THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 2, 1995 TAG: 9512010033
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 168 lines
HIS REPUTATION IS as a hard-drinking, brawling Hollywood bad boy.
During his much-publicized marriage to singer-entertainer-stripper Madonna, his fistfights with news cameramen were frequent. He served 34 days in the Los Angeles County jail in 1987 for hitting a movie extra who tried to take his picture on the set of ``Colors.''
Yet, here Sean Penn sits, ready to do an interview - ready to be taken seriously.
Of course, there are signs that Penn, director of the ultra-serious film ``The Crossing Guard,'' hasn't changed too much.
There's the leather jacket he's wearing for the interview, and a hair style that makes him look like a contemporary of James Dean or Elvis. And there's a nasty cut running dangerously close to his left eye, another cut deep into his swollen nose. A bandage fails to conceal, or heal, the injuries.
The look is the result of a brawl in London that occurred five days before the interview in Los Angeles.
``I was just leaving the bar,'' he explained, with an apologetic tone, ``when it happened. I was on the floor. I got kicked in the head. I got kicked a lot. I didn't know I had these injuries until I got to a mirror.''
He pulls out a crushed cigarette pack and asks if it's all right to light up. He obviously relishes the feel of the smoke that pours from his nostrils.
Penn both wrote and directed the somber new film ``The Crossing Guard,'' starring no less than such acting heavyweights as Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston - both Academy Award winners.
It's a disturbing drama about a father (Nicholson) who has been waiting for six years to get revenge upon the drunken driver who killed his 7-year-old daughter. The death has ruined the father's life. He has lost his wife (Huston) and now hangs out at strip joints. He's living for the day when the driver (David Morse, best known for TV's ``St. Elsewhere'') is released from prison. It's a movie about guilt, revenge and soul-searching.
It's raw film-making and yet another signal that Hollywood itself is ready to take Penn seriously as a director, not just as an actor.
Penn, if he has his way, is going to be directing movies more and acting less.
``I don't know exactly how to explain it,'' he said, ``but directing means so much more to me. I'll continue to act only when I need the money. Unfortunately, being in front of the camera pays a lot better than being behind it. I'll feel the water in the pool and if it's cold, and needs heating, I'll get an acting job. Otherwise, my real interest lies in writing - and directing.''
The voice is soft, almost indiscernible, as he searches, gropes, for a way to explain his new passion. ``Put it this way,'' he explained. ``As an actor, I've been to the set many days when I was messed up - when I wasn't ready to do the scene. But an actor has got to be there. I would never go to the typewriter under those conditions. With writing, you go when you're ready.''
``The Crossing Guard'' is the second film directed and written by Sean Penn. The first, inspired by a Bruce Springsteen song, was ``The Indian Runner,'' the story of a stormy relationship between a small-town cop and his criminal brother (starring Dennis Hopper and Charles Bronson). Some critics liked it at places like the Toronto Film Festival, but it never got wide release. Due to the presence of his friend, Jack Nicholson, ``Crossing Guard'' is sure to get better treatment.
``Being a new father was part of my inspiration,'' Penn said. (Robin Wright, who played Forrest Gump's love, is the mother of Penn's two children, Dylan, 4, and Hopper, 2.)
Penn began writing ``Crossing Guard'' the day after Eric Clapton's 4-year-old child, Conor, died after falling out the window of a New York condominium. ``I couldn't imagine anything more tragic,'' he said. ``Guilt wasn't involved, but I began to think about the loss of a child, and what if guilt was involved? That was the nucleus of the idea.''
The set of ``Crossing Guard'' turned out to be a mass of ex-lovers who might have been expected to go after each other with weapons rather than lines. The director claims that ``they all were professionals. They all went for the characters. There were no problems.''
But consider the possibilities. Nicholson and Anjelica Huston broke up after a 17-year-relationship. He married another. She eventually married. Now, for the first time since the breakup, the daughter of John Huston again acts with her ``Prizzi's Honor'' co-star. Their climactic, all-important, scene is one in which she explains why she can never be with him again. Film fans everywhere are likely to devour it in a fit of peeping Tom frenzy - trying fitfully to equate real life to the script.
The role of a sensitive painter who befriends the outcast drunken driver is played by Robin Wright, who already had left Penn's home before the movie went before the cameras.
``The part was written, from the first, for Robin,'' Penn said. ``She's the only actress her age with the kind of serious weight to do the role. I think she's the best young actress working in films today.''
Penn, taking a puff off his third cigarette of the interview, is clearly not the pugilist he appears to be - at least not at the moment. He was, however, somewhat incoherent. He was speaking in semi-sentences, but he was trying. ``No, I don't like doing interviews,'' he said. ``In the best of worlds, the movie should speak for itself, but this is not the best of worlds.''
I remembered the moment, some years ago, when Sean Penn came up to my table in a restaurant and asked if he could sit down. It was a few hours after an interview on ``Colors.''
``I just wanted to ask,'' he said, on that occasion, ``if I gave you enough in the interview. Did I answer the questions? I really don't see how you could make an article out of what I told you.'' He stayed at the table for 30 minutes, talking about his relationship with the press. ``The press thinks I'm belligerent, but I think they just want to see me that way. It's mainly cameramen that worry me. When they hound you, and show no respect, I think any human being should have the right to fight back. Those things just happened.''
When he left, someone at a nearby table came over to say they were astounded that Penn would stop to be friendly to a newsman, but they added, snidely, ``I guess if I had to go home to Madonna, I'd be stalling and talking to people, too.''
Today, Penn no longer goes home to Madonna. ``I don't stay in touch with her,'' he said, flatly.
When pressured a bit, he added, ``Yes, I would hire her as an actress, if the part was right. I'd like to direct her in a film. I don't think her talents as an actress have even been touched.''
He was hurt, a little, that an interviewer earlier in the day had claimed he was ``moody.'' ``I'm just dead tired,'' he said. ``I was up all night directing a music video.'' The video was for his new girlfriend - 21-year-old Jewel, a folk-reggae singer who is emerging as a new star. Like Madonna, she has only one name. Like both Madonna and Robin Wright, she is a cool blonde.
When he met Madonna, she had not yet been out on a tour and, according to him, there was no way of knowing what would happen with her career. ``I wasn't ready for the degree of public interest given to us,'' he said. (She, in an interview, said that he was still ``the one love of my life.'')
Penn, 35, is a child of Hollywood. Born on the scene, he is the son of a movie director. He began his acting career studying at the Los Angeles Repertory Theater. His first movie was ``Taps,'' as a military cadet opposite Tom Cruise and Timothy Hutton.
He became a star playing a wiped-out druggie in ``Fast Times at Ridgemont High.'' ``I knew a lot of guys like that, but I wasn't playing myself,'' he said.
He played a rich kid who became a Russian spy in ``The Falcon and The Snowman,'' a movie he doesn't remember fondly. ``The director chose to treat me like a child who needed correcting. I don't respond well to that kind of treatment.''
On ``Colors,'' he said, ``It was the first time I had known much about cops who didn't have my hands behind my back, putting on cuffs. I learned to like cops. It wasn't easy.''
For ``Carlito's Way,'' opposite Al Pacino, he received a Golden Globe nomination, but no nod from Oscar. He remembers the role as merely ``a different hair style.''
Returning to his ``other'' job, as an actor, he'll be seen soon as a death row inmate who wants to redeem himself before he dies in ``Dead Man Walking,'' directed by Tim Robbins and co-starring Susan Sarandon. Then, he'll play Irish poet Brendan Behan in a film biography. After that, he'll co-star with Marlon Brando in an in-the-works project.
In the writing category, he's working on a script about suicide - a subject he said interests him only because it is ``particularly nonglamorous.''
He lives in a trailer beside the ruins of the mansion he once shared with Madonna. It was destroyed in Los Angeles' catastrophic fires two years ago. He views the happening as ``particularly liberating, rather than tragic. It made me learn that we shouldn't depend on `things.' I saved the pictures of my children and that was the most important thing.''
At the moment, he isn't thinking of rebuilding ``because a house is needed only by a family. Maybe, when the children are old enough to visit. . . . ''
As for ``Crossing Guard,'' which is now at the Lynnhaven Mall (lower level) in Virginia Beach, he reasons that the title refers to the fact that ``a crossing guard takes people who, either through immaturity or blindness, can not find their way safely across the street on their own. Someone has to help them.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Miramaz Films
Jack Nicholson with Kellita Smith, left, and Priscilla Barnes in
"The Crossing Guard," directed and written by Sean Penn.
Sean Penn...
by CNB