Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 19, 1993 TAG: 9311190358
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BRUCE WESTBROOK HOUSTON CHRONICLE
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
``People think I'm morbid,'' said the filmmaker, whose ``My Life'' opens today. "Even as a child I was obsessed with death, and my mother would say, `Don't be so morbid.' But I'm not morbid, though I understand why people would think that.''
They think it, because all four films he's written concern death, including ``My Life,'' which Rubin also directed.
The movie stars Michael Keaton as a terminally ill Los Angeles workaholic whose wife, played by Nicole Kidman, is pregnant. To leave a legacy for his unborn son, he videotapes himself, friends and family and, in the process, learns a new richness of living.
Though laced with humor, ``My Life'' is a supreme tear-jerker, even more so than Rubin's last film, the 1990 megahit ``Ghost,'' for which his screenplay won him an Oscar. His other death-focused scripts have been for 1990's ``Jacob's Ladder'' and 1983's ``Brainstorm.''
But for Rubin, those stories aren't about death.
``I want to make movies about life in its full dimension, which includes dying,'' Rubin said. ``You can't know life unless you understand death.''
A quiet, soft-spoken man, Rubin, 50, seems an unlikely contemporary of two fiery directors with whom he attended New York University Film School: Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. While they went straight to low-budget horror and action flicks, Rubin went straight to the world.
For 18 months, he hitchhiked through Europe and Asia. Rubin said he began to see life ``as a continuum, rather than discrete episodes, in countries not bound by lines on maps but with cultures and races blending. And out of that has come a flood of ideas.''
He became fascinated with metaphysics and meditation. Now meditation is ``a major focal point of my life.'' And for his first directing job, he needed it.
``The set has so many distractions,'' Rubin said. ``You have to get off the treadmill and find a peaceful center or you'll get spun off into all the chaos.
``Similarly, I try to make movies that, for two hours, take you off the treadmill and make you look at things you don't normally look at.''
So he wrote ``Brainstorm,'' a sci-fi tale about virtual reality and exploring the afterlife. (Star Natalie Wood died during production but had finished her part.) ``Jacob's Ladder'' had Tim Robbins as a GI who's wounded in Vietnam and, in the moments before death, dreams of jarringly divergent paths he might have taken.
The funny-sad and achingly romantic ``Ghost'' was ``pure entertainment,'' Rubin said, with Patrick Swayze as a man who's murdered but helps his lover (Demi Moore) in spirit form.
In ``My Life,'' Keaton's character, given scant time, must come to terms with his estranged parents and brother in Detroit, which is also Rubin's hometown.
All those films are ``different movies for different audiences, but they all concern the same thing,'' Rubin said. ``And that's not death, but life and spirituality.''
Rubin is encouraged that other films also are getting serious about life-and-death matters, including ``Fearless'' and the upcoming ``Philadelphia.''
``The baby-boomer generation is growing up and crossing that point where they see the light at the end of the tunnel,'' he said. ``In a society that denies death and aging, I think people are more willing now to pay attention.''
Rubin paid sharp attention when he awoke one night with severe pains. It turned out to be gastrointestinal, but he thought he was dying.
``As I lay there thinking how my children would know me, I decided to make videos about who I was, as Michael does in the film,'' he said. ``Then I thought it could make a movie.''
For him, ``My Life'' then became ``highly personal.'' Its opening flashback of Keaton as a boy dreaming of a circus in his back yard is straight out of Rubin's life.
``I waited 45 years longer than expected, but now I have my circus,'' Rubin said, noting his creative career. ``I understood that while making this film.''
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB