Avoiding ‘Dangerous’ Comparisons : Czech-born director Milos Forman awaits the opening of his ‘Valmont,’ based on the Laclos novel

There is at least one of last year’s Academy Award-nominated films that director Milos Forman has not seen. That would be “Dangerous Liaisons,” the costume drama about lust and treachery among the 18th-Century French aristocracy adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” and directed by Stephen Frears. Forman is “dying to see it,” he said. But first comes the matter of getting his own movie “Valmont” released this Friday. “Valmont,” somewhat inconveniently, is also based on the Choderlos de Laclos novel.

“I will see it but not yet,” Forman said through a haze of cigar smoke that was wafting out ever so odorously through an open sliding glass door 30 floors above Central Park South. “I’m still in some kind of self-protective period. I wanted to avoid comparisons. Because even against your own will you would subconsciously start comparing and competing.”

Once the movie opens, the danger of cmparisons will be more than subconscious. Budgeted at something over $30 million, “Valmont,” which stars the English stage actor Colin Firth and the little-known American Annette Bening, must appeal to moviegoers who have already had a chance to see a popular film that paired John Malkovich and Glenn Close in the same roles. “Dangerous Liaisons” won three Academy Awards, including best adapted screenplay for Christopher Hampton.

As he awaits Friday’s opening, Forman has reason to be doubly annoyed by the coincidence that has raised the stakes for this, his first film since “Amadeus.” Not only is “Valmont” (adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere) a markedly different telling of the Laclos story and a film some critics are likely to prefer, but it was actually begun ahead of the other one.

“As a matter of fact, we started work on the script before the other film was being considered,” he said.

Yet the 57-year-old Czechoslovakian-born director, who still sometimes bites down on English grammar as if it were a Cuban cigar, is maintaining a sanguine public posture about all this. If he is feeling any “nervosity,” as he puts it, it doesn’t show in his dark eyes. Dressed in black jeans and a olive sport shirt on an Indian summer afternoon in New York, he explained his situation this way: “In my mind I just love to tell the story on film, and that’s it. And if the existence of Stephen Frears’ film will help or hurt, that’s irrelevant to even speculate about. I think as long as Hollywood is crazy enough to invest millions of dollars in two films based on the same book in the same year, the film business is healthy.”

Forman first read “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” more than 35 years ago while a student at film school in Prague. The literature professor who assigned it was Milan Kundera, who would later write “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” “He is a big Francophile,” Forman said, “a real connoisseur of French literature. It was his doing why I read the book. And when you are at film school you read everything including the headlines in the newspaper, thinking if it could be a movie or not.”

Any thoughts he had then about filming the Laclos book were a student’s fancy, though later he did make a number of important movies in Czechoslovakia, including “Loves of a Blonde” and “The Fireman’s Ball” in the mid-’60s. When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August of 1968, Forman was already preparing for his first American film, “Taking Off,” the generation-gap comedy that was released in 1970. The film brought him to New York at the age of 38.

Having lost his parents to the Gestapo during World War II, he left his wife and twin sons behind and remained in America. Not only did he become a U.S. citizen, but he went on to direct a series of big, stylish, conspicuous movies at the deliberate pace of one every three to five years: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), “Hair” (1978), “Ragtime” (1981), “Amadeus” (1984) and now “Valmont.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has voted him the Academy Award twice, for “Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.”

“Amadeus,” which was filmed in and around Prague, took him back to Czechoslovakia for the first time since 1968. “Before ‘Amadeus’ when I applied twice for the visa, just for private visits and sentimental reasons, they turned me down. But then when I applied for business reasons, to shoot a film there and bring money there, they gave me the visa.”

Forman divides his time now mostly between a farmhouse in Connecticut and this small but elegant apartment. He only comes to Hollywood when film production details require him to do so. He has nothing against California, he said, except to add his first impression of the place: “Hollywood, I feel like here one should go for vacation, not to work.”

The rolling hills of Connecticut, on the other hand, remind him of the countryside he knew growing up outside of Prague. “This is the main reason I prefer the East.”

Defining the role of the director, he said, “You can take the same story to two different directors, you can even ask them to use the same cameraman, the same set designer, costume designer, even the same actors, and you will end up with two totally different films, one of which might put you to fall asleep, the other which might move you to tears, make you laugh, enlighten your spirit. It’s the music of images that finally gets to your heart and mind.”

His small work desk in the apartment is an antique, set at an angle from a wall of books and tape recorders so that he faces the expanse of glass overlooking the Park. There is a fresh film script on the desk with a brief cover letter from Robby Lantz, who has been his agent for 20 years. The chair at the desk has a name spelled out in white letters on the back: Korchnoi. It was used by former chess champion Victor Korchnoi in a match against Gary Kasparov in Italy. “I bought both chairs,” Forman said. “Kasparov’s is in Connecticut. I am a big chess fan.”

Resting on the top ledge of a built-in couch are a series of posters for “Valmont.” There is the European one showing Colin Firth, as Valmont, kissing a woman’s outstretched bare buttocks. “They wouldn’t approve this one for the U.S.,” he said with a look of incomprehension.

The film has an R rating despite what is technically no nudity. “I’m happy it has an ‘R’. It would be suspicious if (any adaptation of) ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ was ‘PG’.” (The film “Dangerous Liaisons” was rated R.) Written as a series of letters detailing the sexual schemes of some nasty French aristocrats with entirely too much time on their hands, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” touched something in Forman back in film school that he only remembered years later when he had a chance to see Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation of the book in London.

“I was very surprised at how my memory differed from what I saw,” he recalled. “So I went to the book and read it again to find if the play differed so much from the book of my memories. And I found out that the play is very faithfully following the book, and it’s my memory that is playing these funny games on me. So I found out that I am very much intrigued by this--this conflict between my memories and the book.”

He remembered the characters as more endearing than they looked to him onstage in London. “I wondered, ‘How come I loved all these people?’ They were not at all so black and white evil in my memory. All the characters have their different sides. I don’t think they are better or worse than we are.”

It was also in London that Forman first saw Peter Shaffer’s play about Mozart, “Amadeus,” which he said he was imagining as a film even before the second act began. This time his mind took a slightly different route. When a producer approached him with the idea of adapting Hampton’s play for the screen, “I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to adapt the play. I want to go back to the book.’ Then his interest disappeared.”

And Forman set out to shape the story to his own predilections. Working with producers Michael Hausman, Paul Rassam and Claude Berri, he brought in Carriere, who wrote “Taking Off,” to be his collaborator on the adaptation. Eventually they struck a distribution deal with Orion.

In the meantime Lorimar bought the film rights to Hampton’s play and plunged ahead with “Dangerous Liaisons.”

“Then it became clear that Lorimar was rushing the film very much to be first out. And with the concept I had in my mind, I knew we would never be able to beat them. I was expecting a call, ‘Sorry, Milos, we are not going to take the risk.’ ”

The call never came. Instead his producers rang him up to ask if he was concerned that he would be in competition with the other film. “I said, of course not.”

“Valmont,” which matches Firth as the randy vicomte with Bening as the calculating Marquise de Merteuil, his bitter rival in the game of sexual conquest and control, offers a rather different interpretation of the events set down by Laclos. To begin with, the characters are younger than the people brought to life by Malkovich, Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and the rest of Frears’ principal cast.

In the book, Cecile, the convent girl initiated to sex by Valmont, is 15; Danceny, her music teacher and true love, is also a teen-ager. Madame de Tourvel, the judge’s wife who captures Valmont’s heart against his code, is 22. Valmont and Merteuil are in their late 20s.

Cecile is played here by newcomer Fairuza Balk, who was 14 1/2 at the time of filming; Danceny, by Henry Thomas, who is barely recognizable now as the kid from “E.T.”

Tourvel is played by Meg Tilly, who finally gets to go in front of Forman’s cameras after a last-minute injury scratched her from “Amadeus,” where she was cast as the original Costanza, Mozart’s wife.

“I think it’s somehow more touching if what these people are doing to each other is done out of a certain kind of youthful ignorance than a real mature adult speculation,” the director said. “The other way it’s more evil. This way it’s more touching. I’m not saying that the other approach is wrong. But I myself prefer the more touching effect.”

Where Malkovich was a cold and amusingly ruthless sexual mechanic, Firth is more the warm-blooded rogue whose path to self-destruction takes a wider tragic turn. In “Dangerous Liaisons,” Malkovich’s Valmont forces himself brutally on Cecile, where in Forman’s version, the deflowering takes place more seductively--while Valmont deftly acts out the passionate phrases he is dictating to Cecile during an instructional session in love-letter writing.

Madame de Tourvel, who dies in the book and in Frears’ film, is left to mourn Valmont’s death here. “Jean-Claude is convinced the end of the book is very much due to the moral codes of that time,” Forman explained. “Where everyone who has sinned has to be punished and who has sinned the most has to be punished by death.”

The fact that Laclos’ book is an epistolary novel written from different points of view opens the story to the possibility of these alternate dramatic images. Furthermore, the director and Carriere chose not to follow the book too closely.

“When Jean-Claude and I sat down, we decided to try to construct the story as it happened before the letters were written. Because when you write a letter you are already editing the facts. You are already trying to give your own interpretation of what happened. You try to impress somebody. You boast.

“And for us it was a wonderful game trying to figure out what really happened. We would take a letter and say, ‘Would this situation be described like this in the letter? Was this what happened?’ And in the middle of working on the script, Jean-Claude looked at me and said, ‘Do you realize that so far, no one scene in the script exists in the book?’ And when we finished, we realized that this is true through the whole script. And yet, we feel we are very, very faithful to the spirit of the book.”

The amount of imagining they did extended to the language of the script as well. They used almost no lines intact from their source.

“The language of the book, written as letters, is not the way people talk. They give each other lectures on the philosophy of life, but they don’t talk. Every scene we wrote, we acted out for ourselves, just to hear and see how natural we sound and if we could accept this reality. There are beautiful lines in the book, but the moment you start to act them out, you start to cringe.”

As a concession to his costume designer, Theodor Pistek, Forman adjusted the time frame 30 years backward to allow the actors to wear somewhat less rigid and theatrical clothing than was actually the fashion in the years just before Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine. He claims not to have consciously underscored the romantic intrigues of the plot with the politics of class, yet his use of outdoor market and tavern scenes work as studies in contrast between the people and their rulers.

“For us the whole political aspect of the story is concluded in the last shot of the film. Here, one is dead, the carriage goes away, the servants disappear into the castle, and there is nothing there, just a little smoke coming out of the chimney. And that is the end of the aristocracy.”

Forman is well known for hunkering down for months or years with his screenwriters (Michael Weller for “Hair” and “Ragtime,” Peter Shaffer for “Amadeus”). And since he and Carriere worked on “Taking Off” 20 years ago, Forman has restricted himself to adaptations of books or plays.

Yet while he considers collaborating on the script half of directing, he never takes a writing credit. “No, because I want the good writers to work with me again,” he said.

When he is working on a film, which usually takes him “two years from sitting down with the script to the last day of mix” he cannot do anything else, even read other scripts. “I have President Ford’s problem: I can’t do two things at the same time. I have to finish one and get it out of my system and start from boredom.”

Of all the scripts and projects that landed on his desk after “Amadeus,” what was it about “Les Liaisons de Dangereuses”?

“The same thing that fascinated me with the book the first time: it deals with those areas of our inner life which are so difficult to understand because they include so many contradictions. It’s difficult to extract some final solution, you know?”

His film, like the one by Hampton and Frears, makes a mockery of marriage and suggests that love is something less than the many-splendored thing it was once routinely portrayed in Hollywood. Are these his own views of love.

“Well, I was married twice,” he said, moving his cigar away from his face and exhaling a line of blue smoke. “And I lived for a long time with another two other ladies. And I remember every time I was getting into the relationship and falling in love I believed it was for the rest of my life. I believed it. And then one day I woke up and realized, ‘I’m sorry.’

“And when you talk to friends--of course you can find exceptions that will contradict what I am saying--but you’ll find out that in many, many cases, every person has his or her own span of the length of emotional involvement. I know people where it’s like clockwork: three years and that’s it, can’t sustain a relationship more than three years, five years sometimes. For somebody, it’s one night. For somebody it’s one week, for somebody it’s one year. And I know it and again I will believe, no, this is it, this is the one for the life, for what is still my life.”

So, there is a certain sadness in this, no?

“It is a certain sadness if you are desperate to change it. If you don’t want to accept it, then it is sad. But if you take it as another law of nature, well what can you do about that? There is a certain sadness in the knowledge that we are all going to die, but we don’t have to be sad every day of our lives.”