Mark Romanek - Interviews

Making his Mark in Hollywood

With his first feature One Hour Photo - he regards his 1985 low-budget effort Static as more of an early experimental piece - director Mark Romanek has suddenly become one of Hollywood's hottest young directors. The film, which has a startling starring turn by Robin Williams, is a hugely enjoyable yet disturbing account of a photo clerk's obsession with a young family. Already a hit in America, where it has been receiving both critical and public acclaim and where distributors Fox have been letting word-of-mouth build by rolling it slowly out across the country, the film will hit cinemas across England from October 4.

Tiscali caught up with Romanek during his publicity tour for the picture. A very affable guy, he is refreshingly devoid of Hollywood-speak and clearly on a buzz that his film is being received so well. Having spent years at the top of the tree as a director of pop promos for such artists as REM and Madonna he may well have friends in high places - one of his best pals is Se7en and Fight Club director David Fincher - but his feet remain firmly on the ground.

One of the movie's biggest talking points is the performance by Robin Williams, who is as far from his madcap Flubber persona as it is possible to be. It's an unusual and brave choice that pays off with a turn that is already being touted as a potential Oscar nomination, and Romanek admits even he was surprised by the versatile actor's ability to focus on such a different character. "I was a fan of Robin's but I knew I was making an independent movie with a small budget so I didn't think we'd get a big movie star. I was in the process of interviewing interesting independent actors, but through a series of circumstances his manager read the script, knew that Robin was looking for some new challenges and wanted to work with some new younger directors. When he read it he deeply connected with the script. He knew that this was going to be a labour of love, that he wasn't going to get his usual fee on the film but he didn't care."

Romanek was inspired by what he terms the 'lonely man' films of the 1970s, such as Taxi Driver and Francis Coppola's The Conversation. He even had help from the great bearded one in the editing period of the movie (you can tell that Romanek is a perfectionist as he reveals he spent 13 months editing the film). "Coppola watched the movie, sent me a long e-mail and advised me that it was ok for me to make a genre film, a thriller, which I had previously been unsure about."

Apart from Williams' turn, the film is also surprising in the way that it avoids Hollywood clichés and resolutely refuses to lead the audience down well-trodden paths. Romanek was very conscious of this and wanted to avoid making his film a predictable thriller. "The film definitely plays with your expectations of how these films usually run," he admits. "There are little twists all the way through." The biggest twist of all however, remains the audience's reaction to Sy Parrish, the photo guy of the title. Despite being a character of uneasy motives, both Williams and Romanek worked hard to make him simultaneously compassionate - by the end of the film most viewers will leave with an ambiguous feeling of empathy towards him. Romanek laughs. "I always thought of him as a creepy Saint", he says. "I knew that the situation would be creepy, so I knew that intelligent audiences would have to engage with the film in order to assess how they felt towards the character". Romanek may well have taken a lot from watching classic isolation movies of the 70s, but there is no doubt that he has added his own unique twist to the genre.