Splatter chatter

>> Oscar nominee Ed Harris on how he brought Pollock to life

by JOANNE LATIMER

In 1986, Ed Harris got a birthday present from his father that influenced the next 17 years of his life. His dad was working at the Chicago Art Institute's bookstore, where he bought his son a book called To a Violent Grave. It was on Jackson Pollock, the American painter who rose to stardom for his all-over splatter paintings.

"He said there might be a movie in there somewhere," recalls Harris, on the phone from New York, publicizing Pollock, his debut film as a director. Buying the rights to the book became a complicated affair and years passed before Harris had a working script in his hands.

"By the time I got the first script, it was 267 pages long," says Harris, who never intended to direct the project. "So I didn't confront any studios until I had it where I wanted it. Writers worked on it and I worked on it for years. Finally, it came together and I put up more money than I had intended and I ended up directing for the first time."

Pollock, the film, has all the dedication of a vanity project, but none of the self-aggrandizement. Harris plays down the "heroic painter" aspect of Pollock's public persona, and wisely heads into more truthful territory: Pollock as drunk, nasty, puking, neurotic. Pollock wasn't a masterful genius out of the gate, and his style only emerged after careful cultivation. The turn has earned Harris an Oscar nomination in the Best Actor category.

Intuitive not intellectual

Talking about his splatter painting technique, Pollock once said, "I don't use the accident. I deny the accident." Yet Harris allows for no accidents. Despite the fact that Pollock is a highly watchable film, Harris was anxious that it would careen into a failed, cinematic version of a splatter painting. As a preemptive strike, he made sure that each scene is evenly measured. This controlled style of filmmaking is surprisingly effective for the bottled-up Pollock.

"That was very conscious," says Harris, who has started to paint himself. "But I just took a deep breath and dove in to do the painting scenes. I didn't purposefully watch any other films about artists because I didn't want to use a model, but films that I have seen about painters contain very little painting. I knew I wanted to see Pollock paint because that was his life. Making the movie, I think, was more intuitive than intellectual--not that thought didn't go in it."

The love story fuelling the film involves Pollock and Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, who's also earned an Oscar nomination for her role), a painter who abandons her own career to save Pollock from himself. She's a one-woman nurse, agent, muse, mother and critic. But the script also has to deal with Pollock's last mistress, Ruth Klugman, who is still alive.

Wanting a piece of Pollock

"Ruth," Harris sighs. "Ruth wanted money from us. She felt the film should be all about her and Jackson--although she wasn't with him all that long. She didn't want to do anything without remuneration and we ended up having to settle with her.

"The average moviegoer in America doesn't know Jackson Pollock, or doesn't know very much," continues Pollock. "When the script was 267 pages long, it explained about the other people in his life, but as I trimmed back the page count, I had to take out all that information. It was subjective."

Watching Jackson Pollock self-destruct is like watching a fat, sweaty Elvis in his final days. Pollock got fat, drunk, (more) belligerent and mean to the women in his life.

Then he drove his convertible into a tree, killing himself and another. To Harris's credit, he doesn't ruin his film with a top-coat of Hollywood glamour. The film lacks sentimentality or heroics, and that makes Pollock as strong as its subject matter.

Pollock opens Friday, March 16