The director Anthony Hopkins called every bit as good as Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers, and John Huston
Anthony Hopkins tends to be a pretty opinionated actor, but that doesn’t mean that he’s unwilling to give out compliments, and as someone who has been acting for seven decades, he has grown to appreciate talent more than celebrity.
Where names like Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, and Jack Nicholson could be floated in the race for the greatest living actor, Hopkins is also one of them, having seen massive shifts within the industry during his many years on screen. While not every film that he’s been in may be considered a classic, it’s hard to name a moment in which he turned in a bad performance.
In his experience, he has worked with many filmmakers who’ve been cited as geniuses, such as Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Demme, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott, and James Ivory, just to name a few, but he has also come to the defense of some of his lesser-known directors, including Robert Benton, whom he worked with on the drama The Human Stain.
Benton is certainly not a novice, as he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ for Kramer vs Kramer, the ‘Best Picture’-winning masterpiece that became the definitive film about divorce, yet his name is not often brought up as a contemporary of other legendary filmmakers of his era, such as Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, which may be because he tended to make less commercial films.
Like many of the great directors who peaked during the New Hollywood era, Benton’s career was in the midst of a downward spiral at the beginning of the 21st century. Although 1994’s Nobody’s Fool was a highly respectable drama that featured an outstanding Paul Newman performance, his subsequent film, Twilight, was a box office bomb that essentially put him in director’s jail. However, Hopkins spoke positively about working with Benton when he discussed making The Human Stain with IGN.
“I like the freedom he offers,” he said, “He’s very much like the Coen brothers, I guess. I like that, like with Kubrick in The Shining, where the camera is still and it’s menacing. This way you tell the story, you tell the damn story. He’s like John Houston and all those great directors.”
Comparing Benton to Kubrick, Huston, and the Coens might seem shocking, but it’s hard to argue with his track record, for in addition to directing the legendary war epic Bad Company, the Oscar-winning period drama Places in the Heart, the neo-noir mystery The Late Show, and the psychological thriller Still of the Night, Benton also contributed to the screenplay for classics like Bonnie and Clyde and Superman: The Movie.
Hopkins’ point about his understated direction is also a compelling case, given that it points to a different example of ‘style’, such that where many current directors seem to confuse style with being as anarchic and unpredictable as possible, the intimacy and urgency that Benton was able to bring out of straightforward material was what made him such an extraordinary filmmaker.
While it wasn’t the best film of either of their careers, The Human Stain showed that Hopkins and Benton hadn’t lost their edge and were still capable of making great cinema together. The Human Stain may have been somewhat forgotten after its release, but the industry has been in sore need of the type of adult-driven, emotional character dramas that Benton used to make.
