A Dream Built From the Ground Up

“What is a director but a builder?” asks actor John Shea. He is talking about John Caire, who directed him--along with Oscar-nominated actresses Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Carroll Baker--in “Silent Hearts,” and Shea’s point is as literal as it is philosophical.

Though Caire poured three years of his life into writing, directing, producing and partially funding the movie, which premieres on Lifetime tonight, he spends most of his days reconstructing houses. With a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, he’s a dreamer in a tool belt.

On the occasion of his first interview, Caire relives the intense emotional highs and lows of his three-year struggle to make this film. It’s a rare day off from work, and he’s in his Sherman Oaks home, which did double duty as a set during filming. As he nears the end of his story, he unexpectedly breaks down.

“I’m just tired,” the 35-year-old says quietly, struggling to regain his composure, “physically and emotionally exhausted from this whole thing. There’s just so much pressure because you want the movie to do well so you can pay your investors back. I made a huge financial sacrifice making this movie; I turned down a lot of construction work.”

It makes an awfully good story to have Caire leaping from construction site to film set in a single bound. But the career path of this first-time director-writer is more reminiscent of Harrison Ford, who took the carpentry work in order to afford being a struggling actor in the first place.

The film Caire has constructed in “Silent Hearts” is a serious family drama about the repercussions of loss and the failure of human communication that centers on teenage daughter Niki (Tricia Vessey) and her relationship with her emotionally shut-down father, played by Shea.

“A lot of women have conflicts with their fathers, and I wanted to explore that, to see how far I could push it without being violent. There are no character-driven movies anymore,” he laments. “They’re all dominated by cast and concept. ‘Shakespeare in Love’ was character-driven, and it’s great that it made $100 million. To see a character evolve in front of your face, that’s what the movies are about, for me at least--not tying it into a video game and marketing merchandise.”

Years earlier, Caire had envisioned himself having this Hollywood moment. In the early ‘80s, he moved to L.A., dabbling in screenwriting and journalism while he paid the rent managing an apartment building and substitute-teaching. He sold some stories to the “MacGyver” TV series but never got to write a teleplay. “Nothing went anywhere,” Caire says. “I never made a living as a writer.”

One day, the dream gave way to reality . . . on a tennis court. “These two guys who had to be 60 or 70 years old were sittin’ there, and one guy said, ‘I just finished my last screenplay, and I think this one’s really gonna go,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s not gonna be me.’ ”

In the meantime, he had bought, fixed up and sold a house. Real estate agents began offering him remodeling work. “I was always the kid that could fix everything, so it was easy for me,” he says. “Now I can build a house from the ground up.”

While his construction business grew, he continued writing in the evenings. One night in 1996, he was delivering a running critique while watching a movie with his wife, Terese. “She’s like, ‘Would you quit complaining about all these movies?’ ” he says. “ ‘If you think it’s so easy, why don’t you make a movie?’ ”

He finished the screenplay for “Silent Hearts” six months later.

Once the script was done, Caire took a class at UCLA Extension on how to make an independent film, where he learned about everything from budgeting to casting to set protocol. To raise his less than $500,000 budget, he tapped clients whose houses he had remodeled. “You’re in somebody’s house for six months, you become friends,” he says. “They knew I liked being a contractor, but that’s not where my real passion lay.”

Eva Davis, who hired Caire to remodel her house in La Can~ada, made an initial investment based on her reading of the script. After she saw a rough cut, she increased her support and became an executive producer on the film. “I never cry when I watch films, and I cried. It was very real,” Davis says, adding that her three teenagers encouraged her to help. “They thought it was fantastic. They said, ‘This is a movie about us; this is a movie we can feel.’ ”

Attracting Talent ‘a Bit of a Battle’

Casting director Steve Brooksbank, whom he met through his UCLA instructor, admits it was “a bit of a battle” to attract proven talent for a first-time director with virtually no budget. “The fact he wrote the script helped to show [his] vision,” says Brooksbank, who managed to interest Jean-Baptiste, best known for her Oscar-nominated role in Mike Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies,” to play the role of a counselor.

“A lot of stuff out there is just controversial for the sake of it or very action-based,” Jean-Baptiste said by phone from London. “I’m just interested in doing good work with a bit of soul, a bit of heart. This one did all the stuff you long for in the movies, conflict and people trying to understand each other. This was a piece with a bit of heart.”

She admits she was apprehensive about working with someone so untested. “It was his passion that sold me,” she said. “He was very persuasive. I believed he could do a great job.”

Once she was on board, veteran actress Baker, and Shea, well-known for his role as Lex Luthor in the ABC drama series “Lois & Clark,” signed on.

When he began shooting in the summer of 1997, Caire had never set foot on a film set. The shoot lasted 19 days.

Said Jean-Baptiste of Caire’s performance: “He was very sensitive; he listened to his actors and he knew what he wanted to say. He’s very gentle, which is good for me. I don’t really respond to people who shout.”

Shea found Caire was open to suggestions, allowing the actors to improvise lines that didn’t work while retaining an overall vision. “Some of the best actors are people from all walks of life, and I believe the same is true with directors,” Shea says. “John Caire is proof you don’t have to go to film school to direct a film. . . . I believe that experience prepared him to be a film director, to organize and communicate [his] vision to a team of people and do that work for a price--to be both an artist and a businessman.”

To clean up post-production editing problems, Caire bartered construction work with a film editor; for sound work, he bartered with a sound company.

After Banging on Doors, One Finally Opens

Caire says he was turned down by every film festival but Santa Barbara and Montreal. At Montreal, he met producer Kelley Reynolds, who sold the film to Lifetime. Since Lifetime doesn’t do publicity for acquisitions, he hired his own publicist, and has been involved in every nuance of getting it off the ground.

He admits it has been an uphill battle, working, writing in the evenings and spending time with his wife and 20-month-old daughter, Maria (the couple is expecting a second child in October).

And while he is on the job, rebuilding houses by day, Caire is already developing a new script with Reynolds. He describes it as a more commercial story about a barren career woman who sells her soul to the devil to get a baby. “It’s a really character-driven, frightening drama like ‘Fatal Attraction,’ ” he says.

One day, he hopes to give up his construction business to produce films full time. “The last three years have been the best three years and the worst, because I went through a period where I thought no one wanted this movie,” he says. “Now . . . I have a chance to get people to see my work. That’s all I ever wanted--a chance.”

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* “Silent Hearts” airs at 9 tonight on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with a special advisory for coarse language).