ACTOR WHO HAS SEEN THE LIGHTS

“There are no stars,” the film’s star says with winning, if inaccurate, modesty. “No sex, no violence, no chases. Nothing to entertain at that level. Yet it’s a strong, powerful story about a reality we all face, and it has humor, energy, pace and intellectual excitement.”

Martin Sheen is a passionate actor who, along with a relative handful of actors of his generation, lends his public self to his private passions of belief and concern. He narrated the recent powerful documentary about Central America, “In the Name of the People,” and earlier did two documentaries, “In the King of Prussia” and “Ploughshares,” with and about the work of the often-arrested war resister Father Dan Berrigan.

Now, on a sun-toasted afternoon that makes all Paris look like an Impressionist painting, Sheen sits in the apartment of Richard Bennett, the producer and director of Sheen’s current film, “Chain Reaction,” which is shooting at the Studios de Boulogne here. Across the Seine, the Eiffel Tower looks as if it had been positioned so as to be perfectly framed by the picture window. (Indeed, Bennett says he understands that Eiffel’s family watched from this same building as the tower went up.)

The varieties of the film experience never cease to amaze. “Chain Reaction” is an independent film being largely financed by the so-called Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, a Catholic organization devoted to the example and prophesies of the Portuguese girl who had a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1917.

Sheen plays a nuclear physicist who comes to fear that a nuclear fusion blast in the atmosphere could lead to a nuclear tornado--the chain reaction that once begun would consume the planet Earth. The physicist also comes to believe that a prophesy from Fatima, not previously made public, may have described this holocaust. He goes to Portugal (where the production itself will move in a few days) to seek out the saint’s surviving colleague.

The links to Our Lady of Fatima seem to center on an aurora borealis of unprecedented size that disrupted world communications in 1938 and was taken by the faithful as a confirming sign of the Fatima prophecy of a world war, which indeed followed immediately.

More recently, an American physicist named Rand McNally Jr.--not related to the map makers, it is said--noted similarities between the 1938 aurora borealis and the atmospheric disturbances that followed a 1958 nuclear bomb test at Johnson Island in the South Pacific.

The coincidence led him to speculate on the possibilities of a nuclear tornado, which would, not least, be an ultimate confirmation of the Fatima prophesies.

Director-producer Bennett was approached by what he calls “interested parties” about the possibilities of a film based on the article McNally wrote espousing his theory. Tom Guggino wrote a treatment and Ray Cunneff a script that would seem to combine fact, faith and fiction, with Sheen playing a character inspired by McNally and trying to demonstrate the danger at the laboratory and computer level before it’s too late, with a climactic scene at an international disarmament conference.

Bennett, a Milwaukeean who attended UCLA Film School, became an NBC page and eventually got into directing on “Matinee Theatre.” Most of his work has been in television, although he took over and finished “Harper Valley PTA” (not a work he is proud of, except as a demonstration of competence, he says).

Despite a tight, not to say taut, budget of $5 million, Bennett has recruited an impressive cast, led by Sheen, with whom Bennett worked first on “Insight” dramas for Father Ellwood Kieser. The other performers include Tim Pigott-Smith, that most splendid villain of “The Jewel in the Crown,” as a priest; Peter Firth from “Equus” as another nuclear lab worker; Kenneth Haigh (from the original production of “Look Back in Anger”) as the lab boss; Fionnula Flanagan as Sheen’s wife and Sheen’s own son Ramon as their son.

McNally, who has met with the film makers in Oak Ridge and here in Paris, is consulting on the film, which, sight unseen, sounds like an uncommon blending of traditional and indeed conservative faith with very urgent and contemporary social and political concern, with something to say across a wide spectrum of theological persuasions.

Sheen, whose candor is, like his idealistic energy, refreshing to encounter, says: “Let’s be honest. No one can get financing because I’m in a film. Think of the actors I came up with--Pacino, Hoffman, De Niro. They’re great actors and great international, bankable stars. After ‘Apocalypse Now,’ which was a great chance, I did more television because I needed the work. The offers just weren’t there. I did a lot of stupid, horrible things. Not much I’m proud of, but I had to keep working. Now and then I’d hit on something.”

He thinks “Chain Reaction” is one of those somethings. “The fact that it’s even being done is so extraordinary,” Sheen says. “A film about a man’s subtle transformation, about a spiritual journey he’s compelled to take. . . . Amazing! It’s hard to find anything where you can project your personal feelings.”

These days, of course, Sheen is becoming known as the father of Emilio Estevez, the eldest and most conspicuous of his three acting sons. Ramon and Charlie are coming on fast as well.

“I’m so knocked out,” Sheen says. “I’ve been trying to hold back. Now all three of them are working. I’ll be able to retire pretty soon. I had nothing to do with their careers, never thought of it for them. But I’m so happy for them, because your creativity is a conduit to your spirituality.

“There are two things I envy about them. The first is their sense of humor about themselves. The other is their ability to relax on camera. Relaxing on camera means being able to make it look like it’s happening for the first time. It took me until I was 32 years old, until ‘Badlands,’ to be able to do that. It’s a gift; they’ve got it. I’m delighted for them.”