RUNNING ON EMPTY ADAM SANDLER TAPS INTO EMOTIONAL RESERVES FOR THE POST 9/11 DRAMA 'REIGN OVER ME'.

Byline: Glenn Whipp

Film Writer

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mike Binder was in Manhattan, doing a live interview on "Good Morning America" to promote the premiere of his HBO series "The Mind of a Married Man."

Diane Sawyer was in the middle of a question when she paused, hearing something through her earpiece. She then changed course and said, "We're going to go to Charles Gibson for a story. A small plane has just hit the World Trade Center."

Binder's interview was over, but his connection to that day had just begun.

Five and half years later, Binder's response to the aftermath of 9/11, "Reign Over Me," arrives in theaters. It's not a 9/11 movie, however, more of a meditation on the healing balm of friendship and what it must be like for someone to lose everything in a national tragedy and have that event replayed over and over again in the news media.

"I walked around that night and there were all these people crying and you knew they had lost someone," Binder says. "A couple of years later, I was in New York with my family, and I just thought, 'There are still people wandering the streets who lost someone that day.' Everyone else has moved on, but these people are still living with it. What's that like?"

In the movie, which opens Friday, Adam Sandler plays such a person, Charlie, a man who lost his wife and daughters on 9/11 and has sealed off his memories and his grief, holing up in his apartment, listening to music, playing video games and remodeling his kitchen over and over and over again.

The movie's central focus is on Charlie's friendship with an old college roommate, Alan (Don Cheadle), and how the relationship helps both men -- Charlie, to finally confront the past and heal, and Alan, to acknowledge the built-up resentment he feels in his marriage and career.

"There's a lot going on in this movie," says Jada Pinkett-Smith, who plays Alan's wife. "And that's something of an understatement."

Binder wrote the role of Charlie for Tom Cruise, but Cruise passed.

Sandler got the screenplay, and, initially, passed, too.

"The first time I read the script, I thought it was pretty incredible, but I was afraid of it, so I put it away," Sandler says.

"One night a month later, I pulled it out and read it again, and it was just very moving to me. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It hurt my heart. It also made me laugh. So I told my guys to call Mike and ask if he was still interested."

Sandler and Binder changed the character ("rounded off the edges," as Binder puts it) from a man who had lost his drive to a guy who had lost his sense of fun.

Even with the rewrites, Sandler wasn't sure that he could play the character. He had stretched his acting before with Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love," but Sandler understood that character's seething anger from the get-go. With "Reign Over Me," he was lost, often calling Binder in the wee small hours of the morning to ask for help.

"This movie, I had to create a guy. Every time Mike told me, 'You can do it, you can do it,' in my head I was thinking, 'I hope I can do it. I don't want to let you down. I don't want to let anyone down who has been through this tragedy.' So I put a lot of pressure on myself."

At least he had company. Sandler and Cheadle would often kibitz, asking each other, "Do you have any idea who your guy is yet?" For Cheadle, the problem was that the source of Alan's midlife frustrations was unknown to the character. That's realistic for many men in their 40s who are unable to put their finger on their dissatisfaction with life. But that didn't make it any easier for Cheadle to bring the character off.

"Mike and I bumped heads a lot ... it wasn't a fun, relaxed situation," Cheadle says of script revisions with Binder. "Then I thought: 'Maybe it would be interesting to play a part where the character doesn't know the problem and I don't know the problem. I could use the frustration I felt as an actor with the character's frustration of not knowing what's wrong."

Sandler was reluctant to discuss his process, but Binder says he often felt bad for putting him in a bad place.

"There were takes when he'd be so upset, and he'd go in the other room. I don't know if he was looking at pictures of his dad or something, but he was doing something to go somewhere," Binder says.

(Sandler was very close to his father, Stan, who died in 2003.)

The results are striking, easily Sandler's most layered performance in his career. But he says he won't be taking any more dramatic roles for a while.

"I'm just pretty light. I don't get too heavy. I snap a lot, but I get over it pretty quick. This guy had to hold his pain, and I tried to do that throughout the shoot as much as I could. It was painful, but I knew it was important to feel as much as I could. I'm in no hurry to do it again."

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

[e-mail]

Daltrey, Vedder capture the sound of one man's grief

Given that "Reign Over Me" is named after a Who song, a song that filmmaker Mike Binder played incessantly (along with the rest of "Quadrophenia") while writing the screenplay, it isn't surprising that music plays a huge part in the movie's story.

Adam Sandler's withdrawn widower roams the streets of Manhattan throughout the film, headphones clamped to his head, his iPod shuffling through a playlist wholly devoted to songs he loved before he met the wife and daughters he would eventually lose on 9/11.

The playlist features Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, the Pretenders, two key tracks from Bruce Springsteen's landmark 1980 "The River" album and, of course, "Reign O'er Me," which lost the Gallic "O'er" in the movie's title after Sony Pictures marketers tested it and found nobody knew what it meant.

"It's all music that came before," Sandler says, "music he didn't share with his family."

A few years ago, Binder spent a summer working with Who lead singer Roger Daltrey on a screenplay about the band's ill-fated, party-loving drummer Keith Moon. They couldn't agree on an approach and parted, but Daltrey did read 7/8 and liked 7/8 Binder's first draft of "Reign Over Me."

Cut to last summer, and Binder is trying to convince Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder (a friend of Sandler's) to cover "Reign O'er Me" for the movie's end credits. Vedder resists, offering to write an original song instead.

"He didn't want to sing it because he felt like there was no way he could sing it as good as Roger," Binder says. "And I said, 'Well, I happen to know Roger, and I'm sure he'd be happy with it. If you want, I could get to him.'

"And as soon as I said it, I thought, 'Why did you open your big mouth? How are you going to get hold of Roger Daltrey?' He's an elusive guy. I didn't even know if he'd return my calls."

Binder never had to place the call -- a week later, he was walking along Manhattan's Sixth Avenue near the Essex House and ran into Daltrey completely by chance. Daltrey called Vedder, and the results can be heard over the film's closing credits.

"That song is a real Roger Daltrey signature singing song, this incredible mixture of joy and pain," Binder says. "Someone told me that (Who guitarist) Pete Townshend said that no matter how much they fight, whenever Roger sings that song, he remembers how much he loves him."

-- G.W.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Etched in grief

Cheadle, Sandler find friendship a balm for post-9/11 pain in 'Reign Over Me'

(2) no caption (Adam Sandler)

(3) Don Cheadle - with Jada Pinkett-Smith as his wife - plays the friend of a man who has lost his wife and daughters in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in "Reign Over Me."

(4) ROGER DALTREY

Box:

Daltrey, Vedder capture the sound of one man's grief (see text)