Versatility is key for director

The movie was shot on a pretty low budget, but the stars are quite impressive.

By FRAZIER MOORE

AP TELEVISION WRITER

NEW YORK — Bob Balaban’s résumé is like a mash-up of several people, all of them industrious and bursting with diverse creative skills.

His latest directorial effort is “Bernard and Doris,” an unusual romance about a modern-day pauper and princess. Starring Ralph Fiennes and Susan Sarandon, it premieres 8 p.m. Saturday on HBO.

But he is also the author of the popular “McGrowl” children’s novels. He produced the acclaimed Robert Altman film “Gosford Park,” which won an Oscar and was nominated for seven.

For TV, he has produced the edgy comedy series “The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman” starring Laura Kightlinger, and the animated series “Hopeless Pictures,” both for the Independent Film Channel.

He directed his first film, the twisted comedy “Parents,” in 1989, and he’s looking ahead to his next directing project, an adaptation of 19th century novelist Anthony Trollope’s “The Eustace Diamonds.”

Pretty good for a guy known mainly as an actor who, at 62, has logged more than 50 film performances, from “Midnight Cowboy,” “Catch-22” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Lady in the Water,” “Capote” and “For Your Consideration.”

He also has been in numerous stage productions (in 1967 he originated the role of Linus in the hit off-Broadway musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”). And among his scores of TV appearances, he clinched pop-culture immortality for his recurring role as Russell Dalrimple, the fictitious NBC president and ill-fated suitor of Elaine on “Seinfeld.”

Pretty good for a kid who caught the show-biz bug early (it didn’t hurt that his family owned movie theaters in Chicago, where he grew up, and that an uncle was a Paramount Pictures exec). But he envisioned himself as a future “screenwriter or something,” not an actor, figuring his sawed-off size wouldn’t get him very far in front of the camera.

Turns out he was wrong about that. But even with acting success he began to branch out anyway.

“Why do I do so many things? Because I’m scared of being unemployed,” says Balaban, looking pleasantly fearless in a recent interview. “If I’m directing and producing and writing and acting, there’s more chance I’ll stay busy, and that’s what I like. I try not to not work.”

Trying not to not work has now resulted in “Bernard and Doris,” which he executive-produced as well as directed.

Fiennes and Sarandon star in what HBO calls an “imagined relationship” between two real-life characters: Irish butler Bernard Lafferty and billionaire tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who took him into her employ in 1987.

In this enchanting, bittersweet dual portrait, the relationship is intimate yet conflicted, racked by co-dependency. Doris is a demanding, fast-living grande dame. Bernard is a tormented gay man from humble origins for whom Doris becomes an obsession. Playing them, the always impressive Fiennes and Sarandon possibly have never been better.

Balaban says he liked the story by screenwriter Hugh Costello, “and when Susan became interested and Ralph jumped aboard, it didn’t occur to me not to do it.”

The film — shot in 20 days at a century-old estate with 300 acres of gardens and a 23-room mansion on New York’s Long Island — never hints at penny-pinching, though Balaban says it was made on a bare-bones, $500,000 budget. But thrift held sway. Much of the lavish wardrobe and jewels were on loan. Christolfe provided silverware, Fendi furnished furs.

“And we paid everybody $100 a day,” says Balaban. “The director, the cinematographer, the makeup artists, the actors ... with each of them owning a piece of the movie.”