The Tricky Art of Reading the Heart’s True Fortune

In palmistry, the simian line is relatively rare. A single line that traverses the entire palm from left to right, it supposedly indicates that a person’s heart and mind are hopelessly intertwined. So when Lynn Redgrave pointed out to Linda Yellen, director of the ensemble relationship drama “The Simian Line,” after she was cast that Redgrave actually had a simian line, it seemed like a sign of fate.

It was more than a little appropriate for a film with touches of the otherworldly. In “The Simian Line,” which opens today as the first release from Gabriel Film Group, twosomes gathered at a Halloween dinner party in New Jersey are shaken when a fortuneteller played by Tyne Daly announces that one of the couples will be finished by the year’s end. One of the couples, unseen by all but Daly’s character, is a pair of ghosts from the early 1900s, played by William Hurt and Samantha Mathis.

The cast is filled out by a multigenerational mix of veteran actors and well-known faces newer to acting: Redgrave and Harry Connick Jr. as live-in lovers, Cindy Crawford and Jamey Sheridan as their upwardly mobile neighbors, Monica Keena and Dylan Bruno as young rockers in love, and Eric Stoltz as a social worker who makes a comically unexpected visit.

The germ of the story was born when Yellen, who was going through a breakup, couldn’t help but wonder whether insecurities dot all relationships--young, old or possibly even in the afterlife. “The more I started to investigate with people I knew, friends who seemed like they had perfect marriages, I realized that everyone does” have doubts, she says.

Yellen came up with some rough ideas for characters and a story, and brought them to an eclectic group of actors whose work she admired, although she knew none of them beforehand, to collaborate on the script and flesh out the characters.The actors picked their characters’ names and backgrounds, and Yellen gave each cast member a five-page biographical questionnaire, asking everything from their character’s favorite color to their fears and dreams and relationship history, which the actors would share with each other only if their characters were appropriately intimate. Yellen incorporated the answers into the screenplay, revising the dialogue with the actors, encouraging them to ad-lib during the shoot. It was “like being on a high wire,” Mathis says.

“Very often, what they come up with is even better,” Yellen says of the cast. “I’m always looking for that moment of freshness or spontaneity.”

It helped that Yellen has worked successfully before with ensembles, on the Showtime films “Parallel Lives” and “Chantilly Lace.” Don’t call it improvisation, though. “I hate that word,” Yellen says. “It’s a very confusing word, in that [how] it’s used by someone like Altman is different than the way that I use it, or Cassavetes.”

Since Yellen and her writing partner, Michael Leeds, who share a story credit, considered the cast members to be co-creators, “The Simian Line’s” screenplay is credited to a pseudonym: Gisela Bernice. Yellen first coined the name for “Chantilly Lace,” when she found out that the Writers Guild of America limits the number of writers who can be credited on a film. Gisela is Yellen’s grandmother’s first name and Bernice is her mother’s.

The film, budgeted at less than $5 million, was shot in 12 days with two cameras on location in New Jersey in January 1999. The actors, who worked for considerably less than their usual rates, had no trailers and all shared the same dressing room in a second-floor bedroom of one house. Long working days outdoors in the freezing cold and on the ferry to Manhattan resulted in almost the whole cast and crew coming down with colds or the flu, and Crawford, four months pregnant, battled morning sickness.

“Everyone was there to really do the work,” Mathis says. “We were all there, on call, to be in a scene on any given moment.” The cast quickly bonded, which carried over into the filming. “Linda wisely borrowed [from] the relationships we established,” says Crawford, whose joking around with Connick, who sang to the cast between takes, translated into more of a flirtation between their characters than was originally planned.

While putting the film together in New York, Yellen visited the small town of Weehawken across the Hudson River, where many of the crew she hired lived because of the inexpensive rents and short ferry ride to the city. The historic town, with old Victorian houses overlooking a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline, struck her as a perfect setting for “The Simian Line.” “It seemed to be that if the Big Apple is just beyond the reach, so, maybe, is our true contentment and love,” she says.

Yellen’s impulse was validated when she discovered in her research that Weehawken is supposedly riddled with ghosts. However, the quiet, mostly residential town has traditionally resisted filming, especially on the streets with New York in the background. Because of the film’s small crew and short shooting schedule and her determination, Yellen won approval to shoot there.

At the center of the film’s story is the May-December romance of Redgrave and Connick, a reversal of the older man-younger woman couplings usually seen in Hollywood films.

“Isn’t it refreshing?” Redgrave interjects.

Yellen notes that people tend to point out the age difference of that couple, but not of Crawford and Sheridan or Hurt and Mathis. “It’s the way we’re geared as a society,” Yellen says. “It was something for me to explore because I have in my life been with younger men in a couple of cases and I was never very comfortable with it.”

Adds Redgrave, “We accept men far too old cavorting with girls who could be their [daughters], and as a society we sort of say, ‘Oh, well, a man has to’ when women get older. And it’s an essential put-down of women, I think, to think that women lose their allure because they gain a few wrinkles.”

Another welcome surprise in the film is the nuanced performance from Crawford, who hasn’t made a movie since her maligned debut in the 1995 action film “Fair Game.” “The Simian Line,” she says, was the first interesting acting offer she’s received since. Yellen had seen Crawford on television and at charity events, and was always struck by her “naturalness and sincerity,” she says. “And I felt that if I could bring that out, that that would be wonderful to play against the fact that she’s an extraordinarily beautiful woman.”

Crawford was initially hesitant, but she was persuaded by Yellen’s confidence in her, the convenience of a mere two-week shoot near her husband in New York, and the opportunity to be part of an ensemble with creative input, rather than having to carry a picture. Working with Yellen beforehand, Crawford imagined her character as the person she might have been had she not gone into modeling.

Mathis had to contend with playing not only a ghost, but one who is a cocktail-swilling flapper from the 1920s. To prepare, Mathis watched a number of pre-Production Code films to capture the right New York accent and to come up with vocabulary for her character.

The production used several consultants on astrology, palmistry and clairvoyance, and many in the cast shared an interest in the supernatural.

Daly, who read cards for her cast mates to get into her part, even predicted Redgrave’s Golden Globe win for “Gods and Monsters,” which Redgrave jetted off to accept during the shoot.

Yellen believes people are deeply affected by the past, whether in the form of actual spirits trying to communicate or simply certain feelings being evoked. “Having researched and done this film, I’m much more open to the many things that we don’t understand,” she says.

She could not have foreseen, however, that after Sept. 11 there would be another presence felt in the film: the World Trade Center towers, which appear in the background six times.

Although she considered digitally removing the buildings, she nervously decided it was appropriate to leave them. At New York screenings, she says, audiences have applauded at the sight of them.

“This is so much a movie about ghosts and the past,” she says. “I feel I’ll never get a chance again to shoot a movie with the towers, and to get rid of them would be like throwing away pictures of your grandfather who died.”

Although Yellen has had her palm read before, she hadn’t heard of the simian line until a young assistant on one of her films told her that although he dated a lot of women, his relationships would probably never work out. She asked why, and he said because he has the simian line. “Suddenly I thought, ‘My God, what a wonderful metaphor for what I was trying to tell,’” she says.

“Don’t we all have problems separating the heart from the head?”