”It looks like a movie. What more can I ask at this stage?” says Marshall Brickman about ”The Manhattan Project,” a thriller he wrote and directed and is now in the process of editing in a suite of converted medical offices around the corner from his Central Park West apartment in New York.
The film, which stars John Lithgow, Christopher Collet and Jill Eikenberry, marks a major departure for the soft-spoken Brickman. His two previous directorial efforts–”Simon” (1980) and ”Lovesick” (1983)–were contemporary comedies. And his collaborations with Woody Allen–including
”Annie Hall” (for which Brickman shared a best-screenplay Oscar in 1977)
and ”Manhattan” (1979)–defined a whole subgenre of comedy: upper-middle-class-urban-neurotic.
”This isn`t a comedy,” notes Brickman, 46, seated at what was, until recently, a physician`s desk. ”But it`s not `A Man for All Seasons` either
–although that wouldn`t be bad. I guess you`d call it an adventure–an adventure with a few laughs.”
What ”The Manhattan Project”–slated for a summer, 1986 release–is, is the story of a high-school kid (Collet) who builds his own atomic bomb for a science fair. Academy Award-winner Lithgow plays a nuclear physicist who is dating the boy`s divorced mother (Eikenberry) and discovers that this whiz kid has assembled his own operable–and quite compact–nuclear weapon.
”If it works–and I think it may work, in fact,” Brickman says, ”you will have very tense scenes with laughs in the middle of them, and the laughs won`t ruin the tension, which is kind of hard to do.”
He adds: ”As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera. I have long sequences in this film that are nearly dialogue-less. . . . It`s different than anything else I`ve done, and I like that. A lot more moving camera, a lot more attention to a certain type of style, more active and less parochial, in a way, than films I`ve done in the past.”
Although Brickman, who is married and has two young children, was offered a number of films following the Dudley Moore picture ”Lovesick,” he turned them down in favor of developing his own. The inspiration for ”The Manhattan Project” came from the historic Manhattan Project–the World War II program spearheaded by J. Robert Oppenheimer to develop an atomic bomb. Brickman shelved the idea of making a film about the scientist and his Los Alamos Group collaborators (”It`s such a monster to do, the scope is so enormous–I couldn`t come up with a viable way to make it that wouldn`t cost under $60 million to produce”) and instead tried to put the same themes into a contemporary setting.
”I did a lot of reading on the subject, and I became fascinated with the two worlds that coexist in America now,” he says. ”The one world of ordinary citizens, like the kid in the movie who has all the concommitant problems of adolescence–sex and girls and school . . . and then the other world, which is the world of the military-industrial complex, and within that world the sort of high-priesthood of nuclear-weapons planners and designers. . . . You read through the books and these guys are really creepy: scary and fascinating.
”And very divorced from any sense of consequence, from any sense of ethics or morality.”
The other thing that fascinated Brickman, a self-described gimmick-freak who loves ”mobile telephones, good hi-fi equipment and brushed aluminum,”
was the bomb itself, as a gadget. ”It occurred to me that `the bomb` is for most people simply a concept, a word. Perhaps they have an image of something vaguely teardrop-shaped with fins on the back,” he says.
”But I thought it might be a good idea to approach the bomb as another consumer item, which in a sense it is. You know, it provides a lot of jobs, a lot of work, and ironically a lot of good side-effects.”
In the film, which was shot last summer in the college town of Ithaca, N.Y., the youngster builds his A-bomb using things readily available from
”the technological and consumer landscapes.”
Brickman–who was a member of the folk group the Tarriers in the late
`50s and who came to film work, like his ex-partner Woody Allen, from a background of TV and comedy writing–says he knows what his next project will be: ”a big comedy, and, again, something quite different from what I`ve done to date.”
More Top Picks Best Noise Reducing Earmuffs For Kids
But right now, Brickman`s mind is on ”The Manhattan Project,” and the celluloid being spliced through editing machines in the next room.
”You can`t really think about more than one movie at a time,” he says.
”You`re thinking about it consciously, and the subconscious is working too, and if you cram too much into your head you don`t get any ideas in the shower.
”Which is where all my ideas come from,” Brickman adds, deadpan. ”And then if I turn the water on I really start to think.”