He’s flexing his directing

Scottish director Paul McGuigan was filming a BBC documentary about heroin addicts in Newcastle, England, when Hollywood called asking if he would be interested in directing “Wicker Park,” a remake of French director Gilles Mimouni’s romantic mystery “L’Appartement.” Starring Josh Hartnett, Diane Kruger and Rose Byrne, it opens Friday.

“One minute you’re watching a black-and-white TV in a crack house, and the next thing you know you’re sitting in the Chateau Marmont sipping margaritas with Josh Hartnett,” says the 40-year-old Scottish director over coffee on a rainy February night, in a cafe a few minutes from his house (which once belonged to Johnnie Walker.

Little known outside the United States, McGuigan had just finished “The Reckoning,” an adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s novel “Morality Play,” about a troupe of traveling medieval actors, which was released this spring. His 2000 film, “Gangster #1,” is a riveting, visually stunning portrait of a young London gangster played by Paul Bettany -- the kind of signature work that gets a director noticed.

McGuigan has a prescient instinct for up-and-coming actors -- he cast Bettany before he became known in “A Beautiful Mind” and gave German model turned actress Kruger, who went on to play Helen in “Troy,” her first English-language role. But “Wicker Park” came with Hartnett attached.

Nevertheless, he loved the script, about the true loves and obsessions of four characters in Chicago, and agreed to get on the next plane to meet with Hartnett.

But not before running across the street to Tower Records to pick up some CDs.

“You have to have a rhythm for something, a feel for it, and the way I do that is through music,” says the dark-haired, leather-jacketed, straight-talking McGuigan, who also had a spell directing music videos. “I said to him, ‘Look, let’s not bother talking so much about the script, let’s just drink a bit more and just have a laugh.’ ” They listened to Coldplay, the White Stripes and Rod Stewart. McGuigan told Hartnett: “ ‘If this feels like the kind of rhythm of the movie to you as well, then you know we’re on the same page.’ And of the 10 songs I picked, four of them are in the movie.”

McGuigan says that most of the propositions he gets tend to be dark, revenge-killer scripts, not Hollywood date movies. “ ‘Wicker Park’s’ a love story. It’s the most commercial film I’ve ever made,” he continues. “You’d never think that the guy who made ‘Gangster’ could make a PG-13.” But he says he realized when he read the script that it wasn’t your average dumb Hollywood date movie.

“I was so confused, I hadn’t a clue what was going on, and I love films like that,” he says. “It’s a very complex story. It was just told in a very nonlinear way -- it’s very European.”

He says that the producers were interested in him precisely because he wasn’t an obvious choice.

“They thought it was a really interesting idea to bring some new European with a kind of very strong visual sensibility to work with Josh,” McGuigan says, “because Josh was looking to do something with more of an independent feel to it rather than the big Hollywood movies he’d kind of done before.”

A teller of tales

McGUIGAN, a former photographer and documentary maker, says that in his early years he wanted to become a priest. “I grew up as a Catholic boy in western Scotland, and when I grew up I had a really bad speech impediment and I couldn’t really communicate very well,” says McGuigan, an enthusiastic talker who is still occasionally tripped up by a pronounced stutter. “I felt it was kind of interesting that the priest was always the one to say things, to tell stories. So I suppose that’s the evolution of me becoming a film director. It’s just another way of communicating.”

McGuigan says he storyboards everything to give himself and the rest of the filmmakers a blueprint, then throws it away and never looks at it again. “I’m really irritating to work with,” he says, “because I’m always changing things and seeing something else.” He leaves room for the actors to put in their two cents and has twice changed the ending of a film in the middle of shooting it. He works with the same director of photography, Peter Sova, on all his films, and the two have developed a shorthand way of communicating and a visual style.

“I hate just cutting to a close-up because now we’re getting serious about something,” he says. “I like for the actors to make their own close-up, basically for the camera to be moved by the actors, not the actors to be moved by the camera. I did documentaries for years, and you realize that your camera’s always slightly a beat behind everything, because you haven’t got a clue of what’s gonna happen next. It creates a sense of tension and uncertainty, and that’s what I like to do on set.”

McGuigan says that sometimes when he is stuck with what to do on set, he turns to music. “You always see me walking around with my headphones on before a take, trying to get a feel for the scene,” he says.

While shooting one pivotal scene, McGuigan says he found himself suddenly desperate to get rid of two pages of dialogue. “In rehearsal, I hated the dialogue,” he says. “There’s this big airport scene with like 500 extras and a big setup and the producers were looking at their watches and I thought to myself, ‘This just isn’t right.’ So I put my headphones on and I was listening to this Coldplay song, ‘The Scientist.’ ” He asked the actors to shoot the scene without dialogue, and watched it, headphones still on, secretly taping it. The scene became a wordless pas de deux choreographed to a Coldplay song.

“I think Paul is constantly trying to make departures,” said Hartnett by phone from New York, where he was celebrating his 26th birthday. “I think that’s why we get along. Paul’s a great guy, easy to talk to. He knows what he wants from a movie. He’s passionate. He got me interested.”

Hartnett’s character is a kind of innocent, traveling through a story in search of his long-lost love. “It didn’t turn out to be as much of an acting piece as I had hoped,” he says. “It’s kind of a plot-based movie, so it wasn’t really so much about the character. But it was a pretty emotional piece, and to kind of tap into the emotional honesty -- when you have an opportunity to kind of get back to the basics, or the reasons that you started or where you were when you started -- it kind of teaches you a lot. After this movie I felt I was in a much better place as far as acting goes.”

“Here’s the truth about Josh,” says McGuigan. “He’s a great actor not being allowed to spread his wings, really. He’s a really good-looking boy, he’s really tall, girls love him, but actually he’s a very serious young man who wants to be seen as a certain kind of an actor who takes on interesting roles. We shot a lot of this in Montreal, so we were like a little family. We’d all have been out all night drinking and he’d be first on the set. I’d be like Josh, if I was 24 years old making God knows what he’s making, I’d be wanting to be peeled off the ceiling every day.”

‘100% involved’

Hartnett is preparing to shoot another McGuigan movie, “Lucky Slevin,” which he calls “a stilted, fairy-tale version of gangland in New York,” with Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Kingsley. “He tends to take things very seriously and gets emotionally involved in what he’s doing,” Hartnett says of McGuigan. “It’s not all about separating himself from the project so he can see it best from the outside. He’s more just 100% involved, and that keeps the atmosphere on the set very about what we’re doing at the moment, very now. That’s really valuable, especially when you’ve worked with a lot of people who tend to stand back and not really care what you’re doing, care more about what the outcome is going to be.”

The actor turned down the multimillion-dollar opportunity to do three successive “Superman” movies and instead is trying to focus on more actorly, independent-style films. “I just decided I wanted to tell stories,” says Hartnett, who recently completed filming Petter Naess’ (“Elling”) “Mozart and the Whale,” in which he plays a young man with Asperger’s syndrome alongside Radha Mitchell. “I guess I think a lot of movies are just the same story over and over again, and I just got bored with it. I like to be out there trying to make things work even if they’re difficult to make right, you know?

“You can say what you want about ‘Wicker Park,’ but we tried to do something that had a different cadence to it. It didn’t reside in your typical Hollywood storytelling -- it almost floated above it. We were trying to get at something a little bit pure, I guess.”

McGuigan admits that making a love story was harder than he thought. And there are times, he admits, when he can’t believe he ever made one at all. “I feel like I should be in an AA meeting!” he says with a self-deprecating Glaswegian chuckle. “Standing up and saying, ‘My name is Paul McGuigan and I made a date movie. A chick flick!’

“I think romance is a hard thing to do. It’s a hard emotion to portray on film, a lot harder than portraying violence. You’re always walking a thin line, talking about love. If it wasn’t for movies, I wonder how we would have evolved as people who date and make love. We probably wouldn’t know what to do, because we take all our references from movies.

“When we say it hasn’t really worked out, what we mean is, it hasn’t really worked out the way it did for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. We get disappointed if our love life isn’t like in the movies. Because you’re constantly fighting the references that people expect, it’s really hard to make a movie about love.”