Urbane, 'pinko' film director Phil Alden Robinson - of Field of Dreams - teams up with right-wing blockbuster novelist Tom Clancy in the action-packed The Sum of All Fears. Donald Clarke reports on an unlikely collaboration
Softly spoken and ever-so-slightly tweedy, the 52-year-old Phil Alden Robinson is the last person you would expect to find hanging out with right-wing blowhard Tom Clancy. Indeed, the director of The Sum of All Fears - the latest of Clancy's pavingstone-sized thrillers to be adapted for the big screen - beams as he tells me: "The London Times described me as a pinko last week. I was very proud of that." With his short, grey beard, one could imagine him as a lecturer in Chaucer at some leafy New England university.
One can just about credit that he directed 1989's wistful fantasy Field of Dreams, but the combination of the urbane liberal with his current beefy material - The Sum of all Fears finds CIA operative Ben Affleck seeking to avert nuclear war - seems jarring in the extreme.
"Tom Clancy and I do make a very unusual combination," he agrees. "We were both pretty frank about our views and he is not shy about telling you what he thinks. But I made sure to tell him - so he wouldn't dismiss me as just another Hollywood pinko - that I had served in the military. He was impressed by that. But Tom is very smart. Though I don't always agree with his rhetoric." On the film's US release, the Internet Movie Database pointed out that every major critic mentioned September 11th in his or her review. Midway through the movie, a cabal of neo-Nazis destroy a good portion of Baltimore with an atomic bomb. Understandably, many people felt that the picture's release might be postponed or cancelled altogether.
"Initially I didn't even think about the movie, not until journalists began calling and asking about it," he explains. "At first I was actually kind of insulted. I've since gotten over it: it's their job, they've got to fill those columns. They'd say, 'How does this affect your movie?'. And I'd say, 'Who cares! There's bodies in the rubble in New York. This is just a movie.It's not important.' I remember thinking: 'if the studio shelve the movie forever, I don't care.'
"But, to be fair, the studio and I never had a discussion about that. There was never a phone call, never a fax." But did he not worry that the film's depiction of a massive terror attack might offend? "I remember saying to the studio, at the first meeting, that I assumed they'd hired me because they didn't want an in-your-face, graphically-violent event movie. And they agreed. I didn't want the violence to be cool and exciting. I wanted it be brutish and short: no close ups of people getting hurt, very little blood. I was confident that we'd done something that nobody would say was cheesy or exploitative."
In previous interviews, Robinson has revealed a certain unease about discussing an event that occurs so far into the movie's running time. And normally one would be cautious about revealing such a critical plot point. But by the time you see the picture, you will probably have already seen half a dozen trailers and commercials that allude to the Baltimore bombing.
I believe Robinson was not overjoyed about how the publicity was handled? "What an understatement that is!" he exclaims. "Every film-maker has this problem. You say to the studio, 'Please don't give away the biggest surprise in the movie.' And the studio thinks: 'Hmm, give away the biggest surprise in the movie? Now there's an idea.' The movie business used to be about how long we can keep a movie going, now it's all about how many people we can get in on the opening weekend. So they will throw the kitchen sink into those trailers. I think there are other ways of getting people into the theatres. We argued. I lost."
How different all this mayhem seems from the optimistic languor of Field of Dreams. Robinson's second feature has already established a reputation as a very American classic. The tale of an Iowa farmer (Kevin Costner) who, after hearing mysterious voices, builds a baseball diamond in his wheatfield. The film has an abiding resonance despite the obscurity of its meaning.
"Here's a revelation I had," he says, leaning forward conspiratorially. "The film is about art. An artist is a man who hears a voice or has a vision and then takes materials that are around him and converts them into things that are original or surprising. Things that are meaningless perhaps. But in the act of creating them, he derives deeper meaning. Some people can see it, some can't.
"I phoned Larry Gordon the producer and said, 'Larry, it's about art.' And he said, 'Don't ever tell anybody that!' " In the film, a host of deceased ball players emerge from the wheat. Sadly, this aspect of the story has brought Field of Dreams a following within the crystal-wearing nutcase fraternity.
'I am the least New Age person you could imagine," Robinson says. "My eyes glaze over when people start talking about that stuff: astrology, numerology, ghosts. I'd love to be able to reach back into the past. I don't believe we can. But I'd like to believe it." Maybe the film itself helps us do just that. We are far enough away from 1989 to ask just what Field of Dreams has to tell us about the final years of that notoriously selfish decade.
"At the time, some people criticised the film because they thought it was a reflection of the Reagan era. I was surprised because I thought it was a refutation of that era. It was about someone giving up material values to follow a dream. That sort of idealism was very out of favour at that time. It was important that people didn't see it as a return to conservative values. I think that may be clearer now."
He goes on to explain how barely a week goes by that somebody doesn't approach him to say how much the film means to them. Yet despite Field of Dreams' success, Robinson made only one feature in the decade that followed - 1992's so-so techno-thriller Sneakers. What happened? "I didn't mean that to happen," he says. "I don't love directing. I don't feel compelled to rush out and find the next film. I envy those who do, because maybe if I made more films I'd be better at it. I'm a writer first. Directing can be really painful for me.
"After Sneakers I was invited by the UN to join a relief mission to Bosnia and Somalia. I brought a video camera. I didn't know what I was going to do with it. But I ended up editing the footage together for a series of documentaries on [news programme] ABC Nightline.
"I wrote a screenplay about Sarajevo and almost got it made. Then I did a movie about the civil rights movement - Freedom Song - for cable. I went back to the Sarajevo project, then Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg asked me to direct the first episode of Band of Brothers. So that intervened and then, a month or two after I finished doing that, Sum of All Fears came up."
Looking at that commendable list of achievements, it is all the more puzzling that he found himself lured into Clancy's testosterone-marinated world. Yet the fourth film in the Jack Ryan series is very gripping, after a boyish fashion. Nonetheless, eyebrows have been raised at the casting of the 30-year-old Affleck to succeed Harrison Ford, who was 52 when he last played Ryan in 1994's Clear and Present Danger.
"A lot of literal-minded people did object," he says. "How can Ben Affleck play a 60-year-old man? Well, you just explain this is not episode four of an old series, it's episode one of a new series. You just throw out the chronology."
At the risk of being rude, perhaps it is easy to play around with Jack Ryan's character because he doesn't really have any recognisable personality to begin with.
"I would agree," Robinson concedes. "Ryan the human being is not as well-developed in the books as is his role in the world. He is our eyes and ears into the world. In the early books this works better. In the book of The Sum of All Fears, he is deputy director of the CIA, that's hard to relate to. I relate better to Ryan in our film, where we've made him just a young guy with a good desk job again."
Having spent the last year fielding questions about the film and its relationship to September 11th, I wonder has Robinson come to any conclusions about how the events of that day have affected Hollywood. At one stage every columnist on the planet was predicting a decade of frothy, depression-era musicals.
"Hollywood is an enormous train that's very hard to turn around," he says. "I don't see it changing. Hollywood is run by Wall Street and they want profits for their shareholders. Whatever it takes. Right now we are in a period of event movies - special effects movies made for kids. Kids go and see them three or four times. And that's how you make money." But aren't audiences asking for a change? "I am. I want to see movies about the real world." Surely he can't mean The Sum of All Fears. Guiltily, I keep my thoughts to myself.
The Sum of All Fears opens on Friday
