Peter Krause Aiming to Do His 'Civic Duty'

In college, Peter Krause became obsessed with two things: acting and human behavior.

"How our identities are formed. What we know and what we don't know and how that shapes our personalities . . . how we learn who we are as far as gender roles," he says.

Not surprisingly, that line of inquiry came to drive his approach to acting, explains Krause, best known for his role on the HBO drama "Six Feet Under."

So when he was approached by movie executives who wanted Krause to play a disgruntled Everyman who suspects a neighbor of being a terrorist, his first concern was that the psychological profile be just right.

"I felt it needed to be changed a little bit. The character initially was very conservative. 'Buy American' bumper sticker on his car," Krause says of Terry Allen, his character in "Civic Duty" (See review on Page 39). "I wanted to . . . move him to the middle."

The idea, Krause explains, was to make the audience see more of themselves in the character, who slips into paranoia as he becomes convinced that his neighbor is plotting an attack on the country.

"I think that everyone was very, very afraid after September 11 and for good reason," he says. "It's an orange alert. It's always orange. We live in an orange world. Our film, 'Civic Duty,' asks a very uncomfortable question: Are we vigilant enough?"

Or -- as is the case with Terry Allen -- maybe too vigilant. The out-of-work accountant sacrifices a lot, including his sanity and his marriage, in the attempt to prove his neighbor's ill intentions. It's an exaggerated example, but one the actor thinks can illuminate the fine line U.S. citizens are being asked to walk in the post-9/11 world.

Let Krause get going and he'll expound at length on the issue, citing Thomas Jefferson, explaining that he is neither a Republican nor a Democrat and insisting that "the complacency in this country is what I'm after."

"Hopefully we're saying, 'We, American people, don't want to live like this anymore,' " he says. "If our film can have a role in inciting people to have a voice, that's a huge goal."

-- Ellen McCarthy

Striking a Vengeful Chord

"It's a very simple film," says Denis Dercourt, director of "The Page Turner" (see review on Page 38). "I wanted it to be very simple with this kind of fairy-tale construction, with the butcher and the castle. Everybody understands that." Yet he's the first to admit he doesn't fully understand his own characters.

The psychological thriller opens with a young butcher's daughter, Mélanie, who fails a piano audition when one of the judges, a professional pianist, signs an autograph mid-performance. Ten years later, Mélanie (Déborah François) finagles a nanny position for the son of that judge, Ariane (Catherine Frot), and, thus ensconced, plots her revenge.

"I get a lot of psychological questions about Mélanie's motivations," Dercourt says. "For me, it's very difficult to answer, maybe because I'm a musician. I'm not an intellectual or conceptual writer. . . . The screenplay is like music, with the tension and release of tension."

The director comes from a long line of filmmakers: His grandfather wired Parisian cinemas for sound at the advent of talkies and later became a producer, as did Dercourt's father and brother. Dercourt followed in his mother's footsteps, becoming a professional musician (viola) and music instructor (at Strasbourg Conservatory).

But the world of classical music isn't the film's main theme, he says; neither is the Sapphic undertone of Mélanie's revenge. The intention, he says, "was not to be the male fantasy, that cliche."

Strong lead actresses helped, although Francois is a relative newcomer, with only 2005's "L'Enfant" to her name. "When we filmed 'The Page Turner,' she was 18," Dercourt says. "She reminds me of a child prodigy. It was the only time I met an actor or actress who reminds me of a musician."

As Ariane, the concert pianist who becomes entranced by her young au pair and enlists her as her page turner, Frot is a seasoned comedian. Dercourt calls comedians "the aristocracy of acting": "Failure is not permitted in comedy, so they're very much about mastering everything. . . . I thought it was interesting to have this actress who is totally under control playing someone who loses her control."

But acting chops don't mean music skills, so Dercourt had to teach the actresses to play piano, especially for scenes requiring close-ups of their hands, when "their fingers had to be right."

He writes characters who are musicians, he says, because "for my identification with the character, it's easier. You know, at the beginning I was very scared by the fact that so few people play classical music. But now I've understood that if you speak of what you know, people will understand. "

-- Christina Talcott