spotlight: mark romanek
by peter rainer

"madonna, david bowie, and robin williams all have the same thing," says mark romanek, whose one hour photo stars williams as a deranged film processor. "they all have the charisma machine. you don't so much direct their performance as give them their context and then let them go." romanek comes from the music-video business, where charisma is king. but it's a world he discovered only by accident, while directing static, his first film, in 1985. "i was a 24-year-old sheltered suburban kid who had to learn more about life," he says. but on that picture he met the the, a british new wave band, and made a video for them. "i thought it would be a three-year tangent," he says, "but I ended up making videos for over ten years" — for nine inch nails, michael jackson, lenny kravitz, and beck, all the while writing scripts that hollywood rejected. "i had the opportunity to make some big, dumb films, but i saw david fincher's nightmarish, horrible experience with alien 3 and decided to wait." he channeled that frustration into one hour photo's grisly, dark script about an obsessed stalker. "i was influenced by the existential 'lonely man' movies of the seventies and had to exorcise those demons," he says. so how'd he get patch adams to become travis bickle? "we agreed from the get-go not to be sentimental," romanek says. "we also agreed to stick to the script."


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