A kismet-filled Paris lunch brought Kevin Kline to role in ‘My Old Lady’

TORONTO – When acclaimed playwright Israel Horovitz was planning his new film “My Old Lady,” an agent asked him during a Paris lunch about his ideal leading man for the project.

Horovitz didn’t hesitate. He said he wanted Kevin Kline and at that moment — in a bizarre coincidence — the Oscar winner suddenly appeared at the top of the staircase at the Cafe de Flore.

“I thought they had set me up, it was like a joke,” recalled Horovitz at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. “And then I thought: ‘But how on Earth would they know that I was going to say Kevin Kline?”

“Kismet,” suggested Kline, seated alongside his director for the interview. “I’d come upstairs to use the men’s room. … I was having a coffee with a friend downstairs.”

From that serendipitous meeting, things neatly fell into place.

“(Kline) came over and I said, we’ve been talking about you,” recalled Horovitz. “Because I’ve written this movie (script) that I want to give to you. And he was very polite, so he said sure.”

When Horovitz returned to New York, he sent Kline the script and the “A Fish Called Wanda” star agreed to come on board.

Horovitz has written some 70 plays and regards “My Old Lady” as one of his favourites. It follows a troubled New Yorker who comes to Paris to claim an apartment he inherited from his father but discovers that a legal loophole prevents him from kicking out the current tenants: an elderly woman and her daughter.

Despite his affinity for the piece, Horovitz knew significant changes were required for its big-screen transformation. So he enlisted the assistance of Kline, whose long list of screen credits also includes “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Ice Storm.”

“I said, can you help me?” said Horovitz. “Because I don’t tend to like adaptations of plays, they don’t really look like movies, they’re not quite plays. So I really wanted this to be a movie … And so we would do readings, it had a lot to do with cutting stuff and … increasing the visual aspect of Paris.”

The pair actually shared a long history — first crossing paths over 40 years ago when Kline was at the Juilliard Drama School and one of Horovitz’s plays was mounted. After they noodled around with the “My Old Lady” script for awhile, Horovitz felt “brave enough” to ask “Downton Abbey” star Maggie Smith to take on the role of the imperious senior tenant. Later, he nabbed Kristin Scott Thomas to play her daughter.

The writer — whose son is Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz — laughs when recalling the tongue-in-cheek reasons that Smith and Kline gave for participating in the movie.

“She said: ‘Would you like to know why I chose your screenplay? I have many screenplays I could have done but I chose yours. Do you want to know why?’ And I didn’t think I wanted to know, but I politely said yes, and she said: ‘Because I don’t have to die at the end of your movie.’ And Kevin said to me: ‘I’m going to do it because it’s probably my last chance to get the girl.’”

When asked the real reason he wanted the part, Kline turns effusive.

“I loved the script, I thought it was unusual … it was a wonderful confluence of dramatic and comic and the tone was so elusive and the characters were complicated and realistic and the way Israel writes is, it’s not ‘one thing,’ it’s like life, complicated, complex tonally. To walk that edge was very attractive.”

“My Old Lady” marks Horovitz’s feature film directorial debut — at the ripe age of 75.

“It wanted to be a movie,” he said of his cherished play. “It needed Paris to be onscreen, not just talked about, and I felt I wanted to do something that would frighten me a little bit, something that was really different and challenging. So it just came together.”

“My Old Lady” is set to open Friday in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal.