Independent films’ go-to girl faces facts

As a project, “Factotum” pretty much has “Lili Taylor” written all over it. First, there’s the grit factor. Based on the roman a clef of the same name as well as several short stories, the film is a short and not-so-sweet glimpse at the early career of Henry Chinaski, alter ego of Charles Bukowski, the angry bard of San Pedro and official Last of the Beats who for years did his level best to drink himself to death (until, at age 74, he succumbed instead to leukemia). Matt Dillon is Chinaski, with Taylor playing his equally alcoholic lover, offering glimmers of something like love in a relationship that consists mostly of the long daily crawl from bottle to bed and back again.

So not exactly a Ron Howard film.

Then there was the budget (under a million), the studio (none), the distributor (none) and the subsequent release arc (debut at Cannes, noncompetition; get a handshake deal from Picturehouse; follow festival circuit from Poland to Brazil; lose deal with Picturehouse; get picked up by IFC, which takes it to Sundance; begin national rollout Aug. 18).

If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, then you are not Lili Taylor. Since her big-screen breakthrough in “Mystic Pizza,” the film that also gave us Julia Roberts, Taylor has become the sort of star the entertainment press likes to refer as an “indie queen.” This doesn’t mean Taylor hasn’t appeared in mainstream films; she has, both for better (“Ransom,” “High Fidelity”) and worse (“The Haunting”). But the vast majority of her movie work has been done with independent filmmakers and not so much the kind financed by the “independent” wings of the big studios. The real kind. The kind that depend on festivals. The kind that make films that sometimes get distribution and find success but often don’t, that open big in Europe or go straight to DVD, with any superfluous bit of exposed flesh played as big as possible.

“It’s amazing; if there is any skin at all in the film, there it is on the cover,” she says, laughing.

It isn’t quite the career she imagined back in the ‘90s, when she was building a “hot but serious actress” rep, when playing disturbed feminist Valerie Solanas in “I Shot Andy Warhol” earned her a handful of festival awards and a cult following. But shaped by the increasingly franchise-obsessed, continually conglomerating entertainment industry, it is the career that 20 years of choosing roles for what they can teach you about life and your craft will get you.

“In ‘96, ‘97, I began to notice there was a shift,” Taylor says. “Here we all were just doing movies with pretty much no one telling us what to do or how to do it, and then it changed. It became like Wall Street. And I realized that if a studio film goes over a certain budget I was not going to be cast. I couldn’t believe it.”

It took her a while to get used to the new reality. “I followed Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of dying,” she says. “I think I’m in acceptance now. Because I realize it isn’t personal. It’s like it’s the stock market and everyone is assigned this arbitrary value.”

Taylor has had enough critical success to use the word “arbitrary” and make it stick. Never a Pretty Girl, she has most often found a place in big films as the grounded best friend or sensible ex. Her lead roles, however, tended in the other direction. Her fondness for broken women has caused consternation among fans, but she is considered a consistently fine actress, able to move easily among film, TV and stage. Five years ago, the four episodes she agreed to do on “Six Feet Under” quickly became 10 and then 23, and this year she starred in two off-Broadway hits, Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and John Guare’s “Landscape of the Body,” winning an Obie for the former and dazzling notices for the second -- the New York Times referred to her as “peerless.”

“Peerless,” she repeats, “I can live with that. I could go for more of that.”

The way she sees it

Having abandoned her beloved New York for a few days to do press for “Factotum,” she is sitting in the lobby of Casa del Mar. Wiry and inevitably intense on screen, she is, in person, small and almost delicate, with a ready and surprisingly girlish laugh. She talks of her career with a frankness unusual in Hollywood and dissects the film industry in the same way -- ruthless but with an air of acceptance rather than bitterness.

She came to “Factotum” via Jim Stark, a friend and fellow indie player. Stark, best known for producing several Jim Jarmusch films, is co-writer and producer of the film, which is directed by Bent Hamer, who is described in press notes as being “a prominent member of ‘the new wave’ of Norwegian filmmakers.” (You don’t get more indie than that.)

“I like Bukowski but remember not feeling included, he’s such a male writer, and I didn’t know if there would be anything for me,” she says.

But she liked the contradictions of Jan, who is by turns (and alcohol consumption) sweet and bitchy, deluded and clear-eyed, and the chance it gave her to handle a role a bit differently.

“She was so instinctual and unconscious, I wanted to be as open as possible,” she says. While Taylor usually goes through her script “with a fine-tooth comb,” working out the beats, circling words that seem particularly relevant, writing her own thoughts on the intentions and implications of each scene, she left “Factotum” alone.

“I just absorbed it and got out of the way,” she says. “And that was really good for me to do, a really good lesson.”

She was also happy to work with Matt Dillon. Though they had never done a film together, she says, “we’ve been around the New York scene together for so long that I really felt I knew him. Which was a good thing, that we had a certain intimacy,” she adds with a laugh, “because I arrived on set one day and we started shooting the next.”

It’s Dillon’s film, though Taylor’s scenes certainly humanize his character and create a disturbing, though occasionally amusing, biosphere of codependence, and she knew that going in. She did it, she says, for the same reason she does pretty much everything -- for the experience.

“If I do it for an end result,” she says, “if I do it for ‘the career,’ it always backfires.”

Even “The Haunting,” Jan de Bont’s high-tech remake of the 1963 chiller, which bombed despite a cast that also included Liam Neeson, Owen Wilson and Catherine Zeta-Jones. “I had a good experience, and you never know. Especially with computer graphics. Jan was saying all the right things, and I liked his vision. Julie Harris was terrific in the first one....” She shrugs.

That “The Haunting” would get the big budget and the big distribution while “Arizona Dream” and “Things I Never Told You” -- the films she lists as her favorite projects -- go begging creates the eternal tension of the independent filmmaker. And things, Taylor says, have just gotten worse.

“In some ways there has been hope. We’ve gotten some nominations -- ‘Fargo,’ ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ ‘Monster’ -- but there are fewer quality independent films produced now, fewer where the director has complete control.”

She thought, for a while, that HBO would light a fire under the studios. “I mean, there’s James Gandolfini and Edie Falco for God’s sake, who used to have a hard time getting work. I thought that people would realize how valuable they are. And maybe they are, but I guess I was hoping it would happen a little faster.”

Now there are too many money guys, too many corporate types involved in the decision making, she says, to the detriment of both the art form and her own career.

“I have director friends who want to hire me,” she says simply. “And they can’t. Because the corporate guys say I’m not That Girl. I think I need to learn how to put on a little show for them,” she adds with a laugh. “Put on my little court jester hat and do a little personal presentation.”

If she were in charge, she says, first she’d institute “campaign finance reform” -- limit the amount distributors can spend on publicity -- then she’d start looking for alternative forms of distribution. “It’s not that there’s no product there,” she says. “It’s just how to get the product out. I thought the technology would be there, but it isn’t. So we have to figure out new ways.”

Her tone is light, but it’s been difficult, she says, to stay focused on the work, on the value of the work, and put other considerations -- money, fame, career security -- aside. It helps to stay in New York, where the division between superstar and the majority of the acting community is not so in your face. It helps to do plays, which make her feel strong and perpetually excited, although at $400 a week, they are not a wise full-time option.

But sometimes it just gets annoying. “I was just doing a film which had a lot of ‘favored nations,’ ” she says, referring to stars who are treated much better than the other actors. “And these people were just actors like me, I mean it wasn’t at the Tom Cruise level or anything, but they had the fancy trailers and all that and I just had to get my head around it, though I did snap a few times. I mean I told them, ‘just pay for my parking,’ because really it’s a smart investment.”

A couple of times a year, she says, the frustration rises to the breaking point. “I find myself walking by the hospital wondering how much I could make as a registered nurse,” she says, and it’s hard to tell if she’s joking. “But I’m like the kid who wants to run away -- I’d put my little bandana on my little stick and wait for someone to come after me,” she’s laughing now, “and no one would come after me.”

Besides, she adds, she just loves it too much. “Twenty years in the business and it still thrills me, still fascinates me. Which is a very good thing, all things considered.”

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com