Alcaine

The news that John Malkovich's first film directing effort, "The Dancer Upstairs," is finally going to be released Friday might well inspire the superstitious to take cover.

Nearly eight years in the making--as a result of the usual variety of pre-production and financing hassles--the movie was completed well before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, or the calamitous seizure of a packed Moscow theater by Chechyn rebels last October. But in its tale of the perilous search for Abimael Guzman (code name "Ezequiel"), leader of the Maoist-inspired Shining Path--the notorious group that terrorized Peru from 1980 until Guzman's 1992 arrest in an apartment above a dance studio in Lima--the film has uncanny echoes of current events.

Terrorism, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon in the world. And the brand of communist guerrilla attacks launched by the Shining Path (which is believed to have killed 30,000 people) had its own particular characteristics. But the blood and chaos and fear generated by the group's operations in both the city and countryside- -as well as a fictional scene in the film that depicts a takeover of a theater during an avant-garde performance--endows "The Dancer Upstairs" with an eerie if unintended timeliness.

"On Sept. 11, I was at home in France, taking my son to his first day of school," Malkovich recalled during a recent visit to Chicago. "I flew to New York a couple of weeks later and had a screening for a few friends who said they liked it. Of course we all realized that audiences would now be seeing it with a different set of eyes, but I made no adjustments or changes. I didn't rethink anything when the Moscow theater attack happened, either. The only thing I did then was to right away call my good friend, the Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite, because we had often talked about doing a play together in Moscow, and I just wanted to see how she was."

Malkovich's interest in the Shining Path story began when he read an article in London's Daily Telegraph about the book by Nicholas Shakespeare on which the film is based. Shakespeare was the son of a British diplomat, and had grown up in Lima during the early years of the Shining Path's exploits.

"I have always believed that terrorism is an injudicious response to a sense of victimization," Malkovich said. "I think it is murder, not politics. But I was not particularly drawn to this story because of its look at terrorism. It was the individual people in the story, the tone of the story, that attracted me. It is the way it looks at the corrupting influence of power and ideology, and at the notion of loss in all its various forms and guises. As for Peru, I've had a fascination with it from the time I was a little boy and read about Machu Picchu in a National Geographic magazine."

The film tells the story of an idealistic lawyer-turned-police investigator (played by Javier Bardem) who has spent years tracking down Guzman, the delusional philosopher-turned-terrorist mastermind. Along the way, he also falls in love with his daughter's ballet teacher (Laura Morante), who turns out to be even more complicated and elusive than she seems.

"I think that half of all the people we meet we get wrong," said Malkovich, by way of suggesting how terrorists can blend into the fabric of daily life. "Other people change, we change ourselves, our interests no longer coalesce. Or maybe we didn't really know them all along. And there is a tendency to see in other people what we would hope to find."

Certainly anyone looking at Malkovich's career should not be at all surprised to find him behind the camera. He has frequently directed in the theater, acted in more than 60 films both in the United States and abroad, and been involved in the crafting of adaptations and screenplays.

"From early on I would always hang out with the cameramen and the technicians on a movie set," Malkovich said. "I already knew about acting. What I had to learn was what the camera chose to see--and why and how it saw what it did. Of course then you just have to do it.

"The one thing I knew in terms of the look of the film [which was shot in Quinto, Ecuador and Porto, Portugal, after the Peruvian authorities made it clear they did not want such a movie shot in their country] was that I didn't want it to look like any other movie. I didn't want it to refer to another movie. I also wanted to shoot it quickly. I had a wonderful director of photography, Jose Luis Alcaine--a Spanish cinematographer who has made more than 100 films. But I got up every morning and set up the shots and did a lot of the shooting myself."

"I like to go fast," said Malko-vich, who produced "Dancer" with his own production company, Mr. Mudd (created in collaboration with early Steppenwolf producer Russ Smith and Lianne Halfon, and named after his driver on the film "The Killing Fields"). "I think too much time is wasted on cinematography. I'm interested in storytelling, not in painting. Most directors can make 'pictures' but they can't tell a story or develop characters."

Although he claims not to be a political person ("My approach tends to be to look at a sick tree and ask: What's wrong with it, and then can it and should it be saved?"), he has never hesitated to express his opinions.

"I would say I'm not in line with the French regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, totalitarianism in general, or the idea that the U.S. is always and forever responsible for every evil that has ever happened," said the director, with his teasing half-smile. "But I love Europe and I love living there. I have great friends there, and a great life.

"Of course the Europeans' idea that they are the only people who think or read or understand the world is patently false. And if I cared more about what they said I suppose I would be insulted. Anyway, I think there is a huge confusion in humans between their opinions and their fears. And you really have no idea about what happens in history until many years after an event has occurred."

Still drawn to the theater--he recently staged a Paris production of Terry Johnson's "Hysteria," the play about Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali he directed at Steppenwolf Theatre several seasons back- -he also is at work on several movie projects.

This fall he will be in front of the camera again to star in "Color Me Kubrick," playing the role of the Englishman who for many years was a surprisingly successful Stanley Kubrick impostor.

"It is said that he even had dinner with [former New York Times theater critic] Frank Rich," said Malkovich, clearly enjoying the possibility of such a ruse.

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