Todd Field: Delicately Dissecting the Quiet Life

By LAURA WINTERS

Todd Field still remembers the first time he heard of Andre Dubus. "I was studying directing at the American Film Institute in 1992 and someone told me that Andre Dubus was a really great writer of short fiction," Mr. Field said. "When I started reading his stories, I was amazed. Andre's stories have a classic American feeling, almost like westerns: they're about people, broken and otherwise, living in communities where everyone knows their neighbors. I immediately felt I knew these people from my childhood in Oregon. They reminded me of my cousins, my uncles, my father."

Mr. Field, who is known for his subtlety as an actor (most notably in Victor Nunez's "Ruby in Paradise" and Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"), never forgot the siren song of Dubus's writing. Nine years later, Dubus has inspired Mr. Field's feature film debut as a director, "In the Bedroom," a haunting, masterly tale of a New England family in crisis. In January, the film was one of the revelations of the Sundance Film Festival, where its two stars, Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, shared a special jury prize for acting.

"In the Bedroom," which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, is the story of Matt and Ruth Fowler, an upright and loving couple who live in rural Maine. Matt (Mr. Wilkinson) is a doctor, while Ruth (Ms. Spacek) leads a school choir. Their college-age son, Frank (Nick Stahl), is having a passionate affair with Natalie (Marisa Tomei), a somewhat older working-class woman with two children who is divorcing her n'er-do-well husband. When a senseless tragedy rocks their quiet world, the Fowlers are forced to redefine their relationship to each other and to the snug community that has insulated them.

"I was incredibly impressed by the delicacy of Todd's work," said Geoffrey Gilmore, the co-director of the Sundance Film Festival. "It's clear to me how much he has absorbed from working with wonderful directors like Stanley Kubrick and Victor Nunez. Like Nunez, Todd is one of the few American directors who really understands social dynamics. This is a film that is, among other things, about class warfare, about the collision between an upper-middle-class New England universe and a completely different working-class universe."

For Mr. Field, the people in his film have a kind of authenticity that is fast disappearing and that he still finds in Maine, where he and his wife and their three children spend part of the year. "I love my neighbors in Maine," he said during a visit to New York this summer. "Their feelings are deep, but there's a wonderful understatement about the way they behave. They still have the philosophy that unless you can improve silence, you should keep quiet."

Mr. Field, 37, who is lanky and boyish, shares that quality — but only up to a point. He is a diverting raconteur, effortlessly assuming different accents as he describes the various collaborators on his film. But as these people attest, his warmth cloaks determination and perfectionism.

Ted Hope, one of the film's executive producers, said: "I've made an awful lot of first features, but what's rare about Todd's is how all the different pieces are so carefully orchestrated. He's very much a God-is-in-the-details director."

In 1997, when Mr. Field decided to try to adapt and direct Dubus's short story "Killings," he discovered that it had been optioned to a producer named Graham Leader and that a writer named Robert Festinger had already written a script. "Surprisingly, though, both Graham and Rob were open to my ideas and very generous in terms of letting me have my own crack at it and approach the story another way," Mr. Field said.

Before starting on the script, Mr. Field went to visit Dubus at his home in rural Massachusetts north of Boston. When he told Dubus that the increasingly tortured dynamics between husband and wife were what intrigued him about the story, Mr. Field recalled, "he got really excited and said, "That's why I wrote it.' "

After the script was finished, Mr. Field sent it to a number of potential backers, among them Mr. Hope, who, with James Schamus, founded the independent film production company Good Machine. By coincidence, Mr. Hope had grown up a mile and a half away from Dubus and considered him almost like family. After reading the script, he immediately joined the project.

Mr. Field was devastated, however, when Dubus died of a heart attack at the age of 62 on Mr. Field's birthday, Feb. 24, 1999. Eleven days later, Kubrick died. When he talks of that time, Mr. Field still gets teary-eyed. "These two bearded mentors in my life — the points of my compass — were gone in a week," he said. "I didn't think I would ever make the film."

In the long months that followed, while he and Mr. Hope tried to find financing, Mr. Field was adamant about what he had in mind. "I told people: "This film is about the nature of grief, and it's going to meander at times because there's no formula for grief. I want to make the audience truly feel, in the most physical fashion, what these people are going through.' "

Finally, in early 2000, they got financing from a company called GreeneStreet Films and began to search for actors. "You don't read scripts like that very often," Ms. Spacek said on the telephone from Virginia, where she lives. "I thought it was one thing, and then it surprised me, and then it surprised me again. I felt as if I was on one of those carnival rides that suddenly tilts you in the opposite direction."

To play Dr. Fowler, Mr. Wilkinson, who is British, embarked on a crash course in Americana, working with a dialogue coach and spending a couple of days on a lobster boat with Mr. Stahl, who plays his son. "I decided, with this role, to be American all the way through, even off set," Mr. Wilkinson said in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film was shown. "My whole body language changed, due to the directness of speaking as an American. It made me into a slightly different person."

The film, which was finally shot in June 2000 around Camden and Rockland in Maine, was a neighborhood venture. One location was the Field family cabin in the woods; Mr. Field used members of his son's T-Ball team as extras. "It was like the old days," Ms. Spacek recalled. "In between scenes, we would run to the antique store down the street, and say, "Can we borrow this?' "

But there was nothing impromptu about Mr. Field's work with the actors. "Todd loves being an actor, so working with him was like having a shorthand," recalled Ms. Tomei, who has drawn much acclaim as Natalie, Mr. Stahl's tormented lover. Ms. Spacek said: "Todd knows how to let scenes unfold. He's going for the combustion that happens when you play a scene, and things happen that you don't expect."

Mr. Field was equally clear about the look that he wanted. "For me, Alan Pakula was one of the great American filmmakers, but if you look at his films, they look so simple," he said. "The camera is not doing back-flips, and he's not afraid to hold a shot. You can argue that if you do your work really well, no one should notice."

That may be true of directing, but Mr. Field's other talents have never gone unnoticed. He grew up 10 miles outside of Portland, Ore., in a rural community near Gresham. His father, who is retired, ran a convenience store with his mother.

As a child, Mr. Field played the trombone and the piano and became interested in jazz. He enrolled at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland to study music but soon drifted toward theater. A teacher encouraged him to move to New York to study acting and, in 1983, Mr. Field took his advice.

After two years of struggling to find work as an actor, he got a break: he was cast in a bit role in Woody Allen's "Radio Days." He moved to Los Angeles in 1986, where he met his future wife, Serena Rathbun, a writer, and finally began getting film parts, among them the high-strung medical student in the dark comedy "Gross Anatomy" (1989).

But no role really grabbed him, he said, until he read the part of Mike McCaslin, the disillusioned dreamer on the Gulf Coast of Florida who falls in love with a shop clerk running from her past (Ashley Judd), in Victor Nunez's 1993 film "Ruby in Paradise."

The experience of acting in an intimate, low-budget production was a revelation for Mr. Field. "Victor was the first director with whom I really talked about a character," he said. "We spent hours discussing what was on Mike's bookshelf."

When asked what had drawn him to cast Mr. Field, Mr. Nunez said by telephone from Florida, "It's hard to find actors who can portray the kind of interior intellectual life that Todd can."

After studying at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Mr. Field embarked on a new wave of vivid acting roles, thanks partly to the critical success of "Ruby." Although up to that point he had portrayed rather wholesome types, he went on to play the bitingly sarcastic, unhappily married Duane in the film "Sleep With Me" (1994), the role of Beltzer the storm-chaser in the 1996 blockbuster "Twister" and the tormented, drug-addicted ambulance driver in Scott Ziehl's "Broken Vessels" (1999), among other parts.

BUT his highest-profile role was in Kubrick's final movie, "Eyes Wide Shut," in which he played the pianist Nick Nightingale, a supporting but pivotal character who introduces Tom Cruise's Dr. Harford to a world of iniquity. Not only was Mr. Field able to watch Kubrick in action, but Kubrick actually took an interest in "In the Bedroom," which Mr. Field was just starting to work on.

Though he stressed that he was not an intimate of Kubrick's ("I would be a phony to pretend that," he said), Mr. Field nonetheless found Kubrick supportive of his desire to direct. "I remember one very late evening we were sitting alone on the set, in that big hall, and he was asking me lots of gentle questions: "Why are you going to do it that way?' "Why does that interest you?' "Be careful of this.' "Be careful of that.' It was really inspiring."

Now that Mr. Field has directed "In the Bedroom," he wants to continue both acting and directing. "What I love about acting is the process of losing yourself," he said. "Writing and directing is the opposite: you're the architect, you're the glass blower, you're the janitor and you can never lose yourself."

Though he is thrilled with the reception that "In the Bedroom" has received, he said, he is wary as well. "Suddenly agents whom you couldn't get on the phone before are calling you three times a day," he said.

He paused. "The question is how to continue to work in a private way and do something simply because it has meaning for you," he said. " I would like to make another film. But I hope to do it really quietly." __ New York Times (November 18, 2001)