The Player at Work

Tim Robbins is tired. Make that exhausted. Not even staying at the most exclusive hotel in the south of France, apparently, guarantees you a good night’s sleep.

“There was a wild party here yesterday, breaking glass and everything,” the actor-filmmaker says, coping with his breakfast on the pristine terrace of the now-tranquil Hotel du Cap. “People were in the hallway in front of our door, yelling and screaming, it was insane. And I thought this place would be quiet.”

No place connected to the International Festival du Film is ever quiet, but Robbins already knows that. He was here in 1992, showing “Bob Roberts,” his directing debut, at the Directors Fortnight and winning the festival’s best actor prize for “The Player.” His memories of that year are sketchy (he arrived the day after actress Susan Sarandon gave birth to their son), but one particular recollection capsulizes the ambience exactly.

“Cannes is a very strange mixture of the art of film and the total prostitution of film,” he says. “One of the things I remember is walking into a room and meeting Gerard Depardieu and then walking out and seeing this poster of a woman with large breasts holding a machine gun. The film wasn’t made yet, but they already had a title and an ad concept.”

Given that his impressive new film as a writer-director, “Cradle Will Rock,” enthusiastically received at its Tuesday premiere here, “is in a way about the difference between art and prostitution, about how much money is related to art, “ bringing it to this sometimes hostile festival seemed a perfect fit.

“When Cannes came up, people said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ but it seemed like the film was right for the environment here. It’s ambitious, and it’s about something.”

Cutting an enviably wide swath through 1930s America’s social and political history, “Cradle” (written and directed by Robbins and scheduled for a December release by Disney in the U.S.) confidently intercuts stories surrounding the government-funded, Depression-era Federal Theater Project, its ill-fated Orson Welles-directed production of the controversial Marc Blitzstein musical that gives the film its name, and the conflict between a young Nelson Rockefeller and Mexican artist Diego Rivera over a mural commissioned for Rockefeller Center.

A smart and heartfelt look at a world that is no more, “Cradle” wouldn’t even be able to attempt its nervy mixture of drama, humor and history, its juggling of seriousness and slapstick, real people and imagined characters, without the impressive ensemble Robbins and his casting team assembled.

This particular actors’ gang includes Sarandon as an emissary of Mussolini, Hank Azaria as Blitzstein, Ruben Blades as Rivera, John Cusack as Rockefeller, Joan Cusack as a concerned anti-Communist, Cary Elwes as John Houseman, Angus Macfadyen as his nemesis Orson Welles, Bill Murray as a bitter ventriloquist, Vanessa Redgrave as a madcap countess, Philip Baker Hall as her industrialist husband, John Turturro and Emily Watson as “Cradle” actors and, in the most impressive screen role this acclaimed theater star has yet had, Cherry Jones as Hallie Flanagan, the woman who ran the Federal Theater Project.

It was reading “Arena,” Flanagan’s book about her Federal Theater Project experiences, that was decisive in Robbins’ decision to tackle this subject. “I love the theater. I was a theater major in college, but I’d never heard of this period and reading that book just blew me away,” he says. “Any lover of theater would be really proud of this one woman reaching a quarter of the U.S. population with live theater, with many people seeing it for the first time. It’s truly stunning that they don’t teach this.”

Broader Context of the Depression

Consistent with his overall interest in social issues, Robbins was determined to put the theatrical story--the film shows Blitzstein’s socially conscious musical about labor strife in a company town being closed by federal troops before it could open in New York--into the broader context of “a society that was put to the test.”

“It was the defining moment of the 20th century for this country. We could have fallen into chaos, but collectively we launched a social movement that was very humanistic and became a country that could look after each other without falling into the dogmas of communism or fascism.

“Here you are, a person who lost their job in 1930, and here’s an administration [Franklin Roosevelt’s] that comes along and says, ‘We’re not ready to throw the towel in. We’re going to put you back to work, and we’re going to put on a show that you can see for a quarter. You didn’t ask for it, but here’s a mural for the lobby of this public building. And by the way, this road is going to be better and there’s also going to be a park you can drive to and camp out. Where before we made things better for capital, for business, for monopolies, now we’re going to increase the quality of life for you.’ ”

Robbins is well aware that this kind of thinking is considered outmoded in “a time when publicly funded art has such a negative connotation, when people say, ‘Oh my God, what a waste of money,’ ” but he has to look no further than his own life for a counter argument.

“I cut my teeth in street theater,” he recalls. “When I was 12 or 13 I began in a federally funded theater group in New York called Theater for a New City supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The government paid for my theater training at $25 a week, and now they’ve got their return in the taxes I pay, let me tell you.”

Another key influence, and one that’s at the heart of “Cradle’s” structure, was Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” “I saw it in 1976, when I was still in high school, and it really made me think of film in a different way,” Robbins remembers. “It showed how it was possible to tell all these stories at the same time, it shattered the narrative structure I was used to seeing in film. I still like that interwoven, tapestry feeling, people passing each other unawares, like the scene in ‘Cradle’ where Welles and William Randolph Hearst pass each other for a moment in the 21 Club.”

A Meeting That Ended in ‘Yes’

Because of its structure and its historical roots, “Cradle” was a tough sell, even to Working Title/Polygram, the company Robbins has a production deal with. Finally Disney, in the person of Joe Roth, said yes. “It felt like an old Hollywood thing, like dealing with Zanuck or Thalberg,” Robbins says. “I walked into his office and it was like, ‘How much you need, kid? Who you got in mind?’ It was the only meeting I’ve ever had where I walked into an office and the person just said, ‘Yes.’ ”

“Cradle” was budgeted at $25 million, low by studio standards for a film of its scope, which meant, the director says, that the shoot was “daunting, exhausting but exhilarating.” Though the actors all worked below their fees, Robbins was determined to pay them twice scale rather than the low-budget norm of scale itself.

“I couldn’t ask them to work for scale anymore. It’s ridiculous that quality comes with a low price tag,” he says. “With independent films becoming more like other films, the word ‘independent’ comes in only as ‘independent of paying the creative talent.’ ”

Aware of how dense his material might play if not handled correctly, Robbins’ solution was to do everything at as fast a pace as possible and emulate the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s. He had one word--”Sturges,” as in comedy master Preston--taped to his video playback monitor on the set, and in run-throughs he was always asking his actors, “Can we do it any faster?”

His answer to that question, as well as to his parallel query, “Can you do a movie with social impact without taking yourself too seriously?,” was an invariably, and unequivocally, “yes.”