Now He’s a Known Quantity

Ben Affleck calls his new film “Bounce” “the best work I’ve ever done.” The trailer is testing through the roof among women. And Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a widowed housewife, was committed so thoroughly to her role that she dyed her famous blond hair brown for the part.

But writer-director Don Roos doesn’t have time to think about any of that right now. He’s worried about a stray high heel.

“I hear a clop,” says Roos, sitting in Fox Studios’ darkened editing room recently. He’s surrounded by two producers, two publicists and four sound mixers. On screen, an airline employee crosses a carpeted area to deliver some bad news to Abby Janello (Paltrow), and Roos hears the harsh sound of high heels on tile.

“At 176 I hear a clop,” he repeats, referring to the frame count, and the engineers spring into action. Glitch fixed, the boyish 45-year-old twirls around in his swivel chair, grabs a few wasabi peas and leafs through a tabloid while the engineers set up the next scene.

For the past three hours of this sound-mixing session, Roos has been picking nits--and there’s more to come. After calling attention to an especially subtle chirping bird background, Roos teases one of the engineers: “Anna, I totally read your back. I want a mirror on your [mixing] board so I can see your eyes roll.” Roos’ breezy asides keep the mood light, but he’s the first to admit that “Bounce,” his first mainstream effort, due for release Nov. 17, is generating heavyweight expectations--both good and bad.

“The Opposite of Sex” marked his debut as a writer-director in 1998. It cost a very modest $4.8 million (and took in a very modest $6.4 million at the box office). The cast was made up of fine actors, but, except for “Friends” star Lisa Kudrow and a very grown-up Christina Ricci, they were not household names. And there was no interference from studio suits. The company that originally financed “The Opposite of Sex” “courteously and conveniently” went bankrupt during filming, Roos quips. But the snarky, hip comedy became an indie favorite and media darling, and Roos became a hot commodity around town.

“It’s terrible because now they expect things from you; you’re not underneath the radar like we were with ‘Opposite of Sex,’ ” Roos explains a few weeks after the sound-editing session at a West Hollywood cafe, where he’s dressed casually in faded blue jeans and untucked plaid shirt. “People love to be surprised, love to be delighted by the heretofore unknown.”

But with “Bounce,” notes Roos, “you have Ben and Gwyneth, a very public pair of actors, and Miramax, which is a very public studio. And Harvey [Miramax co-chief Harvey Weinstein] remains a very-out-in-front kind of character. So it all kind of sets you up for people deciding maybe they’ll take all of us down a notch or two. That’s what you feel. You feel more exposed.”

The buzz on the film has been decidedly mixed in the entertainment press and on the Internet. The fact that its pre-Thanksgiving weekend release date is one of the toughest box office battles of the year--”The Grinch” with Jim Carrey and “The Sixth Day” with Arnold Schwarzenegger also open on the 17th--make for a risky venture.

Roos is also going out on a limb with the film’s story. While on a business trip, self-absorbed advertising exec Buddy Amaral (Affleck) picks up a woman at the airport bar and gives his ticket to a man he’s just met there. The flight crashes and the man dies. Ridden with guilt, Buddy tries to secretly make amends to the man’s widow (Paltrow) and winds up falling in love. It’s a dark, serious relationship story, and Roos is fully aware that adult dramas can be a tough sell.

“There are loads of romantic comedies, but when was the last time you saw an adult relationship drama [that worked]?” he muses. “Look at something like ‘The Horse Whisperer.’ It’s very hard to do.”

To be sure, “Bounce” is leavened with a few zingers. “Advertising--that’s agenting without heart,” one character jokes about Affleck’s profession. But with “Bounce,” Roos is ditching the irony that made “Sex” a critical favorite. He’s delivering the straight stuff: an adult date movie about fate that just happens to star two of the most likable young actors in Hollywood.

Affleck’s Buddy Amaral is not, however, especially likable. Says Roos, “At the beginning, he hasn’t really given a thought to anybody, and you have to make the transformation believable. It can’t be too much; you can’t turn him into a god. It’s a really delicate piece of acting that Ben did in the movie.”

Affleck took on the project after the disappointing action film “Reindeer Games” because he admired Roos’ work on “Sex,” and was impressed with his intelligence and sense of humor. Once work began, Affleck admits, “it was extremely daunting. We had to have faith because it’s basically Gwyneth and I, and Don, trying to make this story. There was no set pieces to hide behind. It’s the scariest kind of movie to make.

“Don’s able to shift tone quite deftly, in both his work and his attitude toward work. He can handle both comedy and drama. He makes room and provides an environment, a very relaxed way to give you the room to find what you need.

Roos says he was never one of those “What I really want to do is direct” kind of guys. He came to Los Angeles in 1978 after taking a screenplay course at the University of Notre Dame from Tony Bill, who encouraged him to move West. Roos got his first job in 1989, producing scripts for Aaron Spelling’s prime-time soap “Nightingales.”

“The show itself was, ugh, the worst TV of the ‘80s,” admits Roos. “But even though the product was kind of retrograde in terms of its political and feminist sensibility, Aaron had the most left-wing lot in town. Gay writers, women directors, women editors. Aaron was completely gender- and orientation-blind. It was a great training ground.”

Roos sold his first feature script, “Love Field,” in 1992, followed by “Single White Female” that same year, “Boys on the Side” (1995) and “Diabolique” (1996). All were written on spec. Says Roos, “As soon as you take a check in Hollywood, they treat you like you’re cleaning their house. It’s very uncomfortable. The longer you can postpone taking the check, the more power you have. They like to believe they own you, just as if you’re painting their house.”

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In 1996, Roos endured a nasty skirmish relating to his script for “Easy Women.” Meg Ryan signed onto the project, then dropped out. Lawsuits ensued. Roos was angry.

“When I wrote ‘Opposite of Sex,’ it was like [expletive], ‘You, you and your stupid development notes,’ ” snarls Roos. In creating “Sex,” Roos gleefully vented via bad girl/narrator Dedee Pruitt (Ricci), whose misanthropic voice-over brimmed with venomous one-liners. With producer Michael Besman stepping in to cut the deals, Roos finally got the chance to direct his own work.

“On ‘Opposite of Sex,’ Don was sort of having his way with every director who ever messed with his words,” says Besman, who is also producing “Bounce.”

Roos now regards “The Opposite of Sex” with striking objectivity. Here’s how he describes it: “It’s a very conventional story: An outsider comes to town, everybody gets shaken out of their complacent ways and everyone ends up better than before the outsider came--and the outsider is slightly changed too.”

He adds, “It’s all sort of dressed up as a rebel, but it’s the sort of a rebel that studies hard and goes to bed early and gets straight A’s.”

Roos does take credit for offering a fresh take on sexual mores. “The biggest taboo of all was to have a character who confesses she doesn’t like sex. It’s not so unusual to have an outrageous teenager being a sexpot. It’s very unusual to have a leading woman complain that sex is overrated. And to talk about a gay man’s love life, not his sex life, or not his coming out of the closet life, or not his disease life. I enjoyed it but didn’t think I was blazing any trails.”

“The Opposite of Sex” opened on five screens, then went on to become one of the indie sensations of the year. Time magazine compared it to “Heathers” and “Chasing Amy.” It was seductive stuff.

“As a director, I thought the next thing I should do after ‘The Opposite of Sex’ would be like another ‘Opposite of Sex’ and become a brand name--the Agatha Christie of outrageous ensemble comedy,” he says with his customary dry wit.

And in fact, Roos produced a short-lived NBC comedy “M.Y.O.B” last summer featuring Katharine Towne as a dyspeptic teenager spitting out sarcastic, Dedee-like voice-over narration. The Don Roos-as-brand notion vanished when he received an unsolicited offer to direct his ‘Bounce’ screenplay. “I wrote the script for ‘Bounce’ because I thought, ‘My God, I’m just too gay with this ‘Opposite of Sex.’ I better make sure they still know I understand heterosexuals.”

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Miramax purchased the script, with Roos attached as director. Then came the casting coup: “Harvey said to me, ‘How ‘bout Ben and Gwyneth?’ And I was, ‘Yeah, that’s fine, let me know when you get to the TV actors.’ ”

Never underestimate Weinstein’s clout. In April 1999, Paltrow and Affleck visited Roos in his West Hollywood home, just a few weeks after Paltrow won her Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love.” “I was kind of nervous,” says Roos. “First of all, they’re 20 years younger than I am, with Oscars, both enormously talented. I knew Gwyneth was really, really smart. Ben I thought would be easier to handle, like I could give him a beer or something and he would be, you know, fine. But Ben is really smarter than everyone put together. So that was intimidating.”

After the three-hour meeting, the stars were sold on Roos, contracts were finalized and Paltrow went to work on her character.

“I had to do a lot of sort of thinking about it, coming from a place of grief,” says Paltrow, referring to the then-recent death of her beloved grandfather. “It was still pretty raw. Thinking about life after somebody you love dies, what you have to do to re-form; what would Abby change about herself, how would she carry on?”

Paltrow, not noted for average working characters, says playing a small-time Realtor living in a ranch house in the Valley with two young sons wasn’t that much of a stretch. “I feel very much like I’m just a couple of kids from that woman. I have great respect for women who work and have children; I’m in awe of it.”

If Roos was awed by his high-profile talent, he was hardly shy about telling the actors exactly what he wanted by the time shooting began in August. ‘I would literally say, for example, ‘No, you don’t start that speech with the word ‘but,’ you start it with ‘however.’ I really, really care about the words. I don’t mind [nagging].”

During the 43-day shoot, Roos says impishly, “I think Gwyn was kind of annoyed that I paid so much attention to Ben. I don’t think she’s had a gay director before, or if she did, there wasn’t a major male star with her. It would be like, ‘Oh Gwyneth, go ahead, do that, that’ll be fine. Now Ben! What do you need from me, how can I help you, let me take your hand and take you through this.’ And Gwyn would get very short shrift.”

Affleck says Roos was enormous help in navigating the nuances of his character’s arc. “Don is empathetic, almost a ‘sensitive’--what they used to call mediums--he’s kind of hypersensitive, able to discern and pick out sets of feelings from the smallest of behaviors. Some directors get caught up in the exercise of scoring or editing, but Don’s not trying to do a reel to get work doing music videos. He’s interested in emotion.”

Adds Paltrow: “Don’s level of attention is remarkable. He’s incredibly focused, very specific. He knew exactly what he wants and got it across so simply. He created a safe place.”

Despite the film’s somber themes, says Paltrow, “we laughed hysterically just to sort of break the tension. Every day, we ruined a few takes. Don would be like behind the monitor, and you could just hear his shoulders shaking [from laughing], the fabric of his shirt, and we’d have to banish him from the set.”

Filming on “Bounce” ended last November. Originally set for a summer 2000 release, the picture was pushed back to this fall, which left plenty of time for tweaking (and speculation about whether the film had problems). “I hate previews, because they hurt your feelings,” says Roos. “But they’re very valuable.”

Clashes with Miramax chief Weinstein have been minimal, he says. “Harvey has been hands-on in the right way, not just with notes, but hands-on with money, with resources, with problem-solving. One of the things about ‘Opposite of Sex’ was, nobody wanted us during our whole post-production period, so you were free to do what you wanted with the knowledge that nobody in town wanted what you were doing anyway. I’d rather have people care and care too much and be over-involved but know that they want what you have.

“The biggest conflict Harvey and I have is that we have different jobs--his job is to maximize the most people to see the movie. My job is quite different. I have to really stay true to the bargain I made with the writer, the bargain I made with the actors, the bargain I made with the audience. ‘Yeah, I’d love to get you all home in 80 minutes, but to tell my story I have to have you sit here for 106 minutes.’ You can’t please everybody. So we’ve had tussles over that.”

“Bounce” and “The Opposite of Sex” may be different in tone, but are ultimately more alike than one might think and in ways that people might not expect of Roos.

“Both projects are about the power of love, the goodness of people. I’m really like that. I really don’t have a cynical bone in my body,” he says. “In both movies, it’s about love and the power of love, the power of connection with other people. The solution is to love, in both movies, the solution is to overcome your fear and love somebody. To me they’re very connected in that respect.”

As for industry expectations, well, Roos is ready for whatever may come. “I live very frugally. I always assume that the whole thing may just go away.”