‘Iguana’ Lets Actors Stretch

After director Michael Radford made “1984,” his acclaimed movie version of George Orwell’s allegorical novel--the film was released in 1984--he was offered a big Hollywood movie. Before he made his decision whether to take the film, Radford went to his mentor, the late Oscar-winning director Fred Zinnemann (“From Here to Eternity”) for advice.

“He said to me, ‘Michael, you are at the crossroads. Either you want mink coats and the Cadillacs or you don’t want the mink coats and the Cadillacs; you have to decide,”’ Radford recalls. “I thought, ‘What will I do with mink coats and Cadillacs? I like making pictures. I don’t want to make zillions of dollars. I want freedom.’ Obviously, I want a public, but if it is a question of balancing freedom and cash, I would go for freedom every time.”

He asked Zinnemann if he had ever made that choice. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah. I did make that choice. I went for the mink and the Cadillacs. My wife has expensive tastes.’ I said, ‘Which movie was it, Fred?’ You know what he said, and with a bitterness? ‘Oklahoma!’ He said it took him seven years to recover.”

So Radford turned down the movie. That choice came to him again years later. After he received a best director Oscar nomination for his work on the enchanting 1994 Italian art-house hit “Il Postino,” which starred his friend, the late comedian Massimo Troisi, Radford says he was offered “everything.” But he opted to stay the course. Instead of going to Hollywood, he made the downbeat British drama “B. Monkey,” which barely made a ripple with critics and audiences.

“Dancing at the Blue Iguana,” which opens today, is his first Hollywood film. But it’s definitely not for one of the major studios (the film is a co-release of Moonstone Entertainment and Lions Gate). Shot on a shoestring budget in 23 days, “Blue Iguana” is aimprovised drama about the lives of several women who work in a San Fernando Valley strip club.

Darryl Hannah plays Angel, a dumb but sweet blond who wants to become a foster mother. Sandra Oh is Jasmine, a clandestine poet who finds love at a coffeehouse poetry reading; Jennifer Tilly is Jo, a dancer who finds herself pregnant; and Sheila Kelley plays Stormy, a moody dancer who has had an incestuous relationship with her brother (Elias Koteas). Not only did the actresses choose their costumes and props, they even hung out at strip clubs.

During a recent interview at a funky old West Hollywood apartment where he was staying, Radford, 55, explains that it was easy to find actors who wanted to participate in such an unusual project. “The desire to do this film was based a little bit on the fact that I have cast many movies in my time, and actors come in with such qualities and such training and can only give a fraction of what they are capable of. I think improvisation is great training for any actor, because it teaches you not to be self-conscious.”

Kelley, who is one of the film’s producers, and David Litner had written a script about strippers in the early ‘90s. She had shown the script to Radford before he did “Il Postino.”

He was interested, and Kelley and Litner continued to refine the script. After many delays caused by Radford’s schedule as well as by financing, Radford decided to throw out the script and do it as an improvisational film.

Casting was done at Kelley’s Beachwood Canyon home. Radford auditioned the actors in groups of 10. “I devised a system that I was a documentary filmmaker and they were characters,” Radford says.

“I asked them to come in with a character and stay with the characters. I would talk to them one at a time and interview them. Everyone [in the group] could participate and be part of their lives. I would put them together and make them do little improv sketches. I got kind of a sense of who could do this and who was constrained by it.”

Hannah says that a lot of the actors wanted to stay at the audition all day. “They loved it because it was a chance for them to bring something [to a part], other then the fact they could speak English and read the words on a page.”

Notes Oh: “From the very beginning, for me, I felt extremely and really connected to it. It was really a great experience for a lot of people, especially me. I had done a lot of improv before.”

After the casting was completed, Radford rented a theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. “I had five months of rehearsal,” he says, “but that is such a short time.... For the first two weeks, you are just playing theater games, stripping away self-consciousness, any desire to act.”

After strengthening the group with the theater games, Radford asked everyone to select a character. “I talked to the actors about being the characters,” he says. “Then we started to do character work. We would try to think of a simple dilemma that each of the characters would find themselves in and grow from that.”

Radford, a former documentary filmmaker, shot all the rehearsals with a digital camera. “Those tapes, in a sense, in some ways are more powerful than the movie because they are so intense,” he says. “I am there with a camera and they are completely oblivious to me. I collected about 55 hours of this material.”

Then he gave his actors a week off and he sat down and analyzed what he had recorded. “I extracted from all the scenes what I thought were relevant and interesting. A lot of those scenes lasted 40 or 50 or 60 minutes. I boiled it down to the essential and wrote it down in a script.”

He gave the script to the crew so they could start building the set, and then he gave it to the actors, with the caveat that it was more of an outline than a bible.

Radford, says Hannah, is the bravest director she has worked with in her 20-year career. “To make a film and not have any idea what shape it is going to take and put your faith in the actors.... Most people use actors as models, essentially. To actually use them creatively is just incredibly brave and totally nuts.”

The entire experience was thrilling for the actress, who upon completing the film starred for Radford in London’s West End revival of “The Seven-Year Itch.”

“It was possibly the most creative experience in my career,” says Kelley, adding that it has been difficult to do traditional projects since “Blue Iguana.”

“I think a lot of the reason why people wanted to do a project like this is that it allows you to enter a very dangerous place, a very dangerous reality, and you feel there are no parameters,” she says. “The process is truly life-altering creatively.”

But it also could be maddening. Kelley jokingly refers to the experience as “The Agony and the Ecstasy at the Blue Iguana.”

“Michael Radford--sometimes you didn’t know if you wanted to punch him or hug him. He’s very enigmatic and a hard person to figure.”

“We got into a big fight,” says Oh. “Even though he was the director, I felt much more of an equal standing with him as an actor because we were coming up with this stuff.... You fight so hard to get your story line fleshed out.”

Kelley, Oh and Hannah say they can’t wait to do another movie in this method. And neither can Radford.

“Maybe the structure isn’t quite as story-oriented as this town would want,” he says. “But the thing I am most proud of is the intensity of the performances. The second thing I am proud of is that I think this is a film women really relate to. This film has got to me in a way no other film ever has.”