A Career Spent Near the Edge

The timing couldn’t have been better. It was almost as if the Hollywood-bashers in Washington had timed their salvo to tie in with Fox Searchlight’s campaign for its fall release “Quills.”

The Federal Trade Commission issued its scathing report on Hollywood’s sneaky practice of marketing films with extreme content to children on Sept. 11. And just a few days later director Philip Kaufman flew down to Los Angeles, from his home base in the legendary bohemian enclave of North Beach in San Francisco, to discuss his latest film, “Quills,” an ink-black gothic farce about the extremes of free expression under siege.

The film’s irrepressible and monstrously entertaining centerpiece (portrayed with free-swinging relish by “Shine” Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush) is none other than the Marquis de Sade, the 18th century pornographer and revolutionary misanthrope whose novels (including “Justine” and “120 Days of Sodom”) have linked his name for all time with some of the rougher forms of off-center sexuality.

As the director of the first film ever saddled with an NC-17 rating, “Henry & June” (1990), Kaufman would seem to be the perfect person to weigh in on the FTC report and related issues, or to make a movie that addresses them by implication. And he seems to know this.

“My wife Rose came up with the perfect ad line” for “Quills,” Kaufman offers with a characteristic gleam of irony: “ ‘Not a movie for children of all ages.’ ”

Politicians can rest easy; unlike other R-rated fare, “Quills” won’t be marketed to the under-17 crowd. Kaufman and the studio know it’s definitely a spicy meal, suitable only for adult palates.

Throughout his career, Kaufman has been widely admired for consistently making adult-oriented movies with the personal texture and intelligence of an independent, even when he works for major Hollywood studios--a neat trick that few other filmmakers have managed to pull off. He will be honored for this achievement at the American Film Institute’s Fest 2000, with a special tribute on Wednesday at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

Six of Kaufman’s 11 films will be screened during the festival, including “Henry & June,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” “Quills” will have its U.S. premiere at the Egyptian as the closing-night gala presentation on Thursday.

Like “Henry & June,” “Quills” has both a strong intellectual and sexual charge. As the movie opens, the marquis has been locked away and forgotten, swept under the social carpet, in the lunatic asylum at Charenton, near Paris. Under the benign supervision of a liberal priest, Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), Sade is allowed to purge his insatiable demons on paper, achieving a kind of hectic equilibrium. But Sade is an obsessive verbal exhibitionist for whom the act of expression alone is never enough; he needs to rub people’s noses in the spew of his imagination.

With the help of a levelheaded laundress (Kate Winslet), the marquis is smuggling his books out of the asylum to a fly-by-night printer, and the situation has become an open scandal. The main action of the film, which opens in Los Angeles on Nov. 22, is structured around a battle of wills between the marquis and a repressive “alienist,” Dr. Royer-Collard (a funereal Michael Caine), who has been dispatched personally by Napoleon to plug the leak at Charenton and to clamp the lid down hard upon Sade’s “creativity.”

For Kaufman, “the movie is an entertainment about the game of cat and mouse that the marquis plays with his enemies, a series of moves and counter-moves, and about the ingenuity that the obsessed writer summons to get around attempts to silence him.” At the same time, he admits, “the film really is about the issue of free speech--about expression and the repression of expression. Those issues are central to Doug Wright’s play and to his script, and they were talked about extensively during the making of the film.”

In fact, the free-speech angle was deliberately beefed up during the film’s development process, as Wright adapted his 1995 play, an off-Broadway hit that was also the inaugural attraction at the renamed Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. At the time, Bill Mechanic was chairman and chief executive of 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment. (He resigned in May.)

“The movie I had in my mind when we crafted the play for the screen was ‘A Man for All Seasons,’ ” Mechanic says. “My hope was to bring the ideas to the forefront and let it have reverberations, let it be about a man who would die for what he believes in.”

To its credit, the movie never tries to palm off Rush’s snarling, grandstanding marquis as a saintly or a civilized figure, an innocent martyr with inconvenient ideas. “I don’t think we whitewash the marquis at all,” Kaufman declares. “As Doug portrays him, he is selfish and duplicitous and brutal, an aristocrat elitist who smacks his wife around. He is a terrible man.”

But he was also, the director believes, “the most extreme test case ever, to this day,” of a society’s willingness to tolerate its most assaultive voices. The one aspect of Sade’s legacy that the movie softens, oddly enough, is the one that should be central to the serious issues it confronts: the actual content of the marquis’ scabrous novels, which both Wright and Kaufman dismiss as “unreadable.” The film may be a tad disingenuous here, implying at times that Sade’s works can be stimulating to readers in healthy and even liberating ways. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any sane person becoming aroused by the gruesome sexual violence that was the marquis’ actual stock in trade.

“The one thing you have to give Sade credit for as a novelist,” Wright allows, “is that his stuff has been around for 200 years and we can still smell its stink.”

One odd consequence of Sade’s unique status as a writer who went way too far and then some is that, even in the early 21st century, his novels cannot be read aloud in a Hollywood movie angling for an R rating. (Rather than bowdlerize the originals, Wright created several new passages of pseudo-Sadian fiction for the film.) Is it quite fair, though, to hold up a notorious writer as an icon of free expression and then, with a flick of the wrist, to withhold his actual words? Milos Forman’s film “The People vs. Larry Flynt” was slammed, after all, for failing to acknowledge the repulsive, misogynistic character of the images that Flynt often published in Hustler magazine.

For Wright, however, there’s a fundamental difference: “Larry Flynt was trafficking in imagery, and the marquis was trafficking in language. I think if you really read Sade’s fiction you will find that he describes things in such a baroque and over-the-top fashion that they are biologically impossible. It becomes a phantasmagoric linguistic riff on perversity that has no visual component. As such, I think we can only regard him as a satirist. To simply present him as the Hannibal Lecter of literature felt reductive to me. I thought the most subversive thing I could do was give him back his wicked wink, his sense of humor.”

Most of the humor, and the considerable entertainment value of “Quills,” resides in its tumbling, exuberant use of language. Rush, Winslet, Caine and Phoenix play off each other with the virtuosity of tight string quartet. This film is about the power of words, as much as anything: The marquis is drunk on them, and Napoleon and his minions are terrified of their subversive tendency to undermine the moral fiber of society.

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For Kaufman, too, words are powerful weapons. The director, who will be 64 on Monday, can still vividly recall a Moscow International Film Festival screening of his adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in 1988: “The Russians had never before seen the invasion of Czechoslovakia portrayed from the point of view of its citizens. They had seen some of the exact footage we used of the 1968 Russian invasion, but they had always been told that the citizens of Prague were weeping for joy because the Russians had come to save them.

“So I can tell you, it can be a serious thing, bringing up a potent subject in a potentially volatile situation.”

“Quills” is the latest example of Kaufman’s interest in what he describes as “people who push the outside of the envelope,” citing a famous catch phrase from his 1983 film “The Right Stuff,” about the early days of the space program. “To me, there’s an element of sanity that the dreams of going to the extremes give us.”

Kaufman has stretched the envelope a few times himself. His first films were made far from Hollywood, in his native Chicago and then in San Francisco. This was in the early 1960s, long before independent film was an established marketing niche.

“Phil doesn’t make very many movies,” observes actor-director Ed Harris, who won high praise for his performance as John Glenn in “The Right Stuff.” “And I think when he does decide on something it’s a very, very important thing to him. He collects people around him that he really wants to work with and that have the same passion for the material that he does. Hence, you have a very focused set and it’s almost a family kind of a deal.

“There’s a sense of wanting to surpass what you may have done in the past. He gives you a lot and you want to give it back to him.”

Kaufman is known for creating an intimate atmosphere on the set, which may have something to do with the freedom his actors have often felt to uncover themselves for his camera, both emotionally and physically. Rush spends the last 15 minutes of “Quills” in the buff and there are famously sexy episodes in both “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” with Lena Olin and Daniel Day-Lewis and in “Henry & June” with Uma Thurman and Maria de Madeirosh. None of these scenes, however, has the coy, smirking tone of a celebrity strip show staged for our benefit; they play instead as moments of real intimacy.

“There’s a privacy about Phil and he brings that to his work,” agrees producer Robert Solo, who hired Kaufman in 1978 to direct an urban new-age adaptation of Don Siegel’s classic small-town science-fiction chiller “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” “If you have entered his realm, you’re going to be OK. You’re going to be private with him. So therefore there’s a kind of easy, very personal relationship between him and the actors. There’s a lot of trust.”

This group-bonding instinct is reflected on the screen, as well, in the tight groups of people that often coalesce in Kaufman’s films, as congenital outsiders unite in a common purpose against the society at large: From the James/ Younger band of outlaws in “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid” (1972) to the stranded Arctic explorers and their Eskimo hosts in “The White Dawn” (1974), from the New York street gangs in “The Wanderers” (1979) to the cowboy test pilots and astronauts in “The Right Stuff.”

Kaufman’s work has often won strong critical support, but he has made only 11 films in the past 35 years, with long gaps between projects. “Quills” is his first major release since “Rising Sun” in 1993. Walrus & Associates Ltd., his production company, which is run as a close-knit family enterprise by Philip, wife Rose and his son Peter, has actively developed almost a dozen projects in that intervening seven-year period: an adaptation of the Caleb Carr bestseller “The Alienist”; biographical films about Liberace and 1930s jazz musician and author Mezz Mezzrow; a true-life spy thriller about Aldrich Ames, and more.

‘We’re always working on something,” Peter Kaufman says. “Phil’s always either writing or working with writers. If you could see our offices, they’re just packed with scripts and storyboards.” But so far none of those projects has gotten off the ground.

The sheer range and variety of the projects may have been an obstacle at times. Whereas some directors seem to benefit from being strongly associated with certain kinds of themes and subjects, Kaufman’s choices have been, to put it mildly, eclectic.

Notes Doug Wright: “He’s done so many compelling films, but nobody associates all those wonderful films with the same director because they’re all so different. He’s definitely an artist and not a brand name.”

As Kaufman himself says, “I’m not the kind of moviemaker who makes a first film at 18 and then proceeds to make the same film over and over again for the next 50 years.”

Producers who respond to Kaufman’s work tend to recognize qualities of wit and imagination that can applied to almost any genre. “It wasn’t so much that I thought of him in terms of science fiction,” Solo says of the decision to approach Kaufman for “Body Snatchers.” “But I had seen ‘Great Northfield’ and ‘White Dawn.’ They were directed in a kind of not-straight-on style, something I found stimulating and disturbing.”

Kaufman’s flair for off-center imagery paid off almost on a scene-for-scene basis in “Body Snatchers,” Solo says. “Phil created an overall feeling of paranoia, and he communicated it to the audience with offhand things that had no obvious relevance to the story--little cuts like a phone cord withdrawing into the wall.”

After hitting the wall on so many adventurous projects, Peter Kaufman admits that he was startled when “the studio came to Phil with this Marquis de Sade project. This is the kind of thing we’re usually trying to sell to someone else, and they’re saying, ‘You’re crazy, no one will go see it!’ ”

For Mechanic, however, the choice made perfect sense: “This was a high-quality piece and also a dangerous piece, and when you are looking for a director who has a sense of humor and can deal with sexuality, it isn’t a long list.”

For the record, none of the creators of “Quills” think their film is suitable for children, with or without a compliant “adult guardian.” Both Philip and Peter Kaufman expressed surprise and some discomfort when the film managed to snag an R rating. In fact, when the picture screened at the Telluride Film Festival in September, Peter said he tried to fend off a woman who was taking her young children in to see it.

Wright sympathizes with Peter’s impulse, but adds, “As a writer, I’m not going to limit the kind of material I choose to pursue because of slack-jawed parents who are shirking their responsibilities. To base policy on people like that would severely limit art and reduce its function in the culture.

“To say that Sade should be read is not to suggest that his view of the world is a tenable one. It’s just that he is the opposition, and it’s good to know the opposition.”

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For Rush, the marquis was, among other things, “a notorious celebrity, very much in the modern mold, but one of the first.”

When he was researching the role, Rush dug into Sade’s past, learning that he had been expelled from the household of a “ruthlessly practical and antisocial mother who packed him off to live with his uncle.” The actor then approached a Freudian psychoanalyst and laid out what he had learned, asking, “What would you say about this guy if you had him as a patient?’ The shrink’s response was spine-chilling, Rush says, “because it had a surprising amount of resonance with certain actors and show business people that I know.

“He said, ‘This is a narcissistic personality, driven by the fear of being unlovable to the mother. He is building a wall to sort of push the world away, developing his power to charm and beguile, as if to keep the world from finding out that he is empty and tumbling into that abyss.’ ”

Rush says he also came to a broader understanding of the term “sadism” that seemed to be related to the film’s political concerns: “It is about kicking out at the world. The sense is, ‘I want to hurt you, to challenge you, to question you, because it gives me pleasure.’ ”

For Kaufman, the marquis’ “notorious celebrity” had some surprising contemporary echoes: “Let us not forget that Lenny Bruce died for our sins. All the terrible words that he was hounded to his death for using are now the standard fare of every stand-up comedian. For me the marquis is often outrageously funny, and it often seems that you only get at the truth with humor, or at least that’s one of the main ways.

“The question is, can we learn from dealing with the extremes? There is something to be said for the frailty of human nature and for how interesting that in fact is.”