FUN COUPLES : This Time, Let’s Take a Run Through the ‘Jungle’ With the Woman as the Guide

Even before the official release of Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever”--the director’s latest take on the bad blood inherent in interracial relationships--there were rumors about the bad blood between Lee and Annabella Sciorra, his film’s female co-star.

After five movies, Lee has a not-so-secret reputation as being not so great with women--on screen and off. And Sciorra had been glaringly absent from any stories promoting “Jungle Fever,” a contender at Cannes this year and a film that Lee had hoped would prove as controversial as his earlier “Do the Right Thing.”

Vanity Fair suggested in its profile of Lee that Sciorra’s deafening silence on her potentially career-making role of Angie Tucci was due to the “explosive” and “unpleasant” chemistry between star and director. That revelation was followed by Lee’s less-than-charitable comments on the Arsenio Hall show, where the controversy-making director said he had contemplated firing the actress over ah, artistic differences.

“Not true,” says Sciorra in a phone interview from Seattle, where she’s shooting “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” for Disney.

“Spike never suggested he wanted to fire me,” says the actress, who was so mystified and hurt by the Vanity Fair accusations that she called Lee to confront him. “I felt like I had been used. I was very upset, it just blew my mind, but Spike said it’s (untrue), it’s what they do to sell magazines and to ignore it.”

So what was the big artistic disagreement? “I don’t think on a personal level that Spike has a problem with women,” says Sciorra. “It’s more that nobody’s character was fully written. That’s the way he works. His scripts are not very detailed, more like outlines and he casts actors who can develop their characters on their own. I don’t think Wesley (Snipes) and I really got that at first. At the audition we had to do a whole long improv . . . Spike will try anything that an actor suggests.”

Snipes, who plays the other half of the couple, confirms that Lee’s early drafts were short on plausible character motivations--”a lot of inconsistencies and things that didn’t make sense,” Snipes said. “I wanted it absolutely clear that these two were falling in love.”

Lee, however, maintains that “Jungle Fever” is not about love but “sexual myths--that white women are the epitome of female beauty and black males are the sexual supermen.”

Does Sciorra buy that premise? “I wanted to work with Spike because he is an artist who has things to say and I had an interest in exploring the issues of hatred and prejudice,” she says carefully. “Angie is a woman who has been told what to do her whole life and finally she is at the point of saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is my life.’ And what she does is have an affair with a married black man,” says the actress, speaking almost as much for her own career as that of her character. “Her life will never be the same again.”