Taking popcorn path

Director Carl Franklin does not want to be here. In fact, his wife -- who also happens to be the producer of his films -- is the only reason he is here.

Jesse B’Franklin persuaded her reluctant husband to do this interview to promote his latest film, “Out of Time.”

“I certainly was the one who convinced him to do it,” she sighs. And, she adds, “I rue the day.”

In the courtyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it becomes clear he’d rather be anywhere else but answering questions about himself and his movies. He doesn’t want a drink or an appetizer, he wants to get this over with.

He would especially like to avoid questions such as what it was like to re-team with Denzel Washington.

It turns out that Washington and Franklin’s reunion on “Out of Time” was not all that smooth. Seven years ago they worked together on the acclaimed drama “Devil in a Blue Dress,” lauded as an accomplished, sexy film noir tinged with social realism. Since then, much has changed for both men.

Franklin is now an established mainstream director -- far from his roots as a struggling American Film Institute student. Washington has won two Academy Awards, directed his first feature and is one of the few actors to receive a $20-million paycheck per movie -- a figure that represented nearly half the budget for “Out of Time.”

And it appears there were many clashes on the set between the two. According to Franklin, the tension stemmed from the constraints he put on the actors to achieve the stylized look he wanted for the movie.

The movie, to be released Friday, is a commercial thriller set in the balmy, palm-laden coast near Miami. Washington stars as a small-town police chief who, in the midst of a divorce from his ambitious detective wife (Eva Mendez), embarks on an affair with his married high school sweetheart (Sanaa Lathan). Washington’s character eventually becomes the focus of a murder investigation led by his ex-wife.

“In order for this to work, the pace had to be a really quick pace,” Franklin elaborates in a subsequent telephone interview. “That took precedence over the opportunity to ‘find your way as an actor.’

Although Franklin says Washington never told him how to shoot his movie, the actor had very strong opinions about how his own image was handled.

“We didn’t have hard feelings when we left the set, but there were flare-ups,” Franklin acknowledges.

Washington concedes by telephone that he may have been hard on Franklin, whom he describes as “a caring person and a sensitive man and ... not afraid to show that. I can be tough, and then I’d see that look in his eye and I’d say ‘I’m sorry.’ ... I am interested in making the best picture. People come together to make a film and there are all sides to a relationship. You do what you need to do to make the best film.”

But the way Franklin sees it, “Out of Time” is nothing more than “popcorn” fare -- the kind of picture that he is becoming best known for.

Since “Devil,” he has made a series of conventional Hollywood pictures that are neither critical favorites nor box office home runs. Many admirers wonder what has happened to the man who at one time directed sharp, character-driven dramas like “One False Move,” Franklin’s first real critical hit.

But Franklin likes to keep his movie career in perspective -- they are, after all, only movies. And he maintains a good facade in disappointment.

“Devil in a Blue Dress” never reached the heights of a comparable noir thriller, “L.A. Confidential.” That film, released two years after “Devil,” was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two.

Franklin picks his words carefully when reflecting on this. The releasing studio, Sony, did not campaign hard for “Devil,” mainly because the people who had green-lighted that picture were long gone as part of a regime change, he says, although in the end, “it all plays out the way it’s supposed to.”

But Don Cheadle, the star of Franklin’s 1988 AFI student film “Punk” as well as the trigger-happy gangster Mouse in “Devil,” says Franklin felt let down.

“I don’t think it was a surprise, but I do think he was disappointed,” Cheadle says. “He didn’t wear it on his sleeve. He would say it one on one, but he didn’t walk around with the chip.”

Franklin is an intensely sensitive and private man who, as his wife puts it, “doesn’t want to do a dog and pony show about his life and family.” He has been stung by past stories and, more important, they have hurt his family, Franklin says.

Franklin says he is proudest of his 1998 drama, “One True Thing” -- by far the most sentimental picture he has made. The film, which starred Meryl Streep as a cancer-stricken stay-at-home mom and Renee Zellweger as her dismissive, career-driven daughter, was a deeply personal project for the 54-year-old director, whose mother died of cancer in 1986. He said Anna Quindlen’s book, on which the film is based, prompted him to reevaluate his own mother.

“I read it on a plane and I couldn’t stop crying,” Franklin says. “In the same way that Jesse was discovering her mother late [in life], I did the same thing, but it was after my mother died. It was that....” His voice breaks as he chokes up. He pauses and regains his composure.

“It is the most meaningful movie I’ve ever made, but it is the one I don’t watch because it does a number on me,” he says. “I don’t think you will walk away from ‘Out of Time’ with any great life changing messages. People walked away from ‘One True Thing’ calling their mothers.”

Unfortunately, adult dramas like “One True Thing” tend to make little money at the box office -- an important factor in a Hollywood obsessed with opening weekends and the bottom line.

Directing, he says, is “tougher now because of the test screenings and movie-by-committee mentality and everything having to have a happy ending. It would be great if the environment was more like it was in the ‘70s.” But he adds. “I can’t complain. I’m living my dream, and less than 3% of the world’s population can say that.”

Although “One True Thing” garnered an Oscar nomination for Streep, it received mixed reviews and brought in only $23.3 million in domestic box office. “Devil” grossed $16 million.

Franklin says he agreed to do such “popcorn” fare as “Out of Time” and last year’s Ashley Judd thriller “High Crimes” because of the emotional toll “One True Thing” took on him.

“I needed to do something a little lighter in my own life,” Franklin says.

An intern for Corman

Franklin’s life has had its share of heaviness. His father died before he was born in Richmond, Calif., a blue-collar suburb of San Francisco. He had nine step-siblings, some from his father’s side and others from his mother’s. But the age gap was so large he grew up with one brother and one sister. His mother, who was partly blinded by a cleaning accident when she worked as a maid, was 42 when she had him and suffered through a complex, at times troubled relationship with Franklin’s stepfather.

He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1971 with a major in history. He had begun acting on stage there and left for New York, where he played minor roles in “Cymbeline” and “Timon of Athens” for a Shakespeare in the Park series. Eventually he came to Los Angeles and began acting in 1970s TV shows like “Good Times” and “Barnaby Jones.”

But he wanted to direct. So he enrolled in AFI and interned with famed schlock producer Roger Corman to learn. Then Jesse Beaton came into his life, and things started changing, personally and professionally.

Beaton, a spunky San Francisco native, was on the front lines of the burgeoning indie film scene in the mid- 1980s while working at Island Alive, a distribution company. There she helped oversee the acquisition, marketing and distribution of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “The Trip to Bountiful,” “Mona Lisa,” “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Bagdad Cafe,” and “River’s Edge.” She hired Franklin to direct “One False Move,” a thriller starring and written by Billy Bob Thornton.

It changed their careers.

Though “One False Move” received small, nearly underground distribution through now-defunct IRS Films, it garnered rave reviews and brought Franklin an Independent Spirit Award for best director in 1992. After “One False Move,” studios began sending him all kinds of scripts -- even a remake of Disney’s “That Darned Cat.”

By then Beaton and Franklin had fallen in love. It was she who suggested they adapt Walter Mosley’s novel “Devil in a Blue Dress” into a screenplay.

With “Devil’s” critical success, Franklin attracted the admiration of aspiring directors. Five years ago, he met 15 such directors at the Atlas Supper Club as part of the Independent Feature Project West’s Project Involve program, which seeks to increase the number of minorities working in the industry.

Franklin “encouraged us to go out and make films and that the way to be a director is to direct,” participant Mario de la Vega recalled.

“He told us you can’t just be passive. No matter how much of a reputation an actor has they need guidance, and that is your job,” says De la Vega, 31.

Franklin has not forgotten where he came from.

When “Devil in a Blue Dress” was released, he was host of a screening in his old neighborhood, Richmond, says Margaret Wilkerson, former dean of UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, who cast Franklin in his first university play.

“He did that in order to show younger people in that area that they could aspire to that kind of work,” she said. “I really appreciated him maintaining his connection to the community and the young people in it.”

But whether jaded by Hollywood or simply realistic, Franklin says the movie industry is a sink-or-swim business.

“Most of the people I have known who have done this business and been successful [have] an addiction -- they can’t not do it. If they don’t do it they go through withdrawals.... There is a lot of rejection at all phases of the process.”

Whether he fits that profile or not, Franklin has made clear he would much rather direct than talk about it.