KONCHALAVSKY BREAKS THE CINEMA CURTAIN

Movie executives all thought I was here on a mission from Brezhnev. I think that’s why it’s taken me so long to get started. . . .

--Director Andrei Konchalavsky

It’s the outsider who best understands Hollywood. Nose to the glass, he learns the ways and means of the company town. You can’t get much more “outside” than the Soviet Union--and no Russian director since Sergei Eisenstein has had the freedom to leave. (Even Eisenstein couldn’t crack Hollywood in 1930 and retreated to Mexico.)

Now--after five years of waiting, sometimes patiently and usually not--Andrei Konchalavsky (“Maria’s Lovers”) is working in Hollywood. On first glance he would seem to be as untroubled and unfrantic and, yes, as giddy as Gene Kelly doing “An American in Paris.”

Not that the Russian has a reason to be doing cartwheels. His almost-completed $10-million “Runaway Train” for Cannon Films, which aims to be a disaster movie for the ‘80s, stars a railroad train that has a mind of its own.

The 13-week shoot has proved physically taxing even for a very-taxable international company. Required to launch this project were at least four (credited or credited) writers, three semi-bankable stars--Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca DeMornay--and enough snow machines to fill Toledo. Not to mention the actual snows of Alaska where the company headquartered and froze for a week. The movie is based on an incident witnessed a decade ago in Rochester by Akira Kurosawa, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay. It’s a tale of two inmates escaping a maximum security prison only to find themselves trapped in a train that won’t stop.

Now, in a trailer on location at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium where the film is winding down, Konchalavsky stretched out, but not to relax. Wearing a Paul Bunyan shirt, jock-socks and sneakers, the writer-director at 46 has the litheness and features of a man in his early 30s.

Walk in unannounced, and you’re apt to find him working--not on “Runaway Train,” but on “Duet for One,” the film he begins shooting in August in London with Faye Dunaway. (“Ah, Faye . . . I want her to be lighter in this movie!”) Lately when you ask major actors about directors, you’re liable to get the response, “I want to work with Andrei.” He’ll follow Dunaway with a London production of “The Seagull” with Nastassja Kinski, who starred (and was the reason behind) “Maria’s Lovers.” On back burners are projects for Robert De Niro (“Tatiana,” a love saga about a Russian emigre cellist who falls for his 13-year-old protegee) and Kevin Kline (“Rachmaninoff,” based on the life of the Russian composer-genius who died in Beverly Hills).

That’s how outsiders play Hollywood: While waiting to work, they try to stay visible. They understand that the trick of the game is staying in the game; no more, no less. “To get Jack Nicholson or Shirley MacLaine to screenings of my films, this was not difficult,” said Konchalavsky, whose 1979 four-hour epic “Siberiade” spanned three generations, two wars and won him the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. (Only a talented outsider could get movie stars to sit through a four-hour foreign-language epic, a point to which Konchalavsky agrees.) “But to get presidents of movie companies to look at my films . . . this was another story.”

So, while waiting, Konchalavsky concentrated on relationships. When “Siberiade” first played France, it was Jon Voight who called the director and arranged for a passage to Hollywood. When “Siberiade” finally got a Los Angeles release, it was Robert Duvall who hosted the opening. But that didn’t mean executive suite doors were opening.

This particular outsider at least knows what the inside looks like. His genealogy reads like a family tree of Russian aristocracy. When his painter-grandfather, Pyotor Konchalavsky, was asked to paint Stalin’s portrait, and refused, he was ostracized. (Only recently has Pyotor been immortalized--on a Russian postage stamp.) Andrei’s father wrote the U.S.S.R. national anthem and heads the country’s writers union. His mother is a translator who once ran away from Russia during a four-year love affair with an American.

Such genetic twists gives the gift of perspective: Konchalavsky knew from past history how to hold out, to wait for what he wanted. He turned down directing offers for Agatha Christie’s “Ordeal by Innocence” and Stephen King’s “Dead Zone,” among other films, and it wasn’t like he could afford to look the other way financially.

“But I didn’t know what was under the beds of Americans,” he explained. “Under a bed can be nothing or a loafer or dust. Only when I started to have a feel for American beds was I ready to really work here.” Immediately, though, he was ready for American life.

So Konchalavsky followed a sequence of events that most Americans would be too impatient for. In 1979 Voight, through his production company and the involvement of two studios, got Konchalavsky a visa. (A legal resident of Russia, Konchalavsky is allowed to come and go, due to his second marriage, to a Frenchwoman.) Voight, coming off the Oscar heat of “Coming Home,” wanted Konchalavsky to direct “Rhinestone Heights,” a film about what the director calls the “underside of New York’s 42nd Street, the lower depths and the higher-uppers.” Konchalavsky said no, not being ready. But he doesn’t want that you should think him cocky, or reckless.

“For almost four years here there was no hope, no money, and I was working very hard teaching at Pepperdine College. Creative people, they loved me from the start, but. . . .”

But Konchalavsky was beginning to be known around Malibu by the nickname Margot Kidder gave him, “E.T.” The questions were always the same: Who is he really and where did he come from, and exactly how did he get here? Hollywood has a history of picking up foreign directors (for example, Natalie Wood’s importing of Serge Bourguignon in the 1960s; their projects never evolved.)

Konchalavsky had eight films to his credit and international prizes, and the kind of fast intelligent charm that is seductive. Directing a scene, he will hug an actor, grasp the shoulder of a crew member and use his hands in gestures of Big Acceptance. He can leap from an editing monitor to a railway set in 30 seconds. Of such energy, and new-fresh-foreign insights, are coalitions born, particularly between writers (Konchalavsky has written some 24 screenplays, alone or in collaboration) and actresses. These liaisons are a mainstay of Hollywood folklore: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Neil Simon and Marsha Mason, Lloyd Richards and Eve Harrington, Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange.

Commented Konchalavsky, “I can’t say I’m a better man with women than other men--but I may be a better director with women than other directors. Maybe.” If Konchalavsky’s romance with Shirley MacLaine was newsworthy, it was his friendship with Nastassja Kinski that made for synergy, and the career launch. “Nastassja and I were talking one day in Malibu, not about films but about plays,” recalled Konchalavsky wistfully. “She had just made the cover of Time magazine. She was the hot person of that year, but I hadn’t thought of her for ‘Maria’s Lovers’ (Isabelle Adjani was the original choice for Maria.) But I remember Nastassja saying, ‘Whatsa matter, don’t you want to make a movie with me?’ ”

Konchalavsky did, and so did the moneyed powers at Cannon Films. Konchalavsky took a deep breath before admitting, “Cannon didn’t care about my screenplay or that I had had no Hollywood experience. Frankly, they didn’t even want to talk to me. They wanted a package; they wanted a low-budget film; they wanted Nastassja Kinski.”

What they got was a controversial, passionate look at what happens when you love somebody too much. What happens is a kind of impotence, a subject American movie makers clear their throats over, before changing the subject. Konchalavsky took the film’s poor release pattern in stride, but he is less good-natured when it comes to criticism.

The movie particularly surprised fellow film maker Milos Forman (“Amadeus”). The directors ran into each other last year in San Francisco (where Forman was overseeing final editing on “Amadeus”). The reunion was particularly wistful. “I was already drunk with happiness, because I’d risen over my own fears and tears, and yet I’d not risen over the budget. Everyone had said ‘How’s this bloody Russian gonna do it when Russians are so spoiled?’ Even Eisenstein failed in this country. And Milos and I talked all this out, and got very drunk, and we were talking about life, and our lives, and he finally confessed. He said, soberly, ‘I never thought you’d be able to do it. Every year the foreigners come to crack the Hollywood film system, and every year it gets harder.’ Milos at least had for years been known in Europe, which I wasn’t. But we both knew about challenging this mentality called Hollywood.”

Granted, it’s an odd landing place for the scion of one of Russia’s wealthiest families, a youth who was bred and trained to be a concert pianist. “Listen,” he confided while wolfing down a macrobiotic ginger salad, “I never expected to leave Russia, ever. I thought it was inconceivable I could go. In 1962 I went to Venice and found it fascinating that people were having fun all the time.”

Konchalavsky would rather talk art than politics; even studio politics interest him less than the symbolism in Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.” But he’s up-front about Russia: he can come and go, and does often, but even his writer-director brother Nikita (“Oblomov,” “Slave of Love”) won’t get him to return permanently. There’s a free-floating international rumor that the brothers Konchalavsky are sibling rivals, and here Andrei didn’t mince a word.

“I talk to my brother every week,” he answered evenly. “You can’t say it’s a rivalry, because he’s my younger brother, and I never expected him to become such a marvelous director! Now I have come to an age where I can happily learn from my younger brother. He never wants to leave Russia, and he never wants me to leave, and he never understands why I go and come and go and come.”

Konchalavsky added that his brother, being also an actor, is a very different creature. “I couldn’t be an actor as he can be. I externalize and am good at showing , whereas an actor has to live in his guts. Eric Roberts, who’s gentle, will bark in your face because he consciously needs to protect his fragile interior. He has to be very rude to relax, otherwise he can’t do it so well. And I as a director have to midwife him.”

Konchalavsky’s words to describe a director vary from midwife to monarch, but he doesn’t buy the theory that directors have to play God. His intelligence is extreme, but it communicates itself easily not harshly. “I have to have the answers, yes, or pretend I have them. But if the director is God then the actors would succumb. God forbid!”

“Andrei,” said his production designer Stephen Marsh, “is very definite about what he wants. He wants a piece of reality. He tends to want whole rooms, not just camera angles indicating rooms, like some directors. He wants all the options.”

Marsh was talking on a sound stage that looked intentionally like a wreck of a train, and he was watching a snow machine do its job. His eye, like others on the set, almost never strayed from Konchalavsky. There’s a lot of motion around the director.

“Let’s print the second take and the fourth take and the last take,” said Konchalavsky, holding the hand of Rebecca DeMornay after a rather intense onscreen moment between her and Eric Roberts. “You are enjoying the moments,” he told the actress as together they watched a TV monitor give an instant black-and-white replay of the scene just shot. “You’re enjoying it, and we are feeling that.”

“Andrei unlocks you. The man is light,” said Jon Voight, as he (in the role of a prisoner) was sprayed down with snow and grime. “When a director isn’t light, you as an actor get tied up in knots. Andrei is light.”

“I see him both ways,” countered Eric Roberts. “I think he’s dark and light.”

“We must face into our dark side, always,” insisted Konchalavsky. “We must not be afraid to be unhappy.”