For director, an enchanted ‘Evening’

“Making nice fast -- it’s not easy to do.” Famed Hungarian cinematographer-turned-director Lajos Koltai is laboring mightily to strike at the heart of some undigested truth, willing large chunks of emotion through the makeshift sieve of the English language while trying to keep pace with an over-cranked intelligence. The effect is a little like Borat on speed.

“I always talk about how the Hungarian feels,” he says. “As a Hungarian, you extend your feelings through the camera. Everybody works from the heart and the soul and the stomach.” Koltai was cramming a two-hour interview into an hour lunch at the Four Seasons as he prepared to attend a screening of what, at age 61, is only his second feature film as a director.

“Evening,” Focus Features’ stately, elegiac adaptation of the Susan Minot novel about a dying woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and her memories of a single weekend 50 years ago that ordains the trajectory of her life, is burnished to a high literary sheen in the script by Minot and “The Hours” author Michael Cunningham.

Employing a split time frame, the film, which lands in theaters Friday, has Redgrave’s daughters played by real-life daughter Natasha Richardson and Toni Collette; Redgrave in the ‘50s played by Claire Danes, opposite newcomer Mamie Gummer as her best friend, and Gummer’s real-life mother, Meryl Streep, showing up as Gummer’s character in the closing reel to balance the emotional equilibrium.

“He had the reputation as someone who was kind of a touchstone for the crew, and a really steady presence,” says James Schamus, the head of Focus. “One of the things you worry about when making a movie like ‘Evening’ is that you’re actually going to be living through George Cukor’s ‘The Women.’ But I have to say it was one of the most harmonious movie sets anybody at the company had ever experienced.”

Koltai calls the intimacy between actor and director “being in the same air.” He routinely communicated with the cast in whispers and relied on such moments of emotional expression to direct performances. “The Hungarian language is a very rich, even very lonely language,” he says. “We are alone; no one speaks it, just us. But it has an unbelievable richness of feeling. We have words for everything.”

The dream team

Beginning with a meeting with Redgrave in a hotel room in London last year, Koltai set about assembling a dream cast, which by all accounts uniformly responded to his combination of technical proficiency and European poetry. Of Redgrave, Koltai says, “She took my hand and spoke with me. She didn’t show me her beautiful side, because she’s still very beautiful. The two producers who came with me just backed out of the room, because they say it was like a brother and sister talking with each other ....”

“He never called ‘action’ or ‘cut,’ ” says Danes. “He would just let you begin the scene when you were ready. He’s always by the camera, never by the monitor. And then when it ended, he would say, ‘Thank you.’ That’s mind-blowing -- that kind of awareness and respect for an actor. I like that he understands that it’s an exchange, a form of communication, instead of some athletic feat. He just really understands what actors do, which is much rarer than it should be.”

“He really knew how to speak to the heart of the matter,” adds Gummer. “He would say just a couple of words sometimes, and it would tip off the emotional resonance of the scene.” In a key scene with Danes, in which Gummer’s character contemplates the prospect of an unhappy marriage, Koltai told her to “ ‘Look out the window -- that’s your childhood, and you’re never going back.’ It’s almost like poetry,” she says.

Koltai was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1946, the son of a leather salesman and a seamstress. To his knowledge, his family was not directly affected by the war, but its effects were everywhere as he was growing up, beginning with the partial destruction of the city and the vast poverty that ensued. Both sets of grandparents lived in the family home, although they didn’t get along. It was his maternal grandfather who exerted the biggest influence on him, an actor and “bon vivant” who had worked on the stage with all the greats, in a small theater in an area known as the Taban that was destroyed in 1931.

When Koltai was 17, he joined a legitimate theater and excelled as an actor, which everyone was certain would be his destiny. Instead, leveraging a burgeoning romance between his sister and a boy who worked for a camera company, he arranged to surreptitiously borrow a 16 mm Bolex camera on weekends and began to make short films, one of which starred his future wife, to whom he has been married for 38 years. (She resides in Budapest, where he spends half the year, along with their two daughters and three grandchildren.) When one of his films won second place in an amateur film festival, he gained admittance to the state-run Budapest Film School, where he beat out 700 applicants. Director Istvan Szabo (“Being Julia,” among others) was one of the judges, although the two would formally meet only after Koltai’s first success at Cannes 12 years later.

A long partnership

Koltai and Szabo have since worked together on 13 films spanning 28 years, many with a political theme of circumnavigating the realms of tarnished power and situational ethics. They are best known for an unofficial trilogy of Hungarian films in the mid-’80s starring Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer (“Mephisto,” “Colonel Redl” and “Hanussen”) but also “Meeting Venus,” “Sunshine” and “Taking Sides,” the latter filmed in English in the U.S.

“I started as a director of photography at 26 years old. I always had a very warm look to my movies -- they used to call it ‘honey-brown.’ A golden hue. And Istvan loved that. But when I met him, he says, ‘Let’s go a different way. Let’s try and find a different journey.’ And I decided I needed people who would push me.”

Last year, after the release of “Rokonok,” their latest film together, following revelations in the media, Szabo announced that he had been an informer for the Communist government after the 1956 uprising was crushed, primarily to save the life of classmate and director Pal Gabor, for whom Koltai shot “Angi Vera.”

“No one knew about it,” says Koltai. “People think I knew about it, because I was the closest to him. We just knew that for his whole career, since he wrote most of the scripts, he was struggling with something. We didn’t know what it was, what was inside him, or what he was trying to work out sometimes. In the ‘50s, it was a terrible time in Hungary; there was the secret police there, and everybody wanted to know everything. It was very hard for him, and I think he suffered for it.” (Koltai’s next film will be “Under the Frog,” a novel by British Hungarian author Tibor Fischer that Koltai calls “the most beautiful book on the subject” of the Hungarian Revolution.)

It was Koltai’s directorial debut with “Fateless” in 2005 -- which Gummer calls “a Holocaust film told in vignettes, very unsentimental, staggeringly beautiful, devastating” -- that put him on Hollywood’s wish list of directors, after shooting some 70 films for others, 15 of them in this country.

Koltai was already well into discussions with author Imre Kertesz about adapting his novel -- a brutal dispassionate rendition of life inside Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz as told through the eyes of a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew and consummate survivor -- when the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Summoned for a meeting with President Laszlo Solyom, Kertesz was informed that should he ever want to make a film version of “Fateless,” the Hungarian government would be willing to put up half the budget.

“I wanted the film to be like a statue that could last forever,” says Koltai. “It’s like Imre told me: ‘The beatings were OK. After a while, you got used to them. But just to be there -- that was the most terrible thing.’ And that’s what I wanted to show.”

“I thought it was an impossible adaptation,” says Focus’ Schamus. “The emotion of that book is profoundly philosophical. Just the title alone tells you: Here’s a book about survival that rejects even the basic notion of fate, which is one of the few things you can still believe in if you have no beliefs left. That’s a tough place to get to. And it’s rare when you find a first-time director who can take on underlying literary material that is that resistant and that really succeeds on the terms he sets.

“ ‘Evening’ is in many ways very similar, in that the novel was very easy to adapt, but in the schmaltziest way possible. It took someone with a kind of iron will to avoid so many of the traps that were inherent,” he says.

Unlike his American counterparts, Koltai eschews the practice of referring to movies in terms of other movies, finding the stuff of art instead in the moment, in natural surroundings and in the minutiae of daily life. “In this film, we follow Vanessa Redgrave’s memory, because her mind is now totally free. I didn’t want to talk about the social conditions of the ‘50s. Let’s talk about the sky, the wind, the grass, the sea. And then you’re back in this colorless room, which for me was like a big boat: A big bed in the middle of two windows with big white curtains, which for me were like sails. And so it’s like a sailboat that floats slowly away from this world.”