‘I’m Interested in Taking People Into an Enlightening Experience,’ Director Says

The day after the screening of “Extremities,” director Robert M. Young kept thinking about the woman in the audience. She didn’t tell him her name, nor did he ask. He figured her to be in her late 30s. At the end of the taut drama, she had hung back in the MGM theater to talk.

“She started crying, but she was angry too. She had been raped as a child,” Young recalled, in the white-walled quiet of his Westwood home.

“She said, ‘This is not life. In life, the woman doesn’t get away. . . .’ ”

Adapted from the play of the same title, “Extremities” depicts the actions of a woman (played by Farrah Fawcett) who fights off a rapist, and who does so with what some might consider some rather extreme measures. Like the play, the movie provokes.

“I tried to explain to her what I was trying to do,” Young said. “The film isn’t life, but it is to try to take you into an experience, and we have an opportunity to inform through the structure, to take usinto a place where we may not go in life. I’m not interested in just mirroring life; I’m interested in taking people into an experience that can ultimately be enlightening or revealing.

“And I told her about my daughter.”

Before Young would commit to direct “Extremities,” which opens today, he had his daughter read the script by William Mastrosimone, who also wrote the play. Young wanted her approval. The oldest of his five children from two marriages, his daughter is now 30 and living in North Carolina. She is single. He prefers not to see her named in print.

When she was 16, she was pulled in off the street, held captive in a Greenwich Village apartment near their home for 3 1/2 hours and raped. As in the movie, the man had a knife and threatened to kill her.

In the hospital, his daughter refused to cooperate with the police. “She also had her schoolbooks with her, and he knew her name. He had her name and telephone number and address, and she said he told her, ‘If anyone comes back here or anything, if I get caught, I’m going to get out, and I’m going to come and kill you.’ ”

In the movie, Marjorie (the Fawcett character), who is about 30, thwarts the rape, and her attacker warns: “They lock me up, I get out, I get you.”

Unlike the movie character, Young’s daughter was unable to fight back.

“She used to wake up at night, sometimes crying and shouting, screaming like in rage because she had never been able to . . . to be a victim, to be victimized, and to have to not consent to it, but to go along. . . . He finally let her go. She had kept talking to try to keep reminding him she was a person. My daughter told me she was very proud of herself to survive.”

Young said that when he first read the “Extremities” script, he turned it down. But on the advice of the agent and his lawyer, who’s also his best friend, he took a second look.

He said he had been afraid a movie might be “melodramatic” or “salacious.” He had seen enough movies “which had rape in them which are titillating.” He was also concerned about “the vigilante side” of the story. He said he was afraid to make another “Death Wish.”

And Young had just been burned on a movie called “Saving Grace.” The movie, about a Pope who resigns and goes to live in a small Italian village, came out in a different cut than the one he had made. “I didn’t have any control, and it was a horrible experience.”

So at first glance at “Extremities,” Young kept thinking, “What if it doesn’t work right?”

At 61, the director has a cherubic face with a gray-and-white beard and piercing blue eyes. He is an intense man, gesturing with his hands, sitting forward in his chair. He is what one might label an issues-oriented director; his themes tend to involve the poor and the dispossessed.

Young was somewhere in the South Pacific as a Navy combat photographer during World War II when he knew, suddenly, just like that, that he wanted to be a film maker. “In those days there wasn’t even an expression, film maker ,” he noted.

From an artsy New York family, Young’s father was a film editor. And his uncle, Joe Young (who changed the family’s Russian-Jewish name when he went into show business), was a songwriter whose works include “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,” “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and “My Mammy” (for Al Jolson). He was also one of the founders of ASCAP.

After graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a major in English literature, Young concentrated on documentaries.

“I loved making documentaries,” Young said, “because I could write, I could shoot, I could even do the sound.

“I had a lot of great adventures--I swam with all kinds of animals. I made films about whales, sharks, jellyfish, the life cycle of the octopus; I did a film called ‘Secrets of the Reef.’ It was on the Best 10 list in Time magazine in 1957.”

In the early ‘60s Young became an associate producer and director at NBC, making four of the first eight of the network’s “White Paper” series.

“Extremities” is Young’s eighth movie. With Mike Roemer, he co-produced his first full-length feature, “Nothing but a Man,” about a black railroad-gang worker in the South, in 1964. He also made “Alambrista!” (1977) about Mexican migrants in California, “Short Eyes” (1979) and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” (1982).

Young did not see the stage production of “Extremities.”

“I tend to be uninformed about a whole lot of things,” he smiled. “I am involved in my projects.”

But he did make some changes. For one thing, he toned down a bit on some of the extremities of Marjorie’s behavior, so that she wouldn’t take on the characteristics of her oppressor. “I took out those kinds of things where she became more like him.”

In the play, after burning his eyes, Marjorie hogties her attacker, tosses him into the fireplace and threatens to start a fire. In the movie, she doesn’t. Until her roommates arrive, she begins planning to bury him in the backyard.

“I never let the audience be in a safe place,” Young said of the movie. “I would never let them watch . Now a play is based on watching.

“I wanted to take people into an experience,” Young continued sounding very much like the instructor of film he once was at Yale, “to play the facts and take people into situations.

“I wanted to allow people to really understand the terror of what a woman goes through. And I wanted a woman to understand that if she didn’t fight back, it didn’t mean she went along with this. When he comes into the house, she’s petrified. She’s like a bunny rabbit with a snake looking at it. . . . “

Yet his film shows precisely the opposite, the woman as successful fighter. “It does,” Young replied, “but only at a certain point. . . .

“I wanted the audience and the woman to discharge their anger at this guy. I honestly believe there’s something that makes a lot of sense about the kind of tribal justice of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ She was not sexually raped, but she was psychologically raped. To force somebody under those circumstances to say, ‘Tell me you love me,’ the most important words in the human language in a sense, to make you say it to someone else is a very deep, deep penetration into the psyche of that person.”

Indeed, audiences do let out anger. At the MGM screening, there were shouts of “Kill the guy” and shrieks of glee whenever he was hurt. Asked whether that eye-for-an-eye philosophy doesn’t border on vigilante justice, Young said he agreed. “But that’s not the end of the film. . . . “

Young said that for him, making “Extremities” made him finally understand what his daughter meant 14 years ago after the attack. She said she had been brave. “Bravery was the act of surviving.”

And his daughter’s reaction after reading the script: She said it was “liberating.”