1996

DIRECTING GUY

To "Infinity" and beyond with "The Cable Guy's" Matthew Broderick

By Susan Lambert, Boxoffice Online

It's surprising to see Ferris Bueller looking lost and lonely on the sidewalk in front of Brentwood's Toscana restaurant. Clearly it's not the infamous, obnoxious teenager of 10 years ago. This guy looks older, wiser and so much nicer. Matthew Broderick will later cringe at the word.

"Very often I play saintly guys. That's what I get. That's my `row to hoe.'" Broderick sits back and sighs. "Ah, and I do get bored with it." Broderick often interrupts himself, as if, left unchecked, he's afraid of what he might say. It gives his speech a nervous, halting quality reminiscent of an Americanized Hugh Grant.

This has been an exhausting year for the man who rocketed to stardom as the boy-wonder in "WarGames" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." He won a Tony last year for his performance in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" and will return to the stage when he finishes his co-starring role in "The Cable Guy" opposite the ever-chaotic Jim Carrey. And, somewhere in there, Broderick directed and starred in an intimate romantic drama, "Infinity," based on the early life and first love of Richard Feynman, a Nobel-prize winning physicist who worked on the atom bomb.

Broderick's mother, Patricia, a writer and painter, gave him a copy of Feynman's book entitled, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman." Broderick latched onto it.

"I'm always a little bit looking for a part. And I thought it was an interesting character and that one [of the stories in the book] might make a good movie. And then my mom, she said that she would like to try to write it."

Broderick found working so closely with his mother to be a unique experience. "I have to try very hard to not turn into a little child, screaming, `You never listen to me!' or `Stop smothering me!' You have to avoid those kinds of confrontations. But there's always a tendency to get very personal. It's a whole different ball game."

As mom and son shopped the script, Broderick became protective of the piece. "[We'd] been working on it so long that I guess we didn't really want to just hand it over. Just so we could keep control of it, I started presenting it as something I would like to direct."

Broderick had experience directing plays for a theatre company in New York, yet he had never acted in any of them. For the film, he concentrated his energies on directing and left the acting to his instincts.

"One of the weird things is to be in a scene and then decide what to print when you haven't really seen it. You have video [playback], but interestingly I did not find it was possible for me to, like, step out of the camera, look at the TV, judge what I just did and then do it again. I don't have the personality for that. I had to remember how it felt and trust that."

Broderick grimaces when asked if he enjoyed the experience. "`Enjoy' would be a a reach, really. It was a lot of work. It was not a high budget considering that it was a period movie. We shot most of it in L.A. and it had to look like [period] New York. It was an incredible kind of organizational effort just to get every scene done and not go over budget or time. So it's been endless, trying to, ya know, squeeze blood from a stone. `Fun' or `enjoyable' just doesn't seem the right word." Broderick then adds almost to himself, "But a lot of it was also very nice. I have to try to remember that, too."

After production ended, Broderick went right into "How to Succeed...." He lived a double life, performing the play at night and editing during the day. "At some point, editing starts to be just like acting. You make the same kind of judgments about the timing of something. `How quickly would I answer you?' is something I'm doing when I'm acting, and then you just use that again when you're editing. It just starts to be clear."

Broderick found it hard to be as objective when it came to his role. He says he can barely look at himself on screen, so he had to rely on others regarding his performance. His embarrassment is sincere and he is pragmatic and down-to-earth about the process.

"I just looked at posters before coming here, one sheets, and so it's like three different versions of me and Patricia [Arquette, his co-star in the film] arm around each other or kissing or something and it's all just starting to disgust me a little." For the moment, Broderick is clearly more at ease with "The Cable Guy." "I think with comedy I have more tricks. But I don't know if that's so good all the time to just do what you're comfortable with."

Broderick says working with Jim Carrey has been great. "He's totally nice, which is good, because if he wasn't...." He drifts off considering the possibilities. "It could really be a miserable job, but he's been very friendly." As the "subscriber guy," whose life is ruined by a renegade installer (Carrey), Broderick is glad his character is flawed. He smiles. "It's been fun to play somebody who's not so nice."