Keeping it in the family

>> Tim Roth tackles incest in his directorial debut The War Zone

by MATTHEW HAYS

"It was the most relaxing job I've ever had," says actor Tim Roth, of his first directing gig. The final product is The War Zone, a bitter indictment of incest based on the controversial Alexander Stuart novel of the same name.

Roth is perhaps best known to audiences as an actor in films like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Rob Roy (for which he received an Oscar nomination). But directing is something he always wanted to do, while acknowledging that as a bit of a cliché. "I felt like directing was a job I'd been in training for 20 years. After doing The War Zone, I was ready to give up acting altogether. I thought that maybe this is what I should be doing--unfortunately, there's no money in it."

Though he may feel directing came easily, Roth's film is not. The War Zone is a brutal portrait of a family in denial, a family whose father figure is also pursuing a sexual relationship with his teenage daughter. When 15-year-old Tom (Freddie Cunliffe) learns about the tryst, he attempts to break the silence, but to little effect.

Predictably, The War Zone gained considerable press while screening on the festival circuit last year. "Some people walked out in anger, which I suppose I can understand, because the issue makes me angry as well," says Roth. "Some accused me of being a pornographer. Others of being an abuser myself, which was something I really didn't get."

Roth says he was immediately drawn to the novel, which had a history of contention all its own. When The War Zone was announced as the winner of the annual Whitbread Literary Awards, the outcry was so loud that by ceremony time (when the awards are actually handed out), the award had been nixed. "The book was very cinematic to me," says Roth, despite the widespread sentiment that the book was unfilmable. "The characters had an interior landscape that I felt could really be brought to life on film. I thought it would be very much in the strain of European cinema."

Roth knows this is a film he never could have made under Hollywood studio constraints. "You're right, it couldn't have been done that way. And it's a shame it couldn't come out of the studios."

Roth has stated repeatedly in interviews that he hoped to illustrate to those who have committed incest exactly what the consequences of their actions are. "I suppose it could be read as a message movie. But I don't want people to think of it in any way as a typical message movie. If people read that it's a message movie, it turns them off. The film is a discussion. As soon as I start to announce what that message is, then I risk shutting the discussion down."

The War Zone opens Friday, April 28