Director Adrian Lyne
Examines the Arbitrary Nature of Love in his new Film, Unfaithful
by Keith Bryan Jeffreys
originally published May, 2002 in Venice Magazine
Adrian Lyne is far
too quick to agree to a career label, no matter how
hypothetical. "No. God no!" he says, rolling his eyes, laughing
out loud, and anticipating a question linking his work and the
40th anniversary of Andrew Sarris's auteur theory.
Yet Lyne, a cinematic
pragmatist, has made a career of consistently blending art and commerce
while making films dealing with sexual desire and deceit, memory,
obsession, and manipulation. Through Lyne's lens, and what he likes to
call "the small picture," audiences are allowed to peer in on the
psychosexual nature of turn-of-the-millennium relationships.
Lyne began his career in
the world of television commercials with a list of colleagues that
includes the likes of Ridley Scott and Alan Parker. "I never knew if we
were successfully selling anything," he says, looking back. "Yet we were
fiercely competitive in those days. We were constantly looking at each
other's reels, looking at each other's work to see how this one did this
shot, and this one did that shot."
After several small films,
the competitive spirit brought Lyne into the feature market with Foxes,
an ensemble film with Jodie Foster in 1980. Flashdance followed
as an MTV-ish pastiche about a leg warmer-clad Rocky-ette, who, along
with the film and a hit soundtrack, easily danced into Reagan-era hearts
and mind-sets.
Next, fresh off the
commercial success of Flashdance, Lyne made the provocative 9
1/2 Weeks catching prudish American critics off-guard. Still, the
dominance-themed art film was a phenomenon, a hit worldwide, and to this
day rakes in the green.
In 1987 Lyne hit full
stride with his thriller Fatal Attraction, which marked a
trifecta high-point in Lyne's career as a taut telling of a
fling-turned-obsession complete with perilous aftermath. It was an
enormous and well-deserved success for Lyne, establishing him as a
director who could pick and choose projects as he pleased. He chose
Jacob's Ladder. It stands, previous to his current film, as his best
work. To see it is to experience it, in a way no other film has managed,
an excruciatingly painful trip into a fragile psyche shackled in
purgatory. It is a total immersion into the world of a Vietnam vet
played by Tim Robbins, who turns in a bravura performance that, like the
film, was under-appreciated at the time.
The critical and
commercial failure of Ladder marked another turning point for Lyne who
took an old bar joke to an odd conclusion in Indecent Proposal,
managing along the way to use the vehicle as a means of examining
free-market American mores: In a society where everything is for sale,
even a thing as rare as first love can be bartered for the big, easy,
no-work Vegas pay day—the true cost of the transaction to be paid later,
with interest. As a result, says Lyne of the characters, "We end up
hating the pimp and liking the whore." Beyond the titillation of
anticipated sex, that description may be one reason audiences seemed
willing to buy into the trick: A plot contingent on believing at the end
that all the participants were innocent.
Undaunted by the prospect
of a semi-literate American culture, Lyne next revisited Nabokov's
Lolita with the intent of staying true to the book's themes glossed
over by Kubrick in his 1962 version. His 1997 version of Lolita
is closer to Nabakov’s—owing nothing to his predecessor—faithfully
exploring the theme of redemption driven by true love forever lost, and
the tragedy of a stunted maturity desperately thirsting for an elixir
through the fount of a nymph proxy. Occasionally sentimental, Lyne
makes few concessions and to his credit never glosses over Humbert's own
cruelty toward Lo's mother in order to stay close to the object of his
desire, the one who fails him, Lolita.
If the commercial failure
of Lolita marks a lull in his career as a director, Lyne's Unfaithful
will most certainly stand as a classic. Working as both director and
producer, his film serves as a cinematic contemplation on the nature and
transformation of a seemingly settled suburban relationship: A
housewife, her marriage secure, embarks on a shopping foray to the Big
Apple (surely there's a symbol somewhere here) where she meets a vibrant
young book dealer. Unable to resist her desire, she begins an affair
despite the love and security her husband and young son provide her at
home in rural Connecticut. What follows is a mature tale told by a
cautionary raconteur with the assistance of an enormously talented cast.
Venice: Why Unfaithful?
Adrian Lyne: I wanted to
make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.
You’ve based your film on
Chabrol's La Femme Infidèle. What was it that you saw in La
Femme Infidèle that made it interesting as a subject to tackle?
God. It was a number of
things. In Chabrol's movie I thought it was interesting in dealing with
the fact that two people were trying to live together and one was an
adulteress and the other was a murderer. I was interested in the
ramifications of that. Also, there is a moment [in the original] where
the wife is looking at the pictures and she walks down the stairway and
she is almost radiant in a way that he has murdered this man over her.
What I loved is there was a moment where he is working in the garden and
he looked up and he knew that she knew and then he actually says, “I
love you madly,” which was incredibly moving.
Watching that scene reminded me
in a way of your original ending for Fatal Attraction, the scene at the
end where Anne Archer and Michael Douglas are out in the yard.
Interesting you should say
that. I've never actually said this before, but I thought about that a
lot when I was making Fatal Attraction. I did have that in mind
absolutely.
Your films frequently focus on common
themes. Where does that come from?
I don't know really. I've
always been interested in the small picture instead of the big one, and
I've always been interested in relationship pictures. Obviously, in
dealing with a relationship, sexuality has to be involved, and jealousy
and emotions like that. And I don't know, I've always been intrigued by
those emotions. Jealousy is such a complicated emotion, obviously
destructive and awful. Also, it's such an aphrodisiac because it tends
to make people more appealing, which is the awful truth. I've always
been interested in films where you can identify with the actors. Where
you can be in their shoes and therefore be more involved if they're
people that you recognize. The other thing is that I'm interested in
relationships, but the sex is what people tend to remember in my movies.
I mean, you make a film like Fatal Attraction. What people take
away from it is Michael Douglas and Glenn Close fucking over a sink.
That's what they remember which is a tiny part of the movie. Which
suggests that people are interested in sex. And why wouldn't they be?
What guides your directing style?
What I think is
interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules
of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is
that if your book of rules becomes a book of clichés. The challenge,
really, on any new film is to try to avoid that and achieve a few
moments that aren't cliché. For example, there's a love scene that you
see in flashback—via her (Constance Sumner played by Diane Lane)—sitting
on a train. It's extraordinary really in that Diane Lane's face mirrors
everything she's been through. It mirrors her guilt, mirrors her
excitement. It mirrors her sadness at what she's done. And it was almost
like I didn't need to shoot the actual love scene because you can see it
all on her face, in her memory. But there's a moment in the love scene
where she can't relax. And so I based the next part on a story this guy
living in a village near me in France told me. He was having an affair
with a girl in his own village and they were trying to have sex for the
first time and she couldn't go through with it, and so he said, "Hit
me." So she lashed out, and through the whirling or slaps came the
release that she needed to be able to do it. And when he told me the
story, I thought, that's wonderful. So I stuck it in the movie. Always,
with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or
seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film. So on
my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the
ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of
pictorial reference. The danger is that if you have a bunch of ideas
that you forget to use.
You took a little longer between
films this time.
I did. I was speaking to
Ridley Scott the other day and he makes a film every 18 months. He's
amazing really. I asked him, "How do you do it?" And he said, in that
heavy North Country brogue of his, "Delegate, man. Delegate." I'm bad at
delegating.
That said, perhaps the
contemplation of an idea, letting it gestate is better—
I love doing that. I think
it's good. It's not the sort of thing I could have done ten years ago. I
think you get better at staring into space. Especially living in the
South of France. I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so
totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so
different from American values.
This is an important theme.
That's true. I don't think
an American friend of mine would have said to his girlfriend, "Hit me."
And in that sense, making the
young lover (Olivier Martinez) French is inspired.
And I think you understand
a little bit more why she falls for him. In a way, watching the French
do anything is a little more fun because their gestures are different.
And in that way, they make everything interesting.
Then we're onto the question of
body language. I believe you've said this is about the body language of
guilt.
There's a moment in the
film which happened by accident, when he (Edward Sumner played by
Richard Gere) is in his study and he's working. She comes into the study
and she's just fucked Olivier's character for the first time. Out of the
blue Gere asks, "Do you love me?" And she says, "Yes." As she goes out
of the room she turns the light off by mistake. It's a Freudian slip and
she puts the light up again. That speaks volumes for the state of mind
she's in. I love that. Especially when it happens accidentally.
What interested you in
the character of Edward Sumner?
What I was interested in
was exactly where our breaking point is. What point at which we are
pushed over the line. I think he's a man that bottled it all up and it
came out with awful consequences. He didn't snap because of jealousy, he
snapped because of betrayal, because she gave him the thing that he saw
he had given her as a gift.
The snow globe.
Right. The scene was the
same as in the original movie, actually.
Richard Gere really seems to
have awakened in this film from his post sex-symbol plateau.
I'm really proud of him, I
must say. We expect him to be the lover.
He probably wants to hold onto
his sex symbol image.
We worked very hard at
that. I was very anxious that he should put on weight. That he should be
a little out of shape. He's naturally a very athletic guy. But I was
very anxious to play that down so he would not run like a jock and not
walk like that. He's in a very interesting stage of his life now because
he's not the Olivier Martinez that he once was.
And Diane Lane as Connie Sumner
is vulnerable because she's a little older.
And it makes her
attraction to someone like Olivier that much more understandable. It's
his gloss, the glow.
This is very much about her
seduction.
That's right. And there's
a very important scene where Connie is in Martel's living space and
she's looking at a book. Well, one of the producers thought the book
should be Braille. Then you know that the tactile sensation of her
tracing her fingers over the page makes it a massively sexy scene.
That's great when that happens in the process and we went with that.
In many ways Diane Lane was
perfect for the role.
She has this kind of
sexuality that sort of breathes off her. Not many people have that and
what is unique about her, so unusual, is that with it, she is so
likeable. Normally, when people are sexually attractive, they're tough.
Most of them. And this is what excited me about her.
Her likeable quality allows her
to play a mother easily as well. There's an interesting scene where she
takes the candy from her son's mouth and then puts it in hers.
Funny really. [laughing]
There was one scene where we did it without a cut and she took the
candy, and it had so much spit on it, she said, "I can't eat it. I
can't."
You have to pick and choose what
it is you want to use in a scene.
I need to be like a
sponge, really. I think I should be called a selector, not a director.
It's the process of selection, where I have to say, not that chair, that
one.
This goes back to what we spoke
of earlier about contemplation. In 1968 Andrew Sarris described
directing as "a very strenuous form of contemplation."
I've always thought of
film as wrestling, really. You're trying to get this thing in kind of a
choke-hold. And it's endlessly moving and changing and you're trying to
pin it down. And because the process involves so many people, it can
change so easily for the worse in a million ways. With me it's like
pulling teeth. Every time I do one I feel like I've never really quite
learned anything. I always find that when I'm making a film, I find it a
little bit like I'm doing it for the first time.
Sarris goes on to reluctantly admit
to a director's ability to create "the sublimity of statement almost
miraculously extracted from his money-oriented environment."
The experience on this
film was extraordinary in many ways. Diane Lane's face mirrored every
conflicting emotion about how she felt about what she'd done. It had
radiance, it had guilt, it had sadness. One of the fabulous things about
my job is that I have stolen a piece of her that I'll have forever. You
know there is a moment in the film where Martel asks her if she wants to
take her coat off. And she thinks he asked if she wants to take her
clothes off. Then she understands that she's made a mistake and she
blushes scarlet on the screen and I've never seen that before. I've
never seen anybody do that. That makes it all worthwhile. Maybe that's
the sublime thing Sarris is talking about.
Copyright
2003 Keith Jeffreys
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