Tod Culpan Williams, also known as Kip, is the writer and director of "The Door In the Floor" (This is that, Revere and Focus Features), starring Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges, and based the novel "A Widow For One Year" by John Irving. Kip grew up in New York City, with his mother, a dancer, and his father, an architect. He studied painting and literature at Bard College and Columbia University. Later, he worked as a stringer for The New York Times Los Angeles bureau before attending the American Film Institute. In 1997 he wrote and directed "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" (Paramount Classics), which premiered internationally at the Toronto Film Festival, was selected for main competition at the Sundance Film Festival and earned nominations for two IFP Independent Spirit Awards (Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay). Kip lives in New York City and Alden, Michigan. Tod Williams is the director and screenwriter for the wonderfully insightful film "Door in the Floor." It’s unusual for the screenplay of a new film to be available for sale before the film is released. Such is the case for "Door in the Floor," a movie based upon the John Irving novel "A Widow for One Year." Because of Irving’s support of the film and his influence with publishers, he was able to have the screenplay published at this time. Tod and I talked a little about the good fortune that Chicago’s northern suburbs have with the Renaissance theaters (owned by Landmark) being located in Highland Park. Although it’s not right around the corner for most people in Lake County, it’s a short ride to a great theater, which has free underground parking with an elevator that takes you directly to the theater lobby. Right after I met Tod I told him about Lakeland News being a suburban newspaper and he said, "Good…that’s who I want to come to this movie, frankly." George to Tod: To me you captured the notion of "coming of age" at any time in life. Normally that term only applies to a young adult, but here it means that and adults in their late 40’s. You can be at a fork in the road regardless of your age. While you cannot determine the future, you can have an influence on it by the decisions you make. To me, that’s really what this film is about. How did you put this all together? All the smaller characters were important. Tod: This movie was very difficult to get made. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that adults don’t go to movies that are complicated. It took four years from the time John (Irving) approved the first draft of the screenplay to when we began shooting. The good news in the process was that I got a chance to really polish this thing quite fine. What we chose to publish in the screenplay is actually the shooting script. In the book, you’ll actually see the decisions I made in the editing process. Once I had the actors I wanted in certain scenes, I felt like I could cut back on some of the overly explained stuff because I wanted the story to be somewhat elliptical. George: How do you immerse yourself in a movie of this intensity and maintain some type of personal life? Tod: Well, it’s kind of impossible, but I’m getting married on Saturday (this brings out a good laugh). Part of the reason I wanted to do this was that I was getting divorced when I read the novel. So I was focused on how love dies. The film helped me get my personal life back. After some years I was able to meet this woman and open my heart again. There are ambivalent things about most characters in the movie, with them having things you like about them and things you might condemn. Rarely do I see a movie blows me away but this one did it. I think I particularly liked how Tod was able to capture both the great and the not so nice sides of peoples’ personalities that provide the real complexities of life. It reminds me of a phrase from one of Smokey Robinson’s songs, "…sometimes you love somebody that you don’t even like." Here one may like someone that they no longer love. "Door in the Floor" is a film that entertains while making you think. This will likely be in my top 10 list for films this year. В автомобильной катастрофе гибнут двое взрослых сыновей главных героев. Маленькая дочка, оставшаяся в живых, слабое утешение для Теда и Мэри. Родителям не до нее. Они винят себя в смерти детей и все глубже погружаются в депрессию. Друг к другу они испытывают вполне определенное чувство - злобное равнодушие. Пытаясь как-то исправить ситуацию, Тед даже нанимает себе в помощники молодого мальчика, похожего на одного из сыновей. Он надеется, что присутствие ровесника погибших детей как-то воскресит к жизни жену. Но юноша влюбляется в Мэри, а она, убрав все сыновние фотографии, ложится с ним в постель. Тед тоже не остается у жены в долгу и заводит интрижку с соседкой-натурщицей. В доме на краю света пытаются жить двое взрослых людей, маленькая девочка, до которой никому нет дела, и молодой парень, искренне и абсолютно безуспешно пытающийся всем помочь. А в их домике, в полу, есть потайная дверь если ее открыть и шагнуть вниз, то дороги обратно уже не будет. Такой запасной выход на случай полной потери интереса к жизни. "Дверь в полу" - экранизация пьесы Джона Ирвинга "Вдова на одну ночь". Американский писатель большой поклонник Чехова. И здесь все придумано им в соответствии с чеховским приемом: люди спят, едят, пьют, носят свои пиджаки, а в это время рушатся их судьбы. Режиссер создал нервное, рваное и одновременно очень холодное пространство. Оно как бы лишено цвета. Чуть-чуть подтертая ластиком реальность смутная и застывшая, как айсберг. Несмотря на то что в фильме много секса и голых тел, он удивительным образом оставляет ощущение вполне целомудренной картины. Секс здесь просто один из немногочисленных способов выжить, а в выживании практически нет места оргазмам и эротике. Холодная, несчастная, порочная и ослепительно красивая Ким Бэсингер сыграла, пожалуй, свою лучшую роль. Возраст, обычно губящий карьеры красивых актрис, пошел ей только на пользу. Теперь никому не придет в голову утверждать, что Бэсингер это только внешность. Джефф Бриджес разгуливает по дому в чем мать родила, улыбается и страдает. Его герой-провокатор первым поймет, что к чему, но последним признает поражение, и решение его будет необратимым. Жесткое, депрессивное и красивое кино о тяжелом супружеском кризисе, поисках нового смысла жизни и тотальном отсутствии радости. Семейная драма без хеппи-энда. Если у вас в личной жизни не все гладко не смотрите ни в коем случае. Никаких рецептов у авторов фильма для вас нет. ON paper, Tod Williams might be a guy who's likely to land in the gossip columns, some East Coast version of a Hollywood jerk. His sister is a former supermodel, his father is one of the architects who designed the American Folk Art Museum, his ex-wife is the actress Famke Janssen and last month he married the actress Gretchen Mol. But in real life he has written and directed two captivating, beautifully understated little films, filled with wit and emotion. These movies resist every lurid impulse, even though the first, ''The Adventures of Sebastian Cole'' (1998), was the autobiographical story of a teenage boy whose stepfather becomes his stepmother, and his new film, ''The Door in the Floor,'' features an affair between Kim Basinger and a high school boy. Only a guy who is not a jerk could have pulled them off. Mr. Williams even looks like a director ready to be discovered -- he resembles the actor Ron Livingston, and at 35 has a dramatic gray lock in the front of his dark hair -- but his public profile is so low that a media-savvy director like Michael Moore can, and almost did, steamroller right over him. ''The Door in the Floor'' (which opens on Wednesday) was originally scheduled to be released on June 23, but when it was announced that Mr. Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' would open on June 25, Focus Features moved ''Door'' out of its path. ''It was a smart move; we would have been crushed,'' Mr. Williams said, updating the situation by phone recently as he was sitting in traffic on a bridge, on his way back from a vacation in Canada. Where most movie postponements mean trouble, this one protected a strong film. Based on the first section of John Irving's novel ''A Widow for One Year,'' it follows a children's book author and his wife, played by Jeff Bridges and Ms. Basinger, whose marriage is falling apart several years after the deaths of their two teenage sons. Mr. Bridges gives one of his finest performances, but the story of a family shattered by grief needs careful handling if it's to reach an audience. In a longer conversation about the film last month, Mr. Williams was as unassuming as his nickname, Kip. ''It seemed stupid to use that name professionally because I hope to be directing when I'm 80 and I think it would be dumb to be called Kip when you're 80, but nobody calls me Tod,'' he said in the fifth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up that used to be his home but that since his marriage has become his workroom. It's the tiniest studio, but the roof is almost all skylight and there's a terrace -- a terrace that looks out on the backs of other brick buildings. The room is so spare it seems unlived-in even for an office, with scripts he's been sent lined up neatly on a kitchen table and no writer's clutter anywhere. It looks like the reflection of a Zen-like calm, but Mr. Williams said, ''I feel like I've got my brain in six different directions.'' His career suggests a greater focus. When he went to Mr. Irving with the idea for ''Door,'' he knew he wanted to break off the first section, abandoning the part of the novel that goes on for 30 more years. Instead of balking, Mr. Irving saw eye-to-eye with Mr. Williams from the start. The story was updated from the 50's to the present, and takes place during one traumatic summer in the lives of the womanizing Ted Cole, his delicate and distant wife, Marion, and their young daughter. Eddie, the high school boy, arrives to be Ted's assistant and is wildly distracted by Marion, who finds in him echoes of her dead sons. The film was shot in the sun-splashed Hamptons and is rich with daily absurdities, like Ted's comic, nearly lethal affair with a knife-wielding neighbor. But the bright surface masks the depths of this family's sorrow. Mr. Williams was drawn to the novel at a time in his life when ''I had gone through a lot of loss -- all my grandparents, natural loss in life, nothing unnatural,'' he said. ''And also my first marriage was breaking up. So there was that feeling: how does love die or end? Or what happens to these things if they don't last?'' He tried to remember, he said, ''feeling like Eddie when I met my wife when I was 19, and then feeling like Ted in some way.'' When he adds, ''All that stuff was kind of new to me,'' it helps explain the movie's freshness. Even the film's title, which is taken from Ted's most haunting children's book and seems so clumsy at first, becomes resonant by the end. If making such a subtle film is hard, getting it made may be harder. ''Door'' gestated for four years, including some time spent waiting for Mr. Bridges to finish ''Seabiscuit.'' As Mr. Williams said, ''The movie kind of came together and fell apart so many times in the last four years I can't even keep track,'' including a moment when it seemed that Julianne Moore and Bill Murray might star. ''I went into debt and I did some other screenplay work for money, rewrite jobs,'' Mr. Williams said. ''The script was well liked in Hollywood already, so it got me some work to survive, but it was very hard for me to put my whole focus into something other than this movie. By the time we did go into production -- you know, I made more money than I've ever made on this movie, but when I finished it I was back to zero because I was so deeply in debt.'' There is a weird background to these struggling-artist years. He grew up in Manhattan until he was 12, then moved with his mother, sister and stepfather to Woodstock. Upstate New York is also the setting of ''The Adventures of Sebastian Cole,'' which takes place in 1983. Many other details of Sebastian's life also follow those of his creator. Sebastian has an architect father and a stepfather who announces that he is about to become a woman. And, like Mr. Williams, Sebastian goes to England with his mother, but he soon moves back to New York to live with his stepfather, a character who begins the film as Hank and becomes Henrietta. Mr. Williams talks about the film as if it belongs to his distant past when in fact it is five years old. ''In real life, that person was very important to me,'' he said of the stepfather character, and making the movie was ''a way of acknowledging'' that. Played with total credibility by Clark Gregg, the character is truly endearing. As Mr. Williams says of the autobiographical elements, ''In some sense everybody's heightened, and Hank is probably sanctified.'' Even so, the real-life model for Hank was unhappy that the film was made. Mr. Williams said: ''I told him what I was doing the whole time. And I'd given him scripts. And he never really communicated that he was uncomfortable with it. But in the end I found out that he was. And it was really a bummer because I was trying to say something for him.'' The film's end is wrenching, but is also a departure from the facts. ''He actually went back to being a man,'' Mr. Williams said. ''That would've been hard to explain in the last five minutes.'' He came to make the personal ''Sebastian Cole,'' and moved back to Manhattan, after floundering for a few years in Los Angeles. He thought he wanted to be a journalist (and he was a stringer for The New York Times) but realized he didn't have the personality, he said, ''to go into a terrible situation'' and ask people ''the exact question they don't want to answer.'' He studied at the American Film Institute, and failed to make a film he called as ''as complicated as '8 1/2,' but a viscerally action-packed movie.'' He directed a Nabokov play called ''The Event,'' and now says: ''It was a stupid idea. It was 14 actors on a stage the size of this kitchen,'' a so-called kitchen that looks like it can hardly handle two. From the $350,000 budget for ''Sebastian Cole'' to $7 million for ''The Door in the Floor'' is a leap, but $7 million is nothing by major-movie (and union crew) standards. He says: ''I think that when it comes to the kinds of directors people want to hire for big-budget stuff, they're looking at a lot of commercial directors, a lot of style-first guys. Because that's what people think directing is. And my directing style is to do as little as I can, and to make the audience have to look around. I hate telling the audience what to do.'' Although he may say he's spread in a half-dozen directions, his next project is taking shape: he's writing and directing a new version of Hemingway's ''To Have and Have Not,'' with Benicio del Toro as Harry Morgan, the fishing boat captain made famous by Humphrey Bogart in the 1944 classic. (''You know how to whistle, don't you?'' Lauren Bacall asks him.) Mr. Williams got the rights directly from the Hemingway estate and was able to bypass Warner Brothers because their Bogart-and-Bacall version was such a departure from the novel. He says he's not worried about viewers resenting someone fiddling with a beloved film because his version will be so different. Mr. Williams may be unassuming, but when he says, ''It's going to be a much, much tougher, stranger movie, much uglier,'' Bogart himself couldn't sound more certain. The Door in the Floor Directed by Tod Williams Universal Studios Home Video 12/04 DVD/VHS Feature Film R - strong sexuality, graphic images, language Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) is a famous author of children's books who is past his prime and wiling away the time at his East Hampton house. He is in the midst of separating from his beautiful wife Marion (Kim Basinger), who alternates between staying at the house with their four-year old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning) and residing at a room in a town nearby. To perk up his spirits, Ted hires Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a young man from his alma mater, Exeter, who wants to become a writer. Having lost his driver's license, the author needs someone to drive him around. He is spending a lot of time with Eleanor Vaughan (Mimi Rogers) on the pretext that he is sketching her in the nude. Her gardener Louis (Eduardo Gomez) doesn't like him very much. Although Ted always tells admirers that he is just a writer of entertainment for children, Eddie is convinced that he is much more and he can learn many things from him. These high expectations are dashed when his new employer reveals that they will play things by ear during the summer. Ted shocks the callow youth by undressing in front of him and continuing their conversation while he's taking a shower in the open air. As a writer's assistant, Eddie thinks he'll help with revisions on Ted's latest work, but all he actually does is type and retype a few misplaced punctuation marks. When Ted finally gets around to a critique of a piece that Eddie wrote, he doesn't exactly give him a shining recommendation or encourage him to continue in the craft. With nothing much to do, this young man pursues a popular teenage pastime: masturbation. When Marion walks in one day when he is using her clothes laid out on the bed to arouse himself, he's ashamed, but she handles the discovery as a compliment. She invites him out to dinner and comments on how serious he is. She inquires why he hasn't asked Alice (Bijou Phillips), the nanny who takes care of Ruth, out for a date. He replies that she isn't his type. Marion gets the picture and takes him by surprise with an offer of sex with her. They don't talk very much since she is still mourning the tragic loss of her two teenage sons in a terrible accident a few years earlier. Eddie realizes that the wall between Ted and Marion is built out of grief. Even worse, it has made a natural loving relationship with Ruth near impossible. Eddie is not old enough to understand the immensities of feelings in Marion's loss but he is glad to have been given the miracle of her body and their many evenings of sex together. Writer and director Tod Williams has adapted John Irving's 1999 novel A Widow for One Year — actually the first third of that story — for the screen with remarkable fidelity to its ample themes and spirit. Jeff Bridges puts in an Academy Award caliber performance as the quirky, self-absorbed, and creative Ted. Kim Basinger gives an subtle and touching performance as Marion, conveying through her soulful looks and sparse words a wide range of emotions. The metaphor of "the door in the floor," the title of one of Ted's children's books, also refers to the sense of loss that has swallowed their marriage. In Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen has written: "The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life." It is fascinating to see how Ted and Marion have tried to cope with the loss of their two sons. Their strategies make it near impossible for them to be intimate with each other anymore. The person most affected by this is Ruth, who at the tender age of four seems to have been psychologically damaged by the haunting presence of her two brothers. She was born after their deaths, but they are enshrined in a series of photographs lining a long hallway of the house. Not a day passes that she doesn't study them. The emotional education that Eddie receives in his affair with Marion and in his encounter with the selfishness and creativity of Ted is one that will serve him well if he ever becomes a writer. The screenplay contains plenty of nuggets of wisdom about this arcane and difficult craft. Ted tells him repeatedly that it is very important to always describe in detail what is going on in a scene: what one sees, smells, hears, and feels. This gift is revealed again and again in the Williams' screenplay — these characters and their yearnings come alive through the details that illuminate their actions and behaviors. The Door in the Floor is one of the best films of the year and along with The Cider House Rules stands as another successful screen adaptation of a John Irving novel.