A DIRECTOR OF A HIGHER STANDARD

“Because I had a lot of emotional upheaval in my life, I’m attracted to stories about characters whose lives are full of wounds and secrets,” director Randa Haines says. “I’m not interested in who’s going to ask me to the prom. I never went to a prom.”

Haines, 41, made a name for herself several years ago when she directed “Something About Amelia,” the ABC Emmy Award-winning TV film about incest. Its impressive ratings and the praise it won led to an offer to direct her first feature.

“Children of a Lesser God,” which opens in September, stars Oscar-winning actor William Hurt and unknown actress Marlee Matlin. Haines describes it as “a love story about people from two different cultures, the hearing and the deaf.

“The material is very complex and emotional,” she says, which is exactly the kind of movie Haines wanted to make. She is picky about her work. “I’ve gone for long stretches without working,” she says, sipping Perrier at a Melrose Avenue eatery. “I remember many times peeking into my checkbook to see if any money was left.”

Haines’ selective approach to directing means she can list her seven years of directing credits on a gum wrapper: two PBS films, four episodes of “Hill Street Blues,” some episodes of “Tucker’s Witch” and “Family Tree,” an “ABC Afterschool Special,” “Amelia,” an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episode and now, “Children of a Lesser God.”

“I’ve been a gambler,” she admits. “It’s very scary to turn things down, but a project has to really mean something to me. I’m not interested in making a lot of money.”

Haines’ name continually comes up now when television producers and network executives talk about which director they would like to hire.

“There seems to be good word around town about me,” Haines acknowledges. “A lot of people have come sniffing around.” But her plans for the moment are to stay in feature films.

Tall and slender with shoulder-length curly black hair, Haines wears her high standards like a cross. “A barrier for me--which has been both a strength and a weakness--has been my taste,” she believes. “The kind of things I’m interested in aren’t always mainstream.”

“Children of a Lesser God” is based on the Mark Medoff play, which received its first full-scale production at the Mark Taper Forum in 1979 before going on to win a Tony Award on Broadway.

“My biggest fear when I began working on the project was how in a filmic way we could bring the audience into a relationship where only one person speaks,” she says.

“But after the first few minutes, people forget that only Bill is speaking. Marlee’s face and body language are so expressive.” Haines wants to make clear that the movie is not about the issue of deafness, emphasizing that “deafness is really a metaphor for the difficulty of communicating.”

Like most plays-into-films, “Children of a Lesser God” has been expanded for the screen. The story still focuses on a teacher (Hurt) and his relationship with a non-hearing student (Matlin). But the school for the deaf is now set on the coast of Maine (actually New Brunswick, Canada). Instead of just a few students on stage, there is a whole school full.

The film has had a checkered history. Early on, playwright Medoff was hired to write a screenplay. Sydney Pollack was going to direct, and then Mark Rydell. Robert Redford was going to star.

“Ned Tanen had acquired ‘Children of a Lesser God’ when he was at Universal,” Haines says. Tanen hired Haines immediately after the airing of “Amelia” in 1983. When Tanen became president of Paramount, he took “Children” and Haines with him.

“Randa had an attitude about the movie, a point of view and an enormous amount of passion which has not wavered over an extremely difficult three-year period,” Tanen says. “You don’t buy that kind of commitment.”

Because of that intense involvement, Haines was shocked when theater people at a recent film industry seminar criticized her for allowing “Children” to be presented as “a Randa Haines film”--as if this were some kind of rare credit for a director. She was also on the firing line for bringing in another screenwriter instead of using the Medoff screenplay--as if this were not standard operating procedure in Hollywood.

Her initial response was defensive. Then she began to look at the criticism from a more positive point of view: Now she was important enough to be worth attacking. The decisions she made were the director’s prerogative. She quotes the late sculptor Louise Nevelson: “I take responsibility for everything I’ve done, and when I say that I want to cry.”

Haines recalls a stressful childhood. “My parents were divorced when I was 6,” she says. “I lived with my mother in New York. Then when I was 15, she died of cancer so I went to live with my father in California. I went to about 20 schools.

“It was a very unhappy time for me. What attracted me to the theater was that on the other side of the curtain was a family. I wanted to be part of that family, that community of people, making magic together.”

Haines turned toward directing when she got a job acting for student directors at New York’s School of Visual Arts. “I would come in every morning and all the actors would be on one side, talking about being up for this part or that part,” she recalls. “There was a very low-energy, defeatist feeling among them.

“Across the room were all the directing students, full of positive energy. I found myself sliding my chair over their way. Just about the time I slid all the way over, I got an acting audition. I was wrong for the part, but these two guys hired me as their only employee. I answered the phone, cut sound effects and bought props.”

From there she began supervising scripts. “On my first film I stayed one step ahead of the director. It starred the director’s girlfriend. We shot in a Catskills bungalow, which was standing in for a Polish shtetl .”

Script supervisor--the job once known as “script girl”--offered excellent preparation for directing, Haines discovered. “I worked with a lot of first-time directors, and they leaned heavily on me. I whispered things in their ear--advising, helping and supporting. Finally someone said, ‘You should be a director.’ For several years I tried to think how could I do that.”

In 1975, Haines was accepted into the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women--”which was helpful in that I came away with a piece of work to show.” After writing scripts, she finally got a directing job with PBS in 1979.

“When I first walked on the set as a director,” she recalls, “I felt like it was family. I wasn’t afraid of talking to the crew. I knew their technical language and their jokes. That was a tremendous asset.

“I couldn’t stop and worry what they were going to think of me as a woman director. I had to focus on the work and come prepared. That’s what a crew needs from a woman--to know that you know what you’re doing.

“I think I’ve proved myself. I try not to focus on how I’m being treated differently--unless the treatment is so strong it needs me to do something about it. I’ve always kept blinders on. It’s unproductive to focus on these things. If you just do your work, it should be enough.

“I think it’s still true that if a woman has a failure as a director, all women slide back. But we’re getting to the point where a movie made by a woman is just a movie.”