The Safe House - Expositions

HOLLYWOOD -- Mark Romanek, a music video pioneer turned indie filmmaker, never dreamed that he would end up with a movie star to headline his first major feature film, One Hour Photo.

"I didn't have the ambition of casting a movie star in this movie because I thought it was a dark, strange, European-style kind of thing," Romanek says candidly.

"It (casting a star) would be like planning to win the lottery. This wasn't going to happen."

What happened is that Romanek landed Robin Williams in the key role as the protagonist of his edgy and sometimes nasty drama. Williams, playing a repressed, potentially dangerous photomart clerk, is not allowed a comic twist throughout.

It was the 50-year-old Williams, through his manager, who approached Romanek before the director could make a serious pitch to him. "He was shocked when I said I was doing this," Williams remembers about the filmmaker.

At the time, Williams was scouting for off-beat, out-of-Hollywood roles, a process that led him to Death To Smoochy and Insomnia, as well as One Hour Photo.

"I went: Wow, that's really weird," Romanek recalls during his luncheon with Williams. "(But) I think my knee-jerk wasn't so positive. My knee-jerk was: Robin Williams, he's worth $600 million. Who's going to believe him as a guy who works for minimum wage? But I'm a fan of Robin Williams. Genuinely. I'm not just saying it."

And he remembered Williams in an obscure 1986 film, Seize The Day, and recalled how Williams compressed his wild side, bottled his energy and totally served the role. "And I never forgot it because it is this very raw, naked, emotionally violent film that he was amazing in."

And the "very raw, naked, emotionally violent" quality is present in One Hour Photo, too. Williams' character, Sy Parrish, is driven by loneliness to obsessively stalk a family whose photos he processes.

"The piece was so well-written that you feel a certain freedom from the beginning to just inhabit it," Williams says. "And, as an only child, it's not like I don't know loneliness."

One Hour Photo was a tough, intense shoot on restricted locations. At one point, the sewer backed up in the abandoned and soon-to-be-destroyed store where Romanek set up his fictional drugstore in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. Williams jokes, ruefully, that the movie turned into "18 Hour Photo" by the end of the shoot.

But the intensity of the filming matched the contained intensity of the mentally disturbed character he was playing. The film's style carries that one step further. "The space itself is menacing," Williams says, admiring Romanek's visuals. "Those stores become menacing. They're like shots out of The Shining. I expected (Jack) Nicholson to go: 'Watch out, there's a sale on aisle four, mother-f...er!'

"When you do it, you inhabit it completely. That's the joy of doing movies: That you can inhabit behaviour that you would do time for otherwise."

After shooting his dark trilogy of One Hour Photo, Death To Smoochy and Insomnia, Williams went back on stage for a North American comedy tour that included Toronto.

"The stage show was an immediate kind of vampirism because I got it right back: The laughter feeds it," Williams says of the joyous release he felt. "There is a real kind of catharsis. It comes from the laughter. Stand-up tragedy doesn't work too well."

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