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FILM Magazine
The boy Next Door

Door in the Floor director Tod Williams gets emotional with Anwar Brett.

The golfer Gary Player was once accused being 'lucky'. "It's true," he said in a good natured response, "and the harder I work, the luckier I get." In those terms Tod Williams is a lucky director. Managing to persuade esteemed author John Irving to part with the remake rights to his novel, A Widow For One Year, was perhaps business as usual for a hungry writer-director. But securing them for only a dollar was a sign that things were going his way in fine fashion. "That set the tone for the movie," Williams explains cheerfully, "because it was obvious that he was only interested in trying to make something that was good."

As the project came together with near indecent haste, Williams attracted big name stars Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger to play the one loving couple of Ted and Marion Cole, now estranged after the tragic death of their beloved sons. Each deals with the loss quite differently. Ted pours his emotions in the childrens' books he writes and illustrates, and cares for their surviving daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning) -- when not dallying with local women who are dazzled by his charm and celebrity. Marion is more of a lost soul, until she experiences a reawakening of long forgotten emotions in a torrid affair with Ted's shy new assistant Eddie (Jon Foster).

"Jeff, Kim and Jon more than delivered on my expectations," Williams continues. "And they were so self assured. Really generous, open and humble, confident but not cocky in a way that you only find in a few people. None of them had some fear about their position in the world, because I think a lot of times famous people are very vulnerable."

Williams could have been excused for anticipating a degree of vulnerability in 7-year-old Elle Fanning. Despite coming from the same gene pool as older sister Dakota, Williams initially considered engaging in subterfuge to tease a performance out of her.

"My original plan was to not talk to Elle at all," he explains, "but to direct her through the actors that she was working with. I did that a little bit, but I very quickly found that I didn't have to play games with her. You could talk to her like you'd talk to an adult."

Not that there wasn't something very natural, and in a way pained, in the sincerity of her performance. "She was so enamoured of Kim but Kim kept a distance. Jeff and Elle would draw children's books together, they had a ton of fun but there was a longing, as any little girl might have, to hang out with Kim. She was looking forward to seeing her the whole time."

The power of Williams' film comes from such poignant emotional details. Yet just as some admired the fact that the issues it depicts are coloured by subtle shades of grey, others reacted with horror to a story that didn't spoon feed the audience the moral lessons he might have expected them to learn.

"A lot of times when people think of directing.It's when there's a very imposed viewpoint," Williams sighs. "I feel that this thing has a very clear point of view at almost all times, but it's carefully constructed. It's not neutral but what makes it different from a lot of movies is that you're not asked to identify with one character in particular."

Films with a point of view are rare enough, rarer still are the ones that trust their audience to form an idea of their own. The Door in the Floor signals the arrival of a director to watch, and with a remake of Hemingway's To Have And Have Not in the works it seems like his luck is set to continue.

"It's been cool to see The Door in the Floor out there," he adds proudly. "I think that if you like the film it's a sign that you're willing to think a little bit more than most people. After all this is what we go to the theatre for, or what we read books for. I don't know why movies have to be so dumb. It's a bummer."

Transcript taken from FILM magazine (July 2005 edition). All rights reserved.

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