The Safe House - Expositions

He made his name and fame as probably the quickest mind in all of comedy. But they always say that in the capacity for great laughs lies the capacity for great gravity. And with a trio of roles this year, Robin Williams has been very much putting that theory to the test. Shot before the black comedy Death to Smoochy and mystery-thriller Insomnia but released last among the three, One Hour Photo is a story of Sy Parrish, a photo developer at a Wal-Mart-type retailer who develops (no pun intended) an unhealthy obsession with a young family as he prints their pictures. Placed within the context of his other recent roles, casting Williams in the role of Sy now looks like a no-brainer. But at the time it was a decision marked by significant shades of gray.

“I met Robin for a 45-minute lunch after he’d read the script,” recalls music video veteran Mark Romanek, who made his feature film writing and directing debut with Photo. “And the idea of casting Robin in such a dark, strange role was at the time not part of a triumvirate of dark roles, it was just this very strange idea that in sitting down with him seemed less and less strange because I realized that he had a really deep affinity for this character.”

When “I met Mark, he was astonished that I wanted to do this, he thought it was a joke,” recalls Williams. “It may seem kind of an odd time to add some dark colors to the palette but, well, I’ve always wanted to. They just wouldn’t offer them, you know? Because Hollywood goes for what sells and often what sells is happy, warm and fun.”

“I thought about a film [Robin] had done early in his career that not a lot of people have seen called Seize the Day,” continues Romanek. “It was an adaptation of a Saul Bellow novella for PBS. He gives this naked, raw, powerful [dramatic] performance, and I never forgot it. …I think even though Robin’s very different in this film and he’s doing something that he hasn’t done before, that it’s not that far afield from some of the other characters that he’s played. He tends to play obsessive loners, guys that are often very academic and know a lot about the topic with which they’re obsessed. If you look at even the guy in The Fisher King, he’s a homeless guy but he’s obsessed with the Holy Grail and he knows everything in the literate sense about that period. The guy in Awakenings is similar, even the guy in Good Will Hunting is kind of a loner — an obsessed, socially awkward guy who’s fixated on this issue of his wife. [So the script for One Hour Photo] might have actually been crystalizing something that he’s been working on for a very long time. And then it got very exciting, the idea of putting Robin in this film.”

If Romanek was enthusiastic, Williams was equally so. “Everyone was [cautioning me] that he was a first time director,” the actor says. “[But] I saw his music videos — really interesting and really diverse and with great visuals. I knew the second part of this movie was the visuals, and when he described what he wanted to do with it and I thought, ‘Oh man, this is great. He’s got the chops, he knows his stuff.’”

Those visuals include a very clean, bright and non-cluttered feel, all by meticulous design. “This film happens to have a sort of a distanced, cool, removed, clinical tone,” Romanek allows. “The reason is I think everything in this movie kind of comes out of the character. Even though it’s objectively told, it is Sy’s story and from his point of view — the film almost feels like it was made by Sy. …A warmer approach I think might have resulted in a kind of Lifetime movie-of-the-week, you know: ‘A family is being stalked!’ It might have become sentimental, it might have become sort of morally too black and white. And I thought taking this sort of nonjudgmental, cooler approach made for a more interesting movie.”

The technical knowledge required for the film wasn’t too difficult to master, says Williams, who took a one-week course at a photo lab in the Valley. The main challenge was finding an outlet for all that normal exuberance. “When Sy comes unglued, it’s kind of like bolts popping,” says Williams, who credits the tight, plain clothes and ordered environment of the film’s photo lab setting with helping him find a reigned-in physicality for his character.

Two weeks of rehearsal prior to shooting also helped Romanek shepherd a tight shoot, but once production was finished, the director found himself spending a lot of time paring down the movie to get it just so. “It was a very difficult movie to edit because it’s easy to tip to one side or the other and make him just a threat or make him too sympathetic,” he says.

Romanek also wanted the film to have a significant artistic bent, and so in certain scenes Sy’s eyes are obscured to highlight that notion of a skewed but singular perspective. “For me it was kind of like the Magritte painting with the apple,” says Romanek, “just another way [to show] that Sy is discounted as a person. He’s just like the faceless man, the man that nobody notices.”

That loneliness and insidious desire to belong—and how that eventually can, and, in this case, does, spiral out of control—is central to the film’s themes. Sy isn’t just a misunderstood wallflower, but the notion that society’s cold shoulder could worsen already existent symptoms of dissociation did leave both Williams and Romanek musing. “My favorite line [from the movie], bar none,” says Williams, “is the one where he says, ‘Photographs are your own personal stand against time — that someone cared enough about me to take my picture, that I existed.’ I like that.” That’s also something Sy doesn’t have, any photos of himself.

“There are no small people,” Williams adds. “Just because a guy is working in some service field doesn’t mean he doesn’t have deep hopes and regrets. Everybody is complicated, and there’s nothing wrong [with that]. You can’t be everybody’s friend, you can’t be everybody’s shrink and you can’t listen to your dry cleaner’s problems, but at the same time you’ve got to be civil and acknowledge people.”

“Don’t we all feel that way at sometimes?” asks Romanek of the movie’s depiction of isolation, and how it swallows Sy. “Even if we don’t at heart feel like an outsider, there’s always those moments. Everybody gets lonely.”

Still, they characterize Sy’s problems as something deeper. “I think he was starting to move in,” says Williams. “I think by the ways he was kind of following [the wife] and trying to have lunch with her and do all those things that he was already starting to make the move to insinuate himself into their lives. …So you think at first he’s after [the wife]. Then [you think] he’s a pedophile, and that creeps people out even more horrifically. And then you realize it’s the family, and then the movie takes on a different scope. Then you start to not sympathize with him but you say, ‘Oh, there’s a bigger picture to this and it isn’t sexual, it’s actually a need to belong.’”

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