Director’s thrill: a change of genre

Marc Forster says he doesn’t like to do the same thing twice.

After directing the gritty 2001 drama “Monster’s Ball,” for which Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar, he plunged into the 2004 period drama “Finding Neverland,” which was nominated for numerous Academy Awards.

Now, he’s turned his creative eye to a new genre: the psychological thriller. “Stay,” which opens Friday, is a moody, complex thriller starring Ewan McGregor as a New York shrink who tries to stop a young patient (Ryan Gosling) from killing himself on his 21st birthday.

But nothing is exactly as it seems in “Stay,” as McGregor’s Sam Foster finds his own perfectly ordered world beginning to crack as he delves into Gosling’s troubled psyche. Naomi Watts costars as Foster’s girlfriend, a former patient grappling with self-doubts.

“I try every time to have a different challenge in front of me,” said Forster. “My next film, ‘Stranger Than Fiction,’ is a comedy. I always admired Billy Wilder, who did ‘Double Indemnity,’ ‘Some Like It Hot’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ The thing is, if you constantly do over and over the same thing, let’s say for instance, Hitchcock, you perfect your craft. But I am more of a personality where I need to always start from scratch and re-create myself.”

Forster says that when he read David Benioff’s script for “Stay,” it lacked the surreal visual elements the director uses to illustrate the main character’s growing instability.

“When you read a script like ‘Monster’s Ball,’ the story is very powerful in the script,” he explains. “Here you are dealing with something very different. It is more about interpretation and the feeling you create and the dream you create -- in a sense, the altered reality -- where you want to transport the audience into. You have to figure it out visually and through sound and editing, all the tools filmmaking gives you.”

Before production began, Forster watched thrillers of the late 1960s and early ‘70s as well as Richard Lester’s 1968 romantic drama “Petulia,” which used unsettling flashbacks.

“I love those movies, but when you look at them, like ‘The Parallax View,’ I still don’t understand the ending, and with ‘Petulia,’ there is so much confusion about some of the movie. But there is sort of this feeling they create -- the style and the look -- where you think ‘Oh, my God, this is incredible.’ ”