By Ted Shen
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Sinise and Perry turned out to be movie fanatics too, and so have most of the actors and directors who’ve joined Steppenwolf over the years. “We’ve always wanted to do cinematic things in our plays,” Kinney says, “bringing the light down to a certain focus, using music to connect scenes. If we had any signature in the theater world, it’d be our cinematic approach.” He wasn’t surprised when plum TV and movie roles went to fellow troupers Sinise, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, and Joan Allen. “Movie producers look to us as a training camp,” he points out. “They may not find star material, but they’ll get real good actors who already know a great deal about film.”
In 1984 Kinney turned 30 and moved to New York City hoping to jump-start a career as a film actor. “It was right after we took Balm in Gilead there,” he says. “Besides, I had a theater company in Chicago that I could return to for the periodic charge of my creative battery.” He didn’t want to deal with the rat race in Los Angeles. “I loathe that place.” Soon he made his film debut in a low-budget movie that never saw the light of day.
As he grows older, Kinney is becoming more interested in film directing. He says his experience with Ryan has given him the desire for more control over the final product. “I understand storytelling, understand what great acting is,” he says. “It’s time for me to put things together. It’s always brought me a great deal of pleasure to be responsible for the entire story onstage. The same will be true of film after the time it’s taken me to learn about cameras, lighting, lenses, framing.” He’s pretty sure he’ll get to direct an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Found in the Street sometime this year. “The money people liked the latest draft of the script,” he says. “Malkovich will be in it. And Russ Smith, the producer, has said to me, ‘It’s going to be your first film.’” If successful, the movie would speed up Steppenwolf’s plan to start a feature-production arm focusing mostly on Chicago subjects.
