Director Strangelove

We Dine among the rustle of tailored jackets and the sculpted sheen of Cristophe-styled hair. Everyone within complimenting distance of the Paramount commissary is dressed to kill, everyone with the exception of Adrian Lyne, who dresses like a poet on a binge, in a pullover that looks as itchy as a coral reef. He is Lord Byron among the industry guerrillas, and he writes poetry this town loves: the highly profitable kind. Flashdance and Fatal Attraction were runaway hits. The director's eyes, cooked to the color of rhubarb by the nitrogen-dioxide-rich Los Angeles air and long days in the editing room, drift across the table to my plate.

"Yours is better than mine, you lucky stiff," he says. "You got die patty melt." The lines of his deep smile share the contours of a Möbius strip--it's hard to tell where the joy takes up and the agony ends. Food suddenly becomes die last thing on his mind as his current preoccupation intrudes again.

"I'm busy seven days a week. I have four editors--five, with a music editor. I'm quite up about it this week, actually. Last week I was about to shoot myself. This film, I have good people, really good actors. If something gets fucked up, it's totally my fault and there's no excuse."

The source of this angst is Indecent Proposal, Lyne's widely anticipated sixth film. Scheduled t o be released in April, Indecent Proposal is the tale of a married couple (Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson) in Las Vegas. A wealthy stranger, played by Robert Redford, approaches them with an intriguing, though seemingly absurd, proposition: $1 million in exchange for one night with Demi. Husband and wife mull over the proposal. "It's not my soul, it's not my heart," Moore's character rationalizes, "it's only my body. We can make a big deal out of this and walk away and feel principled, or we can look at it as a business thing."

The price of poker, as the man said, just went up.

"I think it's an interesting idea, and I was always drawn to it--whether or not you'll sleep with someone for a million dollars," Lyne maintains. "It's the kind of idea that gets people talking when they come out of the theater and everybody disagrees. I got the impression that people would more willingly be given a contract to blow someone away anonymously--someone they didn't know--than they would to fuck somebody for a million dollars. That is kind of bizarre, you know?"

Also on the peculiar side is how far the 51-year-old Lyne has come to hold sway in L.A. "I'm from London, yeah, but I hate the English. I hate England and I hate being there. It's a depressing place full of depressing people. The people are always moaning and never fucking doing anything about it. Then they're all over anybody like myself who had the happy chance to get out."

There exists the possibility that Lyne's greatest incentive for leaving home had something to do with the company he kept: The first happy breed of men he worked with were accountants.

"I was a bean counter for about a year after school," he recalls. "I had passed my math and I was overjoyed." His parents helped him land a job the company of a family friend, where his queasy nearness to balance sheets and comptrollers' memos was buffered by his fortunate proximity to the building across the street.

"It was a department store called Peter Jones," he says. "Kind of like the Broadway or Saks. The whole row of ladies' dressing rooms faced our windows and they had no curtains. For about a year, everybody from the senior partner on down would bring binoculars. Hysterical. And that's all anybody ever did. You'd get a phone call from somebody and he'd alert you: 'Terrific in number five.' Then one sad day, one of those fucking tragic days, they frosted over the glass." Lyne is known to find sex in strange places.

He moved on to shoot TV commercials, working with such future British movie directors as Tony and Ridley Scott and Alan Parker. Like his pals, Lyne moved to Los Angeles. In 1980, his first year in town, he would direct his first feature film, Foxes, starring Sally Kellerman and a 16-year-old Jodie Foster. He made the move to Hollywood with his wife, Samantha, to whom he's been married "forever," a unit of time that, for the rest of us, translates to 19 years.

"What does my wife do? Well, nothing, really. I think it's good." His wife's inactivity, that is. "Sometimes I complain a little about it, but I know if she did anything I'd be right there telling her to stop. I know I'd be depressed."

The women in an Adrian Lyne film, however, are very busy. His pictures are inhabited by a spectrum of females ranging from homicidal to heaven-sent. Women who might be devils (Elizabeth Pena in Jacob's Ladder), unkillable, bunny-boiling women leaping out of the tub like bloody Pop-Tarts (Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction), wet women who do mating dances with kitchen chairs (Jennifer Beals in Flashdance), women on skateboards (Jodie Foster in Foxes), blindfolded women who are fed the contents of the fridge as if they were doing an R-rated commercial for cold medication (Kim Basinger in 9-1/2 Weeks). They are women who drive us to distraction.

"Well, my wife and I have a colorful relationship," Lyne admits. With the dark implications in Fatal Attraction, he has done more for marital fidelity than the Seventh Commandment and hundreds of years' worth of papal bulls, so he knows what he's talking about. "We argue and we fight, but it somehow seems necessary for our long-term betterment. It's funny. When I was preparing for Indecent Proposal and I was getting into the rewrite stage, I was approaching writers who wouldn't even contemplate doing subject matter such as this because they considered it immoral or objectionable."

Lyne actively seeks out such conflict. "I love the idea of people talking, arguing, disagreeing about Proposal," he says. In other words, they can obsess on an idea the way he does, view it from every realizable angle, play with it, bend it, pose it like an artist's mannequin. Each pose has its moment of truth and then is gone. Stringing together the poses gives Lyne two things: moving pictures and screen lives that are full of loose ends.

There are those who suffer sleeplessness, heartache, hives, depression and self-doubt because of their art. Among them, Lyne is the generalissimo, the commander-in-grief.

Crazy and compassionate, neurotically shackled by self-reproach, his is a life dominated by cross-examination in which he serves as both defendant and prosecutor.

"Adrian Lyne is a great guy, but he hates all his own movies," a film critic recently told me . Hearing the remark cracks up Lyne to the point where he's doing the backstroke in his chair.

"It's true, yes. I assume they're all going to go into the back-loader. I mean, that's the way I am. I'm lying, of course, but. . . ."

Then again, not entirely. If he looked for help to load all those prints of the disastrous 9-1/2 Weeks into the Dumpster, the line would stretch from Mickey Rourke's favorite Harley shop in West Los Angeles to that town Kim Basinger bought in Georgia. What was supposed to be an adagio of sex and food became instead a dissonant fugue of tabletop humping and hard-to-remove spots.

"Look, it was a wonderful novel," Lyne laments, referring to the Elizabeth McNeill book from which the film was adapted, "and I'd even like to try to do it again, to see if I could do it better. I think there was a better film in there than the one I found. We tried so many different drafts of that story--we were into version K, which gives you an idea how far we went.

"There was stuff in the novel that had more to do with what the story was really about, but to try to put it on film just wouldn't work." Clearly, he can't give this one up. "For example," he continues, "there was one funny, rather erotic passage in the book where the guy's watching a ball game and she's over by the wall in handcuffs. She's a bit bored because he's watching this ball game, until finally the cuffs start to hurt her a little bit. The way the author describes it is really quite beautiful. At least I know some women who found it quite erotic."

Even when his directorial powers are at their best--as in Fatal Attraction--Lyne makes room for agony. In that irresistibly wicked thriller, Glenn Close stalks fallen family man Michael Douglas to her death. At one point, the depth of Close's psychosis is illustrated by having her simply flick a light switch on and off, again and again.

"I liked the sequence very much, but there would always be one titter in every screening," says Lyne, gesturing with his fingers, pinching an imaginary varmint. "There was always at least one. You sit there, wincing and dying. The first showing with an audience is always a nightmare. I remember when I first showed Flashdance. I was sitting with my assistant near the front of the theater. When the film first started rolling, I turned to him and said, 'Is this as I bad as I think it is?' There was this long pause, and then he said, 'Yes.' Then there was another long pause. And I said, 'Is there an exit near here?' But then after another five minutes the audience came around, started laughing at stuff and I got a sense that maybe they loved it."

When the waiter clears our plates, Lyne lets out a moan that could be mistaken for a golden retriever desperately trying to speak.

"I always get upset when people don't eat their fries," he apologizes. Bouncing back admirably from the sight of my plate being spirited away, he invites me to have a look at segments of Indecent Proposal.

•

Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore lie in bed together, considering Robert Redford's offer. The length of their marriage is unspecified, though sex and possession are intimated through body chemistry and sweet talk. Premarital dating exploits and jealousies are still recent enough to bring color to their cheeks.

When they get around to discussing the proposal, their dialog has a spare quality, the pauses rife with innuendo. Beneath Moore's devotion to her husband is an undercurrent of carnal adventurism. Her voice is low, vital and thrilling. Someone slipped slices of desire into her cereal for this role; she has the look of a woman whose touch could grow grass in Death Valley.

Lyne saw three other actresses for the role: Annabella Sciorra, Nicole Kidman and Isabelle Adjani. All were good, but he decided on Moore after she tested by doing the bedroom scene where husband and wife discuss the proposal.

"When she did her test, she was natural. She was lying on the floor with a guy, you know the way it is, like maybe after sex, whatever. She was very unselfconscious. She gave it a womanly style, if there's such a beast, and she looked like a woman--kind of rounded. She had just had her kid and she looked great. I wanted to keep her like that. I told her I'd never really seen her like that. But she was, 'No, no, I gotta lose weight, gotta lose weight.' So that was die first fight."

Lyne spent six weeks on location shooting Indecent Proposal in Las Vegas, errant humankind's last outpost. Because the casinos are virtually always crowded, cast and crew worked from four A.M. to four P.M. That difficult working schedule was a spark that was added to die highly combustible mixture of Lyne and Moore.

"She's focused, ambitious, tough and brilliant," Lyne says of his female lead, his head nodding in grudging approbation with each adjective. "We fought tooth and nail. I'd be thinking, shit, if I want to sit down, she wants to stand up. If I want her hair up, she wants it (continued on page 169)Adrian Lyne(continued from page 128) down. But in the end, she's very bright, so you can't really dismiss what she's saying. The thing is, with her, she questions everything, which at the time I thought was to the point of mania, I must say."

"We definitely had our moments," Moore says, laughing. "But it was healthy, and good rose out of it. The thing about it is, I would throw my hands up and say, 'Man, this is making me crazy. You're making me crazy.' And he would say, 'I know, I know, I'm an asshole.' What can you do when somebody's saying, 'Yeah, I know I'm an asshole'? Other times he'd defend his point of view, then later he'd come back around. It took him a while to find it."

The lion's share of their squabbling was over Moore's character, whom she perceived as being unfailingly strong, while Lyne kept pushing for vulnerability. As a result, every scene was a battleground. "I'm an obstinate person," Lyne concedes. "1 wanted my way and she wanted hers. Now I'm looking at the rushes and she's fucking wonderful. I mean, I'm a terminal manic-depressive about everything I do, but she's really good in this. I didn't know she was that good, really. Now I've been ringing her up to tell her."

"He does," says Moore. "I speak to him frequently. He says he misses me as he watches me. We had conflict because we're too much the same, not because we were too far apart. We would always come back in the end and say we both wanted the same thing. My feeling about him is not like, ugh, I just cannot stand this guy. He did drive me crazy, and vice versa. And literally there were times when I would say black, he would say white. Almost simultaneously. Woody must've felt like the mediator, he was always laughing at us."

Contemplating all of this, Lyne swirls reheated coffee in a cup. It's early evening now, and he will be manning the editing machines long into the night. "When you're sitting in a room, removed from all the angst, all the arguing, all the fighting, when you're removed from the process and you see what you have, it's always a wonderful relief," the director says. "During the shoot, I wanted to murder her--and her, me. But I'm always wary of movie sets where it was a great time and everyone was great to everyone else."

•

Lyne stands in a hall, his tired, bleary eyes skimming through a copy of Lolita. He spends a good five minutes searching for a passage he wants me to hear. While one obsession remains dismembered on 18 reels, spread out over five editing rooms, another one begins to take hold. He hopes to try his hand at a second film adaptation of Nabokov's novel (the first being Stanley Kubrick's in 1962).

"My eyes are as red as fucking tomatoes," he laments, finally giving up on finding the passage. "I've worn contacts for years and now they're fighting me giving me trouble." When he hears of similar problems among Angelenos who have been diagnosed as having a condition called dry eye and that some go as far as having their tear ducts adjusted, his mood brightens.

"You get more tears, then? Well, thank God," Lyne rejoices. "Here I've been going around thinking it's just me."

•

With a predatory stare, Robert Redford lines up a billiard shot, then strokes the cue ball. Watching the balls smack into each other, he makes his million-dollar proposition to Harrelson and Moore. His manner is brusque, unfeigned and persuasive, as if there were an honor system to be employed while tampering with other people's lives. The foggy glimmer in his eyes tells you his heart is as pure as mud. Redford has played mean characters before, but his role as Lyne's Mephistophelian billionaire may be his biggest stretch.

"That's what induced me to get Robert Redford," Lyne contends. "I originally talked to Warren Beatty and that was an interesting thought. And he's a hell of an actor. But I think with Robert Redford, you don't expect it."

Lyne's biggest concern with Redford, who is known as one of the true gentlemen in front of the camera, had more to do with his own work habits. As a director who likes to do a lot of takes, regardless of how good each one is, Lyne fretted privately (and reportedly without justification) that his thoroughness might have been irksome to his star.

"Every once in a while, you'll get a bit of magic from one of those extra takes," he says. "With Bob, if he started to bore himself after he'd done two or three takes of something, if he got in a rut, he would do some enormous laugh or pratfall in the middle of a take, so that it was totally out of sync with the scene. Then after that, when everybody had laughed, or whatever, he'd suddenly be fresh for about a minute. It was rather clever. He would do it to sort of jack up the scene. I'd never really seen anybody do it quite like that."

To add another dimension to the Redford character, Lyne and Redford tinkered with the character's delivery and timing. The arc of Redford's character begins with the idea that he can break up the couple's relationship. Eventually, he becomes fascinated with, Moore's character and falls in love with her.

"You know what people do when they don't answer when you expect them to, or they kind of don't look away? In other words, they sort of embarrass you, when you have a conversation and there's supposed to be the usual to-and-fro time. With Bob's character, we altered that time by having him not answer Demi's character when you expect him to. That's gonna throw her. So we fucked around with that quite a lot. You get this kind of eccentricity--he's not doing the expected thing. And it makes her kind of attracted to him, so it's not as simple as just a financial transaction. That upsets the balance."

•

"Oh, my God, I always find it tough talking about my work," Lyne says, blanching. "I see other people's work, I see something like Malcolm X or The Crying Game and they're so good I want to throw up. But there are things that set you apart. I used to do a lot of really tight shots about ten years ago. Now I tend to give stuff more air. I don't know why, but I do."

The essence of a Lyne film lies somewhere between seduction and self-consciousness. The centerpiece of his technique is the medium shot, which he uses as if it were a string tied to a dropped wallet. His camera doesn't grant the distance of a voyeur, but it is disinclined to invade our space. In maintaining this balance, he draws us in. Once he has dangled the lure, he pulls you along with intriguing questions and provocations. What happens when your one-night stand changes from bitchy to suicidal to pregnant to homicidal? "See what happens to you when you cheat on me, even in your mind?" Tim Robbins' wife scolds him in the hallucinatory Jacob's Ladder.

Watching Lyne's characters is like watching butterflies in a vacuum. You know that their environment has been shamelessly tampered with. Still, you can't keep your eyes off them. He cites the sequence from Indecent Proposal where Woody and Demi first discuss Redford's offer, both of them fascinated and appalled by wondering what the other is thinking.

"There's a shot where Woody is supposed to look up at Demi. Before their eyes met, he sneaked a look at her. We edited out just that initial little flick of his eyes and he went from being a furtive individual, somebody who was fascinated by the whole idea and wanted her to do it, to someone infinitely more innocent. A quarter of a second. Eight frames of film made the difference between this man being squalid and excited by the prospect to being more unassured.

"There's another moment, when Woody changes his mind and runs through the halls trying to find Demi to stop her. The obvious thing would be to play a kind of staccato drum track. Instead, we played the love-theme music. Suddenly the music is not telling what you're looking at, but telling you how he feels. Suddenly you care for this guy a little more, you indulge him, even though it's terrible what he's done. He has just pimped his wife."

No longer willing to endure this inquiry into his personal style, Lyne smudges the fingerprints with a disclaimer. "But it's hit and miss. You try to hit enough of these things to make a film right. But is it ever perfect? Well, you never quite get that far."

•

The scene begins just after Woody and Demi, having agreed to Redford's proposal, say goodbye. Pick up Woody, meandering through the kitschy gaming rooms, pounded by his conscience, as if his free will were a lottery ball suspended in a jet of air.

Back alone in his hotel room, anything that moves seems tainted with sexual innuendo. A television set slowly rises out of the floor. Wandering through the channels, he lingers on a pornographic movie. The porno video is shot using a blue filter, giving the background a fashionable cobalt-and-gray aura, in contrast to the actors, who are clear and breathtakingly attractive, as if De Sica were shooting a rock video.

Intercut with the porno video are shots of Demi, sitting alone in Redford's bedroom on his yacht. As Woody watches the video, he begins to hallucinate that the woman in the video is his wife. The woman looks into the camera as her lover enters her from behind. Unable to bear the woman's sexual rapture, Woody breaks down.

"Up front, of course, there's that ego thing, that he's crazy with jealousy," Lyne remarks, watching Harrelson's character on the moviola, "and what's happened is thoroughly appalling. But somewhere in there, it's kind of exciting for him in a sexual way, it's kind of an aphrodisiac."

It's also the ultimate gamble. Harrelson's character is like a roulette player putting everything he has on red. Winning means having his wife back without any lingering doubts over her million-dollar tryst. More specifically, winning means being reassured that he's a better lover than Redford, that the brief, accommodating smile he catches crossing his wife's face the next time they make love is caused by an intrusive bedspring and not by the abiding memory of Redford's sexual horsemanship.

"That's just my head, I'll have you know," Demi Moore insists, referring to the woman in the porno video sequence. "Adrian just did a very good job."

While there might be some satisfaction in knowing that he has seamlessly attached Moore's head to a more willing body double, Lyne has his sights set on a more cerebral illusion. As a sower of fixations, he's hoping that under the cover of a darkened movie theater, we men will see the faces of our wives or lovers staring back at us, instead of Demi's.

"Well, yes, that would be nice," Lyne wishes, looking for something wooden to knock for good luck. "But you never, ever know about these things. You can't have a clue until you're with an audience." Frustrated in his search for something wooden, he slams the nearest wall hard enough to rattle the ceiling tiles. "I was aiming for the wooden studs underneath. By the way, did I ever show you my surefire system for winning at roulette?"

"'I wanted to murder her. But I'm always wary of movie sets where everyone was great to everyone else.'"