Getting in Touch With His Inner Cary Grant

The Road Warrior in panty hose, Braveheart with a manicure, the Lethal Weapon on estrogen. These are possibly some of the big-screen images Nancy Meyers had in mind when she recruited Mel Gibson to play the retro male chauvinist who gains a supernatural sympathy for women in her romantic comedy “What Women Want.”

The fact that romantic comedy and Mel Gibson were thought to be at best dimly acquainted only served her purpose. “There’s something about seeing him in these domestic situations after 20 years of movies where he’s a superhero basically,” says Meyers, who directed a script that also stars Helen Hunt as Gibson’s fearsomely smart superior at a Chicago ad agency. “Even if he’s playing a regular cop, he’s out on a ledge or jumping on a truck.”

“I’m the guy you least expect to see putting pantyhose on,” Gibson himself admits about his gender-expanding role in “What Women Want,” which opens Friday. “It’s like Santa Claus taking speed or something.”

Not surprisingly, he has some difficulty on-screen getting into female hosiery, part of an extended scene of solo physical comedy in which he also paints his nails and painfully waxes his legs in an effort to better understand how to design ad campaigns for women’s products.

“I only did the waxing once,” Gibson says, “because the hair is gone after one time. You can’t keep waxing the same spot. Actually, it doesn’t hurt. They say it hurts up around the bikini line. That’s what they all complain about. That’s something I learned.”

Gibson in person exhibits a healthy detachment from his celebrity status as a rugged sex symbol. Mad Max and all those tough guys are from a gallery of make-believe miles away from the Beverly Hills hotel where he has come to be photographed with Meyers. He seems to be taking pleasure in the opportunity to hurl a big chunk of irony at movie audiences, who in “What Women Want” will be seeing not just a playboy adman trying to get in touch with his feminine side to save his job, but Mel Gibson doing an Alan Alda imitation. Speaking of which, it’s hard not to notice who plays his boss in the movie: Alan Alda.

Gibson is cast here as a guy (Nick Marshall) more accustomed to getting into women’s pants than their heads, but through a don’t-look-too-closely plot device, he is suddenly endowed with the power to hear, literally, what women around him are thinking. This changes his life, and, beginning with the discovery that many women (including his teenage daughter) think he’s a lame-o jerk, he revises his macho view of the universe.

“The guy’s not a villain, far from it,” Gibson says. “But politically incorrect totally. Telling women at work dirty jokes and all that. People identify with him indeed. There’s a little bit of Nick in all of us maybe.”

Figuring Helen Hunt (Darcy McGuire) to be a “bitch on wheels,” which is to say a smart, successful, attractive woman who got the job he wanted, Gibson sets out to undermine her. But when his telepathic affliction allows him to hear the real her, he falls in love. There’s the dilemma.

“What Women Want” sets out as a battle of the sexes that might resemble a Hepburn-Tracy standoff of 50 years ago but for its updated manners and mores. Then it grows into a serious comedy framed by Freud’s most famous question: What do women want? In Meyers’ film, there is no glib answer, but the notion is advanced that if men just listened better, they might get some ideas.

“I mean, if Freud couldn’t answer it, I can’t answer it,” says Meyers. “But I do think the women in the movie have needs that aren’t met.”

Although she doesn’t quote from John Gray’s best-selling book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” Meyers does say that she gleaned something useful from a television special related to the book that focused on three couples and their problems of communication. “The main thing was how hard it was when the man came home from work to ask the woman about her day.

“There’s got to be something to it,” she says about Gray’s theory that men and women speak different languages and therefore don’t always hear one another. “I mean, I had my own experience to go on. It wasn’t like I needed research, by the way, to write a movie about women.”

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Meyers has distinguished herself as a writer--until this film, in partnership with her husband, Charles Shyer--of such sharply observed social comedies as “Irreconcilable Differences,” “Father of the Bride” and “Baby Boom.” She has directed once before, the 1998 remake of “The Parent Trap,” which she also wrote with Shyer.

She and Shyer, who have two daughters, 13 and 20, separated after “The Parent Trap,” and this film represents Meyers’ first effort without Shyer as a collaborator, a situation reflected on-screen by Hunt’s character, a recently divorced creative executive who reveals she had worked closely with her husband and is afraid to be going it alone.

Meyers “explained to me she wanted it to go a lot deeper than a gimmick,” says Gibson, discussing his agreement to do the picture. “She wanted it to say something a little more profound, which I thought was exciting. I couldn’t help but be attracted by that approach to the material. It was very personal to her, I think.”

Yet it did not begin with her. And that has produced an awkward backstage drama as the film nears release. Meyers was hired two years ago by Disney to rewrite a script called “Head Games” by Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa, who, after multiple rewrites by Meyers and the project moving to Paramount, remain the only officially credited screenwriters of “What Women Want.” (Credits for the authors of screenplays, where more than one writer is involved, are commonly arbitrated by a Writers Guild committee.)

“I was stunned by the guild’s decision not to acknowledge me as a co-writer,” Meyers says. “It was heartbreaking. Because this was very personal writing and I still see myself as a writer first. My ambition with this movie was to take a very funny, unreal premise and make a real movie out of it.”

But Goldsmith and Yuspa, both writers for the CBS sitcom “King of Queens” and an unmarried couple in real life, maintain that much of what’s on the screen comes from their original script.

“I was in a bookstore, and I was reading one of those relationship books,” recalls Goldsmith, 30, “and it said, ‘If you could hear your lover’s every thought, would you want to?’ and I thought that would be a great idea for a movie.”

“It was around the time that book ‘The Rules’ was out that told women the way to get a man was never to present yourself the way you really are but to put on this act, and we thought of writing an antidote to that.” says Yuspa, 29. “We wanted to sort through the unspoken-ness in so many relationships of twentysomethings who were always playing head games.

“The bottom line for us is that we wrote the script and she came in and added her perspective.”

The two concede that Meyers introduced the Helen Hunt character--or at least the character as she currently exists. “From what I know, she has personalized the Helen Hunt character to her,” Goldsmith says.

Gina Matthews, one of the film’s producers who helped develop the original idea with Goldsmith and Yuspa, says that “Josh and Cathy wrote an incredible script, but Nancy brought a real romantic sophistication to the movie. She created the love story; that wasn’t in the original draft.”

“The thing I was going for,” says Meyers, 50, “is that rather than him have a girl that he likes and he can’t get her and then he can hear her thoughts and figures how to finally get her, I set him up with a woman he would never like in a million years except by reading her thoughts and getting to know her.

“For me, that’s a much bigger challenge for his character than ‘I already love you but I can’t get to you.’ Which is why he is undermining her and trying to get his job back, and through this he realizes she’s a good, decent person.

“But he does do some unlikable things in the beginning of the movie. Mel and I often disagreed about this. We would do a scene and he would say, ‘Oh, come on, he’s so slimy.’ And I’d say, ‘He’s adorable.’ In my opinion, he pulls it all off without thinking he’s a schmuck.”

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Overhearing Gibson give an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel, Meyers discovered something she hadn’t known: that the actor read a biography of Frank Sinatra while making the movie. The detail pleases her because the persona of Frank Sinatra became an off-screen presence during production, a spiritual touchstone for Gibson’s character and finally a musical one as well.

“He was a guy, a man’s man,” says Gibson, “but with a real sense of refinement. Very brutish in a way.”

Meyers listened to Sinatra recordings while she was working on the script as a way of informing her sense of Nick. Then, while shooting, she took a boombox to the set and when she wanted to remind Gibson of the Sinatra factor, she cued up Sinatra singing “Too Marvelous for Words,” which she thought of as Nick’s theme song. “Rather than say anything to him, I would just start playing the song, and he would wave back at me, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ ”

During Nick’s night of self-induced feminization, in a moment of second thoughts, he defensively puts on Ol’ Blue Eyes crooning “I Won’t Dance (Don’t Ask Me)” and cuts loose with a dance number, bowler hat and all, that notably contradicts the song’s lyrics and recalls the masculine grace of Gene Kelly.

Who knew?

“I did dancing years ago in drama school,” Gibson says, almost sheepishly. “I was not a great dancer, far from it. I could kind of bring up the back of the line. I was good enough. But with the right camera angles and enough rehearsal, you can do what amounts to tying Fred Astaire’s boot laces. And maybe I was saved by the editing.”

“I never envisioned the dance being the length that it was,” says Meyers. “But once we got together with the choreographer, we made it the length of the song, about a minute and a half.

“I didn’t know he could do it. He didn’t know he could do it. He pushed. He went for it. And it’s everybody’s favorite scene.”

She sings Gibson’s praises in terms that only sound like hyperbole, and, writer that she is, Meyers is aware of this. “What can I say? I’ve worked with Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, Steve Martin and Julia Roberts, and they’re all great, but Mel is the most unusual in terms of how he can bring another dimension to the thing and the performance. He’s not an actor that wants to discuss it with you, he just does it.”

But, compared with the actors she mentioned, he’s not known for comedy. “I wasn’t apprehensive about him not being a comedian because after I met him I was convinced. He’s light on his feet--in life. He has a great sense of humor. He tells a story. He totally gets comedy. But he’s not somebody who would tell you that. He doesn’t approach it like Steve Martin or Martin Short or other people I’ve worked with who’ve made their living doing comedy. But he’s got it.”

And he wasn’t afraid to send up his own image. In a subplot, Nick has a fling with a neurotic Starbucks waitress (played by Marisa Tomei) who at first finds him less than great in bed. The first time they kiss, her private thought is that he reminds her of her sister. “That was Mel’s favorite line in the movie,” Meyers says.

For his part, Gibson says he was reassured by Meyers’ spontaneous laughter on the set. “We had to do some re-voicing because she’s on the soundtrack, laughing so much,” Gibson says. “But that was some kind of indicator that you’d pulled it off. Or maybe done something she hadn’t expected, which was nice. Because she knows comedy, really knows why one thing is funny and something else isn’t. She was a real barometer.”

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Over the journey of the movie, with the aid of divine intervention, Nick comes to better understand women and realize the mistake he has made with Darcy, if maybe too late. Meyers is just beginning a new journey, without Shyer, her partner most of her adult life. They met when she was a story editor and he a writer. A producer ordered them to come up with a script over a long weekend. “So we were locked in a room and it got us very close,” she says. “He was very encouraging to me. He said, ‘You should do this,’ ” meaning screenwriting. They were together 18 years before they married; they were married for three years, then broke up.

In “What Women Want,” the scenes of Gibson and Hunt growing closer while they collaborate on a proposed Nike ad are very much taken from her own experience, Meyers says. “All that stuff, that’s personal. I think it’s very romantic to collaborate with somebody. You know, you’re working late at night, just the two of you, coming up with things together, getting off on each other that way, amusing each other and liking each other’s ideas. You can tell that he’s turned on by the way she thinks.”

In the film, when Nick asks Darcy what happened to her marriage, she tells him: “In the beginning it was great. A guy I could be myself with at work--then something changed. It became competitive, and suddenly the better I did, the worse we did. It’s the price I pay for being me.”

“It was great, great,” Meyers says of her long partnership with Shyer, who has written and directed a new movie, “The Affair of the Necklace,” starring Hilary Swank.

“I think each of us just wanted to work separately,” Meyers notes. She says the subsequent breakup of her marriage was unrelated to their working relationship.

“I’m very proud of the work we did together, and I have great memories of all that. Which is why it looks like that in the movie, the way they feed off each other. Of course, in the movie, unbeknownst to Helen, Mel is stealing her ideas, and that part is not true to my own life.”