Rourke’s Experiment In Erotica

 Versatile young actor goes out on a limb kinky ‘9 1/2 Weeks’ role .

 February 23, 1986

 By: Roger Ebert

 

 The city smells wet and green in the evening, and there are stories that Malibu is turning to mud and sliding into the sea. I drive a half a block down a little side street off Wilshire, and walk down a passage by the side of a building, through an arch and up some stairs. I push a doorbell and stand in the rain, waiting as a shutter opens in the door. I say I'm there to see Mickey Rourke. The door opens and it's a good-looking brunet who sizes me up. She smiles and says I've got the wrong place. "Mickey's my neighbor, but you can't get there from here" she says.

She tells me how to go back down the steps and take the next left on the passageway. I climb some other steps, and knock on another door. This time I have the right one. The office inside is like a fraternity house, where guys hang out and crack a few beers. Mickey Rourke stands in the middle of the floor, wearing brown leather pants and an orange pullover sweater. There is a battered leather sofa up against one wall, and a TV set that's tuned to an old gangster movie, but playing with the sound turned off. The walls are lined with cork, and there are hundreds of photos pinned to them. There are also newspaper clippings, memos and menus from carry out joints. There is a wooden table sticking out from the wall, and on the table are leather bound copies of the scripts of the movies Mickey has made, like "Diner," "The Pope of Greenwich Village," "Rumblefish" and "Year of the Dragon." The new movie is not between leather covers yet. It is called "9 Weeks," and it stars Rourke and Kim Basinger in the story of a weird love affair between a sweet young woman and a guy who likes to call her up and give her instructions about the strange things they are going to be doing together in the next 45 minutes. "I was prepared to go all the way for this movie," Rourke said. He settled into a corner of the couch and lit a cigarette. "I made a decision. This was a movie where I would go as far as I could go. I went off and got into really good shape, and I thought, OK, I'm gonna make one movie like this. We didn't go as far as I thought we would go. We could have done this film as close to hardcore and total nudity as the R rating would allow." But they didn't. Instead, under the direction of an Englishman named AdrianLyne, whose last movie was "Flashdance," they made a slick, polished experiment in erotica that turns out, at the end, to be surprisingly thoughtful about the issues it addresses. The end is probably not the part, however, that most people will be talking about. They may be talking about Basinger's striptease, or the scene where Rourke blindfolds her and feeds her mysterious things out of the icebox, or the scene where they go to a harness shop and he buys a whip and slashes it through the air. They exchange a significant glance, and so, in their own way, do the sales clerks."9 1/2 Weeks" has been surrounded by controversy ever since it was first announced as a movie project. It is based on a book by a New York woman who signed herself Elizabeth McNeill and claimed she was describing a real experience in which she and a man embarked on a voyage to the farther shores of love. McNeill's identity has recently been revealed - she is a French-Swedish woman named Ingebord Day - and now she is said to be writing a novel about incest. The movie was first announced as a Tri-Star production, then dropped by that studio before it was picked up by MGM/UA, which kept it in the can for months before releasing it, and which was reportedly uneasy about some of the wilder scenes. "I thought it was strange," I said to Rourke, "that there's a scene where you buy a whip but no scene where you use a whip." "There's a scene in the European version where I use a belt," he said. "I tell her it's 1946. We're in a whorehouse in Berlin. I start dropping money and slapping the belt around the room. They tried that out in sneak previews, and I guess the American audiences were offended by it. "The European version is edited a little more boldly than the American version." The whole, big thing with this movie, from the powers that be, was how to market it. How far could we go and turn people on, and how far could we go and turn people off? This was not a movie like `St. Elmo's Fire,' where they knew more or less what they had. "He reached for another cigarette. "The script as it was first written was not the one we shot. It was a little harder. When we did the casting, all the girls came in to test, and we saw hundreds of girls. They were all terrified by the reputation of the project, especially after they had read the script. I gained a lot of regard for Adrian by watching him in the casting process, videotaping various scenes, screen- testing the girls and at the same time, getting a clear idea of what would work onscreen.

With some of the scenes, he went to the extreme, and it was offensive. He was testing how far he could go, and it what direction he could go. He had to weigh all the elements. "Why did you agree to make this movie? Weren't you worried about people talking about how Mickey Rourke had made this kinky movie with all this weird sex in it? "It was something personal. I was ready to go out on a limb. I was willing to fail. I thought his movie might help me grow in different areas, and maybe add some dimensions to myself. "In the film, Rourke plays a man named John, a wealthy options trader who lives in a high- tech apartment and deliberately cultivates a great mystery about himself, so that it is not until almost the last scene that we learn anything personal about him – other than his desire for mastery in sex. Basinger's character is much more rounded. She is an assistant in an art gallery in the SoHo district of Manhattan; she has recently been divorced; she is pretty and smart and has a genuine love of art. She is not an adventurer, and that makes it all the more surprising, the day she goes out for lunch and her eyes meet his, and she knows instantly, powerfully, that this man is going to be important to her. "The first time I ever saw Kim Basinger in the flesh," Rourke said, "was in that scene in the Chinese grocery store when I walked up and said Hi! on the screen, while the cameras were rolling. I was never so nervous in a scene in my life. I had not laid eyes on the girl. There were no rehearsals. Adrian did not want us to grow friendly. We were supposed to be complete strangers, and that's the way it was. "I was a nervous wreck. Usually nothing bothers me when I'm making a movie. But I got the jitters, because I knew the trip the storyline was on. All the intimate things that were going to happen between us. And yet we did not know each other." "Lost weight. Got in shape. Got a haircut and combed my hair straight. Made myself stand up straight and talk clearly. Other actors talk funny and walk stooped over for a performance. With me, it's the other way around. And I went out and bought $11,000 worth of suits that I thought John would wear. Adrian took one look at them and said, Mate, they're all wrong. "I guess they were too flashy for a stockbroker. He said they were more appropriate for the character I played in `The Pope of Greenwich Village.' I didn't know Brooks Brothers. "So you traded them all in? "No, I kept them. I'm gonna wear them. "The relationship between Rourke and Basinger on the screen is never less than absorbing, and sometimes truly electric. Yet their off screen chemistry is rumored to have been less than ideal. With a movie like "9 Weeks," people always want to know what the actors really thought about each other, and in the case of Rourke and Basinger, the answer seems to be as little as possible. Basinger was quoted in a recent article as saying that kissing Rourke was like kissing an ashtray. Rourke is slightly more gallant when he talks about his co-star: "Kim and I didn't talk that much. Believe it or not. We didn't get to know each other as Mickey and Kim. I still don't know who Kim Basinger is. I read an article in Interview magazine where she said she knew me only as John. I'm glad she said that. It was the only way we could have done this particular film. That's what the movie was about. The one thing I do know about Kim is that it was tremendously hard for her as a person to make this kind of a movie. That came through and worked for her." The little room had begun to fill up as we talked. A man named Billy Levy settled behind the desk. They had a little discussion about how best to describe his role, whether as sidekick, right arm, No. 1 man, before settling on a British phrase: "He's my minder." A young, dark-haired woman named Terry Farrell came up the stairs and into the office, and she and Billy lighted cigarettes and started a quiet conversation in the corner, thick as thieves. The TV continued to flicker, and now the rain was beating against the window panes. Billy got up and made coffee in a little kitchen, and gave me a cup. He gave Mickey a tumbler full of a pale brown beverage that looked like tea. I had heard that Rourke might be a difficult interview; he has a reputation in Hollywood as something of a wild man. But he was quiet and thoughtful, and it was interesting how changeable his face was. Most of the time, it looked open and good-humored, with that smile that he lets play around the corners of his mouth in so many of his roles. Only occasionally, as he was reaching for a more difficult thought, did I see a flash of darkness, of the complexity and anger that is probably in there somewhere, and which came out in "Year of the Dragon" and "The Pope of Greenwich Village." When he was making "9 1/2 Weeks," he made an interesting acting choice: He plays a character who is obviously strange and perhaps sinister, but he almost always plays him with an open, boyish charm, a friendliness that is deceptive in some of the movie's touchier scenes.

Rourke is known as a New York actor, a street kid who went into acting almost on a dare. He has not yet had an enormous box-office success, and he's still bitter about the cool reception that "Year of the Dragon" got in some quarters - a reception he blames on the clout of the Chinese Mafia and the hostility of U.S. critics to any film by Michael Cimino after Cimino's disastrous "Heaven's Gate." But Rourke has never been less than interesting on the screen, even in little-seen movies like Nicolas Roeg's "Eureka," which got good reviews but was pulled from release after a shaky start. For a certain kind of male character who needs wildness and passion, an edge of danger and a capacity for playfulness, Rourke would be the first choice of many directors. My eyes fell on the row of leather bound scripts on his desk. "The one thing you always seem to do," I said, "is work with interesting directors. Adrian Lyne. Francis Coppola. Barry Levinson. Michael Cimino. Nicolas Roeg. "The thing I liked about Adrian's work," Rourke said, "was that he is a director who is a high stylist. Flashdance' was not my favorite picture of all time, but it was his touch that brought out what was really just a commercial kind of thing. It needed a director who could really light scene.

Not just throw in some lights and shoot, but really light to create an effect. And I also liked that he prefers to direct movies for women and about women, which is not the norm for most directors hands, who knows how it would have turned out? Adrian was the right director for it. Me and Adrian fought like cats and dogs. He calls me crazy and I call him neurotic. But he was right for this project. "What I look for in a director is a project that he's personally really turned on by. Like if anybody else sent me `Rumblefish' but Francis Ford Coppola, I wouldn't have made it, but I knew he would put his own spin on the material. When Cimino made `Year of the Dragon,' I've never seen a director who was better prepared, more up on his subject, better to work with. That was a good movie, but the press kept seeing this dark cloud over Michael's head because of the problems with `Heaven's Gate,' and they wouldn't be fair to the new movie he had made. "When I made `Diner' with Barry Levinson, it was about a bunch of guys he used to hang out with. I never hung out with guys like that. They would have been too square for me. But he knew those guys, and he wanted to tell the story, and that made it right for the movie” I remembered stories about Rourke's early days as a tough guy, a professional boxer, conning his way through the lower echelons of New York. I asked Rourke what kinds of guys he used to hang out with. He smiled and shrugged. "I don't talk about those days anymore," he said. "The story has been told. I don't want to tell it anymore." "Show him the picture," Billy said, from behind the desk. "Oh, yeah," Rourke said. "I ought a show you the picture." Billy gave him a framed photograph and he handed it over. "Mickey Rourke in the early days," he said. It showed him standing behind an ice cream cart. "Selling Good Humor bars in Central Park, across from the Mayflower Hotel," he said. “That was seven years ago." And now you're a movie star. "When I go to New York, I usually stay at the Mayflower. I like to look out the window at my old position."

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