Making Friends With Claustrophobia

When Alfred Hitchcock was preparing to make “Dial M for Murder” in 1954, the big question was how to turn the hit play into a hit movie. Director and former film historian Peter Bogdanovich recalled Hitchcock’s solution, imitating the suspense master’s phlegmatic drawl: “Doooon’t make it cinematic. Just shoot it.” Bogdanovich, who interviewed Hitchcock in 1963, continued: “When I asked why he didn’t open it up, Hitchcock said he didn’t believe if you had a successful play that you should fuss around with the construction. And it didn’t seem to hurt ‘Dial M for Murder,’ which took place almost entirely in one apartment.”

Bogdanovich brought up Hitchcock while discussing his latest directorial effort, “The Cat’s Meow,” which opened Friday and which also takes place primarily in one location. A fact-based story about the mysterious death in 1924 of Hollywood producer Thomas Ince aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, “The Cat’s Meow” is one of several recent films that squeeze maximum dramatic tension from a minimal amount of space.

“Panic Room,” directed by David Fincher, depicts a single mom (Jodie Foster) and her daughter hiding in a high-tech cubbyhole after thieves invade their New York apartment. Ethan Hawke’s directorial debut “Chelsea Walls,” which opens Friday, is set entirely in Manhattan’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.

Last year’s “Final,” a futuristic thriller starring Denis Leary and Hope Davis, was filmed at a former Connecticut psychiatric hospital by actor-turned-director Campbell Scott. In “Tape,” also from last year, three former friends (Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, Uma Thurman) spend the entire movie sequestered in a seedy motel room while they revisit a traumatic high school incident. For the haunted insane asylum drama “Session 9,” writer-director Brad Anderson found all the atmosphere he needed in an abandoned Victorian-era hospital outside Boston. “The Anniversary Party,” Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming’s satiric look at neurotic show-biz relationships, takes place during a party at a single Hollywood Hills home.

Other single-setting indie features include last fall’s “The Business of Strangers,” in which a corporate executive (Stockard Channing) and her just-fired assistant (Julia Stiles) play psychosexual mind games while stuck overnight in an antiseptic airport hotel. The politically charged ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” unfolds within the confines of a Spanish orphanage.

Actors have always loved single-location films: They don’t have to compete with the scenery (see related story, Page 19). Resourceful directors also enjoy the challenge of a static setting. Observed Bogdanovich, “There’s something about the unity of place and time and circumstance, which the Greeks knew about and which certainly applied in ‘Cat’s Meow.’” During an overnight cruise from San Pedro to San Diego, Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard), Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst) and Hearst (Edward Herrmann) party through the night with a gaggle of Hollywood hangers-on, then wake to find a dead man on board.

Filming off the coast of Greece and shooting interior scenes on a Berlin sound stage, Bogdanovich wanted to create the illusion of a single setting and asked writer Steven Peros to compress the screenplay so that all key scenes would transpire on the yacht.

“Enclosures--a ship, a hotel, a train ride--are very good for drama,” Bogdanovich said. “I think it increases the audience’s suspense. It’s not coincidental that Agatha Christie would use that sort of thing. In ‘Cat’s Meow’ you have a single location, but it’s traveling, which gives the story a certain momentum.”

Writer David Koepp came up with the idea for “Panic Room” when he moved to New York in 1999 with his family and started renovating a four-story brownstone.

“I realized ... this is a cool setting for a thriller,” said Koepp, who a few years earlier had read about hidden, impenetrable “safe rooms” to which residents could retreat in the event of a home invasion or kidnapping attempt. “It just seemed like such a great paranoid thing: There’s this tiny space within this great vertical space that’s narrow and tall and kind of confining on its own, but it still gives you great visual opportunities like skylights and stairwells.”

Koepp has scripted his share of epic-scale pictures, including “Jurassic Park,” but he enjoyed working within the constrained universe of “Panic Room.” “It definitely increases the dramatic tension,” he said, “and it also forces you as the writer or David Fincher as the director into more creative choices because you’re limiting the number of colors you can paint the thing with.”

“Devil’s Backbone” director Guillermo del Toro edited together four locations to create the Santa Lucia school, which houses orphans whose parents have been killed by Franco’s Republican forces. For exteriors, a “dummy” building with no interior was built on a vast, empty plain outside Madrid. Said Del Toro, “I wanted to use the location metaphorically to get across the idea that Spain was so isolated in 1939--there’s this great quote about that war, ‘Spain was a peninsula that turned into an island’--so I wanted this feeling of isolation.”

Del Toro also populated his stressful institution with a cross-section of Spanish society. “I wanted to create a micro-universe, which Hitchcock did so well in ‘Lifeboat,’ where you’ve got the high-society people, the working class and, it turns out, one Nazi all on this one lifeboat. You get the whole social strata.”

The school’s hybrid architecture served to subtly symbolize Spain’s tumultuous history, Del Toro said. “I wanted a building that had different parts--Romanesque arches, then steel grids holding up the walls that were probably built in the ‘20s, so you get this sort of Frankenstein building.”

“Backbone’s” story concerns the vengeful ghost of a murdered boy. In the best haunted-house tradition, the school’s secrets are hidden behind, and within, a labyrinth of enclosures. “We wanted to keep finding spaces within the space,” the director explained, “so we go underneath the boys’ beds, the closet in the hall, the basement, the locker.”

Ethan Hawke had a different sort of ghost story in mind for “Chelsea Walls.” Rattling off the names of famous Chelsea Hotel residents such as Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe as well as “live hard, die young” Sex Pistol and heroin addict Sid Vicious, Hawke mused, “I’ve always thought that the Chelsea Hotel is full of ghosts, with all these lives passing through there. One of our hopes in making the movie was to make it feel like a ghost story, in a strange way.”

To ensure an authentic look and feel, Hawke had Kris Kristofferson, Uma Thurman, Robert Sean Leonard, Steve Zahn and other cast members play some scenes in rooms untouched by set decorators.

“If you’re a big studio and try to make a movie at the Chelsea, they’d charge you an arm and a leg,” Hawke said. “The people who live there and the hotel staff are so friendly to any kind of experimental art form that we were able to shoot in actual rooms that belong to residents.”

Hawke, Thurman and Leonard also starred last fall in “Tape,” which was shot for about $100,000 in six days on a New York sound stage dressed to look like a bland Lansing, Mich., motel room. Director Richard Linklater said, “The location is really what it’s about--the movie could have been called ‘Stuck in a Motel Room’--because you, the audience, and two of the three characters would really like to be out of there. I liked the trapped-ness of it.”

Keeping the set simple allowed the actors to focus on performance, Linklater said.

“It was kind of exhilarating, because, say, it’s a 12-hour day: They were seriously acting 10 of those hours.” The ratio is roughly the reverse in a normal movie, Linklater said: “You actually get to act maybe 45 minutes a day, two hours if you’re lucky.”

Created by, for and about actors, “The Anniversary Party” takes place in and around a sleek glass-walled house designed by L.A. architect Richard Neutra.

Leigh said, “Whenever we would think about the house for the couple that we wrote, it was always a mid-century modern house that we’d see in our mind.”

Leigh, who cast Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, John C. Reilly and other friends, said, “We wanted a glass house because there is something unprotected and exposed about these characters, and that seemed a perfect metaphor. The film’s about being exposed, it’s about people who live in glass houses.”

Inspired by “The Celebration,” Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogma film about a birthday party that turns ugly in the course of one drunken evening, Leigh appeared in “The King Is Alive,” a 2001 film about 11 European tourists who gradually go mad after their bus breaks down in the African desert. Leigh said she’s always enjoyed stories that force characters into a “pressure cooker” setting. “Then the characters all disintegrate and go to hell.”

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Hugh Hart is a regular contributor to Calendar.