With just three feature film credits to his name, writer/director/producer Tim Robbins (who occasionally moonlights as an actor as well) has already established a respectable and diverse oeuvre. In 1992 he made Bob Roberts, a satire about an extreme right-wing senatorial candidate whose folk songs charm the constituency. Three years later came Dead Man Walking, his even-handed examination of the death penalty, which garnered him an Oscar nomination for best director and star Susan Sarandon, Robbins' long-time companion, a win for best actress. And this Christmas Buena Vista will release Cradle Will Rock, Robbins' account of the censorship that took place in the 1930s on the eve of World War II and the Red Scare.

But don't call his films political. He doesn't like what that implies. "I think that, if you were to ask any person in America what they thought of politics or politicians, that's probably one of their least favorite subjects and least favorite people," Robbins contends. "So I feel like I've been kind of marginalized, or an attempt has been made to marginalize me, by using the word 'political.' Certainly, I've heard it before, but I would really question whether that's an accurate description of me or my films."

"My films are humanist films," he continues, talking to BOXOFFICE from his cellphone as he cabs to his Manhattan home after a hard day at the office. "My films are films about compassion, love and joy. They don't have anything to do with politics."

Still, it's difficult to deny that there's a common thread. Bob Roberts parodied the very political process, and Dead Man Walking catalyzed discussions on a hot-button topic, most likely because of--rather than in spite of--the care with which Robbins told all sides of the story, refusing to make a martyr out of a murderer.

"Dead Man Walking is right clear down the middle on the [capital punishment] issue," he declares. "It's fair to everybody. It doesn't condescend to anybody. People are given dignity, whose opinions I don't agree with. I take pains and make efforts to do this."

The same is true of Cradle Will Rock, a complex, multi-layered narrative with about 20 principal characters. The title refers to the historic non-production by Orson Welles (here played by Angus Macfadyen) of the eponymous musical by Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria). Banned from performing and barred from their theatre on opening night, the cast and crew of The Cradle Will Rock led their audience through downtown New York City to put on the show in an abandoned theatre sans props or costumes.

Meanwhile, Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) commissions Mexican artist Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) to paint a mural in the Rockefeller Center. Unhappy with the final product, he locks Rivera out of the building and destroys the painting.

Other subplots include efforts by WPA employee Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack) to shut down the Federal Theatre Project because of allegedly un-American themes in some of its productions and the defense of the Federal Theatre by the head of the WPA Theatre, Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), in front of the Dies Committee in Washington. And Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti (Sarandon), sells her country's greatest works of art to Rockefeller and his cronies to raise funds for the war in Europe.

Images, Welles and Materiel

The concept for Cradle Will Rock began gestating the first time Robbins heard about the play's infamous opening. "It all started with the story of that performance that evening," he says. "I was [intrigued] by the heroic nature of it. So I started working backwards, filling in the people, trying to figure out a way to arrive at the climactic ending."

As he began to research, the theatre buff stumbled across equally captivating images from the era. "The next book I read after all the research on The Cradle Will Rock was Arena by Hallie Flanagan, which was the history of the Federal Theatre. Being a theatre major in college and to not have learned that, I was shocked."

Arena led him to a story about a funeral procession for a wooden dummy. "The casting company and the audience of 'Pinocchio' staged this mock funeral march in protest of the budget cuts," he says. "I just loved the message and said, 'Well, we definitely have to have that in the movie. That's another part of the ending.' And I started filling in back from there....I pretty much knew my end. I knew my ending, and then I just had to fill in the first two acts."

One of the challenges on "Cradle" was casting contemporary actors in roles of known historical figures. "The best you can do is kind of imagine what people were like," Robbins says. "With Orson Welles and John Houseman and Nelson Rockefeller and others we had pictures, [and] it was important to get somewhat close, but we weren't doing Legends in Concert in Vegas. We didn't need look-alikes. What we needed really were people who were close in spirit to these people--what I imagine their spirits must have been like, their personalities, their energy."

Welles proved particularly difficult to cast. "It was absolutely impossible to find someone 21 years old to play Orson Welles," Robbins remembers. "Because that was the age he was at. That was his real age. There is not a 21-year-old actor with the command of the language, the deep rich voice, the incredible brilliance and precociousness that I imagine Welles to be. There's no one. That's a tribute to Welles, in a way. It makes you understand why he was able to achieve what he achieved at such a young age. He truly was special. He was brilliant. So Angus [Macfadyen] was absolutely dead-on perfect in the role, but he also is 10 years older than Welles was at the time."

Without talent such as Macfadyen's, Robbins would have been unable to pull off the climactic scene, the ultimate performance of Cradle Will Rock. "That was my biggest fear," Robbins confides. "I swear I was so afraid of coming to the end of the film and having a dud. It was so important to pull that off. We had had so many great things, so many great weeks of wonderful performances. I knew I had incredible, golden performances. But without the end, I was nowhere. "

"My fear was also that we had so much to do [in the scene], and we weren't telling [the extras] that we were going to do it," he explains. "We really only had one shot with every number. If the audience was bored, you'd really see it, because [the scene] takes place in the audience, so I really needed those extras to be part of our world."

"So I took my time with them and really laid out exactly what was going on up until this point so that they really felt like they were part of the movie. I told them about the times, and I told them that the week before there had been a labor riot and everyone knew about it. People had gotten beaten up and killed in Chicago, and there were cops in this theatre, so anything could happen. [As if to the audience,] 'But I'm not going to tell you anything that's going to happen.'"

"[I] also [told] these actors [that] they went to the original theatre downtown and saw armed guards there. 'Something is up. Something is seriously up here. [You] marched uptown with everybody else. There's a real excitement here. You know that the actors have been forbidden from performing. All you know is that Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) is going to be up here performing the entire show for you. Some of you may know some of the actors. Some of you may not. Some of you may be FBI agents.' [I] really took the time. And they really were into it. "

"I also had amazing actors. Probably most importantly, I had actors who really understood the material and were ready to do it. And I had five cameras going, so I wouldn't miss anything. "

"[Shooting that scene was] so electric and so unbelievable. Most of the people that I talked to, the actors and all the technicians, said they'd never seen anything like it in the theatre before, never felt the excitement that they felt. I didn't tell those extras once to laugh or to cry or to applaud or to cheer. It was all spontaneous....You could feel this unbelievable electricity. It was palpable. It was really, really special."

First the Close, Then the Opening

Robbins set up the significance of the final scene from the beginning moments of the film, choreographing an intricate, seemingly seamless, tracking shot that opens backstage at a movie house, where a program of newsreels detailing recent events has begun. "I'd always envisioned a kind of spectacular opening that tells the story," Robbins explains. "In a way, the shot tells us, the audience, about the world of the film and where we might be going."

"The opening helps us first of all understand when [the film takes place] without hitting you over the head with, 'Okay, we think you're stupid. Here's what you have to know before you're allowed to watch this film.' To present the newsreels in that way gives you the choice. You can either watch them, or you don't have to watch them. You can watch [Olive Stanton (Emily Watson)], and you can understand that something's going on: She's dressing. We understand that she's been sleeping there. Then we understand that she's being thrown out of the theatre, that she's a vagrant of some kind. So now we're with her and she's poor, and by the end of the shot, she's washing herself in the fire hydrant."

"And then we're up into a [second-story] apartment where some kind of creativity is happening. A composer is composing, and then he imagines that this little doll in a [model] theatre is singing, so there's a surreal element as well."

"Pretty much, that is the world of the film. I wanted to be able to tell the world of the film....I want[ed] to tell a story in this shot. I want[ed] to very elegantly and quietly and slowly show poverty. Because in order to understand why this is important, why the end of this movie is important, why their standing up in that theatre is courageous, you first have to understand that they have nothing. This is where she's starting, and this is where she could go back to. So when she stands up in the theatre, [there's] a real courage, a real dignity to it."