"It's called 'super- crazy low budget.'"
Bob Balaban on the Making of 'Bernard and Doris'

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Bob Balaban has forged a long screen career playing nebbishes and creeps, but like many actors, he really would rather direct. In his film "Bernard and Doris," which begins airing on HBO Saturday, he got to direct two great actors, Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes -- and he paid them all of $100 a day. They portray a very odd couple: the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, floozing and boozing through her twilight years, and Bernard Lafferty, the gay Irish butler who became her caretaker and executor of her estate, then drank himself to death.

-- Richard Leiby

CBS did a two-part miniseries on Doris Duke with Lauren Bacall in the starring role in 1999. Didn't that deter you?

I never saw it. It didn't deter me. Should I say why?

Please.

This script was very focused on the relationship with her butler to the extent of nothing else. It was something of a love story. It was, in a way, the unsensational version of the six years at the end of her life.

Did you do any research?

We did no research. It is a fable. We invented a fable of the older rich lady and the itinerant drunk butler. We don't know what really happened, so we made up a story of what might have happened.

Many saw Lafferty as a grifter and a craven opportunist -- he was even accused of murdering Duke with an overdose of morphine -- but the film's view seems far more sympathetic.

We did want to leave you with an ambivalent feeling. I hope you feel he is a man capable of conniving, and maybe he even killed her, I don't know. Maybe he did feel strongly about her. I trust you could feel either. We chose to portray him as a character of mixed possibilities.

Sarandon plays Duke as a hypersexualized character, but her first husband, playboy James Cromwell, called Duke "my Frigidairess." Explain.

I do know she had long affairs with different people. I cannot tell you how much she enjoyed her orgasms or not, but in our version, she loved them.

What was your budget?

Around $500,000 or $600,000 -- it's called "super-crazy low budget." Everyone got $100 a day and then fractions of the gross. We made everyone a participant in the movie. But when HBO [purchased the film], we went back and paid their salaries. I was able to rope a lot of people in on the promise of having a good time and maybe making money later.

How many films have you been in?

I don't really know -- probably 70 or 80. Last year I did three: 'No Reservations' and 'Dedication.' [Pause.] I did some other movie. I forget what it was.

You honestly forget?

I was in it for 30 seconds, a cameo. [Pause.] "License to Wed." I think that was last year. . . . The movie lasted about as long as my part did.

The AP just moved an obit about actress Lois Nettleton with this first sentence: "The woman who discovered George eating an eclair he found in the trash on 'Seinfeld' has died." Does this mean your obit will remember you as "Russell Dalrymple, who was rejected by Elaine and later drowned on a Greenpeace expedition"?

God forbid.

I don't remember: Did Dalrymple kill himself?

I fall in the ocean. I get eaten by a whale. [Laughs]. Maybe I did that. Maybe I made that up, the whale part, I don't know.

May I send follow-up questions to make sure I quoted you accurately?

Well, you could also write that "this was an interview done in the style of 'Bernard and Doris,' and I'm just going to make up stuff." And I would get my comeuppance.

Okay!

No, maybe you shouldn't do that.