For all its uniqueness, K-PAX is a film that kept triggering off memories in the minds of those involved as they shepherded it onto the screen. For producer Lawrence Gordon, who optioned the 1995 novel by Gene Brewer immediately after reading it, the story summoned up an equally unusual take which he had steered to success a few years earlier.
“The story reminded me somewhat of Field of Dreams, which I also produced,” says Gordon. “Both are about passionate men who go against conventional behaviour simply because they believe in something, as improbable as it might seem to others. And both stories contain rich, memorable characters that are hard to find in most of today’s scripts.”
For Jeff Bridges, who stars with Kevin Spacey in K-PAX, there was a different kind of echo - that of a film he made nearly 20 years ago. In John Carpenter’s Starman, Bridges really was what Spacey’s character, Prot, claims to be in here: a visitor from another planet.
But Bridges is too much of a professional to allow one film to get in the way of the other. “I didn’t talk too much about Starman during shooting,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I thought it would be better if we started fresh.”
In K-PAX, Kevin Spacey plays a man who says he comes from a planet far, far away, and Jeff Bridges is the psychiatrist assigned to sort him out. Except it isn’t quite as simple as that.
Dick Niro examines a
very unusual new movie.
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For director Iain Softley, who won international acclaim with the Oscar-nominated Henry James adaptation, The Wings of the Dove, however, it wasn’t the echoes of other films that made him jump at the chance to direct this one: it was the strength of a script which was, quite literally, unlike anything he’d ever read before.
“I found both the story and the characters totally compelling and I couldn’t resist becoming involved,” says the BBC-trained Cambridge graduate. “It really was one of the best scripts that I’d ever read, and quite distinguished in that it was difficult to predict the story’s outcome from the early pages. And when I heard that Kevin Spacey was lined up to play Prot, I thought it couldn’t be cast any better.”
Spacey, who has been one of America’s most sought-after actors since his Oscar-winning performance in American Beauty, was first sent the script before that film’s release. It reached him when he was in London in 1998, playing Hickey in a stage version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Hickey is one of the longest roles in modern theatre. But, despite the strain of being on stage for over four hours every night, Spacey found he couldn’t stop reading the script of K-PAX, which had by then been adapted for the screen by Charles Leavitt. He picked up as he was getting ready for bed and didn’t get his head down until he had finished it.
