Director hopes to implicate the audience in character's secret

By Moira Macdonald
Seattle Times movie critic

	Robert Benton
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"It's fun to make a movie as you get older," he said. "You have more freedom."

"The Human Stain," based on the Philip Roth novel, is about a man likewise looking back on his life. Coleman Silk, played by Anthony Hopkins, is a college professor who throughout his adult life has carefully kept a secret, causing great damage to himself and others. Benton read the novel when it came out in 1998, and was dazzled by it. He and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer weren't concerned about the audience connecting with such a flawed character, because Benton has gone down this road before.

"It's like with 'Bonnie and Clyde,' " he explained. "When you meet them, you know they're bank robbers, but you get to like them — they're funny, they rob banks, but they don't do anybody any harm. At the end of the most comic scene of the movie, when you're liking (Clyde) the most, he kills somebody, and you're trapped in that car with him for the rest of the movie. But you're invested in him, you're implicated. I wanted that for Coleman."

Though Benton wrote the screenplays for most of the films he directed, "The Human Stain" came to him as a complete draft, by his friend Meyer. (Benton had earlier tried to acquire the rights to adapt it himself but was too late.) He has nothing but praise for Meyer's work — "an extraordinary job." And while Benton has in the past worked closely with novelists whose books inspired his films (most recently, Richard Russo in "Nobody's Fool"), in this case, Roth's involvement was more remote.

Though the novelist had read the script and approved of it, he kept himself distant from the production, which Benton understood well. "I think, for a novelist, it's extremely difficult to see something you've held in your head become literal. If I told you that I just was in the elevator with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, you'd imagine that. If I showed you a picture, you'd know what I was talking about, but you may or may not agree. Words have the power to evoke; film has the power to specify. That's what's hardest for film, to suggest."

"The Human Stain" represented a first for Benton: He had never before made an independently financed film. "I grew up working in the studio system," he said, fondly remembering the excitement of filmmaking in the '70s, before the studios changed and became more corporate-run. "With 'Jaws' (1975) and 'Star Wars' (1977), the movie business changed. (Those films) made so much money around the world, that corporations suddenly saw studios as a source of great global revenue. Movie studios were founded by entrepreneurs, and for 60-odd years, they had survived. But when corporations bought them — well, corporations can't be run like that. They're answerable to boards of directors and stockholders."

Creative, quirky movies, said Benton, are now mostly being made by the smaller studios, or by the big studios when "someone like Scott Rudin can make them happen."

Rudin, who recently produced "The Hours" and "School of Rock" at Paramount, will be teaming with Benton on an upcoming project. And Benton's also at work adapting John O'Hara's novel "Appointment in Samarra," which he hopes to eventually direct.

So there's no slowing down for this self-described "movie-dependent person," who clearly loves to talk about his beloved art form. An ideal film, he said, should be "like a handwritten letter to a friend. You should never see the director, the screenwriter, the cinematography, you should never say, 'That's great acting.' It should just unfold."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com

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