by Jeremy Arnold
Photos by Erik Heinila

Uli Edel is weary from a long day of directing Julius Caesar in Malta. It's halfway through the shoot of this epic TNT miniseries starring Richard Harris and Christopher Walken, but Edel is now on the phone, thinking back to the first days of his involvement with his previous project, King of Texas, which will air on TNT this June.

King of Texas is Shakespeare's King Lear presented as a Western. Patrick Stewart plays John Lear, an aged Texas patriarch whose decision to divide his cattle ranch among his three daughters leads to tragedy and madness. The dialogue is that of the period (1840s Texas), yet the play's major characters and themes are all represented, and the essence of the story structure remains the same.

A King Lear Western makes sense. Not only are the intensely dramatic character conflicts perfect for the Western genre, but the play treats landscape as important and vivid a character as any person in the story — a trait shared by the best Westerns. In fact, as Edel himself points out, no less a director than Anthony Mann longed for years to make such a picture, but he was unable to raise the financing for it before his death in 1967.

For Edel, the tremendous enthusiasm he felt for King of Texas is a necessity when it comes to choosing projects. "It's very important to feel that this is a story you have to tell," he said. "You have to think you are the right man. It doesn't make a difference if it's a feature or TV, as long as you have that feeling."

Since moving to Hollywood, Edel has directed features such as Body of Evidence (1993) and The Little Vampire (2000), the HBO movies Tyson (1995) and Rasputin (1996, which won three Golden Globes, three Emmys and earned Edel a DGA nomination), episodes of Homicide, Oz and Twin Peaks, and his most recent project, the TNT miniseries The Mists of Avalon (2001).

Working in television, said Edel, means "you have to be a shooter. You have to be fast and make fast decisions. Those are the limitations. It's an enormously tough schedule. Sometimes you move on from a scene not being 100% satisfied because there are another three scenes you have to shoot that day before the sun goes down. But if you've gotten to that moment where you feel you have found the soul of the scene, then you can move on. And with only 30 shooting days, you'd better."

Edel's involvement in King of Texas came off the success of his Purgatory, which became TNT's highest-rated original Western in 1999. That film caught the attention of Patrick Stewart, who had developed King of Texas with writer Stephen Harrigan. (In addition to playing Lear, Stewart is one of the film's executive producers, along with Wendy Neuss-Stewart and Robert Halmi, Sr.) Edel quickly came aboard.

"Stephen's script was very well worked out, with some fantastic scenes. He made an interesting choice by placing the story during the Mexican-Texan War shortly after the Alamo. He's from Texas and had the right understanding of the history of the time. He knew how those people had to talk."

For example, the script originally started with a scene of Lear announcing to his daughters that he is dividing his land among them. Edel, however, suggested opening the film with an Independence Day party at Lear's ranch, at which the daughters arrive one by one.

"This gave us a chance not only to introduce the history of the period but to introduce all our main characters," explained Edel. These characters include Menchaca (in the play, this is the King of France), a neighboring Mexican rancher and soldier with whom Lear's youngest daughter Claudia (Cordelia) is secretly in love; Rip (the fool), Lear's ranch hand; and Westover (Gloucester), Lear's neighbor and old friend with whom he fought in the Mexican-Texan War.

Another significant script alteration was to have several story lines culminate in one final set piece at Menchaca's ranch. Originally there was to have been a huge battle scene between the Texan and Mexican armies in another location entirely, but Edel worked with Harrigan to concentrate the story by creating a smaller climactic raid on Menchaca's ranch itself, where Lear at that point is already holed up with Claudia. The revised sequence "strengthened things structurally, but it was also done out of necessity — there was no way, in a 30-day shoot, we could have a big war going on with huge armies fighting each other off at a separate location."

The limitations of the shooting schedule, in other words, forced Edel to be more economical visually. But the alterations didn't stop there. The Menchaca raid sequence had now been devised by Edel and Harrigan as a fairly straightforward attack scene, but when Edel saw the actual location — specifically the long, wide rooftops of Menchaca's hacienda — he realized how much more powerful and dramatic it would be to have Menchaca's men lying in ambush on the rooftops while the Texans slowly entered below. In the finished scene, in a dramatic sequence of shots, Edel shows the Texans riding into the seemingly deserted compound, then cranes up to reveal hundreds of Mexicans waiting with their rifles. A tense standoff follows before shooting breaks out.

Edel is proud of the sequence. "It is quite visual and told through montage. There's hardly a word spoken." In the fast-paced world of television, explained Edel, there simply is not always time for all the setups required to make each sequence as visual as the Menchaca raid, but this was an exception. He had three days to shoot it and planned the scene down to the smallest detail.

Storyboards helped prepare for this sequence too, but Edel generally sees them as more valuable simply as a tool for communication with his crew, especially on international sets where misunderstandings can cause needless delays. "This way, everybody knows what I'm planning and everything can be prepared in detail. But I still have the freedom during the shoot to make changes."

King of Texas attracted a first-rate cast, an unusual ensemble including Roy Scheider, Marcia Gay Harden, Lauren Holly, Julie Cox, Patrick Bergin, David Alan Grier and Colm Meaney. They represent a wide variety of acting backgrounds — film, theater, television, stand-up comedy — yet their performances are all perfectly in tune with one another. "I'm especially pleased with how beautifully the cast worked together," said Edel. "The English actors with stage experience have a different approach from the American actors who mainly work in movies and TV."

The way to deal with such varying approaches, he said, is to "change the way you direct each actor. All actors have their own personalities and needs, and they need to be treated individually. There is no universal language. One of the jobs of a director is to find a way to communicate with a specific actor in a specific way. It's always a challenge but it's also exciting — a lot of this you do intuitively. [Ideally,] you want an actor to meld the character with the actor's own personality — you want a symbiosis of both." What Edel doesn't want are actors who don't know their lines, something "which happens more than you think, but not in this case!"

Most important for Edel is to be wide open to the ideas his actors bring to the characters which Edel has already imagined. "You need to go to the set with a stubbornness about your own vision, but if the actor's vision is completely different and you take away everything he imagined, you might end up with nothing."

On King of Texas, the power of the performances informed Edel's decisions on the film's understated and melancholy musical score. "Usually I don't make any decision about the music until I see the first rough cut. Then I can see how much music it needs, and which scenes even need music. But one thing I knew from the beginning was that I didn't want to have typical Western music. We scored it very reduced. Even in the final mix we took out some cues because I realized that the performances were so strong that they just didn't often need musical support."

"When you think of King Lear, you think of the blinding of Gloucester, which even on stage is quite an unbearable scene. But my concept was to show not so much the blinding itself, but the reactions of the two sisters to the blinding. So I played most of the scene on Marcia Gay Harden's and Lauren Holly's faces. It is much more interesting to show how their characters react — their horrified expressions turning slowly to a hint of fascination, and then ending up with them participating in the blinding. To react is as important as to act."

The cutting process enabled Edel to deal with another particular emotional challenge as well: the climactic death of Lear and his daughter Claudia. During the Menchaca raid, Lear has ventured outside to try and stop the fighting, and Claudia has followed, worried about her father's safety. But Claudia is shot by a stray bullet, and a grief-stricken Lear then dramatically carries her body out of the compound before collapsing to his own death on the ground beside her. The challenge, said Edel, was to avoid theatricality and to make Lear's grief believable and moving. "Lear becomes at the very end the ultimate tragic character. At that moment we have to feel for him — we have to understand his pain. If you don't get the audience in this scene, you haven't gotten anything. But Patrick nailed it beautifully."

Stewart's expert performance aside, a now-invisible editing choice was also integral to the scene's power. As originally written and shot, the audience was to have seen not only who killed Claudia, but also Lear then killing this man. Edel said, "it occurred to me in the editing that it might be much more tragic if Lear sees Claudia die this completely arbitrary death by a ricochet — as if nobody specific intentionally kills her. So I cut all the original shots out and it played much more tragically than before."

Muller's prior experience with Edel gave him an innate sense of the director's need and methods. For example, he knew the level of detail Edel preferred for his backgrounds, and he knew how Edel liked to organize the 1st and 2nd units for action sequences such as the Menchaca raid. This made for a much faster, more fluid shooting process. Still more important to Edel, however, was "to feel that the AD is working mainly for me, supporting me, and not trying to please the producers. On The Mists of Avalon, a difficult project, Justin turned out to be not only very good in his job, but we also became friends.

"I need a very quiet set," the director said. "I just love to work with actors, and with my crew. I don't give anyone the impression I could do it all alone. We can't do it alone. We need good people around us, people who support our vision and believe in it. The idea of working alone has actually never been very inviting to me."

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