Director discusses his versatility

An interview with Philip Kaufman gives insight into his diverse choices.
By MILAN PAURICH
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
Philip Kaufman has as impressive and eclectic a body of work as any contemporary American filmmaker.
Whether revisionist western ("The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid"), fright flick ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), coming-of-age saga ("The Wanderers"), historical epic ("The Right Stuff"), or classy erotica ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Henry and June"), Kaufman has left his personal stamp on virtually every movie genre. (He also wrote the original story for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with fellow San Franciscan George Lucas, and the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's 1976 classic "The Outlaw Josey Wales.")
After Kaufman's long-planned adaptation of Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" fell apart because of studio budget concerns, the feisty veteran director jumped back into the saddle with the psychosexual thriller "Twisted." Here are some of Kaufman's thoughts on his most ostensibly commercial film to date:
Q. Unlike most of your films, "Twisted" isn't based on an existing literary property ("The Right Stuff," "The Wanderers," "Rising Sun," etc.) and wasn't at least co-written by you. Was it difficult working with someone else's original screenplay?
A. I never quite know how I'm going to arrive at projects. In this case, I was sent a script with Ashley Judd already attached, and that immediately interested me. Plus, it had a story line that I was interested in developing to see whether it could work on film. I liked the idea of an external and internal mystery happening within the same movie.
Q. You're a longtime San Francisco resident. Was the film's Northern California setting part of its appeal?
A. Because I live in San Francisco, I go to many of the locations we used in the film all the time. Tourists might have seen some of those places before, but this isn't the way the city looks to them. This is San Francisco late at night: the fog, the sea lions, and so forth. I made "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in San Francisco many years ago, and it had such a weird and woolly kind of atmosphere that I was eager to direct another movie there.
Q. There doesn't seem to be any consistent theme to your films -- you're always reinventing yourself as a director. Is that a deliberate choice?
A. Well, I don't like repeating myself. I truly believe in looking at life as something you learn from, and I'm always trying to discover new things. In "Rising Sun," I made Michael Crichton's Pacific Rim detective story into sort of a homage to LA. "Twisted" is kind of like my San Francisco-Dashiell Hammett movie.