neuromanek
by paul cullum

10.02

the improbably named mark romanek is the director of such memorable music videos as fiona apple’s “criminal,” beck’s “devil’s haircut” and nine inch nails’ “a perfect drug.” although he co-directed the independent feature static in 1988, with former de palma actor keith gordon, the upcoming one hour photo marks his first feature after apprenticing at the commercial and music video mill propaganda in the early ‘90s, which served as a finishing academy for many of today’s most visually astute directors, from david fincher to michael bay (and all points in-between). one hour photo also marks the finishing touch in rehabilitating the film career of robin williams, casting him severely against type as a faceless photo clerk and emotional time bomb, in what is possibly his best role in a decade. but unlike many of his fellow gearheads and crane-jockeys, romanek is also an accomplished writer, supple theorist and astute observer of films. toward that end, he claims to have been the second one in line for the afternoon showing on opening day in 1979 of apocalypse now at the ziegfield theater in new york city. the first one in line was david mamet.

one hour photo is predicated on the concept of voyeurism. coming out of music videos, is that automatically a central motif in your work?
well, offhand, that seems a bit too academic for the way i think. i mean, it’s self-evident that that’s a plot element of it, but it’s like saying jaws is about the fear of sharks.

there’s a very careful, almost clinical style to this film, one that i might argue comes out of music videos. it places perfect, pristine compositions within the frame, but with an almost violent collision between images. i’m wondering…
did you like the film?

yes. i liked it very much.
thank you.

i wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like the film. why would I ask to interview you if I didn’t like the film?
i just thought it might be harder that way, more of a challenge maybe. i don’t know. just something to pass the time, to see what a truly mediocre director is like to talk to.

“this so-called stylist...”
in relation to voyeurism, the only thing i can say is that i always try to have a very careful sense of point of view—the literal point-of-view shots in the movie. i like hitchcock’s use of pov shots: this guy looks, we see what he sees. he’s very careful not to mix up the points of view too much. he wants to help you identify ideally with the victim, or the guy that doesn’t know quite as much as you do.

maybe that’s what i’m talking about, why he’s seen as the premiere practitioner of voyeurism in films. literally, in rear window, psycho and vertigo; pruriently in frenzy or the lodger; and omnisciently in the birds or the wrong man.
it’s an intentional thing, although i play with it in a way that’s not for the purpose of creating film suspense. generally, he’ll put you in the head of the victim: janet leigh’s walking into the motel, she walks into the foyer, looks around the room, we see cut, cut, cut of what she sees. so, we’re in her head, so now we’re the victim, so now we’re scared about what’s going to happen. and then objectively, he’ll give you information that the character doesn’t have. so, you’re sort of objective and subjective at the same time.

although tony perkins is watching her through the peephole in the wall, that framing is what makes the shower scene so disturbing. that and the fact that it was completely storyboarded by saul bass, the greatest creator of title sequences ever. in fact, that’s really the trick of that film, in that we’re made to identify with the victim so heavily.
well, you kind of got at indirectly what i was trying to say, which is that what i’m trying to do with this film is play around with where our sympathies lie. clearly, my sympathy is with sy [williams], yet i’m fully aware that audiences are going to watch this movie and sometimes you’re going to feel sympathetic towards him, and other times it’s flip-flopping back and forth, where we’re completely creeped out by the way he compromises this family.

was peeping tom a touchstone for you? [michael powell’s 1960 profile of “scopophilia” and a serial killer that literally kills with his camera.]
actually, i don’t even think it is about voyeurism. i think that’s just the mechanism of the storytelling. i think it’s really about the need to feel connected to something. and when you get cut adrift like that, too extremely for too long, it can result in an inappropriate effort to reach out. with sy, until the end of the film, no one talks to this guy. “how do you feel? what’s going on with you? is everything ok, sy?” that doesn’t happen till very late in the movie.

were there films that were touchstones for you? i can see little glimmers of a lot of things. for instance, when we finally see sy’s photographs, they reminded me of faye dunaway’s photos in…
the eyes of laura mars?

no, in three days of the condor. in her house, there are all these black-and-white photos around of cat’s eyes and garbage in the streets and bare trees. all incredibly lonely. the overwhelming mood of your film is one of sadness.
that’s not a conscious recollection. i don’t think a lot of american films indulge in sadness. not a depressing film, but a sad film about loneliness and somebody that’s unable to connect. there’s that book, “the cinema of loneliness,” that i read when i was an adolescent. i think studios think that audiences don’t want to go see lonely, messed up people. the touchstones for me were really the conversation and the tenant and taxi driver, although that’s a more lurid expression of it. and there’s a great french film called mr. hire, directed by patrice leconte. i like the idea that there’s a central motif and you’re just spinning a tapestry off of variations on that idea. with the conversation, it’s recording conversations and wiretapping and bugging and sound and secrets.
and if you look deep enough, everything in the conversation will relate back to that. the character’s name is harry caul, as in telephone call, but also a birth caul.
well, I tried to do the same thing. it’s not as brilliant a film, but the dialogue is all like, “how many prints do you want. oh, what size?” the dialogue isn’t telling the story. it’s all in the subtext. it’s all what you know is going on beneath the surface of this banal conversation. i love films like that. in the conversation, he even shot scenes like you would with a surveillance camera. harry caul is on the phone with his partner and coppola has him undressing. it appears that we’re spying on someone doing something we’re not supposed to be seeing. he exits the frame and the camera doesn’t move; it sits on the empty frame for like 15 seconds, and then in this bizarre delay, pans left to reframe. and then he exits the frame again, and it does it again. that to me is as exciting as it gets. if you notice in my film, many things are framed by other things, so that my motif that i’m spinning off of is snapshots and the framing of life and memory.

Was Robin Williams involved early on?
i would say it’s all early on, because there was no later on. i was shooting 10 months from the time i thought of the idea. we put together a cast list and robin was on the list. i thought it was a very strange, interesting idea, but there was no chance he was going to do it. it was just too dark and small.

You caught him right at the time he was trying to recast his image with Death to Smoochy and Insomnia.
those films weren’t really on anyone’s radar. i think his agent said, “robin might really respond to this. he’s looking for new challenges.” so i met him, and 45 minutes into that first meeting, he said, “i’d love to do the film.” i didn’t think that major movie stars just sat you down at lunch and said they want to do your film. i thought you had to go through the whole process of agents talking to agents and managers talking to lawyers. but it was clear from that lunch that we were really on the same page about how to approach the character. and the character’s not that far afield from others roles that he’s played. a lot of his films are these lonely, isolated, obsessive, academic-minded characters.

have you seen seize the day? [1986 film based on saul bellow’s novel, starring williams.]
oh, yeah. i totally was going to mention that, because if for any reason i had any misgivings about casting him in this role, i always remembered that film. actually, that sounds insulting. this character is meant to be forgettable, yet compelling enough to carry the whole movie. it’s a real tricky paradox. he’s supposed to be this invisible nobody who you forget five minutes after you see him, and yet he’s got to carry the whole movie. i didn’t want a star of the magnitude of robin williams to overwhelm it. i didn’t know if he could get subsumed into this character. but it’s only interesting to see somebody repressing something when you know that he’s repressing a lot, and we know the amount of energy that robin williams is capable of. so, it becomes an engine that runs the whole movie.

in some weird way, our film occupies some sort of strange gray area in the middle. we’ll see what people make of it. It doesn’t operate like a commercial movie. it’s in a more european mode. it’s a sad, strange experimental piece. it’s definitely an artistic character study, yet it has an accessible premise and it’s got a big-ass movie star in it. not that robin has a big ass. actually, robin has a very nice ass.

that’s my pull quote right there. “actually, robin has a very nice ass.”
that would be fine with me.

do you put yourself in the same school as other music video directors who came out of a similar background?
certain ones; not most of them. the directors i admire that i would love to be considered on a level with are jonathan glazer, michel gondry, david fincher, spike jonze—people that had a respect for the audience when they were doing these things.

the tradition you come out of is often disparaged, because of michael bay and people like that, for being all razzle-dazzle, with no particular contemplation of anything beyond that. yet, you’re very conversant.
when you look at sexy beast or being john malkovich or, hopefully, one hour photo or the dangerous lives of altar boys, or even david fincher’s work with a film like fight club; people that give it a little thought see that there’s an upper echelon of smarter guys that came out of that world. when the style is resonating off the content, then smart people don’t accuse it of just flash.

david fincher and michael bay are at the two ends of the spectrum of modern filmmaking. the thing which separates them is not chops or talent or dexterity, but simply innate intelligence.
people sense that prodigious intelligence behind what Fincher’s doing. i think he generally gets credit for it. if he was a less talented director, you wouldn’t notice the script was lacking in some places. he’s a very close friend of mine, and he is operating on another plane of sophistication. i think if anything, he’s so formally brilliant that until he has a script that’s just as brilliant, his level of craft highlights the flaws of the script. he’s definitely giving kubrick a run for his money in terms of craft. music video is an easy pejorative to throw at somebody just because they made some short music films. but if it’s scorsese or spielberg, then it’s cinematic.

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