Character building

THIS is some of what went through Meryl Streep’s mind as she prepared to play a shrink who discovers that one of her patients is dating her 23-year-old son: She would have to gain weight, because “the woman should be round and she should be motherly.” She would have to wear nondescript clothes, because the therapist would “not care about labels.” She would “be groomed well, but not pay too much attention each day to the outfit. The outfit is the last thing. She has to read the journals she has to get through.”

She would care, however, about her jewelry, as “very specific compensation for getting older, not being able to get clothes that fit you and look nice anymore. So you wear a nice necklace, something that makes her cheerful in the mirror.” Streep then pondered whether the necklaces she picked -- bulky, beady and artsy -- made sense for a therapist. “She should like to wear interesting jewelry so the patient has something to look at,” Streep decided. “I know three shrinks who wear interesting jewelry, and I always thought, ‘What’s the idea behind it?’ ”

That led her to her daughter’s old kindergarten teacher, who wore bright red lipstick when the natural look was in vogue. “She said, ‘I always wear red lipstick because the children remember it years later.’ They would draw pictures of her with a big red smile.”

Streep did all this thinking for a romantic comedy, “Prime,” and she made other “character choices” too before shooting it, including picking a child’s painting to hang on the woman’s wall. But once the lights went on, she put her mind to rest, she said -- it was time then to “make a life,” to become the Upper West Side therapist who encourages a 37-year-old WASP divorcee (played by Uma Thurman) to go for it with a sensitive man she’s met until the facts dribble out that he’s an artist and from Brooklyn and Jewish and much younger....

Then Streep’s job is to react: to let her mouth droop, just not too much -- no mugging -- and to fiddle with those beads and do some business with a glass of water when this patient starts talking up her new beau’s wonderful anatomy.

Streep sometimes advises other actors, when she dares tell them anything, “You’re thinking too much.” She says, “You just live there and you hear the news and you try to erase. You don’t want any traces of the first sketch on your pad. You go back to Take 2. You’ve got to start at zero, blank. And it’s a kind of exercise in being alive. In a moment. In the moment. To get back there.”

And given that this is a comedy, she has to trust that “back there” will produce the immediate reward of such filmmaking, which is the laughter of the crew, even if it’s suppressed, and then you hope the real audiences react the same way, just without the suppressing.

Streep, at 56, describes her role in moviemaking as “like the flea hitching a ride on the buffalo” or, to mix metaphors, “a little fish” or, more to the point, like the violinist who has to wait “until Beethoven writes something.” She says she doesn’t plot out her career, if she ever did. “I just can’t do that. It’s like planning, ‘Now I’m going to have this kind of a child, then the next one will be a serious student, and the next one....’ ” She knows, after raising four children, “it doesn’t work that way. You get what you get.”

Not every film can be “Sophie’s Choice” or “Angels in America,” either, that’s a given, but she’s not one to sit home until Tony Kushner commits another act of genius.

“Actors have much lower aspirations,” Streep says. “I think they want to keep working and have it be interesting and make a tiny communication to somebody, you know, make a connection. You look for a piece of material that will transport you in some way. But we’re all human. I also like to hear people laugh.” That’s how she landed in the lap of one very fortunate Ben Younger.

An enviable debut

THE 32-year-old Brooklynite has the sort of bio that’s the envy of any wannabe auteur. As a political science student at Queens College, he fell under the wing of a professor, Alan G. Hevesi, who served in the New York State Assembly, then was elected New York City comptroller and, more recently, state comptroller. Hevesi hired Younger as an aide, to write position papers, and by 20 he was running an Assembly campaign. But he quit to give film a try -- as a grip. He did that for almost four years while, naturally, he was writing a script, which became “Boiler Room,” about Wall Street sales sharks; it was picked up by New Line and had Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel in it, and Younger got to direct it too. Not a bad debut in 2000.

But Younger said another script had been in the back of his mind, inspired by something that happened when he was 24. “I was dating a girl who was in therapy. And we were going down the elevator in her building and she was going to therapy, and I had this flash of an idea: What if she was going to see my mom?” recalled Younger, whose mother is a psychiatric social worker.

That was classic high-concept -- a comic triangle that could be pitched to Hollywood in 25 words. But Younger is one of those precocious filmmakers intent on saving his artistic soul from commercial formulas. Woody Allen is his role model in more ways than one, starting with the wistful tone of Allen’s romantic comedies “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” Younger took from them that it was OK to be New York-centric, to have your clash of cultures be the Upper West Side versus the Upper East Side, and to subject your audience to such anthropological touches as the Jewish family sticking red wine in the fridge. He also relished Allen’s risky aspiration to create Bergmanesque moments amid the laughs.

But Younger was coming off one bad experience on “Boiler Room,” his portrait of cold-calling stock salesmen. The studio didn’t like how his ending tested and insisted that another be shot, with the cops coming in. He resolved to be Woody-like -- to do it his way -- with “Prime,” so named because both of the lovers are supposed to be in their sexual primes. Moviegoers today would expect the tension at the heart of the story -- the couple’s having no idea that her therapist is his mother -- to explode in an embarrassing moment for all, like having the trio thrown together in an elevator. Younger was willing to tease the audience with such a possibility, but not give them the sitcom payoff. He said he also told executives at Universal that “I just need to know that you’re OK with the ending” and would have taken the project elsewhere if they were not.

Perhaps Younger’s greatest hubris, however, was that, as a nobody, he envisioned “the greatest living actor” playing his mother/shrink. “I wrote this part for her,” he says of Streep.

Streep jokes that she got the project under “false pretenses,” that her agent said it was about “an older woman and a much younger man. I said, ‘OH!’ ” -- that with raised eyebrows -- “and then I got the news that Uma Thurman was the ‘older’ woman.” Actually, Sandra Bullock originally signed on to play that role. But Bullock’s box office clout came with script approval, and she was not satisfied with what she read, her representative said when she backed out two weeks before the start of shooting last year.

“Thirteen days!” Younger says, recalling the crisis that might well have sent him to his own therapist, except “I was in so much trouble, I don’t think she could have helped.”

Younger suggests that Bullock’s real problem may not have been his script but the prospect of acting opposite Streep, a notion that Bullock laughs off. “The reason I signed on to do the film was because of the opportunity to work with Meryl,” she said recently. Younger acknowledges that he could be projecting, because he felt the same pressure -- “You have all these doubts about yourself, and [who] better to show the weaknesses or insecurities, whether real or not? I thought Meryl was sort of going to expose me. Yeah, definitely.”

His admission suggests the challenge Streep faces in trying to be a flea on the elephant when others insist on seeing you as the elephant. “I was terrified,” Younger says of their first meeting, at a Manhattan coffee shop. “I started stepping on all her lines. I cut her off.”

Perhaps Streep was already trying out her therapist’s persona, for the Vassar and Yale drama graduate reassured him, “You’re a good writer. I get it.” More important, his words made her laugh without being like most of the “potty,” bludgeoning comedies sent to her, “full of ‘ba-bump-bump’ laugh-line jokes.” Younger refused even to call his script a “romantic comedy,” on the grounds that the genre has gone “down the toilet” in recent years. His film would be billed as “a New York love story.”

So they were on the same page, and the film was on, when Thurman stepped in. But Younger says he relapsed the first day Streep was on the set, in her therapist’s chair, and he began “unabashedly staring” from the other side of the lights, thinking he was hidden, but “after about a minute of this she looked at me and said, ‘What?’ I just said, ‘Are you Meryl Streep?’ She laughed and said, ‘Yes. Come over here.’ And everything was fine after that. Like, ‘Come talk to me.’ ”

She did have to remind him, though, “I need a director like everybody else,” when he once joked that he might as well head off to the craft services table while she was shooting her scenes.

To each a defined role

IT bothers Younger that some actors boast of their directors, “Oh, he lets me ad-lib.” Streep was not like that. He had his job and she had hers, which was to speak his words but “take you to a different place” nonetheless, by inflection or a bit of physical business, perhaps how she pulled down her shirt or grabbed at her framed family photos while trapped listening to the sexy shiksa patient say things she should not be hearing about her son.

Streep did allow herself to tinker with the script just once, when her character, Lisa Metzger, decides that it’s time for her patient to know what she knows, and for them to end the therapy. But all she did was repeat a line. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore,” such echoing for emphasis being a staple of her own off-camera style.

A theme of the film is how each lover learns about life from the other, despite -- or because of -- the age difference. If reality were to imitate art, then, Younger should have picked up something profound from Streep.

What mystifies him is that he already knew it -- that actors, including movie stars, are just people. “I wasn’t nervous working with Affleck or Uma,” he said. “Meryl was always the one.”

Then the Hollywood ending would have him emerge a new person, free of those insecurities about being a fake now that “Prime” is opening and he can start writing “17 Bullets,” a “really cool thriller” set in late-1800s Mexico.

“No, I’m having the same fears,” Younger says, “as far as opening the computer up and the blank page and all that. I thought, ‘After Meryl Streep, that fear is going to have to be gone.’ But nope. The demons are still there.”

As for Streep, she’s moved on to creating more new lives. She’s the magazine editor in “The Devil Wears Prada,” filming in New York, a woman who doesn’t apologize for being powerful. In January, she becomes a wealthy patron of the arts in “Dark Matter,” about the Chinese physics student in Iowa who dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize but killed six people in his department. She’s signed on to appear for the fourth time with an actor young filmgoers may know mostly as a comedian, Robert DeNiro, in Disney’s “First Man,” in which both wind up in the White House, except he ain’t the president. And she may do another political figure, Martha Mitchell, the madwoman of Watergate, if the script for “Dirty Tricks” works out. That’s about all that’s on her immediate horizon, other than next summer’s Central Park production of Brecht’s “Mother Courage.”

Streep also recently got to spend time with the furthest thing from an awed up-and-comer. In July, she was in Minnesota filming 80-year-old Robert Altman’s movie of “A Prairie Home Companion,” the latest of his free-wheeling backstage dramas in the mode of “Nashville” and “The Player.”

Streep was just one in an ensemble of Oscar winners, the cast including Tommy Lee Jones and Kevin Kline in addition to the NPR radio show’s host, Garrison Keillor. Streep and Lily Tomlin played what remains of a country music quartet of sisters and got to make fools of themselves for the octogenarian director, who asks his actors to improvise away.

Streep told Younger about working on that one when they got together to promote the second feature of the 32-year-old who -- who knows? -- may decades from now be making his 86th film with a cast of future Meryl Streeps.

“Altman is following in my footsteps,” Younger said. “He wasn’t sure about Meryl, and then he realized I worked with her, he realized she was a good bet. He wasn’t sure until then, but after Ben Younger worked with her, you know ... “