Matthew Modine: The Long View

The Hotel New Hampshire was another story altogether, one apparently having less to do with the director than the set in general. "Tony Richardson is a good director," says Modine, "and it's an interesting movie. I don't know if it exactly works, but it's certainly interesting. But I never felt part of that group." He puts a hand up to ward off the next question.

"You see," he says firmly, "with each director you receive dif¬ferent things. I find that the best direction I get is through a gesture or through some kind of physical behavior. For instance, in Memphis Belle, Michael Caton-Jones was directing a scene in which I'm talking to my plane. He said, 'Maybe while you're talking you should take your hat off,' and he pantomimed the hat spinning around in my hand. It was crystal clear what he was trying to tell me, how to feel while I was doing some physical gesture. When somebody takes his hat off and fiddles with it, there's some kind of nervousness going on inside him. It's sad, but there usually isn't the time in film to discover the most economical and precise way of saying things."

Not all of Modine's directors are absolute A-list. Certainly, Caton-Jones showed promise, but not genius, with his first feature, Scandal. Still, he's considered a comer and Memphis Belle carries David Puttnam's imprimatur in any case. Harold Becker, who directed Modine in one of the better Rocky clones, Vision Quest, had success with The Onion Field in 1979 and brought some style and tension to last year's Sea of Love, but more than being uneven--all directors are uneven--he can be downright uninspired. Modine says of Becker, "He's a good director." The actor has sly, ambiguous praise for Gillian Armstrong, who directed him in Mrs. Soffel, a box office flop despite the presence of Mel Gibson, to whom Modine played low-voltage second fiddle. "She is," he says of Armstrong, "one of those women who has commitments to visions beyond the box office projections of 'Entertainment Tonight.' "

Ironically, Modine's least impressive performance so far came in a film by one of Hollywood's most highly touted directors, Jonathan Demme. Demme seemed to be pushing the comedy too hard in Married to the Mob, and Modine, usually effortless even in complicated characterizations, did too. Modine himself sees it differently: "Jonathan was very much like Bob Altman," he says. "He's not afraid to take information from different people. If you saw something that would make an interesting shot, he would look at it. He wouldn't be insulted. Actually, the best way to say it is that people aren't afraid to approach him with ideas."

Probably the worst film Matthew Modine has appeared in is one of the more recent: Gross Anatomy. Directed by Thom Eberhardt (_Night of the Comet_, Without a Clue), it managed to embarrass an entire ensemble cast. Well, almost. It's an index of how good Modine is that he remains watchable in these surroundings--a flash of lightning in a chalk garden.

"I did the film," Modine explains, "because it started out as a really different movie. There was a [subplot] of an arrogant guy who was dying of AIDS that's not in the movie anymore. Some film companies have a policy that the script that you read is not the script that will be made, and the film that is made is not the film that will be edited. They read preview cards and alter the movie. I suppose that's why people become producer-directors, to try and control some of that and make the movie you intended to make when you read the script."

Modine says he didn't take on Gross Anatomy with the idea that it was potentially a broad-appeal commercial movie which, with Disney's marketing genius, might just have broken out and hit big, despite being a relatively low-budget picture. And since this is an actor who turned down two of the biggest commercial blockbusters of the '80s--_St. Elmo's Fire_ and Top Gun--because, regardless of their hit potential, he didn't like what they were about, one tends to believe him. Modine is fashioning his career with the long run in mind, with awareness that a lot of people who were high on Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, and Andrew McCarthy when St. Elmo's Fire came out, don't even think about them now. Modine is likely to go on seeking out class projects tied to first-rate directors, figuring one of them will turn out to be the perfect match-up between actor, material and audience. Hollywood, he has said before, tends to "make movies for an instant good feeling. I don't want to do that. I want a relationship with filmmaking, a marriage of sorts."

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David Galligan, writer and director of the musical revue "Blame it on the Movies!," is a frequent contributor to Movieline.

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