August 2, 1987 | Thomas Wolfe was mistaken: You can go home again. And if you’re Robert Benton, the only triple Oscar winner ever raised in Waxahachie, Texas, you can keep returning. All you have to do is want to make movies in your home state.
Benton, a soft-spoken, silver-haired fellow with a slight lisp and an occasional air of melancholy, has lived in Manhattan for more than 30 of his 54 years. Yet his heart belongs to Texas. And his Places in the Heart, a profoundly moving drama starring Sally Field, was set in Waxahachie, where Benton, a Dallas native, spent most of his formative years.
More recently, Benton has written and directed Nadine, a spirited comedy-thriller set in 1950s Austin. The city holds fond memories for Benton — he attended the University of Texas, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in art history. Even so, most of the characters in his new movie are culled from memories of people Benton knew in El Paso, where he spent his 1954-56 Army service painting dioramas at Fort Bliss.
Nadine, which opens Friday, has the off-hand exuberance of something created in a single, giddy burst of inspiration. It’s a trifle, to be sure, but a trifle brimming with energy and great humor. And its most endearing quality is its seeming casualness. It’s not hard to imagine a wrap party after filming ended, where it suddenly dawned on everyone that all their good times and horseplay actually resulted in something practical: “Well, damn, look at that! We made a movie!”
For Benton, the movie works on many different levels. First off, of course, it’s a trip down memory lane, with a few detours into creative license. But it’s also a movie heavily influenced by Benton’s favorite filmmaker, the late, great Francois Truffaut. In Confidentially Yours (1984), Truffaut’s last film, “It seemed to me that Truffaut had reached a point where he was able to work as though it were handwriting,” Benton told me during a long conversation in his New York office. “That it was like writing a letter to somebody. It was that personal, that direct. And that intimate.”
On yet another level, though, Nadine is a typical Benton effort: It began as one kind of movie, then evolved into something completely different. And the finished product has a major female character influenced by the great love of Benton’s life, artist Sallie Rendigs, his wife since 1964.
In Nadine, the title character, vibrantly played by Kim Basinger, is a sassy manicurist who allows herself to be talked into posing for “art photographs” by a sleazy photographer. Shortly after Nadine attempts to gain possession of the saucy pictures, the photographer is murdered. To extricate herself from this tight spot, she must rely on the dubious assistance of her estranged husband, Vern (Jeff Bridges). Love, not unexpectedly, reblooms as the plot thickens.
This is not the movie Benton set out to make. Not by a long shot. “I started out writing a very serious movie about married life,” Benton said.
“And these characters evolved. First, Nadine. I was sitting there at the typewriter one day, and this thing came into my head. I wrote a little thing about her, so I wouldn’t forget, and then I put it away, and went back to work on the marriage script. And then, a day or so later, Vern showed up.
“And it got to where I would come in in the morning, and write a couple of pages about them, and then I’d go back to the regular movie. And then they slowly began to take over.”
It remained a screenplay about married life, Benton insisted. All that changed were the characters and the story. “Putting it into the genre of a comedy-thriller, that’s just a McGuffin, that’s just an excuse for it. It’s really a movie about marriage for me.
“I love these two people, and I care enormously for them. And I think there is something true about them. And about their marriage.”
This sort of indirect approach to cherished goals has served Benton well over the years. The son of a Ma Bell employee and a housewife, he spent a great deal of his youth preparing for his adult career. Only he didn’t know what he was doing at the time.
“Three nights a week,’’ Benton recalled, ‘‘my father would say to me after dinner, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’ Instead of saying, ‘Finish your homework, and then we’ll go to the movies,’ he’d just say, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’ And we’d go all the time. And it nearly ruined me in high school. But it was a great thing for later life.’’
‘‘I’d seen Truffaut’s The 400 Blows before,’’ Benton recalled, ‘‘and I liked it. But the earth did not move. But when we saw Jules and Jim, I was totally transported by it.’’
After graduating from the University of Texas, Benton moved to New York — partly, he said, because ‘‘I had been in love with a girl in college, and when I left college, she married someone else. And I was so brokenhearted, I couldn’t stand to live in Texas.’’ But there was more to the move than romantic disillusionment. During the summer between his sophomore and junior years, Benton and a friend had taken a Continental Trailways bus to New York City, and had immediately fallen in love with the place. When the time came to pick a graduate school, he didn’t look much further than Columbia University.
Once he moved to Manhattan, however, neither his money nor his interest in higher education held out very long. After completing his Army service, he fled back to the Big Apple, where he lucked into a job as art director for Esquire magazine. He felt very much at home.
Years later, Benton would recall his attempt to reinvent himself as a New Yorker with a fair degree of embarrassment.
“Look, let me tell you: I came to New York during the J.D. Salinger period. And during the J.D. Salinger period, you went to the Biltmore Hotel, or the Plaza Hotel, and you sat around there. And you saved your money and got a polo coat or went to Brooks Brothers for your clothes. And you tried to act like, ‘Hey, Texas? Where is that?’ You tried to act, like John O’Hara said, like you had never gone west of the Connecticut River.’’
Obsessed with maintaining an ersatz-bohemian image, Benton took it upon himself to wear Army shirts to the office, almost a generation before such attire became common for chic civilians. (These days, he appears to favor a more conventional shirt-and-tie look.) And to make sure no one mistook him for anything so déclassé as a Texan, he and roommate Harvey Schmidt (another Dallas native) wrote the aggressively trendy IN and OUT Book, a nervy attempt by outsiders to codify in-crowd behavior. (‘‘To be poor is OUT. To be rich is OUT. To be nouveau riche is best of all.’’) The book, much to Benton’s amusement, continues to be influential — even today, city magazines and newspaper feature writers borrow the basic premise when strapped for story ideas.
At the time, though, IN and OUT was a reliable story concept for an Esquire art director often strapped for cash. (Son of IN and OUT. IN and OUT Go West.) Although he was a staffer, Benton was able to sell free-lance pieces to the magazine. He specialized in dry-witted, mock urbane essays about Sophisticated Life in the Big City. And then, much to his surprise, he got the idea for a period gangster yarn with a subversively modernist twist.
‘‘All the key incidents in my life,’’ Benton said, only half-jokingly, ‘‘seem to be tied to one form of heartbreak or another. I had been involved with a young woman for several years, and we had just broken up. And I was desolate.’’
So when a friend visiting from Chicago suggested an evening of dinner and moviegoing, Benton eagerly agreed, if only to shake himself out of a deep blue funk. Purely by chance, the theater near the restaurant where they ate was playing Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut’s celebrated, seriocomic story of a strong-willed woman and the two men she loves. ‘‘I’d seen Truffaut’s The 400 Blows before,’’ Benton recalled, ‘‘and I liked it. But the earth did not move. But when we saw Jules and Jim, I was totally transported by it.’’
He continued to be transported again and again over the next month, as he viewed Jules and Jim eight times. ‘‘And, of course, after you see a film eight times, you begin to notice things. That what the camera tells you is exciting as what the dialogue tells you. And you begin to see the director at work.
‘‘Like, with Jules and Jim. After a while, I began to see those rhythms, and that way he would move the camera, and that lyricism. And that mixture of humor and heartbreak. It was a movie that had sentiment, but not sentimentality.’’
During this same period, Benton made another important discovery: He wasn’t cut out to be a magazine art director, at Esquire or anywhere else. ‘‘I knew that my days there were numbered — that, ultimately, for any number of very good reasons, I would not be able to remain as art director forever. And I didn’t want to. But I didn’t know what else to do.’’
Fortunately, Benton found a kindred spirit on staff: David Newman, a nimble-witted Michigan native who shared — or at least came to share — what a colleague once described as ‘‘Benton’s bittersweet, crazy-legged point of view.’’
Benton recalls his father, who slept with a gun under his pillow, once settled an argument with a neighboring farmer by slipping on brass knuckles and starting a fist fight.
During his years at Esquire, Benton said, ‘‘I had evolved from somebody who was an artist, an illustrator in some way. I had come to work more and more in a collaborative way with various editors, until I couldn’t quite tell you what I did. I think the least important part of what I did was the design of the magazine — because the design of the magazine was good, but it wasn’t that good. I think what I did best was work in tandem with other editors, to come up with ideas. David and I would do that a lot. And we were very close friends at the time.’’
One thing led to another: They shared a high regard for Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other brash young filmmakers at the vanguard of France’s nouvelle vague (new wave) movement. They also shared the sort of determinedly hip, high-stakes recklessness that comes naturally to outsiders desperate to make a mark in the big city.
So when they stumbled across a book that mentioned Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the Depression Era bank robbers Benton heard much about during his Texas youth, it seemed perfectly logical that they would try to write a gangster movie script, ‘‘even though we didn’t know how to write a script,’’ on speculation for Francois Truffaut, a man they had never met.
‘‘Quite frankly,’’ said Benton, ‘‘I had nothing to lose. If I’d had a rich emotional life at that point, if I had still been involved with that girl, I might not have done it. I might have had other things to do.
“But because my emotional life at that particular time was barren, to say the least, this gave me someplace to put my heart.’’
Benton and Newman struggled ‘‘two or three nights a week’’ for more months than they would care to remember, grappling with the intricacies of what was for them a new art form. Quite often, their scenario would explode into the sort of sudden, vicious violence Benton remembers as the dark side of his Texas nostalgia. (Benton recalls his father, who slept with a gun under his pillow, once settled an argument with a neighboring farmer by slipping on brass knuckles and starting a fist fight.) At other times, though, their version of the Bonnie and Clyde saga had the easygoing humor of a folk ballad.
At length, Benton and Newman managed to hammer out a rough draft intriguing enough to capture the fancy of Helen Scott, who worked for the French Film Office in New York. Scott mailed the draft to Truffaut, along with a note suggesting he get it translated for his own perusal. A few weeks later, Truffaut called Scott to announce he would be in New York within a month and wanted to meet the two Esquire-employed scriptwriters during his visit.
Flash-forward one month: Benton and Newman are in Truffaut’s suite at the Regency Hotel. Much to their relief, the French filmmaker is disarmingly charming and encouraging. (At least, that’s how he sounds via the English translation of Helen Scott.) Much to their amazement, Truffaut is eager to offer suggestions.
‘‘There’s one sequence in Bonnie and Clyde,’’ Benton said, more than two decades after the Regency Hotel meeting, ‘‘that Truffaut dictated, verbatim. The sequence starts with Bonnie and Clyde sitting in a car in the rain. And she’s reading the poem that she’s written, ‘The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.’ You see her first reading it, then you see it being set in the newspaper, then you see (Texas Ranger) Frank Hamer reading it. Then you come back to them, and they’re lying in a field. That was Truffaut’s sequence.
‘‘And he did a lot of other things. He broke the film down into unities, he cleared out a lot of garbage, he taught us structure. And he taught us that it wasn’t simply the dialogue, it wasn’t simply the cameras, but it was an organic relationship, of one scene following the other. And expectations: If you raise a question in one scene, you know you’ve got to answer it later.’’
Unfortunately, Truffaut himself could not fulfill Benton’s most optimistic expectations. Already in pre-production for Fahrenheit 451, his first (and only) English-language film, he was unable to commit to Bonnie and Clyde. ‘‘But he did say he was going to send it to his friend, Jean-Luc Godard.’’
By the time Godard, the eternal enfant terrible of French cinema, came to the United States to discuss Bonnie and Clyde, Benton and Newman had already optioned their script to two independent producers. ‘‘And the producers were trying to do it in a way that I now understand was very intelligent,’’ Benton said. ‘‘But they were dealing with a couple of writers who hopelessly believed that you could take Truffaut or Godard to a Hollywood studio and get financing.
‘‘Well, Godard came over, and said, ‘I’m supposed to do this picture called Alphaville. I’m gonna go back, buy my way out of it, come back here. I’ll be back in three months, we’ll start to cast, we’ll start to shoot. We’ll be finished shooting by January.’
‘‘But the producers didn’t have the money ready — they were trying to put together a package. They were trying to get a director, then get a star, then go to a studio. But they didn’t want to admit that — and I can’t blame them.
“So they said, ‘Well, you know, this script was written for the summer.’ And Godard stood up and said, ‘You’re talking meteorology, I’m talking cinema.’ And he walked out.’’
And no one else walked in. For the next two or so years, Benton and Newman shopped their script around to just about every studio in Hollywood, but found no takers. During this period, Benton married Sallie Rendig, an artist he met while doing a free-lance story for the New York Herald-Tribune. She provided comfort and encouragement as her new husband faced one rejection after another.
But then, out of the blue, Benton received a phone call. At the other end of the line: Warren Beatty, an impossibly good-looking actor who, at the time, was more popular with gossip columnists than film critics.
Beatty was looking for a serious movie project to produce, so he could ‘‘play with the big boys,’’ Benton said. Francois Truffaut had suggested Beatty read Bonnie and Clyde.
‘‘I have always thought,’’ Benton said, ‘‘though I have no reason to believe this, that Warren went to see Truffaut in order to try and talk Truffaut into doing another picture. And Truffaut, in order to get Warren off his back, said, ‘Warren, there’s this script you ought to read…’’’
For whatever reason, Beatty said he wanted to read Bonnie and Clyde. Benton said OK, he’d sent Beatty a copy. No, Beatty replied, he wanted to drop by Benton’s apartment. In about 20 minutes.
‘‘Ten minutes later,’’ Benton said, ‘‘there was a knock on the door, and my wife opened it, and there was Warren. And her knees buckled.’’
Beatty managed to remain much calmer, even after he finished reading Bonnie and Clyde and decided it was just what he was looking for. He patiently waited for the original producers to run out their option. Then he snatched up the script as quickly as Clyde Barrow used to rob banks.
‘‘I really think Warren has never been given quite enough credit for the success of Bonnie and Clyde,’’ Benton said. ‘‘It had been turned down by virtually every major studio in Hollywood. Warren gets it, and says to us, wisely, ‘Who do you want to direct this?’ And we said, ‘Truffaut. And if not Truffaut, Godard.’ And he said, ‘Wait a minute. You’ve written this as a French movie. You need an American director. This script is so heavily influenced by the New Wave that you don’t need to compound it. What you need is an American who will do the best with what you’ve got.’
‘‘His logic was inescapable; he was quite right about it. So he got Arthur Penn,’’ who had directed Beatty in Mickey One (1965), ‘‘to do it. And that’s the story.’’
Or, to be more precise, that was the beginning of the story. Bonnie and Clyde opened poorly — Warner Bros. had little faith in the production, and promoted it as an exploitation film — but critics rallied around it in support. Beatty fought to get the film reissued in classier theaters, and won. Bonnie and Clyde wound up being an international box-office smash and earned Academy Award nominations for almost everyone involved. Benton and Newman lost the Best Original Screenplay Award to William Rose (for, of all things, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) But they had little time to grieve — they were too busy working.
They collaborated on the book for a Broadway musical — It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Superman! — that opened and closed almost as fast as a speeding bullet. Then they cranked out a sketch about wife-swapping for the long-running Oh, Calcutta! (Benton, who claims he has never seen an actual performance of the sexy revue, insists the sketch is not at all autobiographical.) For the screen, they co-wrote the sardonic script for the revisionist Western There Was a Crooked Man (1970), in which the well-meaning hero (Henry Fonda) discovers the rewards of outlawry. And they helped Buck Henry and Peter Bogdanovich polish up the script for Bogdanovich’s 1972 nouveau screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?
They took lots of meetings, discussing all sorts of off-the-wall projects — a remake of Mildred Pierce for Truffaut, a film of Jules Feiffer’s play Little Murders with Godard — that were never realized. And they cranked out a monthly column called ‘‘Man Talk’’ for Mademoiselle. A typical essay offered women advice about handling would-be Don Juans: ‘‘It’s hard for you to spot this guy in advance, because he doesn’t do his real number on you till the last minute. But at that point, what you must do is very simple.
‘‘You hit him.’’
By 1972, Benton felt ready to try his hand at directing. He took control of Bad Company, a script he had written with Newman, and made a richly textured, engagingly picaresque Western about two Civil War draft dodgers (Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown) who drift into lives of disorganized crime. The film was highly praised by many major critics. It was studiously ignored by most ticket-buying audiences.
Benton, long on a roll, smashed into a brick wall and was badly shaken. After he and Newman wrote an early draft for Superman: The Movie, they amicably broke up their writing partnership to attempt solo projects. Newman, writing in tandem with his wife, went on to bigger if not necessarily better things (Superman II, Jinxed! and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle). Benton spilled into another deep blue funk.
Years later, Benton would describe his post-Bad Company condition like this: ‘‘I was 40 years old and I had one son, one wife and one picture that was a big flop. At that point, I could not get arrested. I even tried to get people to hire me to do commercials.’’
But some good came of Bad Company: Superstar agent Sam Cohn genuinely liked the quirky little film, and agreed to take Benton as a client. He introduced Benton to maverick moviemaker Robert Altman, who agreed to produce Benton’s first solo effort as writer-director: The Late Show, an eccentric comedy-mystery that teamed Art Carney as a semi-retired private eye with Lily Tomlin as a trendy ex-flower child. The project meant a lot to Benton, who says he put ‘‘a lot of my father’’ into Carney’s character. And it certainly helped his career: The Late Show, though by no means a hit, at least broke even.
Better still, it received even better notices than Bad Company.
Benton was at work on his next project, a Hitchcockian thriller tentatively titled Stab, when producer Stanley Jaffe approached him to write the script for a novel he had optioned. The book was called Kramer vs. Kramer.
‘‘I said I’d write it,’’ Benton told me, ‘‘if Truffaut could direct it.’’
Years after Bonnie and Clyde, he still wanted to make a movie with the filmmaker he regarded as a mentor — and a friend. But their proposed Mildred Pierce remake was aborted in the early discussion stages. Years later, they considered making a film about the last days of Howard Hughes, with Henry Fonda in the lead role. But then Melvin and Howard opened, and they decided their project might appear too similar.
Still, Benton wasn’t discouraged. ‘‘I always thought I could learn so much from Truffaut,’’ Benton said, ‘‘since I spent so much time taking stuff from him, just from watching his movies. I thought if I could write with him, I could learn a lot more.’’
Jaffe was agreeable to hiring Truffaut, so Benton set Stab aside. He completed a first draft of Kramer vs. Kramer, only to find Truffaut was committed to another project. It would be two years before he could direct the film, and Jaffe didn’t want to wait that long. Disappointed, Benton returned to Stab. He finished the script, and turned it over to Sam Cohn for comments. Cohn commented: ‘‘This is terrible. You really shouldn’t do this picture.’’
‘‘None of us as writers, journalists, screenwriters or whatever, expect ourselves to proceed with a sort of machine-like progress, in an evenly paced, steady movement forward. Sometimes, those lapses, those failed pictures, are necessary to get us to some other place.’’
Stunned, and a little embarrassed, Benton asked Cohn, ‘‘Well, what should I do?’’ Well, Cohn replied, Jaffe still needed a director for Kramer vs. Kramer.
And that’s how Robert Benton backed into winning his first two Academy Awards, for writing and directing the Best Picture of 1979. Dustin Hoffman also won an Oscar for his moving performance as Ted Kramer, the self-absorbed advertising whiz who comes to appreciate the joys of fatherhood. And yet another Oscar went to Meryl Streep, who won the Best Supporting Actress award as Joanna Kramer, the ex-wife who battles Ted for custody of their young son.
Even so, there was a small but insistently buzzing fly in the ointment: A few journalists, including industry reporter Rona Barrett, accused Benton of rampant sexism for supposedly suggesting that fathers are better parents than mothers. Benton, who at one point during his bachelorhood dated feminist Gloria Steinem, was stung by the criticism. That Joanna Kramer was a character largely based on Sallie, his wife, only intensified Benton’s discomfort.
Benton based the break-up scene at the start of Kramer vs. Kramer on acrimonious conversations during a rough patch in his marriage. There was a time, he admits, when Sallie felt he wasn’t taking her seriously as an artist.
‘‘Joanna’s leaving scene is based on a time when Sallie and I had a terrible argument,’’ Benton admitted. ‘‘And I was afraid that she was gonna leave. And I knew, if I could keep her talking, she would stay. The secret of Joanna’s leaving is, Ted couldn’t keep her talking. So what I did is, I took that element out of my own life, and used it in another way. What I hope is, essentially, a compassionate and sympathetic vision of Joanna is part of Sallie.
“It’s very difficult to talk about this,’’ Benton added, ‘‘because somehow I end up being in all of everything I’ve ever done. I’ve stolen bits and pieces from the lives and characters of the people around me. And I have twisted them in one way or another. I have oftentimes, I’m afraid, taken the truth and turned it into a lie that would serve the narrative that I need. Or shifted it. Or betrayed it. The people I love are very wary of me now, because I’m liable to use any moment with them.’’
Yet it was the conspicuous absence of precisely this kind of emotionally resonant truth that undid Still of the Night, the cold-blooded Hitchcock homage that Benton directed as his next project. Adapted from the early drafts of Stab — the script Sam Cohn warned him not to film — Still of the Night featured Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep in a self-conscious thriller that freely borrowed images and plot devices from the Hitchcock oeuvre. It is, quite simply, the worst film Robert Benton has ever directed, a fact even Benton is willing to concede. ‘‘When I tried to do Hitchcock,’’ he said, ‘‘I became a slavish imitator of Hitchcock.’’
Still, Benton defends Still of the Night, with a fair degree of persuasiveness, as part of a necessary learning process. ‘‘None of us as writers, journalists, screenwriters or whatever, expect ourselves to proceed with a sort of machine-like progress, in an evenly paced, steady movement forward. Sometimes, those lapses, those failed pictures, are necessary to get us to some other place.’’
In Benton’s case, the failure got him to Places in the Heart. If only for that reason, it’s tempting to view Still of the Night as a kind of purging, as a way for Benton to shed the phony veneer of super-cool pseudo-sophistication. Certainly, Places in the Heart signaled a move in another direction, a direction pointing the way back home.
Ironically, it was during a 1975 conversation with Arthur Penn — director of Bonnie and Clyde, which was shot largely in and around Dallas — that Benton was first moved to make a sentimental journey back to Texas.
‘‘I told him about some stories about my great-grandmother,’’ Benton said, ‘‘and he said, ‘Gee, why don’t you make a movie out of that?’ So I thought about it, and started doing some research — particularly about the people in the family who were bootleggers.’’
Benton wrote a bit, then put the uncompleted script aside to do The Late Show. He didn’t pick it up again until after Still of the Night was in the can.
‘‘And what started out as a picture about bootlegging and violence in Texas — I inserted into it this story about my great-grandmother, so the picture wouldn’t be quite so violent. And she sort of muscled everybody else out of the way.’’
Benton wrote the character of Emma Spaulding, a Depression era widow determined to hold onto her farm and her family, with Sally Field specifically in mind. Field complemented Benton’s lovingly felt, richly detailed script with a performance of tremendous passion and conviction. It was only fitting, then, that each won an Oscar — he for Best Original Screenplay, she as Best Actress — for Places in the Heart. As Benton sees it, neither the role nor the film would have worked without her.
‘‘This is a picture,’’ Benton said, ‘‘about another time, another economic world. And for people in California and New York, another geography. And I felt that, even among the other fine actors in this country, many of them would have a tendency to act the part, to comment on the part, to sort of stand a little bit outside that person. I wanted an actor who would do what very few actors can do — disappear into the movie, disappear into the part. Sally can do that.’’
It’s true: You can’t see any traces of an actress when you study the unaffected sincerity of Fields’ performance. But, then again, neither can you find any traces of the studied irony Benton brought to much of his early magazine and movie work. More than a decade ago, critic Richard Corliss described Benton and Newman as ‘‘two street-smart Manhattanites trying to immerse themselves in rural, past-tense arcana,’’ entertaining audiences best ‘‘when they pull the charade off.’’ But it’s not a charade anymore for Benton.
Neither Places in the Heart, a generous-spirited memory play, nor Nadine, a rollicking good-time romp, can be viewed as anything but an expression of affection for a place that once was home.
Later in his life, after some of his early rebelliousness had cooled, Truffaut used to joke that ‘‘I’ve now come to make movies that I would have attacked as a young man.’’ Benton knows just how Truffaut must have felt.
‘‘I’m making the exact opposite kind of movies,’’ Benton told me, ‘‘that I would have made when I first came to New York.’’ In large part, Benton’s moved by an emotion as homespun simple, and emotionally complex, as homesickness. His mother passed away a few years ago — his father died in 1969 — so, even though he still has friends and relatives in Waxahachie, there’s no truly compelling reason for him to visit Texas ‘‘unless I make movies there.’’
But even if he specialized in, say, gritty urban street dramas about New York, Benton is certain he would find other excuses to go back home. In fact, now that their son is off at college, Benton and his wife are toying with the notion of renting a house somewhere in Texas for a few months, a place where she can paint and he can write.
‘‘My father grew up in East Texas,’’ Benton said. ‘‘And as he got older, he began this thing of needing to go back to East Texas. I don’t know what it is. But something happens to you at some point in your life, and I don’t know what causes it. But there is this bizarre, animal need to go home. And you can stand on a street corner and ask yourself, ‘Why am I here? What am I doing?’ You know you’re not having a great, moving experience.
‘‘But you do need to be here.’’
