Taking a Creative Turn

“Would you care to dance?”

Posing that question to Randa Haines is a little like asking Caruso if he’d like to sing or Michael Jordan if he’d like to shoot a little hoop.

For Haines, who directed such critically acclaimed films as “Children of a Lesser God” and “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway,” dancing isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.

Still, when Daryl Matthews popped the question on a salsa dance floor in Studio City in the wee hours of a long-ago Saturday morning, Haines’ first inclination was to say no.

“I had never seen him before,” she remembered. “It was the last dance of the night, and you don’t want to get out on the floor with someone that can’t dance.”

Reluctantly, she accepted the invitation and took the floor, thinking, “I’m going to feel humiliated.”

Instead, she felt humility. Because hidden behind a polite Texas manner and wisp of a country drawl was the fact that Matthews was a longtime professional dancer and coach. Not only could he cut a rug, he could slice it, dice it and make it into julienne fries.

“We walked out on the floor and, whoa! He was a fabulous dancer,” Haines remembers. “The best dancer I’d ever encountered.”

Over the following months after that chance encounter, they got together frequently. And with good reason, since the union benefited them both: Haines had finally found someone who could take her dancing to the next level, while Matthews, a budding screenwriter, had found someone who could take his career to the next level. Seven years later, Haines is a much better dancer and Matthews is just a day away from seeing “Dance With Me,” his screenwriting debut, open nationwide.

The salsa-flavored film, which Haines directed for Columbia Pictures and Mandalay Entertainment, tells the story of a Cuban immigrant who comes to Texas in search of a father he never knew. He winds up working at a dance club, where he stumbles across a jaded former ballroom dance champion determined to return to the top.

In short, it’s the story of a chance meeting between a man and woman on a dance floor that seems destined to change both their lives forever. Obviously, this was a story close to Matthews’ heart. But it also touched Haines in a number of ways, which is why both found the film an emotionally challenging one to make.

“Ever since I fell in love with [Latin] music and the dancing and the culture . . . I have thought about doing a movie about it,” Haines says. “I’ve been searching for the right story and how to tell it.”

Added Matthews: “Because it’s part of your life, it better be damn good.”

Although most of Haines’ work has featured key dance scenes--Marlee Matlin’s enticement of William Hurt in “Children of a Lesser God,” for example, or Robert Duvall’s solo in his apartment in “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway”--nothing she’s done contains anything near the volume or complexity of the dance numbers in “Dance With Me.” The film features more than 50 separate dance moments, including several extended scenes, all choreographed by Matthews. No recent Hollywood picture has devoted that much time to dancing, Haines says.

But giving that much of the story over to dancing creates a challenge: Simply getting the steps right isn’t enough to move the plot, you also have to capture the joy, the emotion of dancing. And getting that on film proved a monumental undertaking.

“Showing the beauty and the fun of dancing . . . those things were all extra-personal to me and extra-important to do just right,” Haines says. “I think people have an instinct for what’s real and what isn’t. With this one it’s not so much accuracy as really I cared so much about the spirit.”

Months after shooting has wrapped, the pressure and the fatigue Haines felt on the set have faded. Still, as Spanish-language pop music wafts through her sprawling home atop a Brentwood hilltop, Haines insists she took only fond memories from the experience.

“The auditions were amazing,” she says. “Every day . . . the parking lot would be just filled with a whole other group of people in costumes. The salsa dancers would all come at 9 o’clock in the morning dressed to kill. Everybody’s dancing, showing each other moves out in the parking lot.

“Then you go out on another day and look in the parking lot and there are all these people in ballgowns. It was just very fun.”

And inspiring. Matthews, for example, deftly inserted a brief cameo in the script to get the director onto the floor, while many of the post-production sessions featured impromptu dance numbers by Haines, who took to spinning around the tiny editing room to the beat of the soundtrack.

That Haines wound up in the editing room at all is something of a surprise, since she always figured she’d be starring in movies, not directing them. As an only child growing up between divorced parents, she began acting at age 10. The day she finished high school, she hopped on a plane to New York to study under the legendary Lee Strasberg.

But while studying acting in New York, Haines became fascinated by the creative enthusiasm the student directors showed for their work and decided to move to the other side of the camera, working a number of unglamorous jobs for low-budget production companies before eventually winning acceptance into the highly competitive Director’s Workshop for Women at AFI.

There she completed her first project, a film based on the Doris Lessing novel “The Summer Before the Dark,” that quickly established Haines as a director with an expressive emotional style.

“It’s always the emotional heart of the story that attracts me,” she says. “There’s something personal in every story I’ve done. I can’t imagine working any other way.”

She refined that style in a number of television projects--including several episodes of the hard-edged dramatic series “Hill Street Blues” and the controversial made-for-TV movie “Something About Amelia”--before breaking out on the big screen with “Children of a Lesser God.”

Matthews’ route to Hollywood was less direct. A native Texan, he was raised in what he calls “a halfway house for ex-hippies recovering from the drug culture of the ‘60s.” His mother was an accomplished painter, his aunt a writer and photographer and his grandmother an award-winning poet and painter who once served as Texas’ poet laureate.

Matthews chose to express himself on the dance floor, and by age 15, he had become a regular on a local television dance show. After a brief stint in the Navy, he moved to New York, where he coached and danced professionally. He also be came a frequent visitor to the city’s many Puerto Rican clubs, where he had to do all his talking on the dance floor.

“I can only speak Spanish with my feet,” he jokes.

Haines’ spoken Spanish is only slightly better, yet her rustic-looking home is filled with an eclectic collection of artwork, creating an ambience she calls “Latin American Hunting Lodge.” If dancing is her first love, Latin culture is a close second.

“I feel like I was Latin in another lifetime,” she says. “I feel such a connection to the culture, so I had a tremendous desire to make everything reflecting the culture authentic. There haven’t been any . . . sort of mainstream North American movies that have really shown the many aspects of Latin culture accurately, so I decided to do it.”

Part of that striving for accuracy involved casting a Latin American cultural icon, Puerto Rican pop superstar Chayanne, as the male lead opposite Vanessa L. Williams. It was a bold move, given Chayanne’s limited English and inexperience in Hollywood. But it’s the kind of gutsy call Haines has made before. Twelve years ago, in her directorial debut, Haines cast an unknown Matlin in a challenging role in “Children of a Lesser God” and Matlin went on to win an Academy Award.

“I remember the first time I met her,” Haines says. “When she walked through the door, my heart just started to pound. There was something about her. And it was the same with Chayanne. When he walked through the door, I remember everybody started sweating because of the intensity of his presence.”

Haines was introduced to Latin American culture through dance, of course, but she quickly came to understand that the passion and spontaneity of salsa was ingrained in the people who invented it. For many, dance wasn’t just a form of expression, it was a form of escape as well. One of Haines’ first dance partners, for example, was a former political prisoner who fled El Salvador after government death squads murdered his family. For him, dancing became an important emotional outlet.

“It was a long time before I knew that story,” Haines says. “He was such a beautiful dancer and such a happy dancer. And I wanted to be like that. I wanted that experience.”