Director Carl Franklin

Interview by Serena Donadoni

Carl Franklin has been many things: an actor, screenwriter, teacher and director. One thing he's never been is typecast, which for a black filmmaker working in Hollywood is a major triumph. Franklin's latest film, the taut thriller High Crimes (2002), is shaping up to be the 53-year-old director's biggest hit.

"I feel really fortunate," said the soft-spoken Franklin via phone from Los Angeles. "I don't think I have been pigeonholed because I've done things that have broken it. I've done One True Thing and [the HBO miniseries] Laurel Avenue, which were family pieces. I get all kinds of material. I'm actually the one who's decided to do these kind of films. If there is something at work in my affinity for thrillers, I actually think it's unconscious disposition on my part."

That affinity is displayed in three films, One False Move (1991), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and High Crimes, which share a common theme: appearances can be deceiving. Franklin is attracted to stories of impostors, characters who are hiding something crucial about themselves from the people they love. This is the crux of High Crimes. Here, Ashley Judd is a whip-smart lawyer whose well-ordered life is shaken when her husband (Jim Caviezel) is accused of a brutal war crime. She enlists the aid of a disgraced former Marine (Morgan Freeman) to try the case before a U.S. military court, whose function seems to be finding a scapegoat instead of the truth. Franklin also sees a parallel between Judd's character and Denzel Washington's amateur detective in Devil, calling them both coming-of-age stories.

In both High Crimes and Devil in a Blue Dress, the audience follows a protagonist into a parallel world that's foreign to them, where they're forced to confront the illusions they've embraced about their lives. "That reflects my own personal experience," Franklin explained. "For much of my life I've found myself in environments that are foreign to me and operating with people that I don't know. Certainly when I first came to this business, the people that I met here were a lot different than the people I had grown up around."

A native of Richmond, a port city on the San Francisco Bay, Franklin attended the nearby University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in history and drama. He made his big screen debut in Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), a influential family comedy made during the height of blaxploitation. This was followed by experiences as diverse as performing Shakespeare at Lincoln Center and taking up arms for a semi-regular gig as Captain Crane on The A-Team.

It was only after he became an actor that Carl Franklin began to think about directing, and to get behind the camera, he took both the high road and the low one. He went for a master’s degree at the prestigious American Film Institute, where he taught a class in film analysis, and completed his thesis film, Punk, which chronicles "the evolution of a criminal."

At the same time, he got his first real hands-on experience from Roger Corman. Known for producing low-budget exploitation fare, Corman is also famous for giving a number of prominent filmmakers (including Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard) their first assignments. The movies he made for Corman, like Nowhere To Run and Full Fathom Five, may not be memorable, but the experience proved invaluable for Franklin, and the opportunity to film in the Philippines and Peru made him a believer in the importance of location shooting, a practice he continues in High Crimes, bucking the Hollywood trend to dress a Canadian city as several locales.

Franklin's unusual amalgam of experiences shows in One False Move, a terse, sweaty mix of sex and violence set in racially polarized rural Arkansas. The film would eventually win Franklin an Independent Spirit Award, but it was set to go straight to video. The director's wife, producer Jesse B'Franklin (a former executive at the 1980s indie powerhouse Island Alive), took One False Move to film festivals, where it became the cause célèbre of critics like Roger Ebert and eventually got a theatrical release.

"It was the little movie that could," said Carl Franklin of the film which launched his career alongside those of Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton. The success of One False Move led to Devil in a Blue Dress, a beautiful evocation of black life in post-war Los Angeles, which Franklin adapted from the first of Walter Mosley's Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins mysteries. The well-reviewed Devil did little business at the box office. Franklin attributes this to a combination of poor marketing and a disinterest in film noir, a genre he believes is more popular with film critics than moviegoers.

Today, he holds little hope that there will be more films based on Mosley's series. "I'm not that optimistic about it because of cost," he explained. "The budget of that [$22 million] is what Denzel now gets paid in salary. To recreate period is tough, and it's proven not to be a genre that gives that much of a return on the dollar."

That said, Carl Franklin is in pre-production for a contemporary thriller starring Denzel Washington, fresh from his Oscar win for Training Day. In Out of Time, Washington plays a small town Florida sheriff whose thorny personal life is exposed when his former high school sweetheart is murdered. Franklin laughed when it's suggested that this new film hits all his favorite themes. "Definitely," he explained. "I'm interested in penetrating the surface and going below and finding out what the real mystery is."

© 2002, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.

Director: Carl Franklin | Writers: Yuri Zeltser and Cary Bickley | Adapted from the novel High Crimes (1998) by Joseph Finder | Cinematography: Theo van de Sande | Music: Graeme Revell | Production Design: Paul Peters | Costume Design: Kathryn Peters | Editing: Carole Kravetz-Aykanian| Producers: Arnon Milchan, Janet Yang and Jesse B'Franklin | Released by 20th Century Fox | Running time: 115 minutes | Rated PG-13

Cast: Ashley Judd (Claire Kubik), Morgan Freeman (Charles Grimes), James Caviezel (Tom Kubik aka Sgt. Ron Chapman), Adam Scott (Lt. Terrence Embry), Bruce Davison (Brig. Gen. Bill Marks), Amanda Peet (Jackie), Tom Bower (Agent Mullins), Michael Shannon (Troy Abbott), John Billingsley (Oshman), Juan Carlos Hernández (Maj. James Hernandez), Michael Gaston (Maj. Lucas Waldron), Jude Ciccolella (Col. Farrell), Dawn Hudson (Lt. Col. LaPierre), Dendrie Taylor (Lola), Paula Jai Parker (Gracie), John Apicella (Franklin), Emilio Rivera (Salvadoran Man), and Jesse B'Franklin (Ramona).