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Thursday, August 08, 2002

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

NEW YORK -- Although some Manhattanites might be nervous about staying in the city after last fall's terrorist attacks, Sigourney Weaver isn't.

	Related Coverage Bebe Neuwirth got along swimmingly in 'Tadpole' Movie Site www.miramax.com/tadpole

"I have to say I'm very drawn to New York projects. The one big change in my life since 9-11 is I don't like to leave home. ... I feel like if something happens, I need to be here and I need to be close to my family, and if something really bad happens, I want to be with them."

Weaver and her husband, actor-director Jim Simpson, live in New York with their 12-year-old daughter.

And the city is the backdrop for a movie called "Tadpole," shot in November 2000 with a shoestring budget, a 14-day shooting schedule and a director (Gary Winick) not yet a household name. The movie, which opens tomorrow in Pittsburgh, is about a precocious 15-year-old boy named Oscar Grubman who is infatuated with older women -- especially his stepmother, Eve (Weaver).

John Ritter plays Oscar's father, and Bebe Neuwirth is Eve's best friend, Diane, who finds herself a surprise substitute for Eve when a tipsy Oscar crashes at her apartment one night. A Rutgers University graduate named Aaron Stanford, 23 when the movie was being shot, plays Oscar.

As Weaver, clad this day in a navy suit with maroon sweater and heels that make her even taller, tells reporters at the Regency Hotel, "It's a very sweet movie. It could have been a little squalid, perhaps, but not in Gary's hands."

"Tadpole" was an audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival and sparked a bidding war for its distribution. Shot for $150,000 with another $150,000 budgeted for post-production work, the movie sold to Miramax for a reported $5 million to $6 million.

Recalling those heady days at Sundance, director Gary Winick says, "It was a seven-hour negotiation, and I felt like I was in a scene from 'Scarface.' It was really, really ugly. We had [executive producer] John Sloss playing Al Pacino and we had every studio executive playing the other parts."

And their dialogue, Winick says, included lines such as: "If you leave my eye line, the deal is off. ... There's God and there's me and since God isn't in this room, I'm making the decision." After bouncing from room to room -- and offer to offer -- Winick signed with Miramax at midnight.

Today, he is that most neurotic of pitchmen, a director who watches his movie and sees "mistake after mistake." No wonder he says, "I can't see films when they're finished."

For a small movie, it still has a big buzz and an afternoon of print, radio and television interviews at a Park Avenue hotel -- a luxury for a project that paid its crew $100 a day and its actors $249 a day.

Although Weaver joined the gorillas in the mist, tried to put her working girl secretary in her place and battled aliens again and again, she rarely has played a wife or mother. "I would say I'm most comfortable playing mother roles, not that I've ever really had a lot of experience in films playing them. ...

"This was an odd mother role because, in a way, I thought of all the wonderful women I know who have not had children of their own, and for Eve, I think a stepson as wonderful as Oscar is just a great gift that she really cherishes. So, when it gets a little complicated," she and Oscar realize what a change in their relationship could mean.

Winick shot the movie with a small hand-held digital camera, which gave the cast and crew unusual freedom. Most movie productions move like a lumbering giant -- with much noise, little speed and great difficulty -- but not "Tadpole."

"It was digital, so it was a little weird for me. I have always had this feeling -- maybe because I'm from the theater -- that there's one ideal place to have a camera from which to watch the whole scene. By the end, it felt like anybody who could hold a camera was holding a camera. ...

"I loved the fluidity of working in digital, I loved the anonymity. You could go around the city, to Grand Central, and no one even knew we were making a movie, and that was cool. That's the future. Not enough lighting for a woman of my age, but what are you gonna do?"

For the record, Weaver will be 53 in October.

She brought the weight of her experience, including three Academy Award nominations, and her name to the table. When Weaver, while meeting with Winick at a restaurant called Payard, asked the manager if they could shoot there, he said, "Anything for you, Sigourney."

"I was able to come on it early, and one of the things I like about being an actor is you can go from a big-budget picture and actually be able to add some support to a low-budget or no-budget picture."

Weaver may have only spent two weeks playing Oscar's mother, but she's given a great deal of thought to their relationship and his unplanned fling with the Neuwirth character.

"I think she's jealous of a connection Oscar's made with another woman, because he's her own child, as it were, she's very possessive about him without really being aware of that. I think she also thinks that it's improper, really."

The age difference between Oscar and Diane brings up the obvious question about underage men and older women -- and younger women and older men.

"We tend to think of girls as more vulnerable and the men who are involved more predatory, but I don't think you can be more predatory than Diane. She's so charming and so unabashed, a lot of it is Bebe's performance and again, I think it's a lot about who Oscar is. I think it becomes a story about Oscar more than a 15-year-old."

Weaver, married to a man seven years her junior, says she finds Hollywood's all-too-common older actor-younger actress combo unsettling and weird.

"Why is it bad to team up a Harrison Ford with an older woman? People fall in love all ages, all sizes, whatever, and I think in America we really respect love. If their feelings are really true, we're going to leave them alone for the most part."

She and her husband are working on a movie version of the Anne Nelson play "The Guys," about a journalist (Weaver) who helps a fire captain (Anthony LaPaglia) write eulogies for his men killed on Sept. 11.

They're hoping to release the movie by the anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

The play, performed by rotating pairs of big-name actors including Weaver and Bill Murray, attracted many firefighters and families of Sept. 11 victims. "It was an extraordinary experience, because for one thing you're talking about a story that everyone shared, some people much more deeply than others. And the tension in the theater, the sorrow in the theater was all extremely present."

Weaver muses that what she really wanted to do as a younger woman -- but lacked the necessary confidence -- was to be in the repertory company of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and play a queen one week and a maid the next. "So I've actually tried to use that model in my film life, to go from big to small to comedy to drama and things like 'Tadpole,' that's the perfect thing. I've always tried to look for good scripts. I don't think any actor's charming enough to sustain a bad story."

Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632