MOVIE actors making their directorial debuts often do it as a labor of love (Denzel Washington had years to think through “Antwone Fisher”) or as a way to reinvent themselves (think of Ben Affleck and “Gone Baby Gone”). For Michael Keaton, directing “The Merry Gentleman,” which was to have its premiere Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, was a bit of a daredevil adventure.
Mr. Keaton’s decision to star opposite Kelly Macdonald (“No Country for Old Men”) had made it possible for a group of independent filmmakers in Chicago to finance this $6 million movie, about an unlikely friendship between an abused woman trying to restart her life and a depressed hit man trying to end his own. The screenwriter, Ron Lazzeretti, was set to direct; one of the investors, a produce distributor and onetime Second City player named Tom Bastounes, had cast himself in the second male role.
But Mr. Lazzeretti had a brush with death after his appendix burst a few weeks before filming was to begin. And as the producers grappled with finding a replacement, Mr. Keaton flew to Chicago and volunteered. “There was kind of a long pause,” he recalled recently, over lattes at a cafe near Venice Beach.
“I get bored real quick,” Mr. Keaton said, struggling to explain what had motivated him to make his first feature with one unproven star, a shoestring budget, just five weeks of prep time and a shoot lasting all of 25 days — a blink of an eye by Hollywood standards.
“I have to work really, really hard to stay enthused sometimes,” he said. “Being a little bit frightened, and saying ‘I don’t know if I can do this, but I think I can,’ is a huge impulse for me. I like being out there. And the theme of this was: ‘You guys don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll take all the hits. If people don’t like it, they don’t like me.’ ”

Though he was new to “The Merry Gentleman,” Mr. Keaton’s affinity for the material ran deep. When he was still weighing only acting in the film, he phoned Mr. Lazzeretti in the hospital and shared his thoughts about the script and his character. The two were very much in sync.
“I was stoned on morphine, I’d lost like 20 pounds, and I ended up in the most lucid conversation I’d had all week,” Mr. Lazzeretti said. “We both saw it as a little bit offbeat — darker and quieter than you’d expect from something where murders and stuff were going on.”
Mr. Keaton said he was moved by the casual spirituality of the story, which is set at Christmastime, has scenes in a Roman Catholic church and is rich with themes of redemption and renewal. But at its essence, he said, was the inevitably fleeting bond between its two main characters.
“What I love about this movie is that there’s this island, and two people who happen to wash up on it at the same time, and pretty soon the water’s going to rise, and there’s not going to be that island,” he said. “What I love is that the most dangerous guy in this world is actually the best guy for her to be with, the safest and, in a weird way, the most noble and honorable. And I think they both know it.”
There also may have been a little reinvention at play for Mr. Keaton, 56, who achieved superstardom with Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989, but lost his luster after “The Paper” in 1994. The thriller “White Noise” (2005) was a box-office success but a critical flop; his most well-reviewed performances since the late 1990s were in the HBO feature “Live From Baghdad” in 2002 and the TNT mini-series “The Company” last year.
Though Mr. Keaton speculated that the producers had been taken aback by his offer to direct, Mr. Bastounes said he had seen it coming: “He did not want the thing to not happen.”
The feeling was mutual of course. Mr. Lazzeretti said he was thrilled to get Mr. Keaton to star in the movie, which is seeking a distributor at Sundance, in part because of his reputation for “being a little adventurous” in his choices: following comedies like “Mr. Mom” with “Clean and Sober” and “Pacific Heights,” for example, and starring in a 2005 Sundance film, “Game 6,” that had a limited theatrical release.
Mr. Lazzeretti said that this seemed like another adventurous decision — not least because Mr. Keaton’s character, though violent, is extremely taciturn. “Even in ‘Game 6’ he had that Michael Keaton gift of gab,” he said. “Here, for the first I don’t know how many pages, his character doesn’t say a word. I thought it’d be really interesting to see how he expresses himself when he doesn’t have that verbal tool in his arsenal. And I’m guessing that probably intrigued him too.”
For his part Mr. Keaton said he had routinely made decisions not for purely financial reasons but to try something new, whether working with Mr. Burton in “Beetlejuice” or with Kenneth Branagh in “Much Ado About Nothing.”
“There’s something in it where I go, ‘I’m a little scared,’ ” he said. “But honestly I kind of always thought that was the idea.”
Mr. Keaton’s hit man in “The Merry Gentleman” was not an entirely unfamiliar character of course. In an early conversation, Mr. Lazzeretti recalled: “I told him: ‘I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth here, but there’s a little Batman to this guy. He’s got this avenging-angel quality, he’s kind of a tortured guy.’ And I held my breath. I wasn’t sure that’s what he wanted to hear. But he said, ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ and started to reel off the qualities they held in common.”
As it happened, Mr. Keaton had directed before, depending on how one defines the term. He shot a short film for David Letterman’s show in the 1980s, and he once filmed a documentary short about bull riders and rodeo clowns that was never released. But he said he had long been interested in giving it a try.
“I probably could’ve done this earlier, if I was more ambitious,” he said.
One unknown quantity in the movie was Mr. Bastounes, the owner of a Chicago produce company, who plays a police detective pursuing Mr. Keaton’s character professionally and Ms. Macdonald’s romantically. A self-described “tomato guy,” he performed in the Second City touring company in the late ’80s and in another film by Mr. Lazzeretti in 1999, but he acknowledged that because he was a producer, “I was somebody that Michael kind of had to use.”
Mr. Keaton said this was somewhat awkward, given not only that was he directing Mr. Bastounes but also that “it’s his dough I’m protecting.” But he said he recalled how character actors like Joe Pesci and Robert Prosky had seemed to “come out of nowhere,” adding: “If I could get 35 percent of that — somebody saying, ‘How come I’ve never seen this guy?’ — then I’m in.
“I had to go get it, but he delivered it.”
Early on, Mr. Keaton said, he laid down a rule — “No whining” — and set an example by jumping into a frigid river for a scene that he nonetheless ended up cutting from the movie. He saved money by getting his son, Sean Douglas, to score the film with a friend, Jon Sadoff. And he dispensed with costly Chicago locations like Daley Plaza for nondescript places that could be in any old industrial city — perhaps helping, oddly enough, to create the atmosphere for what Sundance organizers called “a beautifully romantic fable.”
He had only two conditions for directing the movie, he said: Ms. Macdonald would have to remain in the cast, and he would have to pick his own cinematographer, first assistant director and camera operator. For a director of photography, he turned to Chris Seager, whom he had met on “White Noise.”
Mr. Seager, speaking from another film location in Winnipeg, Manitoba, recalled being grilled by Mr. Keaton on the first day of filming “White Noise,” even about his choice of lenses. “I thought I’d be fired,” he said. “But we clicked. For an actor he had an amazing amount of visual ideas, which made my life so much easier.”
Mr. Seager had filmed “The Girl in the Cafe,” starring Ms. Macdonald, for HBO, and likened “The Merry Gentleman” to a cross between that film and “Lost in Translation.”
“It’s a slow burner,” Mr. Seager said. “We never get to know the characters properly, they never get to know each other, and the audience is always asking what each of them is thinking.”
As slow and quiet as the film may be much of the time, it has several broader strokes — a bitterly funny sight gag by Mr. Bastounes, a subtly menacing sexual come-on to Ms. Macdonald, a droll take on an office Christmas party — all invented by Mr. Keaton, none involving his own character.
Mr. Bastounes, who hopes not only to reach a theatrical audience but also to recoup his investment, said Mr. Keaton’s contributions had leavened the film quite a bit. “He has a big-show sensibility,” he said. “He’s a big movie star. He doesn’t want to make something that no one’s going to see.”
Da The New York Times, 20 gennaio 2008