Humor in the mind of the married man

To get a sense of how comedians Chris Rock and Louis C.K. process film genre, it helps to know that C.K. defends “GoodFellas” as “funnier than ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,’ ” while Rock describes “Lost in Translation” as “the blackest movie I’ve ever seen.”

This kind of interpretive creativity explains why the new comedy of marriage they’ve written, “I Think I Love My Wife,” is based on French New Wave writer-director Eric Rohmer’s 1972 drama, “Chloe in the Afternoon.”

Rock fans may have trouble reconciling his prowling stage persona with the role he plays in “Wife”: Richard Cooper, a subdued, bespectacled, mustachioed Wall Street businessman whose seven-year marriage has slipped into the dangerous comfort of boredom and sexlessness. When a sexy and flirtatious old crush reenters Cooper’s life, Rock and C.K., with typical frankness, give the viewer a tour of temptation as it plays through the mind of the kind-of-happily married man.

But with this “huge departure,” Rock, who also directed, seems more relaxed than in the past with that uncertainty; he admits that this is the first time he has made the kind of movie that he actually likes to see.

“I didn’t know any better,” he says of past writing efforts like “Down to Earth” and “Head of State,” modestly successful releases in which he was trying to pursue the Adam Sandler-Jim Carrey path to stardom. “I was just trying to make a movie that made a ton of money. So I would shut down this whole side of my brain. I mean, these are the kind of movies I like. I love ‘Talladega Nights,’ but I’d rather watch ‘Hannah and Her Sisters.’ ”

Although no one will confuse Rock’s whiplash riffs with Woody Allen’s stuttering cerebralisms, there’s joy in watching Rock address “Wife’s” subject matter with a new kind of maturity.

“Basically this movie is about a guy at a stage in his life that we’re at,” says C.K., whose now-canceled HBO show, “Lucky Louie,” also explored domestic life. “Where we’re a kid deep into a marriage and starting to feel some ambivalence and clouded feelings.”

For two suburban husbands -- Rock lives in New Jersey and C.K. in upstate New York-- now with two kids each, just walking around Manhattan, the “coolest, sexiest city of our time,” was inspiration enough. Like their protagonist, they would commute into the city to work on the script, talk about their home lives, screen movies, run out for Indian food, marvel at the armies of attractive single women, and even shop for baby clothes (which led to a moment worthy of the movie, during which they were sorting through onesies while the saleswoman none-too-subtly tried to pick up Rock).

Although they kept the big beats of Rohmer’s film, Rock and C.K. put more emphasis on the marriage while looking for chances to blow out comedy scenarios that go unexplored in “Chloe.” “There were little opportunities that we teased out,” C.K. says. “The departures from his regular life get a little more dangerous. But we kept a lot of the weird French existential stuff.”

“I look at it like a great cover song,” Rock says. “There’s the Carpenters’ ‘Superstar’ and there’s Luther Vandross’ ‘Superstar.’ If you don’t know any better, you don’t even know they’re the same song.”

Rock, 42, and C.K., 39, began crossing paths in the mid-’80s in the New York City comedy club circuit. But they didn’t start working together until Rock was pulling together his Emmy-winning “The Chris Rock Show” for HBO in 1996. Rock offered C.K. the chance to develop and run the half-hour showcase from scratch, but C.K. decided instead to follow his fellow “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” writers to Dana Carvey’s new show, a seemingly more high-profile forum until it tanked.

C.K. made a chagrined call to ask for a slot on the Rock show’s writing staff. There were no hard feelings, as they went on to win Emmys for outstanding writing on the show in 1999 and collaborated on the features “Down to Earth” and “Pootie Tang,” which C.K. wrote and directed.

“Sandler always says: ‘You can’t make comedy with strangers,’ ” Rock says. “ ‘Wait, we have one meeting and now we’re making a movie? No. Why don’t we just have a baby together while we’re at it?’ Your friends know what’s funny about you. Somebody who doesn’t know you just knows your greatest hits. But your friends know the album tracks. ‘Hey, Track 9, Album 3, remember that one?’ They know that you’re funny doing this other thing too.”

Beyond the gates of Hell

During a recent screening of “Beyond the Gates,” an affluent middle-aged couple rose from their seats and quietly pushed out into the theater lobby. There they encountered David Wolstencroft, 37, who wrote the agonizing drama they had been watching -- or rather, enduring -- about the unfathomably grim beginnings of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Wolstencroft couldn’t help but ask why they were abandoning the film. “ ‘Too much killing, too much violence,’ ” the writer recounts, not without some sympathy. “[But] that’s the whole point of writing the movie, because of that attitude -- everybody looked away when they saw what was happening.”

The film, in limited release here on Friday, re-creates five days in April 1994 when 2,500 Rwandan students and neighbors, plus a few dozen white Europeans, took refuge inside a secondary school in Kigali where a small contingent of U.N. peacekeepers was based. As a menacing machete-wielding Hutu militia begins to congregate outside, several Westerners, including a young teacher (Hugh Dancy), a Catholic priest (John Hurt) and a BBC reporter (Nicola Walker) -- composite characters based on real people and events -- try to navigate the escalating tension that would ultimately lead to the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in three months.

“What I wanted to do was make it an immersive experience,” Wolstencroft says. “[With] historical moments, the undulations are very smooth with hindsight, and it’s the small decisions and the lack of information and the chaos of the moment that humanize everything. [I wanted] to shine a small light on moments of it, not to make it a definitive Rwanda genocide movie about the entire 100 days.”

A history buff and novelist, Wolstencroft was born in Hawaii, grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, and went on to create a popular, BAFTA-winning British espionage drama called “Spooks” in 2001. The next year, he decided to take a “sabbatical” in Los Angeles with the goal of dipping into American television or perhaps writing a commercial studio feature. In this he failed beautifully: The day he arrived in sunny L.A., Wolstencroft received a fax from his agent that included a five-page treatment written by Richard Alwyn, a documentary filmmaker, and David Belton, a BBC journalist.

“I just felt a weight of responsibility,” Wolstencroft says about making this his first feature script, which was directed by Michael Caton-Jones. “To me, this was a responsibility rather than a gig.”

At the time, it was the first Rwanda project in the works, though “Hotel Rwanda,” also based on the genocide, in 2005 earned director Terry George and co-writer Keir Pearson Oscar nominations for original screenplay. Wolstencroft’s research took him to Kigali in summer 2003 to spend a few weeks with survivors.

“It changed my life,” Wolstencroft says. “I’m a very fortunate person, and here I was coming from a place where some people’s goal in life is to have smoother, younger-looking skin. So to find myself in this situation, suddenly the time that I’ve been given in my life had a completely new meaning.”

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.