THE DIRECTOR WHO DRILLED ‘THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR’

By CARYN JAMES
The New York Times, 7/11/04

On paper, Tod Williams might be a guy who's likely to land in the gossip columns, some East Coast version of a Hollywood jerk. His sister is a former supermodel, his father is one of the architects who designed the American Folk Art Museum, his ex-wife is the actress Famke Janssen and last month he married the actress Gretchen Mol. But in real life he has written and directed two captivating, beautifully understated little films, filled with wit and emotion. These movies resist every lurid impulse, even though the first, "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" (1998), was the autobiographical story of a teenage boy whose stepfather becomes his stepmother, and his new film, "The Door in the Floor," features an affair between Kim Basinger and a high school boy. Only a guy who is not a jerk could have pulled them off.

Mr. Williams even looks like a director ready to be discovered — he resembles the actor Ron Livingston, and at 35 has a dramatic gray lock in the front of his dark hair — but his public profile is so low that a media-savvy director like Michael Moore can, and almost did, steamroller right over him. "The Door in the Floor" was originally scheduled to be released on June 23, but when it was announced that Mr. Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" would open on June 25, Focus Features moved "Door" out of its path. "It was a smart move; we would have been crushed," Mr. Williams said, updating the situation by phone recently as he was sitting in traffic on a bridge, on his way back from a vacation in Canada.

Where most movie postponements mean trouble, this one protected a strong film. Based on the first section of John Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year," it follows a children's book author and his wife, played by Jeff Bridges and Ms. Basinger, whose marriage is falling apart several years after the deaths of their two teenage sons. Mr. Bridges gives one of his finest performances, but the story of a family shattered by grief needs careful handling if it's to reach an audience.

In a longer conversation about the film last month, Mr. Williams was as unassuming as his nickname, Kip. "It seemed stupid to use that name professionally because I hope to be directing when I'm 80 and I think it would be dumb to be called Kip when you're 80, but nobody calls me Tod," he said in the fifth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up that used to be his home but that since his marriage has become his workroom. It's the tiniest studio, but the roof is almost all skylight and there's a terrace — a terrace that looks out on the backs of other brick buildings. The room is so spare it seems unlived-in even for an office, with scripts he's been sent lined up neatly on a kitchen table and no writer's clutter anywhere. It looks like the reflection of a Zen-like calm, but Mr. Williams said, "I feel like I've got my brain in six different directions."

His career suggests a greater focus. When he went to Mr. Irving with the idea for "Door," he knew he wanted to break off the first section, abandoning the part of the novel that goes on for 30 more years. Instead of balking, Mr. Irving saw eye-to-eye with Mr. Williams from the start. The story was updated from the 50's to the present, and takes place during one traumatic summer in the lives of the womanizing Ted Cole, his delicate and distant wife, Marion, and their young daughter. Eddie, the high school boy, arrives to be Ted's assistant and is wildly distracted by Marion, who finds in him echoes of her dead sons.

The film was shot in the sun-splashed Hamptons and is rich with daily absurdities, like Ted's comic, nearly lethal affair with a knife-wielding neighbor. But the bright surface masks the depths of this family's sorrow. Mr. Williams was drawn to the novel at a time in his life when "I had gone through a lot of loss — all my grandparents, natural loss in life, nothing unnatural," he said. "And also my first marriage was breaking up. So there was that feeling: how does love die or end? Or what happens to these things if they don't last?"

He tried to remember, he said, "feeling like Eddie when I met my wife when I was 19, and then feeling like Ted in some way." When he adds, "All that stuff was kind of new to me," it helps explain the movie's freshness. Even the film's title, which is taken from Ted's most haunting children's book and seems so clumsy at first, becomes resonant by the end.

If making such a subtle film is hard, getting it made may be harder. "Door" gestated for four years, including some time spent waiting for Mr. Bridges to finish "Seabiscuit." As Mr. Williams said, "The movie kind of came together and fell apart so many times in the last four years I can't even keep track," including a moment when it seemed that Julianne Moore and Bill Murray might star.

"I went into debt and I did some other screenplay work for money, rewrite jobs," Mr. Williams said. "The script was well liked in Hollywood already, so it got me some work to survive, but it was very hard for me to put my whole focus into something other than this movie. By the time we did go into production — you know, I made more money than I've ever made on this movie, but when I finished it I was back to zero because I was so deeply in debt."

There is a weird background to these struggling-artist years. He grew up in Manhattan until he was 12, then moved with his mother, sister and stepfather to Woodstock. Upstate New York is also the setting of "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole," which takes place in 1983. Many other details of Sebastian's life also follow those of his creator. Sebastian has an architect father and a stepfather who announces that he is about to become a woman. And, like Mr. Williams, Sebastian goes to England with his mother, but he soon moves back to New York to live with his stepfather, a character who begins the film as Hank and becomes Henrietta. Mr. Williams talks about the film as if it belongs to his distant past when in fact it is five years old.

"In real life, that person was very important to me," he said of the stepfather character, and making the movie was "a way of acknowledging" that. Played with total credibility by Clark Gregg, the character is truly endearing. As Mr. Williams says of the autobiographical elements, "In some sense everybody's heightened, and Hank is probably sanctified."

Even so, the real-life model for Hank was unhappy that the film was made. Mr. Williams said: "I told him what I was doing the whole time. And I'd given him scripts. And he never really communicated that he was uncomfortable with it. But in the end I found out that he was. And it was really a bummer because I was trying to say something for him."

The film's end is wrenching, but is also a departure from the facts. "He actually went back to being a man," Mr. Williams said. "That would've been hard to explain in the last five minutes."

He came to make the personal "Sebastian Cole," and moved back to Manhattan, after floundering for a few years in Los Angeles. He thought he wanted to be a journalist (and he was a stringer for The New York Times) but realized he didn't have the personality, he said, "to go into a terrible situation" and ask people "the exact question they don't want to answer."

He studied at the American Film Institute, and failed to make a film he called "as complicated as '8 1/2,' but a viscerally action-packed movie." He directed a Nabokov play called "The Event," and now says: "It was a stupid idea. It was 14 actors on a stage the size of this kitchen," a so-called kitchen that looks like it can hardly handle two.

From the $350,000 budget for "Sebastian Cole" to $7 million for "The Door in the Floor" is a leap, but $7 million is nothing by major-movie (and union crew) standards. He says: "I think that when it comes to the kinds of directors people want to hire for big-budget stuff, they're looking at a lot of commercial directors, a lot of style-first guys. Because that's what people think directing is. And my directing style is to do as little as I can, and to make the audience have to look around. I hate telling the audience what to do."

Although he may say he's spread in a half-dozen directions, his next project is taking shape: he's writing and directing a new version of Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not," with Benicio del Toro as Harry Morgan, the fishing boat captain made famous by Humphrey Bogart in the 1944 classic. ("You know how to whistle, don't you?" Lauren Bacall asks him.) Mr. Williams got the rights directly from the Hemingway estate and was able to bypass Warner Brothers because their Bogart-and-Bacall version was such a departure from the novel. He says he's not worried about viewers resenting someone fiddling with a beloved film because his version will be so different.

Mr. Williams may be unassuming, but when he says, "It's going to be a much, much tougher, stranger movie, much uglier," Bogart himself couldn't sound more certain.