A Risky Change of Pace

Well before the transforming events of Sept. 11, there were indications that the winds of change had come to the movies, as several noteworthy directors broke away from their usual genres to try something different. Perhaps they had sensed that the time was right for turning away from the past--and hoped that audiences would be willing to go along with them.

So this year, Frank Oz transitioned from comedy (“Bowfinger” and “In & Out”) to heist films with “The Score”; Robert Rodriguez readjusted his skills for stylized action (“Desperado” and “From Dusk Till Dawn”) with the kid-friendly “Spy Kids”; the Hughes brothers (“Dead Presidents” and “Menace II Society”) found themselves working in the Hollywood mainstream for the first time with the Jack the Ripper thriller “From Hell,” in which they applied their talents for ghetto crime stories to the class-conscious Victorian era. Some transformations worked better than others: “Spy Kids” was a huge hit (a sequel is underway), but “From Hell” turned out to be a critical and commercial disappointment.

Regardless of recent successes or failures, the breakaway trend continues this holiday season as director Charles Shyer segues from romantic comedy (“Father of the Bride” and “Baby Boom”) to costume drama with “The Affair of the Necklace,” which opens Friday. Next, the usually light and breezy Cameron Crowe (“Jerry Maguire,” “Almost Famous”) moves over to the dark side with the intense psychological thriller “Vanilla Sky,” which opens Dec. 14. And director Darren Aronofsky, no stranger to darkness in his much-lauded indie films “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi,” recently began pre-production on his first studio film, “The Last Man,” a metaphysical sci-fi love story that pairs Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

What’s the motivation behind all this change? Directors say the appeal is both artistic and psychological.

“I wasn’t looking for anything like this, but risk is its own reward,” Shyer offered. He discovered the script for “The Affair of the Necklace” by UCLA film student John Sweet during a showcase reading at the Geffen Playhouse.

“Little did I know what was ahead of me,” Shyer said in a recent interview. “A costume drama is always a challenge. When your other works are from other genres, it is more of a challenge.”

Hilary Swank, best known for her gender-bending, Oscar-winning role in “Boys Don’t Cry,” does her own about-face as the real-life Jeanne De La Motte-Valois, the beautiful, determined young woman stripped of her royal title who fights to regain her birthright on the eve of the French Revolution. She schemes like a hero from an Alexandre Dumas novel to manipulate the widely hated Marie Antoinette (Joely Richardson) and Cardinal De Rohan (Jonathan Pryce), who’s obsessed with becoming prime minister. This game of sex, politics and revenge revolves around a dazzling diamond necklace.

“I had some worries and self-doubt,” Shyer said about making a costume drama. “I didn’t want to make an academic exercise or a historical museum piece like all those old Bette Davis movies. I wanted the audience to go back into the 18th century but not feel stiff or alienated. Emotions and desires, treachery, intrigue. These are what appealed to a guy from the Valley who didn’t know much about French history before [this] movie.”

After optioning Sweet’s script, Shyer and his former wife, Nancy Meyers (director of last year’s comedy hit “What Women Want”), set up the film with Alcon Entertainment, best known for smaller films such as “My Dog Skip.” (“Necklace” is being distributed by Warner Bros.)

“There were a lot of different issues for me,” Shyer said. “We had to make this for a real price, in the $20-million range, and we shot in Prague. All the other movies I made were shot in the U.S. and I worked with the same people. But in Prague, I worked mostly with a European crew--we spoke four languages on the set in addition to English. This was also the first movie that I wasn’t the screenwriter. On every other movie, if an actor asked me about a character, I knew the answer. So I immersed myself in research.”

In at least one sense, directing a costume drama was liberating for Shyer: He was able to leave the confines of the domestic environment and move the camera. “Comedy, to be honest, is spontaneous in many ways but is precise.... A movie like this allowed me to kick out and show that I had those [visual] chops. I let this movie evolve more than any other; storyboarding was more of a starting point; it was more free-floating.”

Oz too felt visually liberated with his fall film, “The Score,” the kind of gritty drama he was intentionally seeking. Robert De Niro plays a high-level professional thief who is cajoled by longtime pal and schemer Marlon Brando into stealing a scepter from the Montreal Customs House.

“With comedies, you have to be careful not to get too cinematic.” Oz explained. “Part of the joy of doing drama is you can use more of a sense of cinema. The idea is to be invisible in comedies. With ‘The Score,’ I could move for an overall tension in a broader sense. And I could use lighting more stylishly.”

Whether it’s simply a case of trying to recharge the creative batteries or redefining a career, directors, like actors, have long felt the need to break away from typecasting. Charlie Chaplin left the Tramp behind to make a very Ernst Lubitsch-like “A Woman in Paris” (1923). Frank Capra set aside his signature “Capra-esque” comedies to direct “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933), which drew comparisons to the exotic, erotic films of Josef von Sternberg.

Howard Hawks, one of the all-time great genre-busters--from screwball comedies to detective thrillers--directed his first western, “Red River,” starring John Wayne in 1948, and its magnificence raised the bar not only for the great western director John Ford, but also for Ford’s collaboration with Wayne. As for Ford, despite his reputation for westerns, he was a genre-buster himself who, of all things, directed the charming and funny “The Whole Town’s Talking” (1935).

Even Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, made the screwball comedy “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (1941), as well as the costume drama “Under Capricorn” (1949).

“Anyone can try anything, but can they do it?” asked critic Andrew Sarris, father of the American auteur theory. “There are so many variables there: a good script, a good cast.”

Cameron Crowe credits the pre-strike anxiety and activity earlier this year for this latest wave of genre-busting.

“People did get the opportunity to do movies that were different for them, because they were ready to go and people wanted to work,” Crowe said as he prepared for the release of “Vanilla Sky.” “There wasn’t a lot of time to think, rethink, over-think and not do something. People were forced to go with their first instincts. And movies got made comparatively on the spur of the moment.”

Crowe said that in some ways, “Vanilla Sky” was more personal than last year’s semiautobiographical “Almost Famous.”

“It has things I’ve always loved as an audience member but haven’t generated myself,” he said. “A bold character-based story that takes me back to my love of Ray Bradbury interior sci-fi that I hadn’t been able to write yet. This has boldness built into the structure rather than a boldness that the characters do.”

A remake of the 1997 Spanish cult thriller “Abre los ojos” (Open Your Eyes), “Vanilla Sky” stars Tom Cruise as a disfigured victim of a car accident trying to piece together fragments of dreams and reality in New York, while coming to terms with his disparate relationships with Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz.

“It’s a raw, emotional movie about the choices, consequences of casual sex, the representation of pop culture and looking at how the mind works,” Crowe said. “Dark, light, romantic comedy, gothic. For me, reimagining this fable was like flexing a muscle that had been ignored. The more I started using it, the more exciting it got creatively.” He adds that he thinks it’s a good time for the movie to be coming out: “As soon as I got up that morning on Sept. 11, I realized there were some very odd parallels in things that the movie says and shows.”

About the need for change in artistic choices, Crowe recalled something Jack Nicholson once said in an interview. “He always chooses what’s different because different may not be best, but in the end, it’s what audiences remember.”

For Allen and Albert Hughes, making “From Hell” was a positive and negative experience. Although they enjoyed immersing themselves in a different time and place, and shooting in Prague with well-known actors (Johnny Depp, Robbie Coltrane and Ian Holm), it was also sobering because the film did not perform as well as they had hoped at the box office.

“We did not realize that folks in middle America want to be spoon-fed,” Allen Hughes said. “People in the suburbs don’t want to connect the dots. Our sensibilities and America’s are obviously not the same. But it’s all blood under the bridge now.”

As far as persuading studios to let them break away from their customary genres or ranks, none of the directors interviewed for this story said it had been a problem.

“What I’ve noticed is that if you make a $100-million success, the studios think you have the Midas touch. The perception is you can do anything,” Hughes said.

In the case of Crowe, it helps having the support of Cruise as producer when he gives you the pick of his projects.

Traveling back and forth between independent and studio environments seems to be the goal of many directors today who look to the success of Steven Soderbergh, among contemporary directors the model of versatility--from the indie thriller “The Limey” to the upcoming star-driven heist flick “Ocean’s Eleven.”

Aronofsky’s goal in moving to bigger budget fare with “The Last Man” is to bring back the independent spirit of the ‘70s. “It’s really not that different from ‘Pi,’ which I consider sci-fi,” Aronofsky said. “There are more visual effects, but the themes are the same: searching for God, love, connecting with people. I’ve been thinking about ‘Pulp Fiction’ meets ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ with a strong love story.

“The scope is new but the process doesn’t feel like a big-budget studio film. I’m approaching it with independent chutzpah and watching the money.”

The native New Yorker, who will next bring his idiosyncratic touch to “Batman: Year One,” has been affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “It’s a brave new world and I’m trying to channel that. As someone being creative in this climate, you are influenced, and so is your audience. After the shock started to melt away, the first week or two I couldn’t read or write. Then, as I started to work again, I found myself wanting to go back to work.

“If I didn’t have that passion for the film, I wouldn’t be able to have that vibe again. That passion is no different whether you’re working on a $60,000 movie or a multimillion-dollar movie. That’s been rewarding about this process. If I didn’t feel that way, I’d go do something else like teaching.” *