bbci films interview
by stephen applebaum

09.30.02

it's 17 years since your feature debut, "static". did you try to make anything else before "one hour photo"?
oh, yeah. i tried to make jg Ballard's "crash", before cronenberg. there was a big project at dreamworks, and another one about [photographer] diane arbus. i have a turn-of-the-century piece that i'm still hoping to do about ota benga, an african pygmy who came to america in 1904. i've been working on at least ten different projects and they've all come to nought because they were perceived as too odd, too hard to market, too expensive, too hard to cast. i think that's why the idea for "one hour photo" emerged as a finished idea very quickly. it was the product of sheer frustration.

what inspired "one hour photo"?
as a teenager i loved those movies of the 70s that later got labelled the "lonely man" movies - you know, "the conversation", "the tenant", "taxi driver", "parallax view", "the passenger" - and i thought it would be cool to make one in a 21st-century mode.

when you had lunch with robin williams to discuss the film, did you doubt whether he could play sy?
we both came to the lunch knowing this was an odd and very leftfield idea that may or may not have worked. Neither "insomnia" nor "death to smoochy" existed on either of our radars at this point, so we were asking ourselves: can robin williams play this obsessive photo guy? it was a much more bizarre idea than it appears to be in retrospect.

williams' baggage actually makes the film more subversive...
exactly. in some ways i think sy is the quintessential robin williams dramatic part. it takes all the things he has been exploring in his dramatic, and in some of his comedic, roles and crystallises it. he has played a lot of loners and obsessives, a lot of socially maladjusted people, a lot of academics and people who are defined by their profession. i can see why he had such an affinity with the character.

some critics have accused you of making a paedophilia movie that doesn't actually want to talk about paedophilia. doesn't that upset you?
it's not [about paedophilia] at all, although it does encourage you to sometimes think certain things. it's playing with the audience's dirty mind, and how untrustworthy it can be.

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