The Safe House - Expositions

Romanek, an articulate, fortysomething American with an agile mind, looks like a rumpled, aging hippie with a fuzzy beard and the vague aura of academia clinging to him.

But his music video credits suggest something else, a slick artiste on the cutting edge of superstar trends. He has made magic for musicians as diverse as David Bowie, Beck, Lenny Kravitz, Macy Gray, R.E.M. and both Michael and Janet Jackson.

He has scooped up a dozen MTV Video Awards, two Grammys and three citations from Billboard magazine. Two of his most dynamic efforts, Madonna's Bedtime Story and Nine Inch Nails' Closer, are now installed in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. MTV awarded him the Video Vanguard prize in 1997 for his pioneering work.

So it is simply astonishing that Romanek is the same guy who wrote and directed the disturbing yet thrilling stalker tale One Hour Photo, which opens in Toronto Friday. The film stars Robin Williams in a dark, cerebral role.

Williams thanks Romanek, who co-wrote and directed another oddity, the film Static, in 1985, but was obliged to wait another 17 years to get a second film made.

"I think the work is just so precise," Williams says of the appeal of One Hour Photo. It was filmed before the actor's equally dark films Death To Smoochy and Insomnia, both released earlier this year, but Romanek spent 13 months in the editing room to get it just right.

"It was a hard process," Williams says of playing Sy Parrish, a creepily repressed clerk at the photo counter of a large suburban drugstore. His loner character becomes obsessed with the family of a woman who brings her photos to him for processing.

"But, yeah, as a whole piece, it's probably the best I've done in a long time," he says. "It helps to have someone like Mark Romanek, who's so precise."

Because Romanek wrote and directed the piece and has a talent for noticing even the most minute detail, the film is meticulously constructed, Williams says.

Romanek represents a new breed of independent American filmmakers who are trying to make movies that are so anti-Hollywood that they are subversive -- and more interesting, accomplished and provocative than mainstream fare. Which is why he bridles when people make too much of his music video background, as if that would trap him in a pop-culture straitjacket and doom him as superficial.

"I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about the whole music video thing," Romanek says. "Because, if Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese, before they directed Citizen Kane and Mean Streets, had directed a bunch of music videos, people would go, 'Oh, this really flashy music video style is really just aggressive, stylish filmmaking that resonates.' "

Instead, when directors adopt techniques they used or found in music videos, critics are caustic about it. So Romanek, slightly on the defensive, wants to justify the techniques he uses in One Hour Photo, such as the harsh, icy-cold lighting he uses to make the drugstore so sterile, so forbidding, so Stanley Kubrick, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"I never tried to make those choices because they looked cool," Romanek says. "I felt that the art direction and the lighting was always character work."

In the case of the lighting, Romanek wanted Williams' character to be in a heightened, surreal world that reflects his state of mind. "I felt that he is a socially awkward guy but he is very much in his place of work. And I wanted it to be the most pleasant, luminous kind of abundantly stocked, wonderfully ordered place. He is really in his element when he is there, so, when he loses his job, it's almost as if he's getting kicked out of heaven."

Romanek calls One Hour Photo "dream-like or fable-like in its style." That approach ensured his script would not turn into a cliche when he directed it as a $12-million movie.

"The risk was ending up with a Lifetime movie-of-the-week about a family being stalked. It needed to feel larger and stranger and more interesting than that," he says.

The influence of Kubrick helped. "I hope it's not too obvious that Kubrick is in there," Romanek says with a smile. "But, yeah, he's the reason that I became a film director, pretty much.

"I think that some people saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and wanted to be in a band. I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and I said, 'I want to be like that guy. That seems like a really cool job.' And I have become kind of Kubrick-obsessed."

It turns out that film directing is a cool job, Romanek says.

"But it's a f---ing hard job. But I wouldn't ever complain about it. I mean, it's a lot of pressure, it's a lot of stress. I don't think anyone can imagine how much stress goes into it because, if you do it well, the film just flows. It's 95 minutes and everything looks simple and amazing. But it's 21/2 years, every day, for 15 hours a day, obsessing over every minute detail and a lot of conflict and stress."

Which is why, Romanek says, it was glorious to have Williams on set -- as soon as cameras stopped rolling, Williams would cut loose.

"Yeah," Romanek says in appreciation, "we spent pretty much half our time weeping with laughter. I'd always have to be the bad guy saying, 'Well, we've got to get going!' and he would snap right back down into Sy. I'd yell, 'Cut,' and he'd go crazy again. He needed to blow off that steam."

And Mark Romanek needed to prove something -- that he wasn't making an elongated music video.

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