Going out on a limb

NICOLE KASSELL is a film director -- she likes it best when people around her fill up the air.

So perhaps it made sense that the more animated the actress Kyra Sedgwick got, the more relaxed Kassell became. They were at lunch on the Upper West Side on election day. Although the actress-tiny Sedgwick in her cropped Chanel jacket didn’t ever get too terribly excited -- she was totally distracted, as most New Yorkers were, by the day’s unfolding events -- she spent most of the lunch violently mashing the ice in her ginger ale with a straw.

Sedgwick co-stars in Kassell’s first feature film, “The Woodsman.” Rolling off the festival circuit and into theaters just before the end of the year, it is already generating talk of an Oscar nomination for the film’s lead (and Sedgwick’s husband), Kevin Bacon. Bacon plays a pedophile recently released from a long stay in prison who takes a job in a lumberyard; Sedgwick plays his forklift-driving, tough-talking love interest. The film concerns the possibility of rehabilitation but also something more: At heart, it’s about damaged people finding or destroying intimacy.

The film had a rocky birth. When Sedgwick and Bacon arrived in Philadelphia for the 25-day shoot, it wasn’t even clear if there was enough money to allow the filming to begin, much less finish. The shoot stretched long after several early days’ worth of work were destroyed by negative damage.

“Then, there was the Nikki thing,” said Sedgwick of Kassell -- the cast had put itself in the hands of an unproven director, a recent product of New York University’s Graduate Film Program. “I had a lot of trepidation, and I’m sure everyone did.”

Risks and rewards

Sedgwick initially rejected the part. “I said no, but my agent, my manager, he said, ‘I think it’s a really great role,’ and I said, ‘Well ... whatever.’ So we met.”

Kassell took a risk too, putting herself at the mercy of working with a couple. “I had trepidation too!” Kassell said. “[But] they’re not the scandalous couple -- they’re not Bennifer.”

The two talk off each other nicely -- just as they did during their first meeting at a Starbuck’s, where both confessed their hatred for the coffee chain and left to find a greasy spoon.

Still, Sedgwick took a while to accept the role after Bacon had signed on to the project: “I don’t wanna be shoved down anyone’s throat.” And what if the couple, who have rarely worked on film together since meeting in 1988, were distracting -- or had, somehow, bad on-screen chemistry? “I had reservations about doing anything with Kev.”

What’s more, she said, “The Woodsman” offered Bacon “the potential to be really incredible in it, for it to be a tour de force for him, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.”

Sedgwick is a mother: She has one teenager, one ‘tween. Kassell, who is married to a doctor, is obviously in her third trimester, though not yet at the grimace-and-waddle stage. So what was it like for these two to undertake “The Woodsman,” particularly Kassell, who became pregnant after spending years on a film steeped in the emotional life of a child molester?

“There’s never a ‘good’ time to get pregnant,” said Kassell, crossing her arms on the table. She smiled. “And I would kill anybody that would come near my children.” One of her biggest fears, she said, was that she would be taken to task for bringing a portrait of a child molester to theaters. “That was one criticism that I was afraid of -- ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you don’t have kids!’ I haven’t really gotten that.”

She also doesn’t “get” film directors who have made their reputation by goading or torturing great performances out of actors. Kassell’s set wasn’t like that. She doesn’t play games, and she doesn’t hide out at the monitor.

“I hated the video village, I had to be right there,” said Kassell. “I believe I have to go through what the actor goes through.” “That was very touching,” Sedgwick added. But both Kassell and Sedgwick refuse to classify this nurturing on the set as a “woman” thing.

“I don’t really do well with negative reinforcement,” Kassell said as she warmed her hands on a silver teapot. “I’ve heard of directors yelling at actors -- but it’s manipulative.”

Sedgwick recalled when she and Bacon first read the script with his role in mind. “We sort of rolled our eyes, thinking, ‘Oh, God, that’s definitely not something you’re going to want to do.’ ”

She acknowledges that “there’s probably a lot of mothers who wouldn’t do this [movie]. I’ve never hid things from my children. They know that there are people like this who exist.... They live in New York, and you can’t not talk to your children about not letting people touch them in a certain way. And they feel empathetic to the victims.

“But in terms of making the film? If I didn’t think that Walter” -- Bacon’s character -- “was trying desperately to get better, that this was someone who was trying to fight these feelings, to be in recovery,” Sedgwick said, “if I didn’t think that that was the, I don’t want to say ‘message,’ but maybe motivation of the film, I wouldn’t do it. It’s not evil for evil’s sake. There’s films that I won’t go to, or I do and I think ‘Wow, that was evil all the way through,’ and it made me angry and it made me sad to be in this world and sad to be a human being -- and this is not that movie. That would be a movie I wouldn’t make.”

Others, however, disagreed and offered intensely negative reactions when they learned about the nature of “The Woodsman,” which is based upon the play by Steven Fechter. Sedgwick said she would insist: “Well, you’ll have to wait till you see it.”

Working through it

The set’s close-knit atmosphere probably prevented the cast and crew from getting swallowed in the dark material.

“For me, the day we shot that park-bench scene was really hard,” said Kassell, recalling a moment when Bacon’s character approaches a young girl.

Kassell conceded that it felt a little, well, creepy to audition young girls as potential molestees -- even though more than 20 Philadelphia girls lined up to audition. “I was shocked that that many girls showed up,” she said. “They all knew what it was about; that was important to me.”

And the lingering shots of children in playgrounds that signal Bacon’s conflict with his past? “The kids in the schoolyard -- I just felt so bad.”

The opera singer Renee Fleming tells an anecdote in her new autobiography, “The Inner Voice.” In a private lesson with the famed soprano Renata Scotto, Scotto’s most heartfelt advice wasn’t about tone production or breath support. Instead, she said, “Have children,” insisting that motherhood took the terror out of performance: “I don’t live or die on the stage every night.”

Fleming promptly did, but did motherhood allow Sedgwick peace over her own performances? “I wish it had! I mean, I’m still the same, you know, in some ways I have been. I definitely had in the last few years, especially, a lightened load in terms of getting it right, that whatever comes out will be OK.”

Kassell is working on a new film, this one starring Michael Douglas as a bigamist. It will probably be said that Kassell has a thing for troubled men.

For now, as publicity ramps up before “The Woodsman’s” release, Kassell is happy to be back with her cast. She feels a little jealous of actors, she confesses -- they get to jet off to the next shooting and make maybe four films a year, but a director must work more slowly and often feels the loss of set intimacy more intensely than the actors.

“I think I started ‘Cavedweller’ ” -- a film by Lisa Cholodenko, from a novel by Dorothy Allison -- “the next day,” said Sedgwick. “Kevin went straight into something else.”

But Kassell was left with her edits for months. “I finally called Kevin -- or Kevin called me,” she said. “I had terrible separation, but I didn’t want to be needy!”

Sedgwick laughed. They left lunch together, walking north on Broadway past the Godiva store, both checking endless messages on their cellphones, engrossed, but together.