Budding genius

A talk with Curtis Hanson

LOS ANGELES -- Some of the wonder surrounding Wonder Boys, Curtis Hanson's follow-up to the Oscar-honored and critically acclaimed L.A. Confidential, concerns why he made the picture. No dense, white-knuckle film noir featuring volatile performances, this adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel is a laid-back picaresque about academe, middle age, the creative process, and softcore drugs. Throw in a paunchy Michael Douglas wearing a woman's housecoat and it's a long way from the corruption, homicide, and heavy testosterone of L.A.

"It's funny, the biggest thrill that I had from the success of L.A. Confidential was that Billy Wilder invited me to come to his office and meet him. To a screenwriter/director Billy Wilder is like the top of Mount Olympus. I went to meet him and the first thing he said to me was, `Next you want to do a comedy, right?' I said, `You're right, how did you know?' And he said, `I've felt the same way, but you're going to have to fight to get them to let you.' And that is the blessing of having success -- that you get to have some leverage. You can either raise your fee and do what they want you to do, or you can coerce them into letting you do something that they don't particularly want to let you do."

Leverage or not, Wonder Boys would have been a hard sell had not star and co-producer Michael Douglas been interested in it. The tale of a writer and college professor unable to finish a book, it is in part a novel about writing a novel, not an easy topic to make cinematic.

"If this was just a movie about a writer struggling with writing a book and struggling with success, I wouldn't have been interested in it," says Hanson. "Movies about writers tend to not be that good. I identified with it and thought that other people would because it's about characters who are all struggling to find a human connection, to find family, to look at past problems and in some cases future success, but they are struggling with what we all struggle with only they are funnier about it, and that's what interested me."

It interested the cast, as well -- enough to get Michael Douglas to gain 25 pounds, grow his hair long and gray, and basically look like your average 50-year-old frustrated writer. "I thought, if he wants to play this part, he's going to show us both the vulnerability and the humor that we haven't seen [from him] before," says Hanson about his star. "He will be really different from what we've seen, this kind of Armani-clad cool customer who assumes control."

Control is a recurrent theme in Wonder Boys -- or at least, controlled substances are. Robert Downey Jr. is Douglas's editor, a Hunter Thompson type with a recreational drug habit. Given that Downey was sent to prison for drug-related charges shortly after the movie wrapped, did Hanson have any qualms about the film's ambiguous attitude toward that loaded subject?

"One of the things I love about the movie is the nonjudgmental acceptance of its characters and their, God knows, eccentric behavior. It's like Billy Wilder. I think the reason Billy Wilder's movies have stood up so well is that though he was called a cynic at the time he made them, I think he was more accepting of people for what they are rather than what we would like to pretend they are, and then dealing with it, in a way that's embracing."

-- P.K.

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