You Call This a Break?

Jennifer Jason Leigh took time out from her career to co-write, co-direct and star in a film with her pals. And they did it all digitally.

By: HUGH HART | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

When she was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles, Jennifer Jason Leigh liked to stay up way past her bedtime whenever her parents entertained their Hollywood pals. She'd finally fall asleep and be carried off to bed. Thirty years later, Leigh revisits that world, this time from a very adult perspective, in "The Anniversary Party."

The movie stars Leigh and Alan Cumming as a show-biz couple celebrating six wobbly years of marriage with a houseful of neurotic guests played by a career full of friends including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Beals, Parker Posey, John Benjamin Hickey and Jane Adams. The ensemble was handpicked by Leigh and Cumming, who together wrote and directed the piece. It's Leigh's first time behind the camera.

Wearing an impenetrable pair of sunglasses during a recent interview, Leigh, 39, works her way through a pack of cigarettes, a cup of tea and a plate of French fries on the patio of the hotel Chateau Marmont, just minutes from the house atop Mulholland Drive where the shoot took place.

"When I was a kid, my parents [actor Vic Morrow and screenwriter Barbara Turner] had what seemed, from my child's perspective, these very glamorous dinner parties. That fast-paced dialogue between adults, and the cigarette smoke, and the laughter, all these things that I just sort of glimpsed but barely understood--'The Anniversary Party' is as much about that as it is about what I know today and what I've experienced in my relationships."

"The Anniversary Party" is no love-in. Leigh, after all, hasn't made a feel-good movie since her 1982 debut in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Mordantly funny at times, this party comes complete with a suicide, a drowning, betrayal, drug-induced meltdowns, and a late-night screaming match that left Cumming hoarse and Leigh toting an ice pack on the set the next day to ease swelling from an all-too-real smack across the face.

Consistent with Leigh's attraction to exquisitely tortured characters, "The Anniversary Party," which opens June 8 in Los Angeles, probes relationships in all their needy, ugly glory. It is the kind of "small" film Leigh excels in, the kind that typically earns great notices but often negligible box-office grosses, the kind that often has a hard time finding financing--the kind, these days, that is perfect for shooting on digital video. Count Leigh as a convert.

Leigh and Cumming shot "The Anniversary Party" on DV, the lightweight video-based technique pioneered by Denmark's Dogma movement, and Leigh believes it would have been virtually un-doable the old-fashioned way. The movie cost $3.5 million and was shot in 19 days. "We could never have shot at that pace using film," Leigh says.

Intrigued by Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 Dogma film "The Celebration," Leigh experienced the experimental, spontaneous Dogma spirit firsthand in 1999 when she acted in her first digital video project, the Danish film "The King Is Alive," shot in a remote African town. (The film opened Friday in Los Angeles.) Under Dogma, Hollywood production values are rejected, and scenes are caught rather than "created."

"I was inspired by the freedom of digital, the immediacy of it, the ease of it, and also how cheap it is to make a movie," Leigh says. "The Danes don't shoot long days--we only shot seven-hour days--so my thought process was, 'Well, we shot seven-hour days for six weeks to do 'The King Is Alive.' If we shot normal 12-to 14-hour days, we could shoot a movie in three weeks!"'

Hooking up with Cumming was the next move. "Alan and I were hanging out a lot, we both wanted to direct, and we thought, typical Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney scenario: Let's do it in our own backyard and write it for our friends."

Leigh met Cumming when she played Sally Bowles opposite his emcee character during a Broadway revival of "Cabaret" three years ago. Cumming, speaking by phone from New York, where he's performing in Nol Coward's "Design for Living," says they were too exhausted from the rigors of their eight-shows-a-week schedule to do much creative brainstorming during the musical's run.

But a few months later, they began collaborating when he stayed with Leigh while visiting Los Angeles. The pair began fleshing out a story about actors and actresses and agents who lived in houses exactly like Leigh's. In fact, the original plan was to shoot the film in Leigh's home.

"We wrote for people that we knew, because we knew their patterns of speech, and we were writing about a house that we were in," says Cumming, who had previously directed short films and a feature titled "Butter."

Familiarity in this case bred a pitch meeting at Fine Line Features. Recalls Fine Line President Mark Ordesky, "This was not a vanity project for them. This is something they really had an auteurist passion for--and I can use that word because they did both write it and direct it. Arianna Bocco, our VP of acquisitions, was so thrilled after she met with them, she called me in New Zealand and said, 'I just heard this pitch, we have to do this.' It was the most straightforward green light I ever got."

Shooting the picture on digital video was not an issue for Fine Line. "Our commitment to 'The Anniversary Party' was not based on it being shot on digital video. I'm not sure the film would have been dramatically more expensive if it had been shot on film," says Ordesky, who also attributes the low cost to the single location and the fact that Leigh and Cumming were able to knock off eight to 10 pages of dialogue a day.

In making "The Anniversary Party," Leigh looked to, among other models, the Coen brothers, for whom she worked in "The Hudsucker Proxy." "They're very low-key, which I respond to. I don't like a lot of hype and a lot of screaming and stuff because it's not my thing. I don't need extra drama," she says, laughing. "It's nice to have a kind of quiet existence and then you can be eccentric and insane in your acting, but your life doesn't need to be that way and the set doesn't need to be that way either.

"We had this fabulous house about a mile away--all the actors would come there, there were three makeup and hair people, they had an hour to prepare, then they all went to the house to shoot. [Jennifer] Beals is a great photographer and took all these great pictures during production of people sleeping in the backyard, on the grass, in the hammock. It was really plush for being very low-budget, a really nice atmosphere, because everyone just hung out."

Dogma's raw style may have motivated Leigh to make her own films, but she and Cumming wanted to wring as much celluloid-style beauty as they could from the digital video technology. Says Leigh, "Video is tricky in a lot of ways. It's not generous, it's not kind, it's not soft. There's a kind of richness and depth that you have with film, and that's what we were always trying to see if we could achieve."

To bring their movie as close as possible to film-level quality, Leigh and Cumming recruited veteran cinematographer John Bailey. A camera operator for Nestor Almendros on the painterly 1978 film "Days of Heaven," Bailey has since served as director of photography on more than 40 Hollywood movies, including "Ordinary People," "The Big Chill" and "As Good as It Gets." Bailey says that when Leigh first approached him, "you can imagine the misgivings I had: actors directing for the first time, a new medium, an incredibly short schedule. But the script was wonderful and Jennifer and Alan were incredibly disciplined. Even though I had a lot of initial anxieties, I didn't by the time we were a week away from shooting. They were totally buttoned down."

Initially, the "Anniversary" team considered using hand-held cameras associated with the Dogma style, Bailey says. "We talked about shooting with a very low-end camera, but as we tested cameras, the quality really just wasn't good. We considered shooting at Super 16 and blowing it up to 35 [millimeter]. Then one day we looked at Bernardo Bertolucci's 'The Conformist,' which is very stylized, formalized, and we suddenly felt the movie should reflect a more upscale, more beautiful environment for these kind of glitzy people to move in. We decided to make the picture as polished as we could."

Bailey opted for digital video cameras that, as it turned out, were nearly as heavy as traditional 35-millimeter equipment. He laboriously lighted each scene, in direct violation of the Dogma "rules" that insist that filmmakers use only available light; and he supervised a complex tape-to-film transfer process, which added graininess and the flicker that audiences unconsciously associate with movies.

Explains Bailey, "'Anniversary Party' was basically shot like a traditional film .... If you want controlled lighting, controlled composition and traditional coverage, it doesn't much matter whether it's film or video. From my point of view, as cinematographer, it didn't make much difference at all."

Rife with tension, uncomfortable pauses, paranoia and envy, "The Anniversary Party" brings to mind French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's quote, "Hell is other people." When she hears it during the interview, Leigh cuts in, "Oh, that's my favorite quote of all time. I say it daily."

Leigh's filmography, populated by bitter, shellshocked losers, does suggest a bleak worldview, but she clearly revels in a close circle of friends she's met over the course of her 20 years of show business--and "The Anniversary Party" gave her a great excuse to gather many of them together. Cates, her co-star from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," plays an actress who's given up her career for motherhood. Reilly, who played a dopey drummer to Leigh's self-destructive punk singer in "Georgia," turns up in "Party" as a morose indie filmmaker.

On "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," Leigh first worked with several of the actors she would cast in "Party." During the shoot, Leigh also discovered a passion for the game charades. "Beals would be in the library looking up arcane titles in mathematical journals to bring into the game and it was fabulous," Leigh recalls.

Those charade memories inspired "Party's" first-act centerpiece--one of only two scenes filmed with a hand-held camera--climaxed by Hickey's character, veins bulging from his forehead as he yells obscenities at his wife to "move on to the second syllable you [expletive]."

Leigh has no plans to give up performing--she's currently working on director Sam Mendes' "The Road to Perdition" with Tom Hanks--but there's no question she's been bitten by the directing bug.

"I do love acting, but certainly now, having written and directed something, it pales a bit in comparison. I just loved it, every bit of it, going to the editing room 10 hours a day, the pre-production. We had no production designer, so it was [a matter of] going to different furniture stores all over town [asking], 'Can we borrow stuff for six weeks?' And I brought all the books from my bookshelf that Joe and Sally [the characters played by Cumming and Leigh] would have in their library, even though you don't see them. I'm so into details, and it's so great to be able to bring everything that you have to a project."

If Leigh has more stories to tell, don't expect them all to have a show-biz setting. Anyway, "The Anniversary Party" is not really about the industry, insists Leigh.

Leigh cites a brutal fight scene between Joe and Sally as an example of the film's focus on relationships. "That explosion between Joe and Sally in the canyon--anyone who's ever been in a relationship has had those fights where you wish you could take something back, where you just say the most venomous, ugliest things you could possibly think to say, and the most hurting, and they're also very funny because you're saying things that are so ultimately cruel.

"We made it take place here and we had it be about people who work in this industry because we know it so well, but really what it's about is relationships and marriage and kids."

Which Leigh is interested in personally? "Yeah. It would be nice, but uh," she pauses, then mutters, "I haven't even gone on a date in ... three months. But yeah, it would all be nice."

Hugh Hart Is a Regular Contributor to Calendar