MOVIES : The Apprenticeship of Matthew Modine : He’s served it with directors like Kubrick, Altman and Schlesinger, apart from the brat pack adventures of his peers

Five years ago, Matthew Modine was worried about becoming a movie star. This qualified as news in the precincts of Hollywood where most of the 10,000-or-so other actors in their 20s were worried about just the opposite and imagining their names above the title of the next youth-market blockbuster with a Giorgio Moroder sound track.

But Modine, who grew up in drive-in theaters, skipped college and studied with Stella Adler in New York, was listening to a different drum machine. He was one of these theater-trained guys who actually thought that acting was more important than being famous. The role models of the Brat Pack made him queasy. Press interviews? He didn’t see the point. He had arrived rather conspicuously in “Birdy,” opposite Nicolas Cage, and “Mrs. Soffel,” opposite Mel Gibson and Diane Keaton, and filmgoers took notice of his freshly scrubbed face. He could no longer walk into restaurants and hotel lobbies and expect no one to bother him.

Robert Altman, who directed him in the 1984 Vietnam film “Streamers,” told the young actor that “you’re going to be a big movie star,” Modine recalls. And he anguished over this because his mentor, Stella Adler, the formidable acting teacher, had “stressed the importance of theater and didn’t care much about movies, maybe because she had never had any success at it or maybe she didn’t think movies were noble enough.”

“Because I was so influenced by this woman and her school, I thought it was something that was bad. Now, I realize that it’s only bad for some individuals. It’s what it has the capability of making you become or what you can allow yourself to become,” he says, conjuring up images of some of Hollywood’s best-known citizens. “It can really alter you. When these red carpets are rolled out for you, you can suddenly believe that you somehow deserve it.”

Many have indulged this belief without a moment’s hesitation, it’s true.

“I’ve realized that you have to go through your life as your own man,” Modine says today, offering an update on his career ambivalence. “I realized that I can’t go walking in the shadow of a mentor or a teacher or other actors I looked up to. I have to find my own way.”

And so it was that he walked down one of those red carpets just the other evening in Westwood when he arrived at the Avco for the glittery premiere of “Pacific Heights,” the new psycho thriller from director John Schlesinger. “Pacific Heights” is one of two current movies in which Modine, the reluctant star, has a starring role. In “Memphis Belle,” producer David Puttnam’s Saturday matinee salute to the young American airmen of World War II, Modine plays a heroic B-17 pilot leading his crew on a 25th and final bombing mission over Germany.

When he talks about these roles or the larger subject of his responsibility as an actor, Modine makes you think not of an actor but perhaps a speaker from an environmental group explaining the need to return Hollywood to its 19th-Century use as grazing land for cattle. He is nothing if not serious, a country boy loaded down with deeper meanings.

“The reason I was interested in ‘Pacific Heights,’ ” he says about the movie in which he and Melanie Griffith play first-time San Francisco landlords duped by a diabolical tenant (Michael Keaton), “was that we as a society call ourselves civilized and we live together in a community and in that community we make rules where we say we won’t take advantage of each other and we won’t think that another individual is taking advantage of us. But instead we always try to give them the benefit of the doubt. And there’s always some person or group who take advantage of the goodness and kindness of the society.”

Is that what he considers “Pacific Heights” to be about?

Modine sits forward in his Westside hotel room suite and says, “You know, you read a script and you believe that that’s what it’s about, and then you talk to the director and he shares some of your views and you make a decision. I remember watching divers in Acapulco, who stand on this cliff 80 feet above the ocean, and they have to time their dive with the incoming waves so that the water is 15 feet deep instead of 5 feet deep. They’re thinking about making this dive with form and grace but also with this leap of faith that the water is going to be there. So, like a movie, you read a script and you meet the director and you make this graceful leap. And sometimes the water is deep and cool and sometimes it’s shallow and, wham, you get your head cracked open.” He adds, “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve landed in very cool deep water more often than not.”

One of the movies that most impressed Modine as a kid hanging out in the drive-in theaters his father managed in various Western states was “Midnight Cowboy,” directed by John Schlesinger.

“The good thing about John,” Modine says, “is that having spent so much time on this planet and having made as many movies as he has, he doesn’t have to impress anybody. He’s very economical. He doesn’t have to say a lot or do a lot to let you know what he wants. It’s like a Zen experience. He’s the Buddha.”

“I’ll tell ya,” Modine says, abruptly segueing to another film, “‘I think ‘Full Metal Jacket’ is one of the best movies ever made. Not because I’m in it but because Stanley Kubrick is a really clever human being. He’s probably the most humanist of the filmmakers.”

Modine played Private Joker in ‘Full Metal Jacket,” a wisecracking Vietnam recruit who runs smack into the spirit-sapping fierceness of Marine basic training. “What Stanley did that was so brilliant was to show the way people behave without commenting on it--as opposed to some other directors, without mentioning names--who drive things home and comment on everything. (His style) is not for everybody because not everybody understands it.”

Counting “Full Metal Jacket,” “Birdy” and “Streamers,” Modine has been in three pictures that dealt in unheroic terms with the Vietnam War. “Memphis Belle” is quite another sort of story, a dramatized version of a documentary shot during World War II by William Wyler about a B-17 bombing mission. In today’s post-Vietnam (and post-”Catch-22”) era, this one looks at first like a throwback to the flag-waving epics turned out by the dozens in Hollywood in the ‘40s and ‘50s. In fact, the movie squeezes in a few anti-war declarations and a glimpse of the real terror these barely grown men must have felt clinging to the freezing innards of their primitive bombers while German fighter planes tried, with frequent success, to blow them out of the sky.

“When those films were made,” Modine says of the standard World War II-issue feature, “they were obviously propaganda films and portrayed soldiers as heroes and put forth the idea that if you were strong, you’d survive. At that time there was this evil thing we were fighting and needed to have some hope we were going to conquer.

“Because we can now look at the war with ‘60s sensibilities, we can make a film today and say things you couldn’t say then: that these guys on the Memphis Belle were 10 ordinary guys that just happened to have survived 24 missions. But there’s nothing extraordinary about these guys. They’re just men. It’s defining or redefining this word ‘hero’ as having something to do with luck.”

Director Michael Caton-Jones, who is Scottish (“It’s real different than English,” Modine discovered), put Modine and the other crew members of the Memphis Belle, including Eric Stoltz, D. B. Sweeney, Billy Zane and Harry Connick Jr., through a 10-day boot camp with enough simulation to actual hardship that, as he recalls, “by the end, guys were breaking down and screaming, ‘(expletive) this, what am I doing here?’ Because we were really really exhausted.”

But the ersatz military training had its desired effect. “We really got to know each other and for the rest of my life there are nine guys that I can really depend on. For that reason, I really mourned the end of the film.”

Now 30 and a father twice since he made his first movies five years ago, Modine continues to live in New York, where he and his wife own a small house in Greenwich Village. At the moment he’s trying to choose between doing a play at the Yale Repertory Theatre and accepting one of a number of promising film offers. He says, “I’m looking forward to going back home.”

He has served a remarkable apprenticeship on the big screen, having already worked for directors Alan Parker, Tony Richardson, Gillian Armstrong and Harold Becker, as well as Schlesinger, Kubrick and Altman. He is not unaware of his good fortune.

“There weren’t a lot of jobs available for actors my age at that time,” he says about his beginnings in Hollywood, “that weren’t some kind of exploitation or just silly, like ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ or something. I was really lucky, I got the cream: ‘Mrs. Soffel’ and ‘Birdy.’ ”

But with Modine, getting the chance to play starring roles in the best movies Hollywood has to offer is not enough to quiet a restless soul. His mind tends to wander beyond the marquees and box office returns to find other matters more pressing.

“I wanted to be a painter before I wanted to be an actor, and the appreciation and love that I have for paintings has been disrupted by the monetary value that’s been placed on paintings. You can’t go and look at a Van Gogh anymore and understand the struggle and frustration of that man’s life. You look at the painting now and go, ‘Oh, this is “The Sunflowers,” $200 million.’ ”

As he says this, he has that same look in his eyes, that look of robbed innocence he used to make us feel Drake Goodman’s fevered disbelief at learning of Michael Keaton’s cynical sham in “Pacific Heights.” And you suspect that, in between the movies to come as he heads into his prime, Matthew Modine is going to do his part to restore Van Gogh to his proper realm.