Berenger plays detective in stylish thriller

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 28

Berenger plays detective in stylish thriller

Tom Berenger, an Academy Award nominee and Golden Glove recipient for his performance as Sergeant Barnes in “Platoon,” plays a detective assigned to protect the witness of a murder in Ridley Scott’s stylish romantic thriller, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” which starts at the Regent today. Scott established himself as a film-maker with an extraordinary eye for beauty in his first film, “The Duellists.” With each subsequent film, he has enhanced his reputation as one of the industry’s premier visual stylists.

“Ridley’s different,” says producer Harold Schneider. “No one can do what he does. The Queen Mary has been photographed hundreds of times, but never the way Ridley photographed it for this film. His vision is awe-inspiring.”

While “Someone to Watch, Over Me” does boast the rich visual style for which Scott has become known, it also marks something of a departure for the director. “In the past, I’ve either done period films or science fiction,” says Scott. “I was looking for a change of pace — for material which would take me into a contemporary world of contempor-

ary people dealing with contemporary problems. “My initial attraction to ’Someone’ was the simplicity of the plot — three characters drawn together, yet two of them never meet. I love the tight encapsulation of two worlds seen through the eyes of the central character, who is played by Berenger, and how he fares in a world he’s not used to.”

The project began in 1982 when Scott met the writer, Howard Franklin, at a social gathering and listened. to the screenwriter describe an idea for a screenplay called “Someone to Watch Over Me.” “He described it in length and in great detail,” recalls Scott. “It sounded like a great idea of exactly the scale and

focus that I was looking for. It was a very personal story, and I think I gravitated to it because of that.” i In the summer of 1986, he began casting. “I go on instinct,” he says, “and frankly, I’d been casting for months and couldn’t quite place the individual to portray the central character of Mike Keegan. “I had seen Tom Berenger’s work in ‘The Big .Chill’ and was very impressed by it. In a funny kind of way, the role he played was a tough one because the character he was portraying was a cliche — an actor playing an actor. However, he completely pulled it off and managed to make the character both sympathetic and vulnerable.” Known for varying and wide-ranging roles, Tom Berenger’s interest in “Someone to Watch Over Me” was in keeping with his reputation of an everchanging screen persona. “I’ve never played a cop before,” he says. “I liked the character because even though he is the hero of the story, he has negative qualities and makes some big mistakes. I always find that interesting — a character with a dilemma to face, confronting his personal morality.”