Softley does it
film culture
Victoria Ward Annabel Jones Sara Macefield Charlotte Gifford Tim Wigmore Jotam Confino
With his star-studded new drama K-Pax, British director Iain Softley has conquered Hollywood. He talks to Mark Monahan
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The Telegraph
SO far, British director Iain Softley has enjoyed a quiet but rather enviable kind of fame. Mention his name to most people, even those who would claim some knowledge of cinema, and the chances are that they will ask, "Who's he again?" But remind them that he was the man behind Backbeat, or Hackers, or The Wings of the Dove and the response is likely to be, "Really? Great film"

Already a box-office hit in the US, his new picture, K-Pax, should take him several steps closer to stardom. Set in a mental hospital in present-day New York, it pits Jeff Bridges - one of Hollywood's most dependable and distinctive talents - against man-of-the-moment Kevin Spacey, and hinges on a single, intriguing premise. Spacey's Prot, who shows up apparently out of the blue one day at Grand Central Station (wearing shades to protect his eyes from Earth's "glare"), claims to have come from the distant planet K-Pax on a beam of light; Bridges' Dr Powell, the psychiatrist assigned to Prot, at first assumes that he is a delusional earthling, but increasingly suspects that he may in fact be a perfectly sane alien.

Although the film necessarily has a fantastical element to it, with Prot wistfully but convincingly describing the beautiful skies and advanced social structures of his home planet, Softley was determined that the hospital environment rang true.

"One of the first things I did when I was working on the film was to contact a very senior psychiatrist in New York, Dr John Oldham, who gave us access to many different hospitals," says Softley. "We were also in touch with consultants in Los Angeles, and, when we were shooting the interiors, we had them constantly on set to check that all the procedural details were accurate. I wanted everything to be as believable as possible, so that, although the film puts two different worlds together - one that we consider to be the real world, and one that we consider to be an imaginary world - it would still be rooted in reality."

Essentially a dialogue-driven two-hander, with nearly all the action taking place in the hospital, K-Pax could easily have emerged as visually flat, like a play dragged kicking and screaming on to the screen. Softley, however, set out not only to make it look beautiful for its own sake (which it does, in glorious widescreen), but to let the ethereal lighting and production design subtly tell the story.

"We wanted the environment to reflect the way everyone is being drawn into Prot's world," he says, "and I also wanted to allow Prot to take his sunglasses off towards the end of the film. Because his eyes are so sensitive to light, we designed the set in such a way that we would be able to progressively tone down the light in the hospital, either by the staff closing blinds, or by the patients putting more and more artwork on to the windows. This starts to create an environment that reflects the purples, oranges, pinks and blues that he describes from his planet."

This meticulous attention to detail is typical of Softley. After graduating from Queen's College, Cambridge in 1979, the Londoner cut his teeth making documentaries and then pop videos, before a grant allowed him to try his hand at film. Since then, his has been a careful, craftsmanlike career, without (yet) what one might describe as a masterpiece, but also, more importantly, without a single lapse in judgment. His debut, Backbeat (1993), was a vivid, vibrant reconstruction of the early days of the Beatles; he followed up with the hip cyber-tale Hackers (1995); and then, two years later, he turned Henry James's The Wings of the Dove into one of the most seductive period dramas of the late Nineties.

Add K-Pax, and you have a CV of remarkably consistent quality, but without an apparent thematic thread, a fact that might explain Softley's relative anonymity. Does he revel in novelty? Or does he see links between these movies that others might miss? "Obviously," he says, "they're very different, because I suppose one's always looking for new challenges - after you do a period film you don't want to do another one, and so on.

"But I think what they have in common is that they're all set in a particular time and place - and hopefully the place and the time are significant - where people from different backgrounds and sometimes different places come together and change each other, and I think they're all about people questioning and not taking for granted the accepted way of living in the world that they live in."

Central as these themes are to K-Pax, it is safe to say that one rather more basic question will be uppermost in audience's minds as they watch it: is Prot an alien or not? Certainly, the climax is hard to predict, in a way that calls to mind such other recent films as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Others, all of which depend on the audience's ignorance of the outcome. Few would deny the entertainment value of such movies - and yet, one could also argue that they risk playing their only ace on the first viewing, leading to diminishing returns thereafter.

Softley disagrees. "I think the second time you see a film like this, you do definitely get other things out of it," he says. "You never have the same experience of not knowing what's going to happen at the end. But I think that particularly with K-Pax, when you see certain scenes, such as the hypnosis scene, the second time around, I think they're if anything more moving because you're aware of the actual chords that are being struck emotionally, because in subsequent scenes you see what's causing that trauma."

As one watches K-Pax, a final, curious thought occurs - namely, what a hefty portion of his career Spacey has whiled away sitting and being interrogated: in 1995's The Usual Suspects (in a police station, grilled by Chazz Palminteri's cop); in Seven, that same year (in a police car, grilled by Brad Pitt's cop); and here, with a psychiatrist rather than a cop, but still seated, still grilled.

"I don't like to characterise actors too much," says Softley by way of explanation, "but Kevin and Jeff are two great actors, and it does occur to one that they have differences as well as similarities. I think that one of the differences is that Jeff's acting style and character seems to be wearing his heart on his sleeve, very accessible, very open, whereas one of the things about Kevin in this role, and as an actor in general, is being an enigma, of knowing things that are hidden.

"Part of the great pleasure of watching him is to try to discern clues as to what's going on."