With ‘Urbania,’ Jon Shear Has Reinvented Himself

“Urbania,” a young man’s harrowing odyssey in overcoming trauma, is an intense experience and so, it turns out, is an interview with the film’s director, Jon Shear. “The movie is about a man who has no control over his life--and I had no sense of control over the film while I was making it,” said Shear over a recent breakfast at a West Hollywood restaurant.

His movie, which has electrified film festival audiences across the country and opens Wednesday at selected theaters, has brought attention to its star, Dan Futterman, and to first-time director Shear.

“I had worked on it for three years; I knew what I wanted, and I just had to go with that. We had 18 days to shoot; we had to do six pages a day; and we had to get our locations, within an area of a couple of blocks in Greenwich Village, as we went along. It was shot like a bat out of hell,” he said.

Shear, whose boyish looks belie his 36 years, describes himself with a smile as “a lower-middle-class Jew from Brooklyn” and “one of those obnoxious kids who acted, wrote and produced at Harvard,” where he won prizes for writing and directing. But it was as a stage actor that he first made his mark. “I was at the right place at the right time: I got cast in plays like ‘Angels in America’ and ‘Six Degrees of Separation.’ In 1979, I was in the first play about child abuse, ‘Runaways,’ on Broadway.” Such strong material allowed Shear to discover the pleasure of energizing an audience.

While appearing in a developmental workshop of Daniel Reitz’s “Urban Folk Tales” by the Mark Taper Forum, he found himself envisioning it as a film that he wanted to direct.

“ ‘Urban Folk Tales’ was very linear, composed of seven scenes, and it would have to be completely re-imagined for another medium,” said Shear. “Reitz and I worked together for a year, and after that I continued on my own. Having played the role, I had the actor’s point of view on the material--that sense of free-fall the man is experiencing. What excited me was to try to take that subjective point of view and express the extremes of this man’s experience--of finding the love of his life and then losing it. This changes the way you look at the world, and the way the world looks to you. I wanted to show his vision of the world from inside him.”

Shear also wanted to preserve the folk tale quality of the play--”Folk tales seem patently absurd yet are true,” he said.

Consequently, in the man’s struggle to regain control of his life he encounters numerous bizarre situations. There are movies that are more graphic but few that are so sexually intense. It doesn’t become clear that Futterman’s Charlie is gay until 25 minutes into the film; by that time Charlie’s life has been so richly detailed, making it so easy to identify with him that his story ultimately transcends sexual orientation, even as the film reveals the darker side of being gay in America. Shear said at one screening a member of the audience called the film the “ ‘Network’ for the Year 2000,” in that Charlie arrives at a point where he’s mad as hell and won’t take it anymore. Yet “Urbania” moves beyond anger and desire for revenge, arriving at a place where an individual moves past self-absorption to generosity.

When it came to casting Charlie, Shear picked the actor who succeeded him in “Angels in America,” Futterman. Shear compares his performance to Hilary Swank’s Oscar-winning turn as Brandon Teena, the young woman who passed herself off as a young man, and the comparison is apt. Charlie is not pretending to be what he is not, but his rite of passage involves confronting the same kind of destructive forces that in Teena’s case proved fatal. The role demanded so much of Futterman, who’s a regular in the “Judging Amy” series and won plaudits as Robin Williams’ son in “The Birdcage,” that Shear felt gratified to hear him refer to “Urbania” as “our film.”

“Urbania” is a groundbreaker not only for its storytelling methods and its sexual candor but also in the way it was made. It was shot in super 16-millimeter, which was both economical and flexible and provided the kind of sooty color and grainy look appropriate to the film’s somewhat surreal quality, reflective of both the film’s urban legends motif and to Charlie’s feeling that his world is crumbling around him. Because “Urbania” has more than 1,500 cuts and because Super 16, with its small image, becomes degraded in negative cutting and also acquires a certain softness and heightened contrast in an optical blowup to standard 35-millimeter film, “Urbania” became the first Super 16-millimeter film to use the digital process as its blowup medium. Shear predicts that this approach will swiftly become commonplace, for it saves the filmmaker money while facilitating his control over the editing process and simplifying the post-production process.

Even in the middle of now marketing “Urbania,” Shear is already thinking about what he wants to do next. “I have five scripts I want to do, and I’m primarily working on two of them.” He would consider an acting role if it appealed to him, but explained, “It’s in directing that I’ve found myself.”