Wispy, haunting and able to take the breath away: smoke. Peter Sarsgard plays a Silicon Valley mind that's going all fuzzy; Molly Parker, of the bravura stillness and myriad freckles, a stripper who Sarsgard fixes upon and to whom he proposes sharing a wild weekend in Las Vegas. Parker, her dancer's form and pale, freckled skin particularly striking as captured by digital video, is remarkable; Sarsgard is convincingly damaged. While Wang and his co-writers, the novelist-couple Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt and performance artist Miranda July, are treading on material that has been played in the likes of "Indecent Proposal" and "Leaving Las Vegas," there is something more modest, and more troubling, on their collective mind. While Wang makes use of the attenuated palette of digital video, there is also much about the heart that is bent on believing fantasy is true, and that a touch will make it so.

Humble and direct, "The Center of the World" may disappoint those who are expecting softcore titillation. While there is nudity, sex, aggression and a particularly explicit instant involving a cherry lollipop, this thoughtful, provocative essay is more about what sparks in the brain to move the other parts of the body to passion or dispassion or even self-defeating acts. The title is inspired—and invoked in an explicitly spoken metaphor within the story—by one of Gustav Courbet's lushest paintings, "The Origin of the World," a remarkable work that portrays a woman's body from the waist down: spread legs and engorged sex. Wang and his collaborators explore a few other dynamics in "Center of the World." The San Francisco-based Wang talked by phone from New York, where he was promoting the film, on April 23, 2001.

PRIDE: Let's talk about Molly Parker. She's always brave and remarkable in her choice of roles and her willingness to go to extremes. Just by allowing herself to be blank, so much bubbles up. But it's also interesting that with her skin, with her freckles and the quality of her eyes, what video does to the intricate starbursts of color of her irises in close-ups. I'm thinking of the close-ups when she's applying make-up for the first evening with Peter.

WANG: Right. First of all, that's why I picked her. She doesn't look like most of these sort of California strip girls. She has her own unique look; she's beautiful in her own way. And when she has no makeup on, you see these so-called imperfections, which are actually quite beautiful also. Then to see that layer of makeup go on and on. And her eyes are really strong, yes. I don't know. I just loved her when she came in to read for the first time. The only concern I had at that time was that she was so dignified and so graceful. So I actually asked her, can you trash yourself up some more and come in? So she did. She looked even better. For the role, at least! I mean, I liked her the first time she came in, because she's, y'know, I kind of fell in love with her that way. And then she came in more trashy, and that mix of, y'know, her own dignity, her own sort of beauty, mixed with that trashy look, was perfect. I also think she is a really brave, really brave... She did some things that were really out there. [laughs]

PRIDE: I was amazed when I saw her in her hometown last year at the Toronto Film Festival, this small woman bopping around in jeans and sneakers, but there's what you describe, this dignity and grace she has.

WANG: She actually enhanced the character a whole lot because she has a moral integrity about her. Especially with the sex scenes and what she would do and would not do. She is very controlling that way, psychologically. I saw that in her and when I cast her, that sort of played very much into her character.

PRIDE: How flexible was this? You told me you didn't have to show a script to Artisan [who financed the under-$2 million production]. I obviously know Paul and Siri's background as a couple and as novelists, but what about Miranda July?

WANG: She's a performance artist, who when she was very young, was a stripper and did a lot of pretty wild things. So she gave us more the specific information. After I pitched the idea to Artisan, I actually kind of freaked out, I said, well, I have a couple of months [before] I shoot this thing, I've gotta have somebody good to help me out. So I went to Paul. Paul was good enough to sit down and say, OK, let's figure this thing out real quick and write it out as quick as I can. So the script was very specifically written out by the time we started shooting. But Molly and Peter, once they sort of understood and got into the characters, we shot it in sequence. We very organically improvised off of it. We eliminated some things; we trusted our instinct every day to build towards the next scene and always trying to keep the next scene a little bit of a surprise. So those are kind of the guideposts we used. I think it was good to shoot in sequence to feel our way through it. To say, maybe we don't need this, maybe we can add this. So the script became truly a very good blueprint.

PRIDE: So the final credit, Ellen Benjamin Wong, is a pseudonym for everyone?

WANG: Yeah. Because I think Paul is so specific about his work, because we did improvise and change some things, we all agreed the best way for the credit to correct is to use the middle name of Paul, Siri and myself. That's all our middle names. [laughs]

PRIDE: It's a really simple story. What kinds of familiar tales were you working toward or against? It'd be easy to lump this with "Last Tango," "Indecent Proposal" or "Pretty Woman" and the like.

WANG: Yeah. Those were all kind of in the back of my head. If there's one that was more inspirational, it was the original script for "Pretty Woman," which was quite dark and brutal.

PRIDE: "3000," it was called, for her price.

WANG: Yeah. I wanted to set up a very simple premise. Whether it's been done or not before doesn't bother me. I just wanted a simple premise with these two characters and spend three days of intense sex, penetration or no penetration with them, that was what I was interested in. So it's almost like a documentary or docudrama of three days with these two people after she set up the rules. I'll go with you, we'll play, but no penetration. It's the details of that I was interested in. I think that's different from a lot of the films [we mentioned].

PRIDE: Simplicity seems to have scared as many reviewers as the idea of intellectualizing sex or ideas about role-playing. They want something more, some subplot or complication—something fable-simple seems scary.

WANG: Years ago, I remember seeing a lecture, a discussion between Jean-Luc Godard and Pauline Kael. It was quite fascinating. Pauline Kael represented the subjective American criticism and Jean-Luc Godard represented the Cahiers du Cinema perspective, which is that American criticism has nothing to do with analysis, some kind of more objective, scientific understanding of films. I think again, the critics that have come out this time [to review "The Center of the World"], it really tells me more about the critics than about the film itself, which I find kind of depressing. I mean, I'm not looking for good reviews or praise, because I think if you take the good reviews, you also have to take the worst reviews, too. But it's just that there's no real interesting analysis of this film, or trying to understand this film. A lot of people are reacting very personally to this film, because, y'know, the film takes them on somehow. A. O. Scott [in the New York Times] went out to kind of persecute both Paul and myself, more than anything else, which is very surprising. I just think that... I dunno. It's kind of a sad state that American criticism has become.

PRIDE: The articles are wildly different. Novelist Steve Erickson wrote a lovely appreciation of the film, and your underrated "Chinese Box," in his piece in Los Angeles, but more of it is like in the L.A. Weekly, Manohla Dargis fits the film into an interesting thesis about the recurrent depiction of female characters in U.S. movies as subservient whores or the Village Voice's writer saying the movie lacks the integrity to get you off—

WANG: Right! [laughs] Or Mick LaSalle from San Francisco, who basically said, it tries to take a feminist perspective on it, yet the woman is raped, and blah-blah-blah-blah, I don't get it at all.

PRIDE: Criticism is unavoidably a form of autobiography, and ideally, that would be a good thing, but in this particular case, it amazes me when reviewers take what characters say as the pure, ironic, unmediated voice of the filmmaker, instead of being what characters say or do.

WANG: Yeah. That's right. That's sort of the problem with it right now. But, y'know, like you said, you also miss a great Pauline Kael, too. It is biographical in sense of the review itself, but nobody has the ability to write as emotionally as she does. It's tough. The other thing that's really interesting is that you make a big studio movie and it's hard to ride the line, to not compromise and [struggle] to make a really interesting studio movie. And then you make a small movie and you take a lot of chances, and you're not given a lot of credit for trying. Everything has to be perfect or right or within their expectations. This film was done with, basically, a burst of energy. It wasn't intended to be a very finessed and very specific kind of film. I made it very simple, almost like a three-character play, very direct. It's [all about] energy. But it seems very hard to make a film like that these days, commercially, money-wise, in the end, no one lets you get away with it. You can't make any mistakes.

Also by Ray Pride

WRITER'S STRIKE
After a European-set thriller collapsed, Helgeland pulled into his quiver of notions and came out with this exuberant, if shambling popcorn picture, a period melange set in the world of jousting that combines elements of "Prince and the Pauper, "Ever After"-style romance, a separated father-and-son story strand, road-movie buddy comedy, Pythonesque scatology and musical numbers of unabashed anachronism.
(2001-05-10)

WB-SPLOITATION
J. S. Cardone's eighth feature, "The Forsaken," is a hurtling, old-fashioned slam-bang near-Tromafilm variation on "Near Dark," noisy, restless and cheerfully, unabashedly "B."
(2001-04-26)

KINGDOM COME
Life was hard during the California Gold Rush; contemporary art film distribution may be slightly tougher.
(2001-04-19)

MULLETING IT OVER
David Spade's newest star vehicle, likable, headlong and often nonsensical, finds the small comic playing an obstinate, put-upon janitor in acid-washed jeans and a ratty mullet wig, who lives for Van Halen and a dream of rejoining his family -- who deserted him at a Grand Canyon rest stop when he was only 8 years old
(2001-04-12)

WORLDS KNOWN
(2001-04-05)

BLOWN
(2001-04-05)

THIS AMERICAN SO-CALLED LIFE
(2001-03-29)

WHOLE CLOTH
(2001-03-29)

COLOR BIND
(2001-03-22)

WORDS ON PICTURES
(2001-03-22)

OFF CAMERA
(2001-03-22)

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
(2001-03-08)