Edition: U.S. / Global


By Dave Kehr
Published: August 9, 2002

Go Ahead, Make Me Laugh

''I had met Clint years ago, once,'' said Jeff Daniels, by way of accounting for his appearance as Clint Eastwood's comic sidekick in ''Blood Work,'' a thriller directed by Mr. Eastwood that opens nationally today (review, Page 16). ''I was at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am tournament, where they call the celebrities out and they all play. 'Dumb and Dumber' had been out for about a year, and I'm in the breakfast tent, and he comes walking across -- it's Dirty Harry, and he's walking toward me. And he comes up with a smile on his face and goes, 'I just wanted to tell you I loved ''Dumb and Dumber.'' ' It was not the words you thought you'd hear coming out of Clint Eastwood's mouth.''

In ''Blood Work,'' Mr. Daniels plays Buddy, a boat bum with a trust fund who lives a few docks down from Mr. Eastwood's character, a retired F.B.I. agent with a heart transplant searching for the serial killer who murdered his donor. Not exactly lighthearted fare, but Mr. Daniels said there were some lighter moments on the set.

''He really enjoyed what improvisation we did do,'' Mr. Daniels said. ''There's stuff that never made the movie, where he would start doing things like he was thinking he was in 'Dumb and Dumber.' I'm bouncing back with him, and he's having a ball. So I'm there as the funny sidekick, but I think I was also on the set for entertainment purposes.''

Mr. Eastwood's reputation as a fast, efficient filmmaker is fully justified, Mr. Daniels said by phone from Puerto Rico, where he was finishing up another film. ''He wants it to happen for the first time,'' Mr. Daniels said. ''He wants that initial attack, so once you figure out that's what he's looking for, you learn not to preplan everything, but to be open and react. You may shoot the rehearsal, or you may shoot one take. I've been with other directors where it's 25 or 30 takes. But if you're on Take Three with Clint, he'll turn to you and apologize for it taking so long. And he means it.''

Gleaners Everywhere

Agnès Varda was as surprised as anyone when her documentary ''The Gleaners and I'' became one of the most seen and most appreciated films of her 50-year career as a director -- a career that includes ''Vagabond'' (1985) and ''Cleo From 5 to 7'' (1962). A free-flowing essay film centered on the gatherers of the world -- from the drifters who pick over fields looking for produce left behind by the harvesting machines to artists like herself who glean their material from daily life -- ''The Gleaners and I'' produced an avalanche of mail from viewers who wanted to share their own gleaning experiences.

That mail, Ms. Varda recently said on the phone from her Paris office, inspired her to make a follow-up film. Titled ''The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later,'' the 60-minute film is included on the ''Gleaners'' DVD currently in release from Zeitgeist Films.

''When it's time for a DVD release, people always ask me, 'Do you have any screen tests or location footage that we can put on the disc?' '' Ms. Varda said. ''But those are things that came before the film. My idea was to make something about what came after. And since I had had such an extraordinary reaction to the film, I thought I would like to know some of the people who had sent me letters and packages. So I began to visit them, and that became the first part of the film.

''But the other element, the more important one, started in the way we watch social documentaries like this,'' Ms. Varda said. ''We meet people who are in difficulty, who are poor or in precarious circumstances, and then we never see them again. I didn't want people to imagine that when you make a documentary like that, you're pinning down people as if they were butterflies. I thought it was important to go back and see the people in the film, and pass along their news. They aren't characters (personnages) -- they are people (personnes), and I thought we owed it to them to see how they were doing.''

Manchester Rocks

It's been said that it takes 20 years for past events to take on the golden glow of nostalgia -- and right on schedule, opening today in Manhattan, here is ''24 Hour Party People,'' a British film that points the way to an 80's revival (review, Page 16). An anecdotal history of the rock scene in Manchester, England, in the 80's -- a scene that included the bands Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays -- the movie centers on the emblematic figure of Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), a BBC correspondent, record producer and club promoter who lived the moment as he helped to create it.

Actually, as Michael Winterbottom, the director of ''24 Hour Party People,'' pointed out on a recent visit to New York, the 20-year theory applies to only the first half of the film, which continues into the decline and disappointments of the 1990's. ''But with the way our lives have speeded up,'' Mr. Winterbottom said, ''maybe it takes a lot less time for things to come back around again.''

Mr. Winterbottom, a slight, spindly 41-year-old who speaks in rapid-fire sentence fragments, grew up in Blackburn, not far from Manchester. ''I'd already left the north when the Hacienda opened,'' he said, referring to the club that was the epicenter of Tony Wilson's world, ''and I only went there a few times when it was a place to drink late at night, rather than a dance club. So this isn't a this-is-my-childhood kind of thing, but it is quite close in the sense of being a place that I knew well, and a generation that I belonged to.''

A prolific filmmaker -- 13 features in 11 years -- Mr. Winterbottom seems able to shift styles at will, from the B-movie excess of his 1995 thriller ''Butterfly Kiss'' to the BBC sobriety of his 1996 Thomas Hardy adaptation, ''Jude'' (1996). ''The material should always dictate the way you make it,'' he said, pointing to the use of different media, from Super8 film to digital video, to create the constantly evolving look of ''Party People.''

But, he says, his fundamental approach remains the same: he tries to leave as much as possible open to chance and inspiration.

''We always have radio mikes on the actors,'' he said, ''so if there are 12 characters in a room, they're all on separate mikes, and the sound mixer doesn't need to know who's going to talk next. The idea is that the actors can change each time they do it because the mix is always open. In the end, whether you're using a dolly with 35-millimeter film or whether you're hand-held and it's digital video, you've still got a much freer place to start from.''

Photo: Jeff Daniels, playing a boat bum with a trust fund in ''Blood Work.'' (Merie W. Wallace/Warner Brothers)