Michael Sragow

Downey is the most extravagantly gifted actor of his generation. A more humane society would grant him better treatment and more solace than the punishment and tepid sympathy that awaits him in the courts and in the press. In San Francisco, in the commercial breaks during Monday’s episode of “Ally McBeal,” the Fox station promoted its 10 p.m. news broadcast with a mug shot of Downey and clips of his previous trips to court, previewing an earnest but flaccid report about the difficulty of controlling or recovering from addiction.

This is the destiny of celebrity drug addicts circa 2000: exploitation and moral bromides, followed by prison. Scholars love to say that show-biz superstars are the equivalent of 18th century aristocrats, living out wild, appalling scenarios that lesser beings can only fantasize about. This idea overlooks the petty, punitive aspect of our country’s celebrity worship. Too often we sacrifice our entertainers and artists to the fears of the middle class and its reluctance to face controversy. Downey doesn’t pretend to be a role model and has harmed no one except himself. As “Wonder Boys” director Curtis Hanson told me the last time this actor got in trouble with the law, throwing an addict like Downey behind bars will one day be deemed as barbaric as treating the ailing with leeches.

James Toback, who directed Downey in “Two Girls and a Guy” and, brilliantly, in “Black and White,” said last spring that Downey’s troubles have made him a more probing artist. That’s a positive way of looking at his plight, but I don’t agree. Toback never gave Downey a better showcase than when he first collaborated with the actor way back in 1987, in the seductive light comedy “The Pick-Up Artist.”

In this burgeoning cult movie, Downey plays a schoolteacher who spends as much time cruising the sidewalks of New York as he does coaching his students in history or softball. He’s a guy with classic rock and roll in his heart — a seemingly eternal adolescent who can da-doo-ron-ron even when his Chevy Camaro convertible won’t ra-run-run-run. And the conviction Downey gives this youthful Don Juan is downright disarming. In the best possible way, the actor, like the character, gets carried away by his own act. When he goes into a favorite spritz — “Did anyone ever tell you,” he asks Molly Ringwald, “you have the face of a Botticelli and the body of a Degas?” — you glimpse the depths behind Downey’s lustiness. First Downey makes you believe that his character is an epic skirt chaser: to use Milan Kundera’s definition, the man pursuing a variety of women to sample their individuality. Then he makes you believe that he’s turned into a lyrical skirt-chaser, searching for his feminine ideal.

Downey has done much of his best work in films that never broke through to big audiences. In 1989, director Joseph Ruben brought out a sensational courtroom drama, “True Believer,” which proved Downey could be as terrific a sidekick as main act. Downey remains the best foil ever for the movie’s star, James Woods: He is just as intelligent and far more fluid an actor, and the way he plays the wet-behind-the-ears associate to Woods’ burned-out radical attorney, his idealism doesn’t just prod the veteran — it needles him, lovingly yet mercilessly. Sadly, the flopping of “True Believer” put a roadblock in Woods’ attempt to become a leading man. But it didn’t stop Downey. Three years later he won the part that would earn him an Academy Award nomination, the rapt attention of directors and the outright awe of his peers.

In the title role in “Chaplin,” Downey embodies the slapstick genius’s distinctive blend of spunk, poetry and enigmatic sensuality — of balletic grace and robust knockabout farce. The movie is diffuse, gimmicky and damnably respectable, but Downey gives it the kick in the pants it needs. The script locates the source of Chaplin’s pathos-laden creativity in his early years with his mad mother, and Downey adopts some of her unhinged look, surrounding his character with an aura of free-floating emotion.

Downey is an extraordinary physical mimic: His deftness and agility make the loose recreations of Chaplin’s evolving style fun to watch. But Downey’s suggestion of an unruly interior life is what keeps the movie alive. The best parts of “Chaplin” come together when the exiled hero, banned from this country since the McCarthy era, returns to receive a special Oscar at the 1972 Academy Awards presentation. When you see the film clips shown to celebrate the occasion, the excerpt from “The Kid” is overpowering, partly because of the connections between that film’s Dickensian milieu and Chaplin’s troubled youth. And Downey is amazing as the elderly Chaplin. It’s a tribute to Downey that when the film cuts to Chaplin’s eyes filling with tears as the Tramp embraces Jackie Coogan in “The Kid,” the moment isn’t sticky or embarrassing. It’s transporting.

If “Chaplin” remains Downey’s career high point, it’s because of the scope it afforded him. Downey was wonderfully funny — the most elaborately baggy-pantsed clown you could imagine — in the tart first half of Michael Hoffman’s costume picture “Restoration.” (He had previously limned a slimy soap producer for Hoffman’s hilarious “Soapdish.”) And he briefly jolted Mike Figgis’ all-too-tony “One Night Stand” back on its feet as a dying AIDS patient who provokes an old friend to feel and tell the truth. He’s rarely been more sly, daring or touching than as the gay husband of Brooke Shields in “Black and White” — especially when he comes on to Mike Tyson — and in “Wonder Boys” he holds down his position in a crackerjack ensemble with a controlled euphoria unlike anything I’ve seen since Jack Lemmon in his Ensign Pulver days.

In “Ally McBeal,” Downey has, against all odds, introduced a streak of wary sanity into creator David E. Kelley’s cockeyed universe — and has somehow grounded Calista Flockhart’s giddiness in his own loamy emotions, which range from the ballsy to the bluesy. When Downey sang on the show Monday night, his melodious hoarseness had a soulful, lyric rapture that both pierced Ally’s heart and frightened her. In the course of the episode, Ally admits that she fell for him because he lifted her up; now she worries that he’s carrying around a grief and despair far greater than her own. She voices the confusion of the actor’s own admirers. In the end, she stands by him.

May Downey’s fans do the same.

All these filmmakers came to mind in the last three weeks. Murnau via “Shadow of the Vampire.” Coppola because of the recent A&E abortion of “The Great Gatsby,” a novel he adapted differently, and superbly, 30 years ago. And every time we look at the calendar and see the year 2001, Kubrick again commands attention.

The best work of this trio makes today’s most acclaimed releases seem like bags of tricks (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) or boxes of soap (“You Can Count on Me”). They opened up complete new worlds for audiences through that mixture of expansive conceptions and machete-sharp perceptions that used to be the hallmark of film as a popular art. Kubrick, the moviemaker I’ll consider first, turned an entire universe inside out.

Since our entrance into the new millennium, magazines and newspapers have filled feature pages with stories about whether reality has caught up with the mechanical marvels of Kubrick’s space movie, from HAL the talking computer to the moon shuttle that runs more smoothly than our intercity air shuttles. Nearly all the coverage is by science writers who reduce Kubrick’s groundbreaking, space-shattering spectacle to a piece of technological prophecy. Even the DVD included in Warner Home Video’s Stanley Kubrick Collection contains as its one significant extra a prerelease press conference with Kubrick’s co-writer, Arthur C. Clarke. The sci-fi guru positions the movie as a psychic shock absorber, preparing mankind for the first jolting contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Once those science topics are exhausted, what’s left are the enigmas within and around the movie itself. How did Kubrick manage to make a big-studio epic without a conventional plot? What held audiences then and continues to fascinate them now?

“2001: A Space Odyssey” endures not as crystal-ball gazing, but as a mad amalgam of science and showmanship. Its beauty and bombast are as much a part of our culture as “The Wizard of Oz.” A TV commercial for a minivan has only to play Kubrick’s thundering quotes from “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and we know that the ad guys are referring to the director’s big black slabs. Watching the film straight through for the first time in 21 years, I was amazed to see how its shadow stretched not merely over obvious candidates like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Contact” but also over a kids’ classic like “Toy Story.” When Buzz Lightyear cries out, “To Infinity and Beyond,” he echoes Kubrick’s title card, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.”

The “Dawn of Man” opening of the movie has been endlessly pillaged and parodied and spun off; it’s hard to imagine even films like “Dinosaur” and “Cast Away” without it. With typical audacity, Kubrick began his picture with tribes of ape-men competing for food and water and being nudged into humanhood by a mysterious perfect ebony slab that inspires their use of weaponry. Is Kubrick saying that man is innately vicious — or that he just needs technology to survive?

The film’s directorial poker face is part of its blend of challenge and charm. What’s crucial is that Kubrick thrusts us into vast and undefined landscapes that make us feel — like those man-apes — helpless before natural forces or more aggressive animals. We experience the chaos of those prehistoric times — of living without a sense of time and space — and instinctively appreciate the bone tool as the world’s first ordering agent. If it enables man to secure his position on Earth, it also gives him a greater capacity to destroy.

The movie starts with the emergence of Homo sapiens; it ends with the emergence of homo who-knows?. Keir Dullea, the lone survivor of a space mission to Jupiter, undergoes a strange death and transfiguration under the spell of the same (or an identical) black slab. He becomes a figure in an astral fetal sac, leaving us in the exact dilemma we experienced two hours before. Is he an upwardly mobile, evolutionary mutation? Should we be singing those lyrics from “Hair”: “Good Morning, Starshine, the Earth says ‘hello’”? Or is he a monster capable of crushing a planet between his fingers?

The British critic Clive James, in his Cambridge University student days, ascribed the shifts in the film (which he thought was a masterpiece) to a clash in sensibility between Kubrick and Clarke. According to James, Kubrick, unlike Clarke, believes in neither progress nor entropy: What draws out this director is the spectacle of change. For example, in the movie’s midsection, a paralyzingly dull squad of scientists analyze a black slab buried in the moon, trace a homing signal to Jupiter and then send astronaut-scientists Dullea and Gary Lockwood (and three other hibernating crew members) to investigate it.

Even the most famous jokes in the moon sequence are warmed-over burlesque. “What’s that?” asks one bland scientist of another who is eating a synthetic mystery-meat sandwich. “Chicken?”

“Something like that,” he replies. “Tastes the same anyway.” Most of Kubrick’s defenders chalk up the banal dialogue to an Orwellian parody of the poetry-denuded vocabulary of the future. (It’s telling that the movie describes the astronauts’ hibernation as sleep without dreams.) But James sees it as an indication that, in years to come, verbal poetry will lose out to visual poetry. It’s a neat argument: a solid-state theory of beauty!

I think it’s Kubrick’s contradictions, not his syntheses, that make the movie fascinating. In one of Kubrick’s funniest and most graceful cuts — OK, one of the funniest and most graceful cuts in movie history — the ape-man’s jagged bone-weapon, flung into the air in victory, becomes a streamlined nuclear weapons satellite. The edit from a somersaulting bone tool to a lithe 21st century spacecraft emphasizes the wonder of man’s tenacity and the intelligence mirrored in his technology. As soon as we go inside, Kubrick seems to be condemning future men for ceding their human qualities to machines. Yet when he plays “The Blue Danube” as the shuttle and a space station do an extended waltz, the director is doing the humanizing.

The entire film is summed up in this paradox: Kubrick wants to have his super-powered future and his Johann (and Richard) Strauss, too. Even before the movie makes its blinding and boggling jaunt to infinity (and beyond), it’s a seductive light trip of the future fitted out, for the most part, with the feelings and rhythms of romantic music from the past. No director was more cosmically dour than Kubrick, but after watching “2001″ again I can understand why Spielberg, in a eulogy, could picture him as upbeat. Kubrick bounces the banks of winking computers and control panels and the supernal blacks and purples of space off the visors of his astronauts — an effect resurrected most memorably in the triumphant final minutes of “The Right Stuff.”

The ambiguity permeating the movie stems from Kubrick’s own divided feelings. That’s why “2001: A Space Odyssey” was genuinely controversial and broadly appealing. It drew both techno-geeks and countercultural seekers — not usually part of the same crowd, especially in those days when the left was wide-awake enough to attack the military-industrial complex. On the other hand, it alienated most literary and movie critics. The late Penelope Gilliatt, who then shared the film chair at the New Yorker on a six-months on, six-months off basis with Pauline Kael, was virtually alone in calling it “a uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi, made by a man who truly possesses the drives of both science and fiction.”

Although several reviewers revisited the film, the real debates over the movie erupted in VW bugs and coffee shops. A year after it opened, I remember arguing about it during a three-hour drive with an actor-director from a theater workshop in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to my then-home in southern New Jersey. There I resumed arguing about the movie with an English teacher who portrayed it as a parable of man’s need for both technology and art. The linchpin to that theory was, of course, the characterization of the supercomputer HAL 9000. On the trip to Jupiter, HAL proves to be a great chess player and information source, and in a key scene, he acts like an art reviewer, rating Dullea’s sketchpad portraits of the other crew members. HAL himself can’t draw, even though he “knows” all about drawing. Back in ’68, I attacked HAL’s subsequent nervous breakdown as a “crude plot device” exploiting “fear of the machine.” But HAL alone (with the help of voice actor Douglas Rain) edged his dialogue with subtle humor and menace, advising Dullea in a crisis to “calm down, take a stress pill.” And only HAL attained tragicomic stature, singing “Daisy,” the song he learned as a child computer, while Dullea gives him a lobotomy.

The reaction to “2001″ epitomized the organic, grass-roots controversies that erupted in that fecund age of American movies. The “Modern Library: The Movies” series, edited by Martin Scorsese, recently issued a book called “The Making of ’2001: A Space Odyssey,’” which contains some never-before-reprinted production histories and retrospective views as well as a lot of material first collected in Jerome Agel’s 1970 “The Making of Kubrick’s ’2001.’” I think the Modern Library might have been more wise to reprint Agel’s giddy paperback original, which captures the explosiveness of movie appetites circa 1968-’73 in its free-form structure and vertiginous graphics, spilling over with reviews, interviews and (best of all) Kubrick’s fan mail. The marginalia in Agel’s book isn’t left to the margins, because it’s often more arresting than the main attractions, including a brief illustrated history of monolithic icons from Stonehenge to an Austrian painting called “The Unhinged Doors of Gaza.” Agel’s book about “2001″ ends puckishly with a quote from the script about the moon’s black slab: “Its origin and purpose still a total mystery.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Former Time magazine movie critic Jay Cocks’ highly personal introduction to the Modern Library’s “The Making of ’2001: A Space Odyssey’” comes to a close with a vignette on the North Shore of Long Island, where Kubrick rented a house in the spring of 1968. Cocks and Kubrick notice “a light blinking on the edge of a dock.” After they both recall “The Great Gatsby,” with its motif of Jay Gatsby gazing at the green light where Daisy Buchanan’s estate met the same shore, Cocks is tempted to “make a remark comparing Gatsby’s light and the monolith, talismans of mystery and hope for two generations.”

Gatsby’s light, like Kubrick’s monolith, has remained a talisman into the new millennium — a notoriously dangerous one for filmmakers, as the current A&E cable version has proved again. Indeed, this TV adaptation, swamping Gatsby’s fabled “romantic readiness” in a wash of bathos and melodrama, has caused critics to wonder whether any effort to film Fitzgerald’s beloved novel is eternally doomed.

After all, the 1974 movie starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow has gone down in history as an overpromoted fiasco. As the book “Inside Oscar” chronicles, Time pegged a cover to “The Great Gatsby Supersell,” Newsweek dubbed it “an extraordinary white elephant” and Esquire gave the picture a place of dishonor in its annual “Dubious Achievements” issue. But, as “Inside Oscar” goes on to note, “nobody blamed [screenwriter] Francis Ford Coppola for ‘The Great Gatsby’ letdown.”

And there’s an excellent reason. After hearing about the virtues of Coppola’s script for a quarter-century, I finally got my hands on it — and it’s wonderful. Word of its quality must have spread around the industry. If Jack Clayton, the sometimes-marvelous British director, had been more at home with American idioms, and if Redford had been willing and able to convey the immensity and vulnerability and grittiness of Gatsby’s yearnings, they might have made a classic.

Coppola gets everything there is to get out of Fitzgerald’s book while supplying, in a long and brilliantly concocted romantic centerpiece, the dramatic ballast a film adaptation needs. Lines that the finished film glided over — like Daisy’s statement, “That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world … a beautiful little fool” — are in the script positioned just right, both to take on emotional weight and to arouse intrigue.

Who could have embodied Coppola’s Gatsby? I say Steve McQueen. He would have been believable both as the Long Island millionaire and socialite and as the crook others assume Gatsby was in his shady past. McQueen, like Gatsby, was born in the Midwest and (after a stint in a California reform school and a number of odd jobs) started to make his fortune in the East (on the New York stage). McQueen could have showed us the toughness in the man’s character that forged such a drastic change of identity, in addition to his ever-youthful ardor. In McQueen’s most “off-type” role — the larcenous Boston millionaire in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (like “2001,” a film from 1968) — he played polo like Tom Buchanan and savored every change in eveningwear as if he were the formidable Gatsby himself.

In the 1920s, the German director F.W. Murnau was as looming an international figure as Kubrick in the ’60s or Coppola in the ’70s. “Shadow of the Vampire” imagines what it would have been like if Max Schreck, the star of Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” his classic 1922 version of “Dracula,” were a real live — that is, undead — vampire. It’s friskier than you expect of a one-joke movie, mainly because of Willem Dafoe’s vaudevillian gusto as the vampire. But the picture has nowhere to go without turning John Malkovich’s Murnau into a professedly modern, “scientific” version of an all-for-art impresario. By the end, the Murnau of this movie transforms “Nosferatu” into a snuff film.

The most famous anecdote about Murnau has to do with his death in 1931, his fifth year in Hollywood. His rented Rolls overturned off the road near Santa Barbara, supposedly while Murnau was orally servicing the handsome young Filipino man behind the wheel. So the filmmakers probably felt no compunction about portraying Murnau as a Teutonic variation on Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom.” My complaint is that they trivialize him and truncate his career. Seeing this film, you’d never guess that Murnau not only mastered a style of unprecedented fluidity but also showed staggering range and was able to ply his art successfully overseas. Indeed, my favorite Murnau films next to “Nosferatu” were made in America and the South Seas.

Murnau’s 1927 Fox production, “Sunrise,” rentable on tape or laser-disc at video specialty stores, is a parable of marital betrayal and redemption, about “the Woman from the City” (Margaret Livingston) who tries to get “the Man” (George O’Brien) to drown “the Wife” (Janet Gaynor). Murnau brings unexpected potency to every element of this fable. If the city were presented as a sinkhole of iniquity, the movie might have been too simple. But it’s a place of liberation as well as corruption, right from the moment when the panicked wife boards a streetcar to flee from her repentant husband. The circular flow of “Sunrise” conjures both the cycle of nature and the dizzying swirl of aerialists and carnival rides. In this movie, life spins like the Earth — and like a roulette wheel, too. Gaynor captures the sparkle in the Wife’s childlike emotions and O’Brien conveys all the Man’s uncomplicated feelings, from helpless lust to stalwart devotion. Under Murnau’s direction, O’Brien truly is the Man’s man.

Murnau’s 1931 “Tabu,” available for sale or rent on a superb Milestone VHS tape, is primal exotica about a Bora Bora virgin (Reri) who resists becoming the untouchable sacred maiden of the whole South Seas. Her beau (Matahi) spirits her away to another island, where he makes a living as a pearl diver and racks up outrageous debts. Tabu — an alternate spelling of “Taboo” — is the system of customs and beliefs that curses the couple for profaning a divine rite. “Tabu” starts out shakily, but once Murnau’s vision takes hold, this spectacle turns into a masterpiece. (Murnau began the movie in collaboration with Robert Flaherty; they share the story credit.) To Murnau, the islanders are in synch with natural forces that are also supernatural. The director fills the action with mystery and metaphor. When the tribal elder who captures the runaway stows her in the hold of his boat and then shuts up the hatchway, it’s as if he’s sealing her in a coffin.

Photographed by Floyd Crosby (who won an Oscar), “Tabu” looks like no other film. Murnau doesn’t go after the usual island vistas. Sometimes he cuts out the sky entirely, imbuing his hula-dancing characters with imposing exuberance, then giving his frame over to the dramatic rock formations and the roiling sea. “Tabu” does move like other films — all by Murnau. He and Kubrick and Coppola are virtuoso manipulators of images and rhythms. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” was subtitled “A Symphony of Shadows.” His “Tabu,” I once wrote, is a symphony of sun, moon, sand and waves.

Nicholson becomes his troops’ hero for standing up to the Japanese, even though his reason is that officers shouldn’t work side by side with their men on the building of a crucial railway link. When Saito releases him because British enlistees won’t obey Japanese officers, Nicholson, too, gets disgruntled at their shirking. Nicholson wants the bridge to be his “show”; he wants to prove how well his Englishmen can build a bridge. As the bridge goes up before our eyes, it’s easy to lose sight of the structure’s military importance for the Japanese. It’s like those moments during an inventively designed play when the audience feels like cheering the set.

David Lean insinuates escalating ironies through the characters of the British medical officer (James Donald), who looks on with disbelief, and the American (William Holden), who thinks that all military regimens, whether Japanese or British, have “the smell of death” about them. As he next did in “Lawrence of Arabia,” Lean both celebrates the Great Man theory of history — with Nicholson as his Great Man — and criticizes it.

The irony of the “extras” on the DVD is that they point up how vastly different Hollywood’s idea of great men in moviemaking is now from what it was in 1957. The commemorative booklet — which for once in a DVD is a useful memento — reprints the text from the film’s original souvenir book. This written program tells the story of a swashbuckling producer named Sam Spiegel who has followed up his productions of “The African Queen” and “On the Waterfront” with his most ambitious and expensive enterprise yet. The director isn’t even cited until the 13th paragraph.

The major part of the filmed program, including recent interviews with crew members, tells a different story. It relates, first, how an inspired filmmaker named Lean refused to accept the hackneyed script that Spiegel handed him and kept working on it with blacklisted writer Michael Wilson right up to the moment of filming; and, second, how Lean stayed on top of every aspect of the movie, from the casting to the blowing of the bridge to the final editing.

In addition to an astute appreciation from filmmaker John Milius (writer-director of “The Wind and the Lion”) and a contemporary featurette (“Rise and Fall of a Jungle Giant”), the DVD also boasts a peculiar assortment of coming attractions. (Why is “Fail-Safe” here?) Archaeologically, the most intriguing extra is a USC-produced educational film that uses on-set footage of “Kwai” to illustrate the rudiments of film appreciation. It contains a section on Lean and Guinness rehearsing the film’s one severely flawed scene — the climactic moment when Nicholson realizes what he has done and moves toward the commandos’ detonator. The short presents the vignette as an instance of practice making perfect. But a witness for the DVD’s own making-of documentary says that Lean and Guinness never achieved absolute clarity on Nicholson’s final motivation.

The disc’s image at least approaches Lean’s full-bore approach to CinemaScope, though it still shaves a sliver or two off the left side of the screen. The night scenes lack vividness and depth, and not enough digital restoration has been done to reduce the graininess of the opening shots. But this edition of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” provides ample testimony to the moment when Lean’s epic impulse exploded — and he made all the world his soundstage.

But at the low-budget, indie end of the spectrum, Bromell, with “Panic,” enjoyed an even giddier “Me and Bobby McGee” type of freedom — the freedom that comes when you have nothing left to lose. Debuting as a feature writer and director with a $2.5 million budget and a cast working for scale out of devotion to his script, Bromell did his job in a spirit of serious yet relaxed invention that netted far more cohesive and poetic results. It’s not a diamond in the rough; it’s a diamond about a rough.

Sure, the premise of “Panic” resembles that of “The Sopranos,” as once again we see a professional killer in midlife crisis (William H. Macy) visiting a shrink (John Ritter). But to borrow from HBO’s own ad campaigns for its TV show, think of “Panic” as “The Sopranos” redefined. Bromell wrote his screenplay around the same time that David Chase wrote his pilot for the HBO series, and the film’s setup resembles a WASP-y “Sopranos” purged of ethnic and operatic excess.

Macy is heartbreakingly brilliant as the hit man son of a hit man father (Donald Sutherland). He can no longer lie to his wife (Tracey Ullman) or uphold the family business. But when his psychotherapist and an erotically quivering young woman (Neve Campbell) let fresh oxygen into Macy’s airtight box, the outcome is an emotional conflagration. “Panic” stays unexpected and involving. It starts out as a single-minded study of Macy’s passive-aggressive psychology, but turns electric when it plugs into volatile feelings that rock and roil through the whole ensemble.

Bromell calls Macy “a guy rattling in his cage.” What makes the film so full and satisfying (at a swift 88-minute length) is the rest of the cast’s ability to convey how that rattle shakes everyone around him.

The outcroppings of Macy’s cramped, secret rebellion dent the controlled surfaces of his father and mother (Barbara Bain). They rouse hurt and bewilderment in Macy’s bright but in-the-dark wife and piercingly sweet young son (David Dorfman). And they drive him into the arms of Campbell, a messed-up young beauty he meets in his shrink’s waiting room. The movie is about how you always hurt the ones you love — and how, sometimes, you can save them. Watching it, I kept thinking not of “The Sopranos” but of what Arthur Miller might have done if he had updated a family play like “All My Sons” and written in a part for a latter-day Marilyn Monroe.

Bromell is a veteran TV executive producer and writer, best known for his work in both capacities on “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Northern Exposure.” He has directed episodes of those shows, but the rules and styles of staging and performance that are set down at the start of a series usually limit a director’s choices. “Panic” has a seemingly offhand, steadily intensifying visual elegance unlike anything Bromell has done for television. Where it resembles his TV work is in its appetite for humanity’s quirks and unruly contradictions. Bromell is currently a consulting executive producer on the CBS comedy-drama “That’s Life,” about a 32-year-old New Jersey neighborhood gal who goes to college — a show that, at its best, has the tart good humor and honesty of an American “Educating Rita.”

Bromell began his creative life as a fiction writer (with work published in the New Yorker) and journalist (he wrote essays on film for the Atlantic), and has a new novel due out in May. It derives from Bromell’s childhood abroad in the ’50s with his CIA father — and should be even further from “Meet the Parents” than “Panic” is from “Analyze This.” Although he’s based in Santa Monica, Calif., Bromell wrote “Panic” in Baltimore during his downtime on “Homicide.” The film premiered at Sundance a year ago. Artisan Entertainment (“The Blair Witch Project”) picked it up, then sold it straight to cable after test-screening it, Bromell says, with Campbell fans, who may have been expecting “Scream 4.” Roxie Releasing, which worked wonders with “Red Rock West” and “Freeway,” is now bringing “Panic” into theaters. I spoke to Bromell before opening night of its successful run at San Francisco’s Roxie in December.

Later, I’ll get to my conversation with Zemeckis, who talked about making “Cast Away” with Hanks and some of the great directors he has turned to throughout his career.

Do you feel that this “inner life of the hit man” trend has emerged for any particular reason?

I can’t explain it. One of the other perpetrators of it is a guy named David Chase of “The Sopranos,” who is a friend of mine, because we did the TV show “I’ll Fly Away” together with Sam Waterston. He wrote “The Sopranos” pilot a little earlier than I wrote “Panic,” but we didn’t know that. I was away in Baltimore and wrote mine and unbeknown to me he wrote his, and when I got back we were just trading stuff to show each other what we’d been writing. I read “The Sopranos” and he read “Panic.” And he went, “How can this be?” Then, of course, there were others — “Analyze This,” “Gunshy,” “Grosse Pointe Blank” — all happening independently. So David and I just figured there must be a lot of writers in therapy!

I’m not normally interested in hit men and stuff like that. I was trying to think of a man whose occupation would make him the extreme antithesis to someone who’d usually go into the middle-class, suburban therapy syndrome. Imagining it made me chuckle. Then I described the character to a homicide detective whom we had working for us on “Homicide.” And he said, “Oh yeah, that’s very realistic. I could take you to three guys just like that.” He meant killers who appear to live a normal existence. They have nothing to do with the mob, and they have wives who have no idea what they do — who think their husbands sell cars or something. So not only was this notion of mine interesting, it was real.

In a lot of ways, “Panic” is the opposite of “The Sopranos.” Your guy is white bread, not ethnic. And psychologically Macy’s primary problem is with his dad, not his mom, and his crucial child relationship is with a son, not a daughter. And what’s great about this movie is what you leave unstressed. Sutherland and Bain are a strong marital unit — she obviously knows everything about the business — yet Macy has accepted his father’s command that he will never tell his wife, Tracey Ullman, what he really does for a living. She thinks he’s running a mail-order business. Isn’t that lie a large part of what’s driving him into therapy?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. He has to struggle to have a family of his own. His parents have total control over him. What I wanted to do was to tell the story about a guy who is now in his 40s but is basically 8 years old inside. Which is horrible. And I thought the most dramatic means I could use to show it was to give this boy-man a 6-year-old son who is starting to feel the same pressures that this grown character had when he really was a child. I think it’s effective because you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, this is terrible,” and you realize, “Oh, my God, that’s what Bill Macy had inside, too.”

When Bill Macy stands up to his father finally, when he’s able to stop being the little boy, it’s because he’s doing it for his son — he can’t do it for himself. Which I think is something most people have experienced, and not necessarily with your own child but with anyone who is obviously weak or vulnerable. It’s easier for us to stand up for them than for ourselves. Bill’s relationship with his son is completely pure, and that purity compels Bill to protect him. Bill Macy doesn’t have a clue how to get out of that little circle until he does that.

It’s funny that you talk about Macy’s life being a little circle because as soon as you think “Bill Macy,” even visually, you think “square.” He’s such a rectangular actor.

But he also has a clown’s face, which is one reason I thought he’d be perfect for the role. He can do the plastic things that clowns can do; and you can see the helplessness of his character in his eyes.

He’s unformed, but he looks formed — he just pours himself into the structure of what his dad calls his “destiny.”

This could have been a movie about Donald Sutherland running a law firm in Century City and preparing Bill to take over the practice, but Bill is sick about it, miserable. Instead, it’s about this guy who has the personal life of a lawyer, with this house in the suburbs and his wife and son, but does this other thing. To me that was texturally more interesting — even though he’s not connected to the mob and there are no Italians anywhere in sight. It’s WASP-y.

And, of course, there’s something funny about it. You bring a real cool crispness to the depiction of Macy’s home; it’s “Ordinary People”-esque.

[Laughter] Yeah, I used to call it “Ordinary Criminals” when I was writing it.

And that crispness melts in the scenes where Macy becomes involved with Campbell, who lives in chaos.

If you don’t understand how extremely screwed up each of these two people is in their own way, then there’s no way that you can understand why they’re attracted to each other. It’s not like Bill is Sean Connery and Neve is this ingénue. Sexually, she’s all over the place; she doesn’t even know what gender she is really. And that’s OK; that kind of confusion is survivable when you’re in your 20s and you’re still trying to figure stuff out. I decided there was something Los Angeles about having these two characters bump into each other. I’m sure it isn’t discernible in the movie, but in my head one of my big influences is Robert Altman and one of my favorite Altman films is “Short Cuts.”

Campbell is the opposite of Macy: She can’t hide that she’s unformed. She makes sharp, provocative statements — like when she asks Macy whether he sees them as the pained middle-aged man and the beautiful young thing. Those are her equivalents of gunshots. When she can focus, she’s way ahead of him.

She is way ahead of him, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing while she is quite aware, psychologically; she just has no control. I loved working with Neve. She made herself quite vulnerable to do the part. Here was this sort of glam teen idol person and she really wanted to do this part to see if she could. I knew my instincts were right to show the script to her. She made some connection to the part — I don’t know what it is — and then she approached it very intelligently. She parses scenes as well as anybody I’ve worked with. Bill loved that. She’d say, “No, I don’t think I get depressed until after the next line.” She was quite intellectual about it, which I never would have expected only because she has had little training — she was a dancer who broke or destroyed her hamstring or one of those things and then six months later got into “Party of Five.” One of those American stories! God knows she has a gift, but she hasn’t had time to learn technique.

I love that at the end you make a connection between her character and Macy’s son. And that little boy, David Dorfman, by the way, is amazing.

The kid was always written as precocious, but he was originally meant to be a year or so older. What happened was, we read over 100 kids and they had all learned these terrible habits doing commercials and sitcoms and stuff, so I told the casting people to go younger, to find someone who had never done anything.

Maybe because I have a child, a son, I knew what I had to do when we filmed all the scenes where he was in bed with his father. We did that all in one day. I didn’t do any “acting” stuff with him, and he couldn’t read — he had to memorize the script, so he was referring to the text in his head. But we created a little tent, with nobody in the tent except Bill and the kid and me and Jeff Jur (the cinematographer). I never said “Action,” I never said “Cut,” and he never knew we were shooting, or even whether there was film in the camera. I told him we were “practicing”; I didn’t say “rehearsing.” I brought in the props for him: The stuffed toy he’s holding, that’s my kid’s. When he starts to go, “Dad,” and he’s touching Bill so tenderly, that’s just him. He’s in the scene.

When the kid talks about the concept of infinity, it’s charming at the beginning, heartbreaking at the end. David Dorfman’s performance and that speech warm us up to the movie, and suggest that there’s hope for transcendence in this film’s universe. How much did the boy understand of what he was saying about the open-endedness of life?

His mother told me that she and the boy’s dad had recently gotten divorced. I think he tapped into some of that sort of uncertainty.

You treat Tracey Ullman’s character, the wife and mother, with respect — you include a flashback to her first meeting with Macy that is sad and funny and erotic.

One of the things I said to the actors is that this man is not looking for something outside the marriage because the wife is bored with sex or because of any of those other clichés that we’ve seen a thousand times. This is his problem, not her problem. And Neve, in her shrewd adolescence, understands that — everyone understands more than Bill does. Even the kid understands more than Bill does.

This is the best performance I’ve seen Tracey Ullman give since Fred Schepisi’s “Plenty” 16 years ago.

She would say to me, “Henry, I’m really scared.” And I’d say, “I’m not.” She had no outrageous “characters” to lose herself in, which she is so brilliant at. All I had to do was remind her that getting out from behind those characters was why she was there at 4 in morning, doing this for no money. And out she’d go like a trouper. She’s an actress who has made her way using big gestures and I was asking her to make tiny gestures. I think she did a darn good job.

Sutherland is the one who has to give a dominating performance. And he comes through for you.

When you get guys like Bill Macy and Donald Sutherland acting together and you do it in a simple two-shot (the kind of shot that makes you forget you’re in a movie frame while you’re watching it), and you’re seeing them in a bar and Sutherland is saying a line like, “I love you too much to let you throw your life away” — I love it. But one thing you learn as a director is that actors have different rhythms, and Donald is a seventh-take actor.

A seventh-take actor?

He’s got his own internal thing he’s building throughout the first five or six takes, and then he just, wham, goes for it. When I was interviewing Robert Altman for Rolling Stone, he said that on “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” he had an actress, Julie Christie, who was best on her first three or four takes, while Warren Beatty didn’t get wound up until the 40th. And that was true with all those great scenes, like when Warren says, “I got poetry in me.” So Altman would find himself at 4 in the morning with Julie dying on her feet, and Warren’s saying, “Please, we just gotta do it again.” And Altman finally says, “Warren, just keep on shooting all night if you want; I’m going home. I’m going to bed.” And he leaves. And they just keep shooting.

Speaking of shooting, you chose Jeff Jur as your cinematographer — he has done several films for John Dahl (“The Last Seduction”), including the forthcoming “Squelch.”

When I met with him I knew in 10 minutes he was the right guy — because he completely understood all my references! He knew not only the great American directors of the ’30s and ’40s but all the great international filmmakers of the ’50s and ’60s and early ’70s. So we communicated incredibly well. I said I wanted it to be a very horizontal movie because I thought that was a good way to look at L.A.; it’s a horizontal city. Horizontal compositions sort of squish things, which I thought was right for the movie, and also make all the perpendiculars stick out, like a palm tree or an isolated figure. Jeff listened to all this and said, “Well, let’s shoot widescreen, anamorphic.” You get more color and thus higher depth and stronger contrast because you’re using more of the frame for filming. The blacks are blacker — much blacker. People look at “Panic” and ask, “How could you have made that film for $2.5 million?” One reason is that the film is gorgeous, and I hope part of that is how we composed the shots. And there’s one big advantage to shooting a movie for that amount: You know nobody is there who doesn’t want to be there.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

From “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to the “Back to the Future” movies to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Robert Zemeckis has been the Speedy Gonzalez of film directors. Although he shifted gears in “Forrest Gump” and “Contact,” he still is so quick and industrious that when he came up with the idea of taking a hiatus on “Cast Away” to allow Tom Hanks to shed 60 pounds, he sandwiched in the summer’s hit pastiche thriller “What Lies Beneath.” With “Cast Away,” Zemeckis has tried to throw away old tricks and make a movie of discovery, for himself and for the audience. One reason for the mixed results is that as hard as he tries, Zemeckis can’t will himself into naiveté: He is still hyperconscious about filmmaking. And when he works with Hanks — who is himself a filmmaker (“That Thing You Do!”) — he seems, more than ever, a director’s director. I spoke with Zemeckis, along with three other journalists, after my interview with Hanks.

Was it hard to find the rhythm for this movie? While you’re portraying the frenetic existence of a FedEx manager, you’re also preparing the audience for the drastic change in his life’s rhythm that comes when he crashes.

There’s a point in the movie where, as the viewer, if you don’t resist it completely intellectually, you give yourself over to it. In other words, you say, “Oh, this is what it’s going to be,” whether you’re thinking it or feeling it subconsciously. I’d love to find out someday when that happens, because I think for a long time you’re trying to figure it out. We’re all so sophisticated when it comes to movie stories, but there comes a point when you’re kind of like Chuck — you give up! You think, “Well, I guess we’re going to be on this island for a while.” And you are either going to like that or not.

Tom Hanks said that he and Bill Broyles had worked on this project for a while before you came on, but you were the one who brought it to a point where they could see themselves doing the movie. What did you contribute to the early part of the process?

Well, I just kept at them. I kept saying, “It’s a great idea for a movie but it’s not a movie yet.” Then we all went off and did other movies, and Bill kept writing. He came up with the idea of Chuck having to make a decision either to live or to die on the island. And then I said, “Now we’re getting somewhere — now we can structure a movie.” Because otherwise it was just stuff happening to him and it didn’t have any dramatic form at all.

It’s interesting that the idea of suicide was the pivotal thing because you sort of underplay that.

It’s totally underplayed, but at least I knew how to tell the story, what the form was going to be. It basically comes down to dramatic writing. When that half of a portable toilet washes up, he has a moral dilemma. Do I continue to just survive here and die here, or do I risk my life by trying to get off the island? So at least you had somewhere to go in the story. But it’s very subtle. It’s not this big “Ta-dah!” kind of thing.

Did you shoot that suicide attempt?

We tried writing it because that was obviously the way we approached it first. But what happened was that every time we wrote it, it just wasn’t right. And I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t just not right, it always felt bad. And when I looked at movies, I found an interesting thing. Whenever they try to depict a suicide where the guy is given some act of God, if you will, or something happens [to prevent the suicide from being completed], it’s always bad. It’s always great when he jumps, when he actually goes — those are great scenes. But that can’t be your main character. And then I realized that the “going to the brink and living to tell about it” story is powerful when you’re told it. You could do it in a novel, because you can go into a character’s soul and find out what happened to him at that moment. But movies are two-dimensional. So coming to that realization I said, “Let’s be really courageous and let’s just let the audience catch up to that part rather than try to have a butterfly land on his toe and he decides not to jump.” Can you imagine what that would look like?

To talk about “What Lies Beneath” for just a second: Everyone always refers to Alfred Hitchcock whenever anyone does a thriller like that, but it seemed to me that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Diabolique” was the biggest influence on your film.

Oh yeah, that’s the one! It was definitely Clouzot. And he was the one who inspired Hitchcock to make “Psycho.” That was the real deal. You’re absolutely right about that. The shadow in the window? He had all of those things.

Also “Diabolique” was, before “What Lies Beneath,” the wettest, dankest suspense movie ever made.

That pool, that dirty swimming pool. Oh yeah, all of that stuff.

I was wondering if before you made “Cast Away,” you took a look at Luis Buñuel’s “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”?

I saw it way back when I was in film school. But I didn’t go back and look at any of those movies because I didn’t want to go there. Conversely, when I did “What Lies Beneath,” I looked at all those movies. This time I just said, “I know this isn’t ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ I know this isn’t ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ I know this isn’t ‘Swiss Family Robinson,’ so I’m not even going to look at those.”

Did you have the confidence that the idea of “Cast Away” had a certain innate “movieness,” so you could deal with its dramatic situation in a spare, straight-ahead way?

I think what happens — and I think this is where you’re going with this idea — is that once you give yourself over to a movie, and you start watching a movie on its own terms, then the Eisenstein school of filmmaking starts to kick in [in which ideas and feelings emerge from the juxtaposition of images]. It takes the first section of the movie to get there. You’re trying to figure it out — you’re comparing it to other movies because we all compare everything to everything else. But the movie then takes on its own drama and that’s what’s fascinating. At the halfway mark of this movie you can do a scene where he’s making fire and it is suspenseful because you are at that point dealing with the movie on its own terms. Is it suspenseful like “Seven Days in May”? Probably not; it’s a different kind of suspense.

You and Tom have been emphasizing the film’s realism a lot, but there’s also this fablelike shape to it.

Yeah, isn’t that amazing?

How did that emerge?

Well, some of the images are so dramatic. Once he gets off the island, the music starts to sneak in and you’ve got all these lyrical images. You’ve got this whale, and you’ve got this huge surf break and the island disappearing in the monsoon, plus it’s just this one guy. So the movie takes ancient icons from mythical stories and transposes them. You’ve got fire, water — the elements. You’ve got whales — biblical things. All that stuff is woven in there.

I’m actually surprised at the level of Federal Express involvement in this movie because the moral could be construed as anti-FedEx.

They’re hip and smart people; they were very cooperative. I don’t know if it’s an anti-FedEx movie. It might be an anti-rat race movie more than an anti-Federal Express movie.

When you say it’s an anti-rat race film, the emblem of that to me is when he returns and we see the crowd outside the glass door, and he’s in this empty room waiting to meet his woman.

Believe me, we worked hard on that. Our idea was that he turns out to be more isolated back home than he was on the island.

It’s like this sudden splash of Antonioni.

Yeah, with that sea of people behind him.

Only a director of your track record would be able to –

Do this movie. You’re absolutely right. And Tom and I said one of the reasons we should do this movie is because we can. Only because of our collective clout could we convince anyone to do a movie not only this risky but in the way that we did it — you know, shutting down and coming back. [The studio executives] must have been going, “Oh, my God!” They never said it; they always said, “Oh, it’s fine.” But they must have been going, “Oh, man!”

Did you work with [fired Fox movie chief] Bill Mechanic on this?

He was the one who greenlighted the picture and now he’s gone.

And he was really a filmmaker’s executive.

Yeah, he was great. He deserves all the credit for letting this project exist.

Did you have to suffer the notes that we hear directors get all the time?

Like when does the supermodel wash up on shore? No. But you know what? You exchange one problem for another. No, they don’t do that to me anymore. But the problem is, they think you have some kind of magic. So you’re all by yourself. It’s lonelier. Yes, when I was a young struggling director, I had to put up with insanity. They’d say things like, “It’s not funny enough. Make it funnier.” But now it’s “Everything’s great.” Well, is it really that great? “Oh, yeah, it’s wonderful.” So now you have to discipline yourself, to make sure you’re not becoming lazy or bloated.

I was also thinking that you tend to work with people you really trust and that you’ve worked with before.

That’s the safety net — where you find yourself working with a comfortable crew and there isn’t any fear because everyone can say what they think and I’ll take it or leave it. I’ll take a good idea from anybody. Certainly that’s the relationship I have with Tom.

Tom said, in fact, that what sealed his trust in you was when, on the second day of filming “Forrest Gump,” you said it just wasn’t working.

Yeah, “Whatever you’re doing, stop it!” If I remember it was, um, a very subtle thing. In trying to depict the kind of simple-mindedness of Forrest, he was doing too much physical stuff and we talked about it. He really didn’t have to do anything other than work with his voice and his eyes.

The sound is so important in this movie, and you’re collaborating again with sound designer Randy Thom.

This time I gave him the first half of the movie a year ago. And I was able to give him a sound designer’s dream words. I said, “Randy, you’ve got to score the movie with sound effects.” If you really pay attention to the movie, his work is beautiful because the different qualities of the rain and the wind and the sounds over the island really do evoke the emotion of the scene that’s being played. If it’s tense, the surf is pounding and quicker-paced; when it’s lyrical, it’s all quiet and melancholy. He’s great.

You know, with “A Hard Day’s Night” making all this money at the box office, you should bring out “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” again.

You’re right — we should reissue it.

Both you and Tom started out making these completely wild comedies, but now –

It has to be an age thing, don’t you think? And was it Groucho Marx who said that dying is easy, it’s comedy that’s hard? I don’t know who said it. Comedy is so hard — it’s so hard. But I love doing it. Whenever I can squirt it into the movie I do it. I’d love to make another comedy.

Watching “Cast Away” at a critics’ screening five weeks ago, the Gore connection was inevitable — after all, Tom Hanks’ character, Chuck Noland, hails from Tennessee. Though the movie is in large part a “Robinson Crusoe”-type adventure about a FedEx hotshot who crash-lands in the ocean and learns how to survive on an island without a stopwatch, it is less about handling goods — or loneliness, or the infinite — than it is about transforming loss into victory.

If any single thing in “Cast Away” made me turn against the film, it’s what happens after Chuck returns from his island. I won’t spoil it here, but I will say that I found the action hugely disappointing — if not unbelievable. “That’s so anti-movie,” I said to a colleague. “It’s so anti-life,” she corrected me. The filmmakers may feel the ending represents an authentic turn of events, but in effect they’re operating like the U.S. Supreme Court. To the audience, as to the voting public, Chuck, like Al Gore, is a loser only in disguise — he’s a loser who should be a winner.

Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis are smart, talented and resourceful; what separates them from Gore is that they’re also instinctive politicians, with a hammerlock on middle-class sensitivities. The 70-minute mid-section of the film, when Chuck is on the island, is wonderfully engrossing and surprisingly funny, especially when Chuck interacts with a Wilson volleyball he names “Wilson.” But this actor and director are too anxious to be believable, in a regular-guy sort of way, to transport us into magical or transcendent realms. Moments like Chuck staring into the eye of a whale become precious gifts, because otherwise the film is cautious in the area of wonder. The movie takes the form of a fable, but its few fairy-tale strokes are wispy, even wan, and are expressed in the hollow visual terms of angel wings — which Hanks sees first as an odd decoration on a FedEx box, then as the plastic sails he carves from a beached Port-a-potty.

Both Hanks and Zemeckis have superb creative reflexes, yet the indefinable sheen that made them consummate entertainers pre-”Forrest Gump” has been wearing thin. Hanks gives his most trenchant serious performance in “Cast Away” (I vastly prefer it to his virtuous turn in “Saving Private Ryan”), but I miss the lunatic serenity he had in “Splash,” the weird, square-cut grace he had in “Turner and Hooch”; in “Cast Away,” he’s easy to admire, but no longer a simple joy to watch. The danger is he’ll go the way of Jack Lemmon: into practiced, award-winning pathos. Maybe I’m demanding from Hanks — and from Zemeckis, who was a delirious slapstick artist in “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Romancing the Stone” and “Back to the Future” — a near-impossible blend of sophistication and spontaneity. Still, it seems to me that “Cast Away” is at best the height of Goldilocks moviemaking: The filmmakers want a cinematic porridge that’s not too hot and not too cold.

As interviewees, Hanks and Zemeckis are nonpareil. Reaching San Francisco as the last, dinnertime appointment of a three-city tour — the jet-age version of a whistle-stop — they spent roughly an hour apiece with two groups of four or five journalists. The actor and the director refueled on Starbucks while reporters nibbled; and at their separate group sessions, each did an expert job of focussing on the scribblers surrounding them at table.

Below are just my questions from the Q&A with Hanks, and his responses to them. I’ll run the Zemeckis answers in my column next week.

Hanks made it easy to start by talking about how much he liked Salon. “I check Salon every day,” he said, “to see what’s going on. It’s not unlike the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. If you just give it a quick scan every day you’re pretty much up on the good, juicy stuff that’s going on.”

How do you feel about coming out with an “anti-‘Survivor,’” since that show ended up celebrating a Machiavellian scenario, whereas the whole voyage your character takes in values is a 90-degree turn from that show.

I guess the closest you can come [to connecting "Cast Away" and "Survivor"] is saying that Chuck voted himself off the island! You know, we had to do long-lead press before we even had a cohesive version of the entire movie and people hadn’t seen the film. And that was the first thing they asked: Well, what are we going to do about this “Survivor” thing? I said, well, look, this is July: I believe “Survivor” will be long gone by the time we come out. We’re pretty much right on time.

This is a rare, totally original Hollywood project — it’s not even based on a Vanity Fair article. How close were you to the conception of the guy at the center of this? It’s interesting to hear you talk about reading on the Internet — you clearly like the pace of contemporary communications and the reflexes you develop scanning them. But here you’re playing a guy who is going to find out, in an almost Dickensian, “Christmas Carol” kind of way, that there’s a cost to all that. What was the hook here? What made you feel you had to do it?

I don’t know how or where it all began. I remember I heard Louis L’Amour, the writer, on some talk show. I heard him talk about how he had been shot down or shipwrecked during World War II and had clung to some atoll somewhere. The person who was interviewing him on TV couldn’t quite get that it was not a pleasant experience for him. She asked two questions. She said, “Oh, that must have been interesting for you.” “No,” he replied, “It wasn’t. It was a life-and-death situation.” Then she asked: “Well, have you ever wanted to go back to that island?” And he said, “No, I haven’t.”

This was so obviously counter to everything we would assume about the castaway on a desert island — be it “Swiss Family Robinson” or “Gilligan’s Island” — that I thought, well, now, that’s interesting. And FedEx, I’ve always thought, is a fascinating business model. I read some article about them and put together that they have these jumbo jets filled with packages that fly across the Pacific every day as routine. That gave a brand of logic to the idea of what would happen if our lives were totally free of distraction? If there were literally nothing to get your attention away from your environment after you have figured out how to eat, how to drink, how to make fire and how to get a roof over your head? Well, then, what do you do without communication, without religion, without art and without anybody else to talk to?

Originally, I was thinking that the theme to examine was as small as a guy who talks all the time [and] suddenly has no one to talk to. Well, it ended up being much bigger than that, when [screenwriter] Bill Broyles and I started talking about the connection between what the character does for a living and the reality of all this time he’s spent on this island. There was a whole kind of philosophical credo, a manifesto that we sort of came up with of how we were gonna do this. But we ran into a huge roadblock that frankly we could never get past. He’s on the island and four years go by. But we knew that we wanted to get to a place where a man and a woman are standing in a room, and they love each other more than anything else, and they have been soul mates for each other, but they will not stay together.

What is the construct for that? Either working backwards or forwards from whenever that happens? So that everybody who is participating in the story will understand both their motivations? It’s not like a clap-o-meter decides what’s going to happen. There is a relentless truth to the endgame that plays out here. That is what we were trying to shoot for. But we went down so many bad, bad tributaries to get there and they were just cheesy beyond belief. You know, it was originally called, like, “Chuck of the Jungle.” We did all of those scenarios of what happens to him when he comes back to the world. It was loaded with self-pity; it was loaded with Rip Van Winkle. Kind of like, “Jeepers-creepers, look how small the computers are.” We thought he’d be turned into some media celebrity. And what is he going to do, be sitting in the Secret Square with Susan Anton right next to him? “OK, and now we’ll go to Chuck Noland to block! Chu-u-u-ck, true or false?” We tried all those kinds of scenarios. Bob became involved after about four years. He was the one who cracked it open for us.

So it predated Bob Zemeckis?

It predated Broyles, too. I had to talk to some other writers and they just didn’t see the same kind of story or idea — I didn’t even really see it myself yet. And it wasn’t until Bill came along, very soon after we’d done “Apollo 13,” that he saw the same sort of thematic enterprise as I did.

So from the beginning the whole love relationship was central to your concept?

Very much so. Yes.

Because that island stuff has been done in many different fashions, but this particular kind of romantic separation seems to be done best comically — like in “My Favorite Wife.”

We played around with it in all sorts of permutations — they were married, they weren’t married, they wanted to get married, she wanted to get married. And when Bob came along, the way it solidified was that both of these people have been failures at [love and marriage] prior to this. You know, Kelly [Helen Hunt] had been married and they make jokes about that in a pretty good-natured way and somewhere along the line we get the understanding that Chuck has not been very good at relationships.

But before the crash, they are at this point in their lives: They aren’t teenagers; they aren’t America’s Cutest Couple. They have done something to restart that includes each other. And it’s kind of like, “Thank God they found each other! Thank God they are in this position!” He’s rising up. He’s got not only the gig, but also a lifestyle that provides him with plenty of excitement and distraction. And she’s working on her dissertation, which is probably after a long hiccup in her life when she wasn’t doing that. And here they are on the cusp of all the security and solidity that they’ve been yearning for.

And they’re old; they’re probably 38, 39, 40 years old. Well I am [laughter], she’s probably 32. But you know what I mean. So right then when it’s all supposed to be done, all the hard work has finished and we’re now actually going to go off and reap the benefits of everything we’ve been struggling with, well — this crash comes along. This crossroads happens in both of their lives. And it doesn’t come out of a time of great anxiety; it actually happens at a time of great promise. And that’s just the kind of thing to throw the film in a different direction — otherwise it’s just the story of a man who learns his lesson.

It’s often said that a one-man show is the hardest thing to do in show business, but at least onstage you actually have an audience there. When you have long stretches like you do in this movie, of just you on the island, where do you get the emotional connections that you usually strike with other actors?

I don’t know! It was hard. I must say it was hard. It’s the greatest challenge I think you can face because there is nobody to play off of. It is reacting, it is still doing that, because there’s plenty of stuff to react to. But just the pace of it was bone-wearying after a while. Because all [the crew] had to do was move the camera and they were ready. The pace that movies can often take — of off-and-on, three minutes here, then five minutes here, then 40 minutes there — was instead like [snaps fingers twice] “OK Tom, they’re ready for you!”

It’s tough. Particularly when there’s bona fide emotionality that’s required. If I ever talk to acting students again, I’m gonna say, “Look, you have to be prepared because one of these days a soccer ball with a face painted on it is going to be drifting away and you have to have a nervous breakdown out in 40 feet of open water — and it has to make sense and be real.”

I also was wondering about the physical tactics you used to prepare for this role — your way of trying to “look real” was also your way of feeling the real emotions.

Yeah, you know it’s not easy to walk on those rocks underwater and stuff like that. It’s not easy to climb around like that. It was an oppressive climate in order to make the movie. Much worse for the crew. I got to strip down while they actually had to move stuff around in it. But at the same time if the job is to tell the truth in front of the camera, that was there. There were some times when we just turned on the camera and said, “Let’s see what happens.” You didn’t have to fake the things that were happening. They were happening.

In that kind of situation does the partnership with the director become more crucial?

Yeah, I don’t know how I would have made this movie with any other director than Bob based on the communicative shorthand that we have and our working relationship. I know that Bob Zemeckis is the hardest-working man in show business. For everyone else it’s hard but for Bob it’s doubly hard because he never leaves the camera. His work ethic is incredible and he doesn’t shuffle off anything the way a lot of other directors would. You know, a lot of directors direct like pashas; they have a coterie of people who bring them in on a sedan chair. Bob isn’t like that. Bob is always up and around and trying to figure stuff out.

But more than that was Bob’s trust to be able to sit down with me at any given moment and examine what it is we just shot and how it impacts what we’re going to shoot next and what that means about what we shoot farther down the line. I think Bob is extremely anxious to hear what I have to say, he knows that I’m the actor in it. And I think there are other actors and directors that are not interested in that process at all. “Please come to the set and do exactly what I tell you to do! Don’t ask any questions! Because if you do it’s going to cost us time!” And Bob isn’t like that. Bob would say, “OK, so what about this thing that we’re going to do today?” Sometimes we’d have an hour and 20 minutes’ conversation about it. Sometimes we’d have a two-minute conversation about it. And sometimes it was just, “I’m ready, Bob. I know what we’re doing here. Let’s go.”

Along with the physical changes, you make some distinct vocal changes in this movie. When you introduce the character at the beginning, he’s totally glib; he defines glib. He defines it in a very affable and lighthearted way, but nonetheless, he’s so facile that you don’t know if he means what he says unless you’re his employee and he’s yelling at you to get you to do something. The first time you hear him on the island there’s a purity to his exclamation that’s unlike anything we’ve heard out of the guy’s mouth before. You and Bob made the choice not to use any voice-over, and I think that works, because the audience wouldn’t register Chuck’s vocal changes as strongly if he were always chattering at us on the soundtrack.

Yeah. You can almost hear a bad voice-over, whatever kooky things he would say: “I’m on an island and not a Four Seasons Hotel to be found anywhere on it. This is madness I tell you, madness! There’s got to be a swimming pool in here somewhere.”

You’ve talked a little bit about the fierceness and the hardship and doing the unconventional thing in a conventional framework. But wasn’t there some feeling of zest in doing the kind of outsize persona you have in the second half, when you seem almost like Billy Bones out of “Treasure Island,” with that weird beard and the bent walk and all that?

Oh yeah. It was a blast. Because you rarely get to play someone whose gone through such a substantial change from beginning to end, and one that is so physically manifest as it is there. And that was a bodacious thing that Bob suggested at the beginning: “Oh, we’ll just shoot the first half and then we’ll take a year off and come back and shoot the other half.” And that was fantastic because then [everything you need to know is] physically evident. That shot after four years later: You don’t need any voice-over saying “and so I lived by my wits for four years” because it’s all there.

It was just getting around the island and doing all the stuff that I had to do minus the 60 pounds that I had to do it with the first time — that was a stroll in the park now. I was a little tired, a little hungry, but by and large it was so much easier to pull myself in and out of the water and get up on the boat this time than it was the first time. It was enjoyable. But it was going to a place and getting dirty every day. And we had these things on my hair that were, I don’t know — were they glued, were they stapled? Just these things every day that were pulling on my scalp. And then the beard itself. Sometimes it’s fun to have one for a week: “I’m doing a job, so I have to have a beard.” But doing it for eight months was — you know, it was a pleasure to take that thing off.

I was also wondering about this subtle theme about the artwork: Chuck does his own artwork on the island, and develops this almost mystical connection with a female artist he doesn’t meet until the end. Were you trying to suggest that this area was opening up for a guy who would never have had the chance to –

You know this whole artwork thing, in earlier incarnations, particularly when it was just me and Bill working on the script, did have a much bigger part. Chuck was opening himself up to a world of creativity through art. I like it better the way it is now because it is so much more sotto voce. We did shoot some scenes of him figuring out that mud could be yellow and he could figure out red. But if we were going to say that he came back from this island a completely altered individual with new talents and new interests and new pursuits I think that would have been false. If he’d come back and said, “Well now I appreciate art because I was on that island by myself,” I think that would have been bogus. He might have developed some interior openness to other things, but I think the truth of all the research that Bill did and all the things we have seen is that you come out of this monastic experience much like you went into the monastic experience. John McCain, I think, is the same guy now that he was before.

If it would work that you can put somebody off by themselves with a can of paint [and have them become artists], well, then, let’s do it at San Quentin because all those guys would come out and then they wouldn’t be crooks anymore. But at the same time, just the very fact of how he did this, we can get a sense of what he’s like — he’s not educating himself, he’s entertaining himself. He is somehow painting his world and the first time he’s doing that he’s talking to Wilson, which I think is really cool, too. He’s filling his day with something that can somehow connect him to the world. It is a distraction much like the distractions we have but it can only last for so long because eventually even that becomes a hollow pursuit for him. And maybe you need four years to go through this. Otherwise you’re making what could be a pretty cheesy editorial on “What everybody needs is a good solid dose of losing everything because — then you kids could appreciate what you have.”

Human nature really doesn’t work that way. The best you can hope for is, I think, what we have at the end of the movie. That you can stand at the crossroads and feel everything is going to be OK, going to be all right. As long as you keep breathing and keep up a certain perspective and proportion to your life, you’ll be OK. And that’s not a huge shift for Chuck to have gone through even if he hadn’t been lost. People do it all the time. “I quit. I don’t want to do this job anymore. I’m going to go figure out what I want to do. And I’m going to be OK doing that.” And that’s interesting. It’s almost as though Chuck can say, “The best thing that ever happened to me was that I was in this plane crash where five people got killed and I survived for four years and I came back and I lost the woman I loved. That was the best thing that happened to me. That really put some perspective on my life.”

Because of the film’s sprightly assembly, viewers hooked by that line didn’t feel cheated when they found the “madcap” laced with anomie and melancholy. And the movie had two hot cultural properties: the director, Nichols, who’d trumped his Broadway-comedy Golden Boy image with a prize-winning film debut on Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; and, supplying songs for the soundtrack, Simon and Garfunkel, purveyors of tuneful alienation. Put these pop-art question marks and exclamation points together and what you got was an incredible pull factor — naughtiness wrapped in an ambiance of “class” and cutting-edge attitude.

The DVD features two main extras: a talking-heads documentary called “‘The Graduate’ at 25″ and an extended interview with Dustin Hoffman. In the documentary, producer Lawrence Turman comes on as the prime mover. Originally thinking of novelist Webb as good screenwriter material, Turman ended up optioning Webb’s book instead, and hiring Nichols to develop and film it after the director’s early stage smash, “Barefoot in the Park.”

Turman then gave Nichols the leeway to hire just about anyone he wanted, including Simon and Garfunkel — and Hoffman. As screenwriter Buck Henry says, they initially envisioned a prototypical California clan: “blond, healthy, a family of surfboards.” Their fantasy casting was “Bob Redford, Candice Bergen, Ronald Reagan and Doris Day.” But when Hoffman nailed the part, they surmised he could connect “as a genetic throwback — as if Doris Day and Ronald Reagan had this monkey.”

Hoffman was crucial to the movie’s aura of wit and daring — which is still more of a kick than the movie itself, which ends squarely on the side of naivete. With Mrs. Robinson, a cat-woman in plush lairs, seducing Ben before he falls for her picture-perfect daughter, “The Graduate” is a kitten in leopard-skin clothing. Yet for a cultural phenomenon that opened the floodgates for youth movies and generated a rash of imitations, “The Graduate” hasn’t dated, at least as entertainment. Nichols and Henry’s appropriations of Webb’s seduction scenes (Henry shared screenplay credit with Calder Willingham) have the paradoxical timeless/ephemeral quality of the comedy routines Nichols did in clubs and on stage and TV with Elaine May.

“The Graduate” may still play as a breakthrough for young audiences who haven’t seen it, since it’s hard to think of another movie that places such a sweeping symbolic indictment of adulthood into such a swoony vision of triumphant youth — and gets away with it. Still, viewing the film today, it’s even more ambiguous whether Benjamin feels out of it for good reason or whether this schlub simply knows he’s not ready to carry an elaborate upscale L.A. lifestyle. When a family friend gives Benjamin some pithy advice about his future — he just says “plastics” — it’s a great line, but it doesn’t sum up the Braddocks. No matter how consumerist they may be, all we know at this point in the film is that they want Benjamin to go to graduate school — which, to them, is doing something.

The movie treats Mrs. Robinson as a monster, though she’s the most sensual and complex character. Bancroft in this film is a sensational American Moreau, with a quicksilver erotic ambiance, plus tinges of warmth and lightness that cement her crack bits of comedy. The running joke in the movie is that Benjamin wants to talk and have what future cosmopolites called a “relationship,” while Mrs. Robinson wants sex. But Bancroft at least shows that Mrs. Robinson likes and savors sex: rubbing her hands over her lover’s chest, she expresses the pleasure this woman takes in being close to a strong young body.

Soon, though, she’s snarling like a banshee. From the source material up, the story is conventional; the unfaithful woman must be punished, the true lovers must have their day. In the documentary Turman states that Nichols came up with the mildly racy alteration of Benjamin’s wresting Elaine away after she says “I do” to a med student. Nichols’ knowing tone and craftsmanship are what give this film the impression of bite — that, and the inspired casting of Hoffman as Benjamin.

The most uncomplicated and lasting change the counterculture wrought was the alteration of upper-middle-class style — the doffing of the de rigueur white shirt and sport jacket and the proper image that went with them. That’s roughly clean-cut Ben Braddock’s transformation in his mini-odyssey, and the oddball casting gives it zest. Hoffman’s DVD interview is about his “Jewish nightmare” of “an ethnic actor” meant for “ethnic New York parts” being asked to do the unlikely, such as romancing a jaw-dropping American beauty like Katharine Ross. But Hoffman does provide some clues to his and Nichols’ combination of Method and improv-comedy techniques, including the development of Ben’s nervous squeak and his risible erector-set approach to handling Mrs. Robinson’s breasts.

Through most of the film, Hoffman’s flat delivery and wary, awkward gait (walking like he’s in his scuba outfit even when he isn’t) suggest a man who won’t say or do anything until he’s ready. His performance leaves the character open to unexpected possibilities. At the end of his interview, Hoffman admits he once proposed a sequel in which Ben and Elaine have settled into a not-very-good marriage (including regular in-law visits from Mrs. Robinson), and Ben has an affair with his 17-year-old son’s girlfriend. “I get it,” Nichols replied; “You become Mrs. Robinson.”