NEW YORK (TNA) – The wildfire disintegration of Tony Kaye’s career as a feature film director sounds something like the set-up for a really bad joke: What happens when you cross a bad boy filmmaking novice (Kaye), a hit-hungry studio (New Line), a control-junkie acting prodigy (Edward Norton), and neo-Nazis (subject of the film, “American History X”)?

Director Tony Kaye

But wait. There’s more. Let’s layer the joke with Marlon Brando (Kaye’s confidant and friend at the time), monks and nuns (recruited by Kaye to help protest New Line’s cut of “X”), Humpty Dumpty (the pseudonym Kaye insisted New Line credit as the film’s director), and a public career meltdown that makes Britney’s recent, well-documented travails look like hiccups to a heart attack.

It’s been a decade-long wait for Kaye to deliver the punch line, but he has, and it’s anything but funny. It is, however, more brilliant than anyone – even the director himself – could have anticipated. “Lake of Fire,” his epic, non-partisan documentary about abortion, is a stunning, harrowing, heartbreaking, deeply human film that gives equal time, credence, and rope to all sides of an issue that is too easily reduced to punch lines and sophomoric analysis itself.

“I wanted to try to make an important film, if I’m allowed to say something like that,” says Kaye. “I felt there was a void. There didn’t exist anywhere a film that dealt with the entire issue of abortion. I thought I could bridge that gap. I think I have.”

The sweeping effort, photographed in a stunning, elegiac black and white and already pegged as an Oscar front-runner, took Kaye 15 years and seven million dollars of his own money to complete. Though he’d never helmed a documentary before, Kaye became intimate with the works of medium greats Errol (“The Thin Blue Line”) Morris, Michael (“Roger & Me”) Moore, and Leni Riefenstahl, “despite her poor choice in subject matter,” he adds.

The English-born Kaye believes he was born to be a documentary filmmaker.

“As a kid in school, a lot of my classmates said, ‘we hope you can make a living staring at things, because that’s all you seem to do,’” he recalls with a nervous laugh. “Somehow I’ve made my way. I do make my living staring at things. I like to be plunked down somewhere or other and try to grab things, even if it’s only people talking. That’s what making a documentary is.”

”Lake” took Kaye from coast to coast, to the frontlines of crime scenes, to political rallies, prayer meetings and, most notably, to a front row seat of a graphically-depicted termination procedure. He credits the openness of his interview subjects, particularly “Stacey,” the young woman who allowed her abortion procedure to be filmed, for the documentary’s power and resonance.

“I still don’t know how we got a lot of the stuff we got. I’m baffled, really,” Kaye admits. “I believe people thought I was making a righteous film, if you understand my meaning, and were keen to have their side of the story told too.”

What “Lake of Fire” makes evident is the deeply personal, emotional nature of the abortion issue, which is too often tipped over into a political or religious soapbox. All of the “talking heads” in Kaye’s sumptuously photographed film are portraits of pain, vivid sketches of moments in time where passion and dogma overtake logic and truth.

Even after a decade and a half in the trenches, Kaye is still without steadfast opinions on the abortion debate. His film – which he calls “a journalistic investigation” – reflects this, providing no pat answers, no broad-stroked good and evil. As “Lake of Fire” finally fades to black, audiences are left only with the devastating emotional wallop of real people struggling with real issues, like the filmmaker himself.

“I’m pretty much an empty vessel, to be honest. I let things flow through me,” he says. “Sure, I have ideas. Then again, on this issue, to really have a point of view, to really understand what abortion is, it’s difficult for a man to do. I guess I could say, I’m very confused – which I think is a valid place to be.”

The film’s 15-year journey to completion saw radical changes in America’s political complexion, from the pro-choice Clinton-era to the pro-life Bush regime. The shifting political landscape provides the film with a nerve-rattling backbone.

During Clinton’s presidency, abortion clinics were in good supply and a woman’s right to choose was well preserved, even as clinics were bombed and doctors shot to death on their way to work. Today, there are fewer clinics in the country than there were 20 years ago, less medical students are specializing in termination procedures, but the peripheral, ghastly violence has largely subsided.

“I’m not a politician or a religious spokesperson. I have no agenda. But the government has changed in 15 years,” says Kaye. “Things are quieter now than they have been in a long time, but there are also less options for women. I don’t know what is the greater good or the lesser of two evils.
“I do think that if we go back to a pro-choice government, then it could all change back,” he says.

During the sprawling production of “Lake,” Kaye took the reins on “American History X,” a gritty, fictional take on neo-Nazism in America starring Edward Norton. As post-production on “X” wore on, it became clear that director, star, and studio had different notions of what the finished product should be.

Kaye, with a background in stunt art and television commercials, sought a grounded, open-ended, free-styling look at the complex, brutally violent subject matter, while New Line and Norton had ideas for additional footage that would shine more narrative light on Norton’s ghoulish character.

Kaye’s surreal protests became the stuff of Hollywood legend, as he took out full page ads in Hollywood trade papers ridiculing the studio, trotted out monks and nuns to plead his case, and even sued the studio for $250 million when they refused to list Humpty Dumpty as the film’s pseudononymous director.
The filmmaker’s stunts led his friend Marlon Brando to comment, “I hear you’re as crazy as I am.”

Kaye was blacklisted in Hollywood, dismissed as a control freak, a loon, and a lost cause.

“I behaved very egotistically during that time. I made a lot of mistakes,” he says. “But the bigger picture, I think, is I needed to check out. I needed to self-destruct and go into the wilderness for a while. I burned the bridges. I locked the doors.”

While Kaye spent the interim years completing “Lake of Fire,” he watched several other first-time helmers soar where he had flown kamikaze.

“I do wonder what would have happened had I kept my mouth shut, had I just bitten the bullet, as so many directors do, and what would I have become,” he says. “I would have had a career as a filmmaker, but I don’t know what I would have made in the last 10 years. I don’t think I would have been ready for it, in all honesty. I don’t think I had mastered the form then, not that I ever could. You’re always learning.”

With “Lake” already receiving critical accolades and being pegged as a Best Documentary Oscar front-runner, the 55-year old Kaye is enjoying a sudden resurgence in his career. Next spring will see the release of his next dramatic film, “Black Water Transit,” an Altman-esque ensemble film set in New Orleans in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Kaye is sanguine about the future.

“It feels amazing. To begin a career at 55-years-old, it’s really cool – because that’s a period of time when you really need a big win,” he says. “I’ve got that now. I’m fresh. I’ve got some experience. I’m very keen and focused on trying to do the right thing. I’m hoping I can make some very cool films.”

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