ABSURD WORLD OF ‘TROUBLE’S ALAN RUDOLPH

Film director Alan Rudolph was sitting in an empty restaurant in Toronto one Sunday afternoon last year, being interviewed by a writer about “Choose Me,” the offbeat romantic fantasy that had just won Rudolph the grand prize at the Toronto Film Festival.

Rudolph says the writer was suggesting that his films are inaccessible to a lot of people because he creates unreal characters and unreal situations. He was asked why he does that. Just then, a waitress shouted, “There he is!”

“We looked out the window and the Pope was going by in his plastic bubble waving his arms up and down,” Rudolph says. “Behind him were about eight buses filled with guys in suits. I turned to the writer and said, ‘I can’t give you a better answer than that.’ ”

Through Rudolph’s eyes, this is a pretty strange place we all inhabit, where the real and the unreal are close kin and where one is wise not to post odds on which is which. One moment you’re having a beer, the next you’re staring through bulletproof glass at the world’s best-known religious leader.

“People talk about reality as if they know what it is,” Rudolph says. “Well, they have to prove it to me. I see Reagan on television and say to myself, ‘If I had written that character into a movie, the critics would have killed me for it. For that particular man, with his background, to become the most powerful man in the world? That’s pure Kurt Vonnegut.”

It is more helpful to know that Rudolph is a Vonnegut fan than to know his background as a protege of Robert Altman. Rudolph’s early films--”Welcome to L.A.” and “Remember My Name”--were obviously influenced by Altman’s technique of placing characters in surroundings of almost documentary naturalness.

But he has since evolved a style 180 degrees away from that, creating--as does Vonnegut--an absurdist world in which the only things that are real are the feelings and emotions at the core. In last year’s “Choose Me” and this year’s “Trouble in Mind” (now playing for one week of Oscar qualifying at the Plaza in Westwood), Rudolph paints some painfully honest portraits of lonely people chasing romance and holds them up to a fun-house mirror.

“The only thing that matters to me is the care and respect for human values,” says Rudolph. “I don’t know how to do realistic films; I don’t believe they even exist. People say ‘Mean Streets’ is gritty reality. It’s not. It’s gritty fantasy. By definition, movies are a lie on reality.”

Rudolph’s films are the work of a hopeful romantic. Both “Choose Me” and “Trouble in Mind” are love stories set in almost surreal urban settings where the characters are so interesting, you even like the bad guys.

“Trouble” will go into the books as one more entry in the bulging genre of the film noir spoof, but anyone who would cast the porcine transvestite Divine (dressed down as a man) in a role based on the Sydney Greenstreet model is after something else.

“I had Divine in mind when I was writing the script,” Rudolph says. “When I went to see him about it, I said, ‘If you have any hesitation about playing this, just imagine walking into a film memorabilia shop 20 years from now and pulling out a show card with a picture of you and Kris Kristofferson holding guns on each other. That ought to be reason enough to do it.’ ”

As it turned out, Divine (his last role was that of a prairie hooker in “Lust in the Dust”) was so eager to play a man that he told Rudolph he would have done “Trouble” for nothing.

“Trouble” cost $2.8 million to make, a big budget by Rudolph’s modest standards. But his next movie--”Made in Heaven”--may run five times that.

“Heaven,” being developed by Lorimar for production early next year, is another look at loneliness on the prowl for love and involves some heavenly intercession that Rudolph won’t detail.

In the meantime, he says he is having such a good time writing a script based on Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” syndicated cartoon that he can hardly wait to get going on that one.

“There is no continuing story in the cartoons, it’s just an attitude that I like,” Rudolph says. “It’s the same kind of madness that Vonnegut does, looking at the world for the circus it is.”

While Rudolph’s views on life and movies may dwell in the fantastic, reality does occasionally rear its ugly head.

During the production of “Trouble” in Seattle last winter, a pretend event almost shut the movie down. There is a restaurant fight scene in the movie where Kristofferson’s character knocks down another character played by Keith Carradine. Rudolph says the scene was designed to look stagy. Bloodless. But something happened.

On the third or fourth take, Carradine didn’t get his jaw out of the way fast enough and Kristofferson--a boxer in his youth--connected with a big left.

Carradine, bleeding profusely from wounds where his teeth had cut through his skin, was taken to the hospital for stitches. A week later, Kristofferson followed with a seriously infected knuckle. (“Keith was great about it,” says Rudolph. “He went around saying, ‘If I ever want to hurt someone, I’ll just bite him on the hand.’ ”)

The incident shut down production for two weeks, while the actors’ wounds healed. Then they had to come back and do the same scene again.

Why didn’t they just use the one where the real punch was thrown?

“We almost did,” Rudolph says. “But it looked fake.”

DGA SPECIAL: Martin Ritt, Ida Lupino and Billy Wilder are among the 17 directors who will be making appearances with their selected movies during a two-month celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Directors Guild of America.

The screenings will be held in the Leo S. Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art, beginning Jan. 3 with screenings of “Love Me Tonight” and “Becky Sharp,” followed by the appearance of its 87-year-old director Rouben Mamoulian.

Peter Bogdanovich will close out the series March 1, appearing with “The Last Picture Show” and “They All Laughed.”

The other directors scheduled are Paul Mazursky, Taylor Hackford, William Friedkin, Lawrence Kasdan, Robert Wise, Sidney Furie, Bob Rafelson, Tony Richardson, Andre De Toth, John Schlesinger, James Brooks and Richard Brooks.

For schedules and ticket information call (213) 857-6201.