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David O. Russell directs with brilliance

Writer-director David O. Russell is not your typical film geek.

He did not pick up his first camcorder at the ripe old age of three. He has not watched back-to-back screenings of "Taxi Driver" and "Mean Streets" 273 times in the last month. He cannot recite the dialogue of "Pulp Fiction" verbatim. He does not even claim that one screening of his charming and inventive new film "Flirting With Disaster" will change your outlook on life. What he does suggest is that if nothing else, it will change your outlook on the armpit.

"I'm hoping people will begin to appreciate the armpit as an erogenous zone," he said sardonically, in a recent interview with the Michigan Daily. "It's been demonized by the deodorant companies. The implication seems to be that you should just scorch it with a blow torch, paste it down with tar and then slap deodorant on it ... whereas, I think it's a great place to go ... with your mouth."

He's kidding. But whether exploring the sexual power of the armpit or the Oedipus complex, the 37-year-old New Yorker is not likely to tread the well-worn path, or do it quietly.

His unusually confident and emotive debut feature, "Spanking the Monkey," won the Audience Award for Best Feature at the indie film version of the Oscars, the Sundance Film Festival. Released by Fine Line Features in 1994, the film was an art-house hit and the recipient of two prestigious Independent Spirit Awards, for best writing and best directing by a first-time filmmaker. With a deft comic touch dangling near the macabre, and an engaging performance from Jeremy Davies as the confused protagonist, Raymond, Russell tore a lopsided yet sizable hole through Suburbia's well-mowed status quo, shoved in a fun-house's distorted mirror and made his audience re-examine the family in "family values." Brilliant, satiric and deeply disturbing, the film was easily one of the year's best.

It also almost didn't get made.

He was offered a $1.5 million budget and a deal with a major studio if he could get an actor like Faye Dunaway to play Raymond's well-meaning but over-involved mother. The script was solid, Russell had already won awards for earlier short films, everything seemed plausible. Yet, Dunaway wasn't interested, perhaps due to the film's racy subject matter. With no star, the deal fell through. Russell persisted, rounding up $80,000 in grants, a mostly inexperienced cast and crew (who worked for deferred payments) and made the film on his own, no-budget and no studio.

Hard work paid off. The already commercially successful and critically hailed "Flirting with Disaster" is the proof.

A twisted road story about the adopted and very confused Mel (Ben Stiller), your average New York yuppie who's obsessed with the notion of finding his birth parents, "Flirting With Disaster" careens from state to state with funnier and more outlandish consequences at each turn.

"The way it functions is like channel surfing or family surfing or city surfing," Russell said. "It's like, what if I was from San Diego -- whoosh! -- you're in San Diego. What if I was from Michigan -- whoosh! -- you're in Michigan. What if I was from New Mexico? It zaps around the country to all these different places."

As for how he chose which places, Russell said, "In an age when cities are becoming increasingly identical through strip malls, you want to find places that are gonna have their own character." While the film's Michigan scenes were shot mostly in New Jersey, shots like the signs for the airport and Kellogg's were shot here. "I've been a life-long fan of Kellogg's so I thought I'd better pay my respects," he quipped.

With typical ruthless aplomb, when asked what sets the film apart from the slew of other comedies out now, Russell said: "Well ... it's funny."

"But here's the main thing," he continued eagerly. "You never know what's gonna happen. We defy expectations at every turn. Yet, it's real. When people laugh or cry, it feels very real, it doesn't feel like a parallel comedy universe. Then there are bizarre happenings in this very natural, real world as opposed to a comedy void or something."

Under Russell's comic microscope are wacky Bed and Breakfast owners, the post office, LSD-laced food, circumcision, jealousies, marital misunderstandings and of course, armpits.

"But the most important thing we need to get into is the fact that this is the first film to include a joke about hypospadia," he said. A condition in babies that can cause the curvature of the penis, it provides the film with a number of comic moments. Russell discovered it quite accidentally when auditioning sets of twins to play the nameless baby in the film. "When it happened to the second set of twins, I said that someone is telling us to put this in the movie."

Filling out the cast is Patricia Arquette ("True Romance") as Mel's wife, Tea Leoni ("Bad Boys") as the adoption agent who joins them on the road, classic actors Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal as Mel's adoptive parents and Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin as his birth parents.

Casting for "Spanking the Monkey" involved putting ads in trade publications, going to arts schools to look for students and holding open auditions. Casting "Flirting" was a little different. "This time we had star negotiations and studio negotiations and trying to explain to someone why you cannot have Kim Basinger on the couch," he said wryly. "If it's Kim Basinger playing the adoption agent, instead of Tea Leoni, it's like having Marilyn Monroe there, you're gonna know the rest of the sub-plot."

In a search for a "young Dustin Hoffman," Russell cast comedian Ben Stiller. "I defy you to name any other well-known actor who fits that type," he said. "Maybe David Schwimmer has emerged now, but that hadn't happened at the time. I was looking for someone smart, urban, slightly neurotic, maybe a little ethnic. The period I grew up in with movies was the '70s. It was Pacino and Hoffman, the kind of guys who aren't really around anymore. Now it's more of a Brad Pitt-Ethan Hawke prototype."

On the phone, Russell is faintly Mel-ish, but with more of an edge. He's wryly acerbic, pleasantly obnoxious, deadpan hilarious and thoroughly self-aware. New York City-speak blunt, fast-talking and gently arrogant, his low, gravely voice trills lovingly on each word, each jabbing response, each opportunity to amuse his listener. Like any good comedian, Russell clearly enjoys the sound of his own voice, the clever, biting quips that his twists on words and ideas can produce, the way he can simultaneously mock and expand upon the most sacred of American standards. He is a complex character himself, but vividly, refreshingly real.

As happy as he is with his newfound mainstream success, Russell doesn't see it as a compromise to the notion of being an independent filmmaker. Like the '70s movies he so loves, Russell thinks it's entirely possible to make studio films that have guts. "I think being independent in film is about wanting to deft expectations, wanting to break, push genres to their limits, pushing things as far as they can go so that they become new."

Next up for Russell is probably a period thriller that would take place in the first quarter of the century. Other future endeavors could include a "political satire, but it would be very, very contemporary."

Once a union organizer, a poet, a short story writer, and a journalist before finding film at 28, the now 37-year-old Russell is thankful for his delayed entry into the celluloid world.

"By the time I made my first full-length film, I was 33. I'd been through a lot of relationships, I'd had a lot of different jobs, I'd met a lot of different people. I'd been through tragedies and comedies and good things in-between. I think that experiencing all that first will help give me the depth of insight, the experience to make a variety of films over the course of my life, instead of just referencing culture."

"Although," he added wryly, "I had to write a bunch of bad screenplays before I finally wrote a good one.