With Hope Floats, his directorial follow-up to Waiting to Exhale, Forest Whitaker aims to show audiences that Sandra Bullock is "a very serious actress who can do just about anything she wants."
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When Forest Whitaker, the tall, hulking actor with the gentle-giant vibe, parlayed the success he'd achieved in roles for such big-time directors as Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money), Oliver Stone (Platoon), Clint Eastwood (Bird) and Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) into a film directing opportunity for himself, not many people guessed he'd score a box-office success like the glitzy, soapy, crowd-pleasing diva-fest Waiting to Exhale.
Suddenly, a guy who'd previously directed only a few plays, some videos, and an HBO flick found himself not merely sought after as a solid, commercial director, but considered by many in Hollywood to be a terrific director of women. With an array of follow-up film possibilities before him, including Exhale novelist Terry McMillan's new one, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Whitaker chose Hope Floats, an intimate, multigenerational Texas romantic comedy/drama about a young woman who goes back to her small hometown to reclaim herself after being publicly embarrassed when her best friend blabs on a national TV talk show about the affair she had with the woman's husband. With its twangy drawls, countrified backdrop and messy family entanglements, Hope Floats is unflashy by comparison with Waiting to Exhale. Moreover, it's a film in which the star and executive producer , Sandra Bullock, has the task of reclaiming her career after being publicly embarrassed by the critical and box-office disappointments In Love and War and Speed 2: Cruise Control. What drew Whitaker to simultaneously tackle the direction of such down-home material and the reinvention of a movie star?
"I got attracted to trying to put on-screen how you feel when you're as lost as the character Sandra plays," he says. "The movie's about the pain of losing yourself and the joy of regaining yourself. It's the story of someone being dragged to the bottom, someone who loses some of the best parts of herself, but who then somehow rises back up. That just grabbed me."
Whitaker's persuasive actor, and he's got a "relationship movie" to sell, but he utters his with such palpable empathy that I'm moved to comment, "Sounds like you've been there and back."
"I have felt most lost in my life around certain relationships, "he observes, staring off and smiling ruefully. "I was probably a lot more idealistic when I was younger, but I remember being so in love with somebody that I flew to another country just to be where she was. In this relationship, there were always lies that I refused to believe were lies. For instance, if she said, 'I have a friend who lives with me,' I would accept that. So, this one time, she was supposedly out of town, and, let me say, I was really in love--really, really gone. I flew to where she was, and I remember thinking, 'Well, if she's really out of town, she won't mind me climbing up this ladder to look in her room way up there. If she's there, I can talk to her. If she's not, well, then, she was telling the truth.' So I found myself climbing up this ladder, and there she was with her friend and lover. I was just devastated. I climbed down and took the lessons from it."
Such romantic desperation and resignation probably account for Whitaker's damn-the-KIeenex, full-speed-ahead approach to the transcendently melodramatic Waiting to Exhale, and may explain his feel for Hope Floats, in which Sandra Bullock's character is forced to come to terms with things like her sometimes harrowing impulses toward her young daughter and her relationships with both her flamboyant mother (Gena Rowlands) and her Alzheimer's-stricken father (James N. Harrell).
"I don't consider women's experiences foreign to me," asserts Whitaker. "I don't mind listening and looking deep into women, to what they say and feel. I try and see past everything. There have been times in my life when I've felt every bit as lost and without hope as some of the characters in Exhale or Hope Floats, times where--especially in love relationships, as I said--I basically lost my mind."
Is that how he sees Hope Floats--a story about somebody losing their mind? "I had this idea that I kept to myself until now," Whitaker says, "that the whole story was like a dream. First, the lead character dies a terrible 'death' being ripped to shreds in the modern equivalent of a Roman coliseum, which is what I think a talk show is. After that, she must revisit every issue in her life, every person in her life, all of whom show her parts of herself she must come to terms with in order to progress to the next level. See?"
Well, sort of, but what most people probably want to see is whether Sandra Bullock will finally prove herself more than photogenic, sweetly sexy and inordinately lovable. Does she pull it off? "Many people who are involved in the movie expressed concerns and worries about that," concedes the director. "I just looked inside of Sandy's eyes when I met her and I could see little pockets of pain, insecurity. I saw how vast she is, the capacity she has. She came to this with a dive-in attitude, really wanting to expose different parts of herself and wanting to play darker moments. Actors need to have confidence that they're not going to fall. I let Sandy know that I was walking with her and she went very far emotionally. In a couple of moments especially, she just destroys you. If she doesn't show all [she can do] on camera, it'll be my fault. I don't think the movie's going to change people wanting to see her do the comedy stuff she's so good at, but I think people are now going to take her as a very serious actress who can do just about anything she wants."
Given Whitaker's reputation for working with big (and, at times, legendarily difficult) female stars, I can't help but ask how working with Bullock compared with handling the likes of, say, Whitney Houston. "I'd work again with Whitney in a second," he insists. "In fact, I'd love to find something right away for us to do together. I never had a problem with her. Whitney and Sandy are very different, but I'd work again with either of them anytime."
Since part of the rediscovery Sandra Bullock's character goes through in Hope Floats is romantic, how does Bullock spark with Harry Connick Jr., who plays the underachieving house painter that such actors as Matt Dillon, Dermot Mulroney and Dylan McDermott, not to mention Billy Ray Cyrus, purportedly wanted to play? "We saw a lot of people for the role," Whitaker acknowledges, refusing to confirm or deny the usual suspects. "Harry can be really goofy so that one second you're laughing at him, then, all of a sudden, he flips some switch and can be really sexy like the Marlboro man. I felt he was the one from the beginning, and when Sandy and he did their screen test, the heat between them was so obvious, that was it."
Speaking of heat, what's with the rumors of friction between Whitaker and the studio powers that be, particularly over the film's bittersweet finale? "I hardly ever lose my temper," he comments. "But I do sometimes have to say, 'Get off my back, I'm trying to make the movie.' I didn't want to make a movie where Sandy's character meets a guy who 'saves' her. To the studio's credit, they let me try it the way I wanted it, and thank God, the first preview audience saved my ending. We also have this scene where Sandy and Gena finally connect emotionally, but don't hug. I had this thing about never letting them hug, because in life not everyone always gets to resolve relationships with a hug. Preview audiences weren't with me on that one. They were like, It they love each other, why don't they hug?' Well, because I asked them not to, that's why."
With the completion of Hope Floats, Whitaker will be returning temporarily to the other side of the camera, first with Ashley Judd in a Mona Lisa-tike thriller called Velvet Underground, and then in a movie directed by Jim Jarmusch. But he's a director for the duration, with upcoming plans that include the pilot for a TV series on which his new company has gotten the green light. He'll also be closely supervising his semi-autobiographical children's animated TV series The Village, voiced by Boyz II Men. Then it'll be another feature film. "I'm really intrigued by Fox's movie Anna and the King, which is a non-musical The King and I with Chow Yun-Fat," he notes. "But the one genre I'm really trying to convince them to let me do is a musical. I mean, I saw Evita, and Cinderella on TV, and told my agents: 'That's what I want to do.' I love pieces that are operatic, almost mythic."
Whether Oscar-bait or deluxe popcorn fare comes next for Whitaker, he insists he's happier than ever and hasn't been tempted to climb a ladder in years. Summoned to the dubbing theater to decide on such matters as whether to tone down one of Sandra Bullock's more raucous laughs or amp up one of Connick's sexier lines, he philosophizes, "For a long time, I thought it was going to take a lot to make me happy. Now, though, I'm relatively at peace. I love acting and directing when I'm doing them, yet there's no sense of 'I must,' because I could do neither of them and still be happy. If I can just tell some stories, maybe uplift some people by telling them, I'll be more than OK."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Christina Ricci for the April '98 issue of Movieline.