VALLEY BOY MAKES FIRST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FILM

For weeks now, Bob Swaim, the expatriate American director who left Tarzana for Paris 20 years ago, has been getting up at the crack of dawn to make his first English-language movie.

He doesn’t like it one little bit. That’s because he’s used to working French movie-making hours, where they start around 11 in the morning and continue straight through until early evening--giving everyone time for a leisurely dinner without worries about getting up early.

But Swaim is not complaining. The film he is making here, “Half Moon Street,” is important for him. Not only is it his first chance to work in English, but it boasts two stars, Michael Caine and Sigourney Weaver, who will, he hopes, ensure the film a wider audience than that enjoyed by his last picture, “La Balance.” That won a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar, and was a big success in France, but getting American audiences in to see French films, however good, is not easy.

“In some ways,” said Swaim the other day, “coming to London to make this picture was like starting all over again. I knew nobody here--just as I knew nobody in Paris when I first went there. And the British are so different from the French. Very reserved. It takes time to know them. That threw me at first, but now I’m used to it.”

Based on a novella in Paul Theroux’s “Half Moon Street,” published last year, the film is about an attractive woman (Weaver) who, finding herself unable to live in London on her pay from a research institute, decides to supplement her income by working for an escort agency--sleeping only with men able to pay her high price. One of her lovers, a high-powered statesman (Caine), becomes the target for an assassination attempt and she is involved. Swaim himself co-wrote the screenplay with Edward Behr.

Although Half Moon Street actually exists--it links Piccadilly with Curzon Street--Swaim has rebuilt it at the EMI Elstree Studios to give himself freedom of movement.

“There are too many problems when you try to shoot in a real street,” he said. “And anyway I don’t think Half Moon Street is that attractive. What I really like about it is its name; it evokes a lot of images for me. So the street we’ve built on the back lot is more attractive than the original.”

He expects to finish the movie before Christmas, take a brief break in Kenya--”I must get some sun”--and then start preparations for a film he will make in California, “L.A. Gold.”

“That’s about a Valley girl,” he said. “And since it takes place in the San Fernando Valley, where I grew up, it should be an interesting experience for me. But Paris will always be my home.”

If Swaim is happy about “Half Moon Street,” so are his stars. Weaver says: “This is a sophisticated, grown-up movie and it’s time grown-up movies made a comeback. I love my character in the film; she’s terrific.”

Weaver has now been in Europe for some time. Before coming to London, she was in Paris starring with Gerard Depardieu in “Une Femme ou Deux” (“A Woman or Two”) for director Daniel Vigne.

And when she completes this one, she will start “Aliens” for director James Cameron, reprising her role as Ripley from Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie “Alien.” It was that film which first shot her to prominence and got her dubbed “the new golden girl of films” by Newsweek.

“Moving from one film to another like this is wonderful,” she said. “It’s rather like working for a film repertory company.”

She speaks French well, and when Vigne flew to New York to talk to her about “Une Femme ou Deux,” their conversation was conducted entirely in French.

“Truthfully, I only understood about half of what he was saying,” she said. “What got to me was his passion for the project. So when he said, ‘Do you think you can do it?,’ I didn’t hesitate. After he’d gone, I took intensive French lessons for about six weeks to feel comfortable in the language again.”

The filming involved working in an unheated Paris apartment during a severe cold spell and then several weeks in Provence, where it rained steadily. “And the good thing was that when I was in Paris I was able to talk to Bob Swaim about this project,” she said. “I’d already seen ‘La Balance’ and was an admirer of his.”

Daughter of Pat Weaver, who was president of NBC in the ‘50s, and English actress Elizabeth Inglis (she had a role in Hitchcock’s original “The 39 Steps”), Weaver will now be here filming until the beginning of next year. Then she will return home to New York to finish writing a script for director Ivan Reitman in collaboration with Christopher Durang.

She, too, misses the French movie-making hours.

“They make such sense,” she said. “I find I get up so early here I have to have a sleep during the lunch break.

“When I first was asked about filming in Europe, I wasn’t too sure. I’d just finished a Broadway play (David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly”) and got married (to director Jim Simpson) and I didn’t really want to leave home. Now I’m glad I did, and Jim has spent a lot of time here with me.”

When he finishes this movie, Caine will take a short break at his California home and then return here for another film for the same producer Geoff Reeve, “The Whistle Blower.”

“This is the ideal sort of film for me,” he said. “A short shooting schedule (eight weeks) in a nice place with nice people. A film takes a lot of time out of your life, so you’d better make sure you’re going to be happy with the people and the place. ‘Half Moon Street’ is great on both counts. I can’t see myself going to the Antarctic with a load of people I hate just to get an Oscar nomination. Anyway, I’ve already had three (‘Alfie,’ ‘Sleuth,’ ‘Educating Rita’).”

Caine, as English as fish and chips in a day-old newspaper, has never really lost his homesickness despite his seven years in Beverly Hills.

“A while back I said to my wife, Shakira, ‘I’m rich and famous, but I’m not happy.’ I was sitting watching ‘Black Beauty’ on television, and she said, ‘Isn’t that a children’s picture?’ I said, ‘Yes, but it shows the English countryside, so I’m watching it.’ And she said, ‘Then we ought to find a place to live there’ and that’s just what we’ve done.”

He now plans to divide his time between Beverly Hills and a historic house with a 250-yard frontage on the River Thames.

“The plan is to spend the winter in California and the summer here,” he said. “Eventually, I want our daughter (11-year-old Natasha) to go to school here for a few years before she goes to a university in the States.”

Although he suffers from bouts of homesickness when he spends too long in California, Caine has never had any regrets about going there.

“I was doing all right here before I left,” he said. “But by going to America, I made myself a better bet for British producers because I am now known in the U.S.

“Maybe if I’d been equipped to be a great classical stage actor like Richard Burton, I’d never have left London. But I wasn’t. I’m a film actor. Since I was 11-years-old, I studied how the masters like Spencer Tracy did it. He was so good, you couldn’t tell when he was acting and when he wasn’t.

“Perhaps the best lesson I ever gave anyone on a set was when I went over a scene with a young actor I know. People kept coming up and saying, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were rehearsing.’ I told this actor, ‘We’ve got to keep on doing this until someone comes up and simply joins in the conversation. As long as they keep saying, “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were rehearsing,” we’re just not doing it right.’ ”