In 2000, Philip Roth published the final part of his trilogy about the turmoil of postwar America, which began with 'American Pastoral' (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and 'I Married a Communist'. With his third instalment, 'The Human Stain', Roth unleashed both critical acclaim and controversy (and won the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award). 

Set during the Presidential impeachment hearings of the 1990s, The Human Stain exposes the cloaked life of Coleman Silk, a man Roth describes as "ensnared by a history he hadn't quite counted on." Silk appears to be an eminent Jewish intellectual and devoted husband. But the truth about Coleman Silk is far more complex than anyone knows. Among other things, Silk has been hiding behind a thick veil of lies - having obliterated his origins in an African-American family in order to find a freedom he thought would be impossible otherwise.  His secrets persist until he meets Faunia, an equally reticent cleaning woman half his age, who awakens something in him both sexually and emotionally that leads inexorably to a confrontation with his past.

The book's title emerges from the idea that no matter what a person does, a human being leaves a mark (whether by rage, desire, ambition or accident) on the world, a kind of scar or stain that cannot be undone.  For Coleman that stain is the deception and concealment he has carried for decades.  (In the film, "The Human Stain" becomes the title of Nathan Zuckerman's book about Coleman's secret life.)

Says Philip Roth of the title: "It speaks to that which is imperfect in us as humans. The Catholics call it original sin, I suppose.  It is simply that which creates the human mess." 

Adds director Robert Benton:  "To me, the human stain is the mark we leave on everything.  It speaks to the fact that we can't get through life without marking the world around us in some way. We have no choice.  It's part of being human."

Philip Roth began writing the novel after becoming fascinated by the idea of a character who takes the American ideal of the self-made man to an extreme, jettisoning his identity at a young age and creating a new one from scratch.  He says:  "I was most engaged by Coleman Silk, and by the great decision of his life at a young age to shove his biography overboard and remake himself as he wanted to be. Coleman's life is a success on his own terms, but his decisions have costs.  Self-determination at the expense of someone else is the beginning of his tragedy."

The idea for the novel came to Roth in the mid 1950's while a graduate student in Chicago.  Roth explains "I had a little graduate-student fling with, and who was, as we then said, a Negro.  We began to go out, and I met the, who very pale Negroes decidedly so on her mother's side.  And I never forgot her mother saying that there were relatives of hers who'd been lost to all their people.  The girl explained to me later what her mother was talking about - that these relatives, who could physically pull it off, had given up identifying themselves as Negro, had moved away to the white world, never to return.  And I never forgot, though I certainly never imagined that in such a story there was a subject for me.  Yet both the story and the people made a lasting impression.  Self-transformation.  Self-invention.  The alternative destiny.  Repudiating the past.  Powerful stuff."

Roth also wanted the novel to explore the nature of mature male friendships through the elusive, and ultimately, moving relationship between Coleman Silk and the writer Nathan Zuckerman, a character seen in several of Roth's novels.  "Male friends can be terribly important to each other," Roth observes. "Usually friendships are strongest when you're a kid, an adolescent, when you're in college, but these two men meet each other much later, when they're both free and alone, and most of all, lonely.  They come to each other out of this loneliness, and Zuckerman becomes an ear into which Coleman can pour his story." 

Roth says that he was always interested in Coleman more as a fascinating human enigma than as an emblem to sharpen a particular social or political point, although he accedes that the book might have both a social and political impact. He says of Coleman Silk's decision to "pass":  "You could describe him as trying to hide his racial identity, but that's not how he would describe it.  I think he would say he was seeking the fullest freedom he could find, and he realised he would be forever bound if he stayed in the world in which he grew up, so he took a gigantic risk."

Historically, Roth points out that Coleman Silk's story is something that happened to a significant number of Americans. "You have to remember when this takes place," explains Roth. "Prior to 1945, America was a deeply segregated country. Coleman makes his decision in the pre-Civil rights era when I suspect there were many people who made similar decisions.  It's what Coleman felt compelled to do if he wanted to be what he thought was a free man."

racial passing
The term "racial passing" has traditionally been used to describe individuals who have attempted to shift their social identity from African American to white, although it has come to have a wider meaning over the years.  In the 19^th century, passing was considered a survival technique for slaves hoping to escape from cruelty and humiliation, but it is a phenomenon that has continued into modern times.  It is a practice that has raised hard, and sometimes taboo, questions about the fluidity of identity, the relationship between the individual and the community and the price of betraying one's past.

Racial passing has long been a subject that has woven its way through American literature.  As early as the 1880's Mark Twain wrote in one of his sketches about passing.  Among others, two celebrated Harlem Renaissance novels also addressed the subject: Plum Bun by Jesse Redmon Fauset about a Philadelphia girl who discovers she can pass for white; and Passing by Nella Larson (the first black woman to win a Guggenheim), in which Clare Kendry, the daughter of a mulatto janitor father and black mother who died when she was young, takes on the life of a glamorous, wealthy white woman until she meets an old childhood friend who brings her back to Harlem. 

In the 21^st century, as social change has broadened opportunities for many, racial passing has lessened to a certain extent, but the practice continues.  Black-to-white passing is also not the only form of passing.  Stories abound of those who have "passed" in numerous ways - man for woman, gay for straight, rich for poor - in order to avoid intolerance, stave off danger or live a life that did not seem possible. 

This fall, New York University media professor Brooke Kroeger will publish a book entitled 'Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are', in which she details the complicated lives of several different contemporary Americans who have chosen to radically shift their identities in one way or another -- often with personally devastating consequences.  Using these true stories, including one of an African American man who passed himself off as a white Jew, Kroeger writes of how social and cultural situations can sometimes force honorable people into terrible deceit in the search for self. 

bringing the book to the screen
The story of Coleman Silk immediately drew media attention, but it was the book's deeper connotations as the story of a quintessentially American man that brought it to the attention of producer Tom Rosenberg. "When I first read the book, I knew that making the film would be an enormous challenge but one that I was determined to take on," says Rosenberg.  "Coleman Silk's most compelling characteristic is a will to define himself without bending to societal constraints. THE HUMAN STAIN is a classic American tale of cultural biases in collision with uncompromising individualism.  I believe we have put together the right creative team to realise the story as Philip Roth envisioned it."

"We set the bar high in undertaking this project," adds Lakeshore Entertainment president Gary Lucchesi.  "I thought it would be one of the hardest adaptations ever attempted, so the search ensued to find a writer who could adapt the book honorably.  Nick Meyer was a former client of mine when I was an agent, and he immediately came to mind.  His work was extraordinary, and I am thrilled that it attracted such tremendous acting talents as Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris."

One of America's most honored writers, Philip Roth's first published novel, the National Book Award-winner 'Goodbye Columbus', was translated to the screen in 1969, starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw.  Three years later, his fourth novel 'Portnoy's Complaint' was also made into a movie with Benjamin in the lead. His other award-winning titles include 'The Counterlife', 'Operation Shylock', 'Sabbath's Theater' and 'Patrimony'.  All of his novels have danced dangerously through the territories of sex, death, politics and morality. 

The complex themes, characters and scope of Roth's works have proven a daunting puzzle to filmmakers in recent years.  But Oscar-winning writer and director Robert Benton's incisive literary sensibilities and enthusiasm for the timeliness of the story were the keys to making a movie from a Philip Roth book for the first time in nearly four decades.

"The Human Stain is one of the seminal American novels of the 1990s," says Benton, who was an editor at Esquire magazine prior to writing the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for "Bonnie and Clyde," a film that captured the spirit of another decade.  "Embodied in the lives and struggles of a few individuals are the ambiguities, unhealed wounds and tragedies of a turbulent and pivotal time in this country's history."

a director's approach
Robert Benton approached The Human Stain as a kind of modern American Greek tragedy.  He explains: "For me, it's no accident that Coleman Silk is a classics professor at a college named Athena. I think Roth has written a 20^th century version of the Greek tragedy around modern themes.  It is really about the struggle between the individual and the community, and the price that being part of one extracts from the other.  And I believe in some sense I have sympathy for both sides of the story, both for the choices Coleman made and for what he betrayed by making them.  That's the beauty of what Roth accomplished in his novel: exhorting us to both care deeply about Coleman and understand the gravity of what he has done." 
casting
To play Coleman Silk, the fierce enigma at the centre of the film, the filmmakers chose Anthony Hopkins who, despite his Welsh origins, seemed to embody the deeper qualities that make Silk such a strong character.  Says Benton: "Coleman is a great character, but he is a deeply flawed human being.  The challenge was to make him likeable enough so that the audience is right there with him when he commits his crimes." 

Says Roth of Hopkins: "You can't pull off Coleman Silk's kind of self-transformation without tremendous power, concentration, focus, cunning and toughness and Hopkins has these things." 

To Hopkins, Silk is a kind of troubled hero.  "He's a man of great conviction and passion, a man who loathes political correctness, and in that sense he is my hero," admits the actor.  "Throughout his life, he shook the rafters and shocked people, and he just didn't care.  On the other hand, everything he does leads to disaster, and he is pulled into this relationship with a younger woman which ultimately destroys him."

Despite their radically different backgrounds, Hopkins found himself relating to Silk's desire to transcend the barriers he feels that his racial identity might present.  "I've never thought of myself of being any particular nationality," the actor says, "not because I'm ashamed of who I am in any way, but because I don't think it really makes any difference.  Coleman, on the other hand, wants to escape bigotry, racism and prejudice.  But when he says 'I'm a man, an ordinary human being and I want to do what I do' I sympathise deeply with that."

Also compelling to Hopkins is the portrait of Silk's morally and physically dangerous but very affecting affair with a woman much younger than himself, a woman with whom he shares almost nothing, except secrecy, urgent need and a kind of search for tolerance. 
"It's interesting to me the power that love and sex have to devastate a man's life, especially at Silk's age," Hopkins comments.  "I think sex can be at once a very creative and also deeply destructive force.  It has destroyed empires and destroyed presidents, and it can just rip people apart. Really, sex is one of the most powerful and frightening parts of our lives, and Coleman gives himself over to that." 

When it comes to the power of sex to transform and shake loose Coleman Silk's long buried secrets, that power is wielded by Faunia, the damaged but strong woman, with whom he strikes up an unlikely affair.  Benton describes Faunia as "possessing that dark, complicated, ambiguous, mysterious quality that I find truly beautiful, qualities Nicole Kidman also possesses."


Kidman found the role a natural segue from playing the equally complex but far more refined and erudite Virginia Woolf in "The Hours."   "I had just done a book by Michael Cunningham and to go on to doing a Philip Roth novel continued the opportunity to work with some of America's greatest writers," she says.

To further research the role of Faunia, Kidman spent some time in shelters for abused women. "Even though Faunia is a very dark character, I wanted to give her a dignity on behalf of these women," she says.  "Every woman that I talked to wanted to dispel the idea that abused women are stupid and wanted to advance the idea that they are very strong women." 

As for her complicated relationship with Coleman Silk, Kidman was excited to portray such an unconventional relationship between a man and a woman.  "I think it's lovely to see a relationship that doesn't conform to what we expect to see on screen," Kidman comments.  "Because you never really know why there is chemistry between two people or why two people need each other.  I love the line that Coleman has where he says: 'This is not my first love, it's not my great love, but it's my last love.' I think that's a lovely way of putting it.  And when he asks Faunia what she wants out of the relationship, her line is 'kindness,' which is also quite beautiful, because we all want someone to be kind to us." 

The casting (continued)
The look of the film
Director Robert Benton
Nicholas Meyer (screenwriter)

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