ShareThisTORONTO -- No kissing. No nudity. No talking to himself onscreen.
Those were among Ricky Gervais' ground rules for "Ghost Town." Director and co-writer David Koepp said the British comedian told him, "I don't kiss anybody. Nobody wants to see that. If you can't handle that, then we shouldn't do the movie."
Koepp could work around that and, in fact, didn't want the traditional crutches of romantic comedies. He envisioned the characters on the cusp of being happy.
"There's one version of a movie where people kiss and the crane pulls up and the credits start to roll and the music swells. We certainly all know that version." This isn't that version.
Instead, Koepp looked to "The Accidental Tourist," which ends with the ghost of a smile from William Hurt. The moviegoer, Koepp says, feels as if he's just about to break the tape at the finish line and that's the mood he wanted to create.
Koepp, who wrote or co-wrote the fourth Indiana Jones film, "War of the Worlds," "Spider-Man," "Jurassic Park" and other blockbusters, turned to the past for his ghostly guidance.
No matter the genre, ghost stories provide a platform to explore love, loss and longing, and the movies that seemed most effective to Koepp were such 1940s fare as "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" and "Blithe Spirit," made before the advent of special-effects technology.
In "Ghost Town," Gervais plays misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus, who doesn't like the living, let alone the dead who start haunting him after a hospital mishap. Greg Kinnear's Frank Herlihy, for one, pesters Pincus about his widow's plans to marry again.
"Ghost Town" had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the director, writers (John Kamps shares credit), Gervais, Kinnear and Kristen Wiig met the media at the posh Four Seasons Hotel. Missing was Tea Leoni, who plays Kinnear's wife and whose real-life husband, David Duchovny, had recently entered rehab for sex addiction.
Gervais, perhaps the funniest fellow of the 10-day event, talked enough for everyone, weighing in on Pincus, "The Office," HBO's "Extras," fame, bogus reports he believes in ghosts and was spooked by spirits at a Hollywood hotel, his distaste for schmaltzy endings (preferring the closing lines of "The Apartment") and even why faux fur should replace the authentic bearskin hats worn by Buckingham Palace Guardsmen. Seriously.
Affable Kinnear played sidekick, chiming in with praise for Gervais and answering the occasional question. He was starring in another festival movie, "Flash of Genius," a true story about an engineering professor who invented intermittent windshield wipers, only to have the auto industry steal his idea.
"The first time I saw him, he was larger than life," Kinnear said of Gervais. It was in the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden, where Gervais performed during the High Line Festival curated by David Bowie.
"We were going to check out Ricky, and I didn't know if we were just going to meet him. I'm sitting in this 5,000-seat theater, and in he walks with a beer in his hand, by the way, and a T-shirt and people went nuts, but he was flawless."
Entertainment Weekly, in its review of the concert that milked laughs from unlikely topics such as cancer and war, said, "with his playful grin and high-pitched squeal of a laugh, Gervais did a good job of making himself hard to hate."
The same might be said of Pincus, loathsome yet lonely. The British comedian said he laughed at this "curmudgeonly, awful, rich, successful, clever man going around saying you're all idiots."
Clad in his customary black T-shirt and trousers, Gervais added, "I've always liked those wisecrackers that sort of laugh in the face of adversity and it didn't do them any good. That's the important thing, they're still the loser -- Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Bob Hope," and Pincus is a fictional member of that club.
Gervais also felt sorry for the dentist, pointing to the way Pincus makes himself cocoa and has his pajamas laid out. "He's a man who wants order, but he's missing out on something, and he sort of knows it deep down and that always appeals to me. Pathos. Comedy-plus, I call it."
The British funnyman is the rare actor who says he's not usually the best man for the job.
"With David Brent, it was my role and I think I was the best person for the job" on "The Office" in Britain, which spawned the American hit. "Mostly I'm not. If I got offered a hundred films, 90 of them would be arbitrary, and I'd know there would be better people than me, and if I think that, I can't go into a film thinking someone else would be better for this."
He turned down a role in a sure thing, one of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" adventures. "I was busy, I just thought I don't want to sit in a Winnebago for six months to pop up as a comedy pirate. ... I get no joy out of seeing my fat face on the screen. I get joy out of the work."
Gervais wasn't surprised, by the way, that America gets "The Office" concept.
"'The Office' isn't as quintessentially English as you first might think. It's about universal subjects, about wasting your life, it's quite existential -- a bad boss, boy meets girl -- and also, all my influences are American, everything I've ever loved."
As for "Ghost Town," he suggests there's no film like it in theaters.
"You go back to the '40s and you'll find things a bit like it. Of course, there's lots more modern sensibilities and the humor's changed a little bit; it's a bit spikier than something that Jimmy Stewart would have done."
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
