Star's small touches leave big impression

NEW YORK - If you ask Benicio Del Toro what he brought to his new movie, what changes he made to "Things We Lost in the Fire" - what bits he added in, or dialogue he tweaked - he shrugs and says, "We would have to open the first version of the script. Right now, the movie is what it is. It's a strange feeling - What did I bring in? You get confused." He doesn't remember, in other words.

But Susanne Bier does. "I'll give you a couple of examples of his magic," the Danish director says.

She starts with the first scene he's in as Jerry Sunborne, lawyer-turned-junkie. It's at the wake for his best friend from childhood, played by David Duchovny, who was shot on the street trying to help a woman being beaten by her husband. Del Toro's character shows up with unkempt hair, a rumpled suit, tie askew, and the sleepy eyes that are the actor's trademark. He lights a smoke and offers one to another man at the wake, a neighbor of his dead friend. The neighbor takes a few puffs and tosses the cigarette aside.

That's when Del Toro reaches down, uses his finger to extinguish the butt and puts it in his pocket. That's nowhere in Script 1, 2 - any script - that "very little gesture telling a whole thing about the character," Bier says. "He just did that."

She moves ahead to one of the last scenes, long after Del Toro's Jerry has been taken in, as a human reclamation project, by his friend's widow, played by Halle Berry, whose character is trying to raise two children - a girl, 10, and boy, 6 - through their collective grief. It's time for Jerry to head out from the protective womb of the family's garage. He must say goodbye to the little girl, who doesn't want him to go and locks herself in her room. The script called for Del Toro to talk to her through the door, Bier recalls, but he suggested that they slash his dialogue.

They did leave in an "I love you," but Del Toro proposed that his other lines be replaced by a gesture, him slipping a note under the girl's door. The audience did not even need to see the letter or hear it read. Less is more. Suggestion over statement.

"It replaced a whole lot of words and actually did something which was much more affectionate in a very simple way," says the director.

Of course, as a film is being released - "Things We Lost in the Fire" hit screens earlier this month - directors are supposed to gush about their stars, whether they have Oscars or not. But the 47-year-old director buys some credibility for her insistence that this one is a "true genius" by 'fessing up that it was not always easy to collaborate with an actor who "came to the set every morning having rewritten every scene he was doing."

Bier, who was making her first film in English, figures it was an 85/15 proposition: 85 percent of his ideas were inspirations, and keepers, the rest not quite.

To research the role, Del Toro consulted a medical authority on addiction, sat in on recovery groups and had ex-addicts tell him how heroin withdrawal was "like the worst case of flu you've ever had." But most "didn't want to turn the page," to go into much more detail, he says, so he turned to William S. Burroughs's novel "Junky," which did. He invented a scenario for why a man who grew up with Duchovny's upper-middle-class character and became a lawyer might have ended up shooting up in an addict's alley, envisioning this guy from a country club family that looked good from the outside but wasn't and who didn't feel normal until he took drugs.

"You know, he's immensely secretive," Bier sums it up, "and I think you want to open that door. You want to know what that secret is, even if it doesn't exist."