Philadelphia Weekly

Let's begin with the nudity. If there's a near-constant in the films written or directed by Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Nobody's Fool), it's that they tend to have an unusual amount of bare flesh for mainstream Hollywood fare. Depressing as it is, even his latest outing--the sprawling multicharacter saga Feast of Love--pushes today's boundaries.

The film's centerpiece is a vicious relationship spat between supporting players Radha Mitchell and Billy Burke. As they accuse, yell, defend and slap, they do it entirely naked.

"It seems to me I've never seen that scene before," Benton says over the phone. "What [the nudity] does is establish intimacy. It also seemed true and real to me."

He adds, "We're frank about violence and we're not frank about sex. That seems odd. I think I'd rather be frank about sex than violence."

Alas, Benton can't quite claim credit for the scene. It was Mitchell who, after the scene was shot with the actors partly clad, suggested they try it again, this time unclothed. Benton, who directed the film but didn't write it (that was Allison Burnett), also says he didn't come up with the economical idea of combining two of the characters from the Charles Baxter novel into the one played by Morgan Freeman.

"He's the narrator, and yet as the film goes on he becomes more and more involved, until it becomes about him. The film's about his disconnect from life and his reconnection to it," Benton explains. "It was an ingenious thing to do. I wish I'd thought of it."

Collaboration comes up a lot during our conversation. Unlike a lot of his colleagues in the '70s filmmaker pantheon, Benton is hard to pin down, shifting job titles and genres over his long career. A onetime journalist, Benton switched to screenwriting and, along with writing partner David Newman, shopped Bonnie and Clyde around for four years. Before director Arthur Penn took the reins, the project fell briefly into the hands of French legend Fran�ois Truffaut.

Asked what Truffaut's version of Bonnie and Clyde would've been like, Benton responds, "I think this much: It would have been beautiful. But we talked to Warren [Beatty] about it and Warren very wisely said, 'It's an American story. You need an American director.'"

The two talked about working together. Benton even wanted Truffaut to direct Kramer vs. Kramer, but thanks to scheduling conflicts Benton wound up doing that himself--and scoring an Oscar for Best Director. (He also won for screenplay, as he did again in 1986 for Places in the Heart.)

Directing was never initially Benton's plan. "In Hollywood, if you want something, they don't give it to you. But if you don't want it, they'll throw it at you," he says.

After his and Newman's scripts for Bonnie and Clyde and What's up, Doc?, studios offered him a directing job on a low-budget Western, which became 1972's Bad Company.

"I remember driving from the hotel to Paramount, thinking, 'I'm going to make an utter fool of myself,'" he recalls. "But when I walked onto the film set, it was like a family. A dysfunctional family, but a family. I come from a dysfunctional family, so I felt totally at home."

Benton has since alternated between writing, directing and both. His most recent writing credit was 2005's The Ice Harvest, a neo-noir like his 1977 award-gobbler The Late Show, which paired aging gumshoe Art Carney with hippie Lily Tomlin. (Benton says he wrote the movie for Jimmy Stewart and Diane Keaton, adding, "but I will not complain about that cast at all.")

Benton cites Robert Altman, who produced The Late Show, as helping him develop his directing skills. "Before I worked with Altman I thought directing was simply illustrating the screenplay," he explains. "Altman taught me to honor and respect actors. So I began to work with actors in a collaborative way. It changed my life."

Asked what on earth unites a movie like The Late Show with the romantic sprawl of Feast of Love, Benton replies: "I think I'm simply drawn to characters who are deeply flawed--who want to do the right thing but rarely manage to do it. But who struggle on."