A Director’s Coming of Age : Beeban Kidron Moves Into Big Budgets and Top Stars With Bittersweet Dramatic : Comedy ‘Used People’

“Throughout the making of this film,” director Beeban Kidron recalls, “people would come on set, sidle up to me and say the same thing.”

She assumes a tone of exaggerated concern. “ ‘Aren’t you intimidated working with all these people? Because, my God, you’re so young!’ ”

The film, “Used People,” which stars three Oscar-winning actresses--Shirley MacLaine, Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy--was the first American-made feature for the English-born Kidron. Budgeted at $16 million, a figure far greater than any of Kidron’s previous efforts, the film also features Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni (“8 1/2” and “La Dolce Vita”), who has been an international name for 35 years as a result of collaborations with directors such as Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni, and Sylvia Sidney, 82, whose early screen appearances were years before the 31-year-old Kidron was even born.

A bittersweet dramatic comedy, with a script by actor-playwright Todd Graff, “Used People,” set in Queens, N.Y., in 1969, is the story of Jewish grandmother Pearl Berman (MacLaine), who is newly widowed after 37 years of marriage. Her two daughters (Bates and Marcia Gay Harden) are divorced and in different ways unhappy; her mother, Freida (Tandy), is considering leaving Queens for Florida. Things look bleak. Then right after her husband’s funeral a dapper Italian stranger (Mastroianni) arrives at her home, offers condolences--and asks her out for coffee.

Kidron, a warm, humorous, outspoken woman with a shock of untidy hair that she constantly brushes from her eyes, is now back in England, where she lives in a central London flat atop three flights of stairs. Reflecting on her fond feelings for the film, she says:

“For me it was just the greatest pleasure. Here I was with a script I adored. I had worked with a writer to make a film we wanted to make. I had the people I wanted to see in those parts, and the film was put together carefully in a slow way.

“There’s something about actors--not stars, but actors--if they have the character and someone is pushing and shoving them to be the best they can be, they enjoy that.”

She says all this like someone who has been directing distinguished actors for years. Yet Prior to “Used People,” Kidron only had two pieces of work to her name.

First was the TV series “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” which was made for the BBC but shown on A&E.; Adapted from the English novel by Jeanette Winterson, it dealt with the coming of age of a girl raised in the north of England by a strict Pentecostalist family; after they discover she has been involved in a lesbian relationship, she is forced to undergo a brutal form of exorcism. The highly original series won an ACE cable TV award.

Then came “Antonia and Jane,” again made for the BBC, but released in the United States as a theatrical film. It told the story of annual reunions between two contrasting old friends: messy, disorganized, altruistic Jane and her nemesis--glamorous, seemingly perfect Antonia.

“One was a difficult subject and one was much more accessible,” Kidron says. “Together they enabled people in America to see I was more than just a one-shot.”

She was sent several scripts with offers to direct, though none appealed to her. “The problem for me isn’t the bad ones,” said Kidron. “They’re easy. It’s the awfully well-written and well-put-together ones. They’re like getting on a bus, going for a ride, and getting off at the same bus stop where you started. That’s not enough for me; if I’ve got to sit on a film for a year and a half, I’ve got to love it to death.”

She threw a bunch of scripts in the back of her car and drove across country to Telluride, Colo., where “Antonia and Jane” was being shown at that town’s film festival. One script was “Used People,” which Lloyd Levin, president of production at Largo, had given her. “I’d met him, and it was one of those meetings where you actually feel understood,” Kidron recalls. “As soon as I read it, I called him from a call box on the road, and said--this is it, this is what I want to do, these people I know.”

By this time, Kidron’s name was becoming so hot that she was increasingly in demand. “I was getting offered green-lit films, pay-or-play offers,” she says now. “Instead of accepting them, I went into a period of development on ‘Used People,’ and decided to stick it out.

“It was just that I didn’t understand as much about Hollywood as I do now.

“I had the feeling this was a great project, I was the right person for it and there was no way it wasn’t going to happen. When it was green-lit, people sent me flowers. I couldn’t understand it. I thought--why flowers on this particular day?” She chuckles at her naivete.

Together with Graff, she spent a fruitful four months revising his script. “Then (Largo boss) Larry Gordon told me to go out and find a cast.” She came back with MacLaine, Mastroianni, Baker, Tandy and Sidney: “I told Larry, you should know better than to send a Jewish girl out shopping. But these people are jewels. I specifically wanted them all.”

An added complication arose. “Used People” was given the go-ahead to start shooting in March, but Mastroianni, Baker and Tandy were not available. Kidron went back to Gordon, asking him to delay shooting until September, when all the actors she wanted could be ready.

She feels now her insistence over casting has been justified. “There’s something about Shirley, a light,” she says. “When she’s working, she has such a talent, there’s nothing I need to say to her. She knows what to do. Any director would find her a pleasure.

“As for Marcello, I went to Paris to ask him to do the film. He said--why do you want me? And I told him I couldn’t think of anyone who embodies better the spirit of his character. If this film’s about second chances, if it’s about things coming from a place you don’t expect, how wonderful to bring in a man with another history, another culture, another accent. When he walks through the door for the first time, you don’t have to explain a thing. I think of all the great American actors who could have played this part--but it wouldn’t have been as magical.”

Kidron notes that the script’s strong Jewish element attracted her. “I’ve discovered my Jewishness late in life,” she notes. “And I’ve really enjoyed exploring that world. I’ve liked being Jewish in America--there’s a secular version of Jewishness there that’s more about bagels and jokes than going to synagogues. Dealing with that has appealed to me.”

She grew up mainly in north London, in a strictly atheist household that she further describes as “revolutionary socialist.” Her father is an economist and academic; her parents together ran a small radical publishing house.

Her entry into filmmaking was by an indirect and unlikely route. At age 11, she underwent a throat operation and was voiceless for almost a year. A family friend bought her a camera, and she became interested in photography. Two years later, she was on vacation with her family in Portugal when the 1974 revolution broke out. She took photographs of the fighting in the streets, which were printed by alternative publications.

She started receiving photographic commissions, and was summoned by the legendary American photographer Eve Arnold, who lives in London. “She offered me a job as her assistant,” Kidron remembers, “and I had to tell her that the next day would only be my 14th birthday.” Arnold found the situation amusing, but repeated her offer two years later, when Kidron went to work for her.

Arnold finally persuaded her to travel around the world and see life. Kidron then entered Britain’s National Film School, with hopes of becoming a documentary photographer--but too many of her fellow students were intent on becoming the next Steven Spielberg, and she became disenchanted.

After the NFS, Kidron made an acclaimed film, “Carry Greenham Home,” about women anti-nuclear protesters who camped for months on and near a U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common in England. It was a labor of love for her; she stayed with the women for seven months, sometimes sleeping upright in her car.

Her feminist credentials were thus established, she says, and confirmed all over again by “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” The series not only caused a stir because of its subject matter, but also much was made of the fact that its three prime movers--Kidron, novelist-scriptwriter Winterson and producer Philippa Giles--were all women, a rarity in British film and television circles.

She also points to a future project, “Payment in Full,” about a Jewish family who adopt a young black orphan in the 1930s: “It’s about the relationship between blacks and Jews in New York--it’s quite rejecting of an assimilating politic.”

Then there’s the low-budget BBC film she has just completed (again with Winterson and Giles) called “Great Moments in Aviation,” starring Vanessa Redgrave, John Hurt and Jonathan Pryce.

Now Kidron wonders whether by involving herself with Hollywood, she is retreating from the more overtly political material of her earlier work. “I hope,” she says, “that every film I make has something to offer in the area of making people feel either vindicated or different in terms of who they are. If you’re a 50-year-old woman from Queens, ‘Used People’ is going to be pretty revolutionary in terms of its values, relationships and its allowing (nature).”

Kidron sees “Used People” as “a celebration of family. Not in that narrow Moral Majority way, which sometimes makes me think the whole concept of family has been abducted. In this film, we have two divorced daughters, a widowed mother. It’s not a nuclear family--but it’s what family is .”

She also insists the film has important things to say about senior citizens: “I think there’s been an abandoning of respect for age. People live longer and longer and we give them less space to be old.”

With this in mind, Kidron is happy about the film’s ultimately upbeat tone. “I’m not committed to happy endings,” she says, “but I am committed to living in this world as if it’s slightly better than it is. I like for people to identify, feel vindicated, changed and heard. That’s something this world doesn’t give you too often.

“I sometimes wish I was a doctor--you can at least know what good you did at the end of the day. But film has the potential to uplift, heal and give people space in a world that’s not very generous. A good two hours at a movie can be a great thing.”