Sean Penn plays a charismatic governor in 'All the King's Men'

TORONTO—During the Toronto International Festival, most of the of the cast of “All the King’s Men” stayed at the posh Four Seasons Hotel, where fans with cameras stand watch night and day.

Sean Penn, who stars in the film as a 1930s Louisiana governor, Willie Stark, has characteristically hidden himself away a half-mile away, in a hotel suite so white you wouldn’t be surprised to find him wearing sunglasses.

Penn isn’t. He’s in his usual rumpled suit jacket, complementing that now-weathered face, which makes him look more and more like the 1940s and `50s character actors he most admires. He’s smoking, of course, and is, as always, forthright to the point of bluntness. Asked why he felt it was worth revisiting “All the King’s Men”—the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1946 novel filmed in 1949 that won a best picture Academy Award and the best actor Oscar for Broderick Crawford, who played Louisiana governor Willie Stark—Penn admits it was all new to him.

“I had never read it,” says Penn of Robert Penn Warren’s tale of populism and political and personal corruption, considered to be one of the finest fictional examinations of American politics. “I knew of it, but it had just slipped past me. And I had never seen the movie. So all I saw was a hell of a script by Steve Zaillian, who I had worked with years ago on `The Falcon and the Snowman’ and had always wanted to work with again.

“Then I read the book, and I watched the movie, and basically thought it was pretty dated. So I wasn’t intimidated by that. And it clearly hadn’t been shot in New Orleans, so it lacked authenticity. I figured if we could put that back in it, we might have something.”

The New Orleans of “All the King’s Men” is the New Orleans of Huey (Kingfish) Long, the legendary populist demagogue who won office by championing “the little man” he claimed was being exploited by the big boys in the state house and the oil companies that owned their votes. This was a theme that the politically active Penn could warm to, noting, with cocked-eyebrow understatement, “that some people might find some contemporary relevance in it.”

In “All the King’s Men,” Willie Stark is a small-potatoes, do-gooder local official who attracts big-time attention following a tragic fire in an elementary school, a consequence of shoddy construction. Stark had publicly accused the local pols of taking kickbacks from the builders.

Had “All the King’s Men” arrived on its original release date of December 2005, it would have been in theaters just months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, which could have given the film even more resonance. But it was called back for “fine tuning”: That’s often studio-speak for when a film tests badly in marketing screenings, or when the studio chiefs are disappointed.

Penn bristles at the suggestion that a movie of his would have stooped to capitalize on the lingering horror of Katrina. A year to the day before this interview, Penn was in a small boat in New Orleans, a volunteer rescue worker in what he calls “the hot, black water.” He was criticized by the Fox News-talk radio crowd for being a grandstander, but he says his connection to New Orleans was long-established.

“I’m a road rat, so I had spent some time enjoying and entertaining myself there even before I went there to make `Dead Man Walking.’” says Penn. “There’s a culture there I can appreciate, a part of America that somehow resisted a lot of homogenization. I think if you asked Steve (Zaillian ), that was one of the things he wanted to look at in `All the King’s Men.’ I know it’s something I thought about a lot.”

Before filming began in January 2005 on the movie, which costars Jude Law as a patrician reporter who goes to work for Stark when he’s elected governor, Kate Winslet as the wealthy beauty Law loves, and Patricia Clarkson as Stark’s chief of staff and mistress, Penn went back to Louisiana to bone up on Long’s history. He visited his birthplace in Winn Parish, and sought out Long’s living relatives: “There’s a whole lot of Longs in Louisiana,” he says. “A lot of them followed in his footsteps.”

Huey’s brother Earl was three-term governor of the state, and his son Russell was one of the longest-serving and most powerful of U.S. senators, representing the state from 1948 to 1987.

“Huey Long is still beloved there,” says Penn. “Even those who despised him admired his political acumen, and no one can dispute the good he did for his constituents ... The issue is always what he had to do get that done, and how much he personally profited.”

The original 1949 film casts Stark/Long as a venal, primal figure; Zaillian, who wrote “Schindler’s List,” restores the more complicated Stark of Warren’s novel.

“I like the guy for the same reasons Louisianans like the guy,” Penn says. “He had a crude charisma, and he spoke straight to you—not straight truth, maybe, but directly to you. And there was always a large sense the major part of him wanted to do right by things.

“It’s the reason Bill Clinton is a rock star. There’s intelligence and charisma there that can captivate you. It doesn’t mean that in 20/20 hindsight we can’t look at what he did wrong, like abandoning the Haitian refugees.

“Every great politician is an actor,” says Penn, who says he felt free to portray Stark as “larger than life because he fashioned himself larger than life. If you were ever going to go big, this was the one to do it on.”

But even though Penn has thrown himself back into acting in the past five years, winning a best actor Oscar for “Mystic River,” he still finds the job difficult. Asked whether he now takes pleasure in the process, he offers a long, obtuse explanation before stopping and smiling: “The answer is no.”

Penn has now done three politically themed movies in a row with “The Interpreter” and “The Assassination of Richard Nixon.” He says it’s less a consequence of an desire to ring alarm bells—“nobody seems to listen to them, anyway”—than the fact that politics are “what the good writers are concerned with right now. And they ought to be. What’s more relevant and interesting?”

He is shooting his next film as a director, an adaptation of “Into the Wild,” Jon Krakauer’s compelling account of Christopher McCandless, who gave away his substantial savings, abandoned his car and burned his cash before going to live in the Alaskan wilderness. Penn had wanted to make the film for years, but two problems intervened: McCandless’ family was understandably wary about how he would be portrayed, and as Penn puts it, it was “hard to find the way into an odyssey taken in private.” With both issues resolved (Penn wrote the script) and Emile Hirsch cast as McCandless, filming began in June and the movie will be released next year.

“I suppose you could interpret what McCandless did as a political act,” says Penn. “You may want to wait to vote until you see the movie.”

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© 2006, Detroit Free Press. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.