Acting all grown up in a land of ‘Children’

“DON’T age. Make sure you dress like you’re 15 years old. Have grand sex until you’re 80. And God forbid you should ever grow up or be serious-minded or have a discipline or pursuits, and think that somehow there is value in that.�

Actor-turned-director Todd Field is sitting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, excoriating perpetual youth culture, something his generation ushered into being, lived by the sword of and now seems to regret every day of its life -- not the least when trying to fashion serious entertainments. It’s a resonant theme in Field’s second feature, “Little Children,� based on a novel by Tom Perrotta (“Election�), who co-wrote the script with Field. In this ensemble coming-of-age story, the characters are all old enough to know better.

Nominated for a slew of awards, including three (elusive) Golden Globes, and with potential Oscar interest come the announcements Tuesday, the film makes good on the promise exhibited in Field’s first feature, 2001’s brutal drama “In the Bedroom,� based on an Andre Dubus short story, which pitted Tom Wilkinson against Sissy Spacek in a devious reimagining of “Macbeth.� That film seemed to come out of nowhere to garner Oscar nominations for best actor, actress, adapted screenplay and picture.

By contrast, “Little Children,� which opened to generally warm reviews and is being rolled out slowly, is what the 42-year-old Field, the father of three, terms “a satirical melodrama� -- he and Perrotta have leavened it with humor, given it an authoritative voice-over narration to keep it on the rails (by “Frontline’s� Will Lyman, no less) and embellished it with moments of poetic precision that evince an actor’s instinct for the telling detail. Kate Winslet (whom critics have singled out and Field calls indefatigable) applies her Pan-American accent to Sarah, a lapsed literary doctoral candidate whose suburban anthropology and postmodern rejection of the pleasures of the text have made her a walking target for an opportunistic strain of romanticism -- wearing “Madame Bovary� like a badge and hiding her lover’s photo in a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Her contemporaries -- “Angels in America’s� Patrick Wilson as a prom king trapped in a distended adolescence, Jennifer Connelly as the distant wife he has recast as his mother and Noah Emmerich as a tarnished former cop and self-appointed hall monitor to this suburban redoubt -- all cling to the last vestiges of what might kindly still be referred to as youth, out of a fear of the alternative.

This is exacerbated by the sudden presence of a convicted child molester in their midst -- child star Jackie Earle Haley (“The Bad News Bears,� “Breaking Away�), returning to films after a 13-year hiatus -- presumably a threat to the nominal little children in their community. As such, the film comes off as a benign, more forgiving version of Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,� one less intent on punishing its audience than allowing its protagonists a benediction of momentary grace.

“There are two things I didn’t want referenced: Todd Solondz and ‘American Beauty,’ � says Field. “My one hesitation in making this film is that it will be perceived as some kind of send-up of suburbia. I have no interest in doing that -- that field’s been plowed for 50 years. I’ve lived in New York, I’ve lived in London and I live in the middle of nowhere now [rural Maine], and I just don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think there are those ‘little people.’ I don’t buy that.�

Instead, Field and his collaborator focused on what he terms “playground politics.� (The film opens and closes on a neighborhood park, the final shot a haunting image straight out of Terrence Malick, save that instead of the lush foliage of the New World, it’s rusted swings at night swirling in the breeze.)

Casually quoting Montaigne’s admonition that “the play of children is not really play, but must be judged as their most serious actions,� he reduces the complex interplay of social manners to an overlapping system of internecine judgments -- a virtual preschool with money -- that functions equally well as cultural commentary and as an allegory for current events.

“If we weren’t groomed to be adolescents, we would be terrible consumers,� says Field. “We’d be responsible with our money, we’d buy things that last, we’d insist on quality and we’d spend our time in pursuits that had meaning for us, rather than just plugging ourselves into the consumer engine. We’re like catfish at the bottom of Hoover Dam with our mouths open, and our tails just get bigger and bigger.

“Which is also the state of our country right now. We’re living in this really paranoid, anxious time where people are saying there are evildoers, let’s go kill them, and where we’re all terrified of not being accepted as whatever is proper in the culture.

“So Larry [Emmerich] is like George Bush, this pastiche of behavior he’s observed from elsewhere -- football, cops, anything that reeks of masculinity; he’s walking around like a kid with a stick looking for someone to hit. And Ronnie [Haley] is simply ‘the other’ -- let’s send him down to Guantanamo, because he looks funny and he said some things.�

A bookish sort

FIELD displays a distinctly writerly sensibility -- one he has apparently come by honestly. He is married to the writer Serena Rathbun, who scripted his AFI short “Nonnie and Alex� and is the daughter of screenwriter Bo Goldman (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,� “Melvin and Howard�). And his whole family reads voraciously. “In my house, you could spit and hit a book,� says Field. “My son reads 400 pages a day; we have to hide books from him to get him to stop.�

Field says he was initially attracted to “Little Children� because of author Perrotta’s voice, “and I wasn’t so keen about losing that. If you look at Jane Austen or Tolstoy or [George] Eliot for that matter, the idea of third-person narration and characters’ interior lives reflected back into it was really the creation of the novel. So then it became: What are the rules of this framing? And it was very simple for us: Every single character has a moment of introduction and a moment of their interior life being reflected back through that introduction by this grown-up. The only person that would never have it would be Ronnie, because we’re uncertain about what he has or hasn’t done.

“But as soon as the term ‘literary’ is applied to film, there’s this big, ugly word that everyone pulls out of their scabbards, which is pretense. People are dubious of anything they don’t think is real, and we’re all experts on what’s real. Yet elsewhere, there’s a long tradition of other types of storytelling.

“Look at the French New Wave, Truffaut, ‘Jules and Jim,’ and the way that film is framed with narration. Or look at Pedro Almodovar -- you can argue that all his films are melodramas, many of them satirical melodramas, and that’s very intoxicating for American audiences. And yet for us here, we like our stories served up nice and neat. The idea of satirical melodrama just confuses the categories.�

Along a hard road

THE son of a librarian and a father who worked variously as a truck driver, policeman and welder, Field was born in Pomona, but the family moved to Portland, Ore., when he was 2 months old and his father took a job as a traveling salesman of welding supplies. “I know he would come home and feel like an outsider in his home, and I vowed that I would not be a Willy Loman to my own family,� says Field. “Which ultimately I wound up being, because I was an actor and would always be away on shoots.�

Seeing the sadness engendered in his father, a frustrated poet, he learned early the value of chasing your dreams, and soon headed for New York.

“I had no agent,� he recalls, “so I really had no meaningful way of finding work other than go and dumpster dive for the breakdown [the schedule of auditions and callbacks], fill out my own submissions under fake management companies, go to the studios as a messenger and sneak onto the lot and get myself auditions. And I did: I saw Milos Forman for a film where it was between me and John Cusack; I did the same thing on ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and it was down to the wire between Tim Roth and me for Mr. Orange. I had a couple of kids at home, I had no money, my wife was selling antiques out of the back of a pickup. I was hustling for work.�

His breakout role as an actor came in “Ruby in Paradise,� the 1993 Victor Nunez film that won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. For all intents and purposes, this was to be Field’s swan song to acting, as he entered the American Film Institute’s director’s program immediately afterward. But that film’s extended life on cable led to roles in “Sleep With Me,� “Walking and Talking,� “Twister� and, most notably, a phone call from Stanley Kubrick to play pianist Nick Nightingale in “Eyes Wide Shut.�

Heeding the call, Field spent eight of the next 15 months in London, where he shot all of four scenes but received a master class in filmmaking from one of the medium’s acknowledged masters -- an experience he is still loath to talk about in print, lest it rob him of some of the awe he still feels for what transpired there. He credits Kubrick and “Eyes� star Tom Cruise with pushing him to take the plunge into full-time filmmaking, and after Kubrick’s sudden death, Field hired the director’s longtime amanuensis and aide-de-camp Leon Vitali to run his Santa Monica-based production company, Standard Films.

The truth in the moment

LIKE Kubrick, Field has turned out to be a serious filmmaker, one who trusts the subconscious and is willing to wait if necessary to find the truth in the moment. After “In the Bedroom,� he spent more than a year on “Time Between Trains,� a biopic of Edwin Booth, the most famous actor of his generation who today is merely a footnote to his brother John Wilkes Booth.

Field claims he lived for months in the Theater Collection at Harvard’s Pusey Library and was ultimately unwilling to compromise on the historical detail required to depict five major cities over a 50-year span, which would have put the budget in the $50-million to $80-million range. (DreamWorks halted the project after executive Michael De Luca left the company.) “If something is affecting me in a way I can’t turn my back on -- well, I’m not that unique, so someone else will be affected in the same way,� says Field. “I’m addicted to that, and I trust it, and it’s been really good to me.�

When pressed, Field cites the attention lavished on his cast as the most gratifying aspect of the honors that have trailed “Little Children� -- Winslet, of course, who was honored this month with a career retrospective at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, but comeback story Haley as well, who received the New York Film Critics Circle’s best supporting actor award.

“The way something happens can bring a power to the work,� says Field. “Here was a guy on his honeymoon in France who got a call that Steve Zaillian and Sean Penn were looking for him [for ‘All the King’s Men’]. I can relate to that, because I got a call from Stanley Kubrick to come to London, and I didn’t even have an agent. You can let go of a lot of insecurity in approaching the role in a situation like that. There are generally three parts to the working actor: true talent, enthusiasm and confidence. And a lot of times, it comes down to not trying to convince anyone else, but rather convincing yourself.�

Taking stock of his surroundings in the commercial heart of Beverly Hills, a space and sensibility he seems to try to live as far from as is geographically possible, the soft-spoken character actor-turned-burgeoning-auteur is clear about his role in the vast machinery of which he is once again at the perfect epicenter.

“The enormity of this opportunity is mind-blowing, but it is a privilege, and it’s not to be squandered. It’s serious. Yes, in the end, for a lot of people, it will just be entertainment, something they did one afternoon. But it can’t be that for you. You’re telling someone a story, and that’s the only connection we have to each other -- the stories that we tell.�