It is the first original screenplay Pakula has both written and directed, and he awaits its fate with more than customary interest because its themes are so close to his heart.

Pakula, just out of Yale in 1950, began his career as a production apprentice at MGM. He subsequently earned Academy Award nominations as the producer of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as a director for “All the President’s Men” and as a screenwriter adapting “Sophie’s Choice,” which he also directed. His other credits as a director include “The Sterile Cuckoo” (his first effort); “Klute” (Jane Fonda as a hooker pursued by a killer), the powerful speculation on political conspiracy called “The Parallax View” (Warren Beatty as a reporter) and, most recently, “Orphans,” with Albert Finney in the adaptation of a play.

Pakula’s wife, Hannah, whom he married 16 years ago, has published a scholarly and very well-reviewed biography of Queen Marie of Romania. She is now working on a biography of Queen Victoria’s daughter, also named Victoria, who married Emperor Frederick of Prussia and after his death became known as Empress Frederick.

Pakula’s first wife was actress Hope Lange, herself now happily remarried, and they remain on friendly terms. “Couples don’t necessarily kill each other, they just don’t get along,” Pakula says.

“Marriages succeed or fail without those involved being good people or bad people. We probably all spend too much time trying to apportion blame. Much of it has to do with compatibilities you thought existed but didn’t.”

In the film, Pakula’s central figure is a psychiatrist, played by Jeff Bridges. Farrah Fawcett is the ex-wife, Alice Krige (memorable in “Chariots of Fire”) is the widow he marries. Pakula rehearsed his cast for four weeks and regards it as an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle.

“It’s about people who’ve had other lives and are now falling in love,” Pakula says, “and about the difficulty in dealing with the lives we had before. It’s about being able to break through your own defenses so you can fall in love again. It reflects my feelings about love--romantic love--and the family, and about my observation that at a certain age you better co-exist well or you won’t survive. It also reflects my optimism, and I guess more than anything else it’s an ode to falling in love and being in love.

“I couldn’t write about my own life directly, but, on the other hand, I couldn’t have written it at all if I hadn’t had comparable experiences.”

Not least, Pakula says with a grinning look at the ceiling, “Courtship brings out the outrageous in you. Your co-workers have every right to say you’re out of your mind.”

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Pakula is an unusually reflective film maker who sees the industry and the medium with some detachment, an attitude probably symbolized by his living and working in New York rather than Hollywood and, at that, on the fringes of the film community in Manhattan.

“The best of this business is the collaboration and the worst of this business is the collaboration,” Pakula says. “The collaborative effort is so much a part of it that you have to keep reminding yourself who you are.

“You have to keep a life for yourself outside of film. Hannah and I are just back from a long stay in Italy, where we drowned in art. We should all be required to take a year off and do something else.”

In his earlier days, Pakula says, the process of film making was fascinating and appealing for its own sake. No longer. “I have no interest in making films just for the process. It’s not that exciting anymore.”

What matters--although they always did, as a look at his credits confirms--are content, characters and relationships. “Presumed Innocent” will be a return, as Pakula says, to the social and political tensions of “All the President’s Men,” with some of the sexual tensions from “Klute” as well.

Pakula enjoys working with actors at their most creative and contributory. “At this point in my life it’s not just a matter of working with wonderfully talented actors but working with them without tension, in a certain area of trust and relaxation where we get the best from each other.

“You can’t imbue an actor with passion and caring about family and children if it’s not there to begin with,” Pakula says. During the month’s rehearsal on “See You in the Morning,” “We were making families. Any film develops a sense of family before it’s done, but it was even more so on this one. Jeff (Bridges) was wonderful at it; he’s full of surprises. You can have interesting critical disagreements that come out of respect not contempt.”

Pakula, as is not invariably the case with directors, is fond of actors. He admires Farrah Fawcett’s intense love of acting and her dedication, and he continues to go in awe of Meryl Streep, who was extraordinary as the Sophie of “Sophie’s Choice.”

“The word genius is bandied about and I’ve only met a few, but Meryl has it. Critics resent it and patronize it, but she’s not just an actress acting. She synthesizes the character. There’s no ambivalence in her about the work. She plunges into it.”

It remains to be seen how well Pakula’s private experience has translated into a fictional story. But it arrives as a valentine to a successful marriage that appears to be founded on mutual admiration and acquired wisdom.

“We’d both been through things and that makes it easier to adjust,” he says. “You don’t take love for granted. You don’t take anything for granted. I’m not the same pain in the neck I used to be--I think, I hope. So much has to do with compatibility. It’s easier when you know who you are--as much as you ever do.”