When Barry Levinson made his feature directing debut with the autobiographical dramedy “Diner” in 1982, many expected him to continue making similarly handcrafted, personal stories. Levinson delivered on that expectation with memory pieces set in his native Baltimore like “Tin Men,” “Avalon,” and “Liberty Heights.”
Yet right from the beginning, Levinson mixed things up by taking on adaptations and other assignments that didn’t originate with him — he followed “Diner” with the big studio Robert Redford vehicle “The Natural,” and followed that with a Steven Spielberg-produced fantasy film (“Young Sherlock Holmes”), before returning to more personal filmmaking with “Tin Men.”
It’s a pattern Levinson would continue throughout his career, alternating original screenplays with assignments where he would often — as in the case of “Rain Man” and “Bugsy” — find the sweet spot between commercial appeal and artistic ambition. Equally adept at auteurist passion projects as he was at mounting mainstream crowdpleasers from popular IP like “Disclosure” and “Sphere,” Levinson became a figure unusual in Hollywood cinema: an idiosyncratic personal filmmaker who was also comfortable working as an old-fashioned journeyman classicist — John Cassavetes and Michael Curtiz in the same body.
To be a Levinson fan in the 1990s meant that in the same year you could savor both the offbeat comedy “Jimmy Hollywood” — a movie only Levinson could have made — and the Michael Crichton adaptation “Disclosure,” the kind of film Hollywood was cranking out by the dozens at the time but which also seemed singular thanks to the intelligence and visual imagination Levinson applied to the material.
“Disclosure” kicked off a series of high-profile Levinson assignments for Warner Bros. based on bestselling books, the second and best of which was “Sleepers,” the writer/director’s 1996 adaptation of Lorenzo Carcaterra’s fictionalized account of his harrowing childhood spent in a juvenile detention center and the conspiracy between him and his friends as adults to exact revenge on their tormentors. A well-resourced, impeccably cast (including Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Robert De Niro, Jason Patric, Dustin Hoffman, Billy Crudup, Minnie Driver, and more), and beautifully scored (by John Williams at his best) adult drama, it’s one of Levinson’s best movies from an era when he was cranking out great stuff on an almost yearly basis.
Brad Pitt in ‘Sleepers’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
When asked about his varied output at the time, Levinson says it was less about strategy than instinct and taste. “It’s always hard to explain why you want to do what you want to do,” Levinson told IndieWire. “Something just gets into you, and you can’t let it go.”
With “Sleepers,” there was something about the years of consequences for one careless action — four young boys stealing a food cart and setting off a chain of events that would lead to their incarceration — that Levinson felt would be worth exploring.
One of the most interesting things about “Sleepers” now, 30 years after its release, is its restraint — although the film is violent and filled with heightened situations, Levinson and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus eschew melodrama in favor of a subtler approach that pays huge dividends in the movie’s final moments, when the emotional impact of all that the characters have been through is felt with full, undiluted force.
“I gravitate toward things that have a strong point of view, but I’m not looking to throw it in your face,” Levinson told IndieWire, noting that the key to “Sleepers” was adhering to a kind of understated naturalism without sacrificing the potential for drama.
“You have to find a style that’s naturalistic but has an element that’s visually interesting,” Levinson said. To that end, Levinson, Ballhaus, and production designer Kristi Zea (both of whom had worked on another 1990s New York classic, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”) devoted themselves to shooting in locations that were accurate to the movie’s 1967-1981 period while also offering possibilities for atmospheric lighting and deep, autumnal colors. The compositions are precise and hypnotic, though Levinson says he likes to keep himself as loose as possible on set and tries not to lock actors into specific movements or blocking from the outset.
“I know certain things that I want, but I don’t necessarily want to manufacture it,” Levinson said. “If you lay it out too much — saying, ‘now step over here, and go over to the couch’ — that can get into the actor’s head and affect their spontaneity. Even if you want to get them there, you don’t want it to feel like a mechanical process. I try to keep the environment on set as casual as possible, because I find that anytime you apply pressure, people have a tendency to tighten up and you don’t get the same personality and the unpredictable nature of the emotions and communication.”
‘Sleepers’ cast: Joseph Perrino, Robert De Niro, Geoffrey Wigdor, Brad Renfro, Jonathan Tucker.©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Levinson has had the occasion to think about “Sleepers” for the first time in decades thanks to a new 4K UHD edition from Warner Bros., though he tends not to indulge in looking back at his earlier films. “I’m glad they restored it, but I personally don’t revisit the films after they’re done,” Levinson said. “For me, you have an idea, you do the work, you try to put it all together, and then it goes out into the world, and that’s it.”
Right now, Levinson is looking to the future and hoping to make one of two projects he’s been working on. “One is a comedy, and one is a real drama; they’re totally different from each other,” he said, once again displaying his penchant for jumping between tones and styles. Although he knows the business has changed drastically since the days when studios would mount his sophisticated adult entertainments with high production and marketing budgets, Levinson is still intent on finding ways to make the movies he wants to make.
“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but the business is in an awkward time right now,” Levinson said. “It doesn’t know where it’s going. I just try to do the things that interest me, and they’re all over the place. We shot ‘The Humbling’ [a Philip Roth adaptation starring Al Pacino] for $2 million because no studio wanted to make a movie of that nature. We had a great cast, and we shot it in my house in Connecticut. You have to look at what’s going on now and say, are these just the same transitions that the film business has always gone through over the decades? Probably. So you just have to find a way to do what you want.”
Warner Home Video will release “Sleepers” on 4K UHD April 21.