Lights, Action, Keaton : In ‘Unstrung Heroes,’ the Star of Woody Allen Films Finds Success in Her First Feature Behind the Camera

If you talk to Diane Keaton long enough about the impressive job of directing she did on “Unstrung Heroes,” you may end up wondering why you’re talking to her at all.

Not that you have that long to talk to anyone at Cannes, where prime interview targets like Keaton are frenetically shuttled from one-on-ones to group situations to TV rooms to photographers like a valuable private railway car being switched from track to track. But even under those situations, Keaton, whose film is one of the successes of the festival’s Un Certain Regard section and is scheduled for a fall release by Disney, spends a good portion of her time talking about the contributions of the other members of her “Unstrung” team.

“I feel like I’m a thief, I took from everyone, there wasn’t a section of the film where I wasn’t helped,” she says, pleased for the chance to go into specifics about everyone from screenwriter Richard LaGravenese to the director of photography, the composer, the actors, even the first assistant director. “Wherever it came from, if it provoked a thought, I took it. Gladly, gratefully, happily.”

These encomiums are not only notably sincere, they also turn out to explain why Keaton’s work was so successful. To direct a film as empathetic and emotionally telling as “Heroes,” the story of 12-year-old Steven (Nathan Watt), who forms an alliance with his two completely eccentric uncles when his mother becomes seriously ill, you would have to form genuine connections with your cast and crew, which is what Keaton apparently did.

“I’m in love with the uncles, I love them,” Keaton says in a burst of engaging enthusiasm about Uncle Arthur (Maury Chaykin), who painstakingly collects what others discard, and Uncle Danny (Michael Richards, Kramer on TV’s “Seinfeld”), such a paranoid conspiracy theorist he believes “Idaho means Jew-hater in Cherokee.” Yet though they are funny, the film treats the uncles with touching respect because Keaton happily admits to being something of an eccentric herself.

Though still primarily known as an Oscar-winning actress and the star of Woody Allen pictures, Keaton has been directing for years, almost exclusively on television, and once she read the script, based on an autobiographical novel by Franz Lidz, she knew she wanted it for her theatrical feature debut. “I said, ‘OK, this stuff is actable, this stuff is funny, I’m touched, I’m moved.’ And it’s kind of a valentine to moms. I love my mother [Keaton is in fact her mother’s family name], and I wanted to be part of telling that story.”

So the first person Keaton cast was Andie MacDowell, who plays the ailing mother (and gives her best performance since “sex, lies and videotape.”) And though Keaton wondered whether John Turturro, cast as Steven’s distant father, could convincingly play a man desperately in love with his wife, “as soon as we talked about his own mother, I knew he would be fine.”

As for Michael Richards, riveting as Danny, Keaton’s worry was, “Will he actually do this? I thought, ‘No way will he want to do this.’ This is an ensemble piece, and he is so huge on TV. Wouldn’t he want a big theatrical role as his first one out of the gate? Would I do this if I were him? I don’t think so. But he really liked the script.”

Judging by the results, the cast must have really liked Keaton’s direction as well, but typically you wouldn’t know it from talking to her. “Everyone will be curious about what I got from Woody, but there is no way I could ever have his imagination. He creates, and I was just working with material, grabbing thoughts. But on the set, he leaves actors alone, he’s always about loosening it up, and I tried to do the same. I don’t like too much direction myself, it stops me from thinking or feeling. I like it short and simple, like ‘faster, slower.’ If someone talks to me too much I clam up.”

Not surprisingly, the parts of directing Keaton likes best are the off-set aspects, the preparation and the editing. “I don’t like shooting, it’s so hard, I’m scared to death. And you have to see the rushes, feel like you’ve failed, but still you have to go on. It’s an endurance test, a world of panic and boredom, and you’re constantly going out of your mind.”

And for someone like Keaton, in no way enamored of the kind of publicity hysteria that Cannes represents, promoting a film once it’s finished is especially daunting. “Releasing a picture is my least favorite part,” she says with finality. “If it were up to me, I’d make a movie and put it in a vault. The problem is, they wouldn’t let me work if I did that. I guess what goes on here is the price you pay.”

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One of the infrequent pleasures of Cannes is coming across an unheralded film that takes you by surprise and makes an impression. Such was the case with “Georgia,” directed by Ulu Grosbard and starring Mare Winningham and, in one of the strongest performances of her career, Jennifer Jason Leigh. And, par for the course for the movie business, the things that make it impressive were the things that almost prevented it from getting made at every turn.

Grosbard, known for his work with actors in films like “The Subject Was Roses” and Dustin Hoffman’s underappreciated “Straight Time,” was told about the script at a Hollywood dinner party. The intensely honest story of the complex relationship between a successful singer (Winningham) and her passionate, self-destructive younger sister (Leigh), it had been written for the latter actress by her mother, screenwriter Barbara Turner.

“We knew no major would ever touch this material, so we sent it around to the independents and got turned down pretty much everywhere,” Grosbard relates. “They said it was too much of a downer, too ambiguous in terms of its ending, too real.”

Financing was finally secured, primarily through the French company CB 2000, but then problems arose with the casting of Winningham, an unfamiliar face overseas but essential to the film not only because of her acting but also her impressive singing ability. Finally, Grosbard sent the French a tape of her voice and a single still photograph and they agreed.

That singing was key because about half an hour of the film is music, including a devastating 8 1/2-minute version of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back,” done by Leigh, who had never sung before this movie.

And Grosbard was determined to record the 13 songs live “in the face of resistance by every single music supervisor I talked to. In fact, I got to recognize the mixture of pity and contempt on their faces.”

“Georgia,” which is currently without distribution, is sure to increase Grosbard’s reputation as an actor’s director, and, though not quite sure what the term means, he tried to explain how he works. “It’s trying to put some small measure of truth on the screen, to show people the way they really do talk, really do think, really do live. It’s the most difficult thing to come by, and the most wonderful if you can catch it.

“Once actors know you talk the same language, have the same goals, they begin to have confidence in you. They open up, take chances. Actors learn to protect themselves, and it’s easier for them to feel naked in front of a camera if they don’t have to worry that their mistakes will end up in the movie. And when they bring a sense of reality to the set, everyone rises to it.”