Hal Hartley Places His ‘Trust’ in the Family : Movies: In his second feature, the offbeat director tells his own unbelievable truth about life and love in the modern family.

While the bulk of today’s filmmakers might pass their spare time during a visit here doing deals on their hotel room phone or browsing through Premiere magazine, Hal Hartley spends his reading Kierkegaard.

Characters in his movies read books too. And then they smash things up. Hartley’s is a screwy world of philosophy and frustration--maybe even the philosophy of frustration.

In “Trust,” Hartley’s second idiosyncratic independent feature opening today, families don’t look anything like those depicted in TV sitcoms, campaign ads or Hollywood movies. In one of the film’s most memorable lines--reflecting both the deadpan humor and behavioral analysis of a screenplay that captured the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival--one of the main characters intones: “A family is like a gun. You point it in the wrong direction, you’re going to kill somebody.”

“What we know in our real lives about what people are is far more realistic than our conventionally accepted notions of such things as they are presented in the movies or in books,” said Hartley, 31. “People are willing to accept and live with what they know about other people, but they have a hard time watching it on screen. Perhaps they just want entertainment. But I have always found it more entertaining to look straight down the barrel at what we fear and hope for. I want to make films about the things I’m even embarrassed to articulate myself in polite conversation.”

“He’s a completely original voice,” said Ira Deutchman, president of Fine Line Features, the film’s distributor, who compared the appeal of the young filmmaker’s work to that of playwrights David Mamet and Harold Pinter. “It’s closer to what people look for in theater, where the author has a particular voice that attracts an audience. It’s the language of his films that people respond to.”

The language of “Trust” offers opinions on loyalty and betrayal, love and loveless marriages, television and transcendence in suburban Long Island. The film chronicles what Hartley terms “the self-actualization” of a pregnant teen-ager named Maria (Adrienne Shelly), whose father drops dead of a heart attack after she slaps him during an argument. With the help of Matthew (Martin Donovan), an angry electronics genius whose own sadistic father commands him to clean their already spotless bathroom over and over again, Maria, part mall chick, part Cinderella, part Christ, rises above the deadening traps of middle-class suburbia and in the process transforms those around her.

Though ultimately optimistic, the film has no Hollywood ending--boy doesn’t exactly get the girl here and whether anyone actually lives happily ever after is very much in doubt. Still, like Hartley’s blackly whimsical first film, “The Unbelievable Truth,” “Trust” is often wickedly funny.

At one point, Matthew quits his job at a computer company that manufactures defective equipment, and then refuses a job at a TV repair shop because it is against his principles to fix TVs. In order to get medical benefits for Maria and her unborn child, however, Matthew returns to work at the computer factory. At home after a particularly humiliating day, Matthew attempts to anesthetize himself by watching television. When Maria challenges him that he hates TV, Matthew responds: “I had a bad day. I had to subvert my principles and kowtow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible.”

Hartley revels in “getting in the face” of television, of families, of his audience. He chose to shoot the film mostly in close-up, occasionally showing just the face of one person in a room while others converse outside the frame. Hartley, whose own family of two brothers, a sister and their father was “broken up” after his mother died when he was 11, said that after sitting through “Trust,” his sister-in-law told him that the movie made her feel so claustrophobic that she wanted “to run screaming from the theater.”

But that sort of response seems to please Hartley as much as reviews that praise “Trust” unconditionally. “Fear, frustration and anger are as valid a reaction in a movie theater as anything else,” Hartley said. “It’s just that in most movies there is nothing to get angry about.”

Though weightier than last year’s “The Unbelievable Truth,” which was made in 11 days for only $75,000, “Trust” is nonetheless eminently accessible to more than just art-house regulars, Deutchman insisted. The film won top prize recently at the Houston Film Festival, “not exactly the most esoteric art-house audience,” Deutchman added, “and audiences at film festivals everywhere have roared with laughter.

“I’m hoping that he will turn into a filmmaker like John Sayles (“Brother From Another Planet,” “Matewan”), where every time out you can count on a certain level of interest among his fans--a growing level of interest . . . which will allow him to make movies on an ongoing and prolific basis, and eventually one of his films will break through to a much broader audience.”

Hartley said he fell in love with filmmaking while studying painting in art school. He graduated from film school at the State University of New York-Purchase in 1984, and then made short films whenever he could scrounge up the money and time. He was answering phones at an industrial video company when his boss agreed to bankroll “The Unbelievable Truth.”

“Film just excited me like nothing else,” said Hartley, who listed Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders and Preston Sturges among his favorite directors. “Just the physicality of images projected on this wall with this little machine, in a way it seemed so archaic, yet at the same time it was just the most poetic thing in the world.”

After “The Unbelievable Truth” played at a London festival, Zenith, a British film company that has produced “Sid and Nancy” and John Huston’s “The Dead,” gave him $700,000 to make “Trust.” “That seemed like a huge amount of money to me,” Hartley said, even though the average Hollywood movie costs about $20 million. “I couldn’t believe it.”

People have been giving Hartley money ever since. Two experimentally bizarre short films on the themes of work and ambition aired last month on the PBS series “Alive From Off Center.” Hartley is editing a one-hour segment of “American Playhouse” he wrote and directed that is scheduled to air on PBS next spring. And this fall, Hartley plans to begin production on his next feature, “Simple Men,” on a big--for him--budget of nearly $2 million. The film tells the story of two brothers--one a criminal, the other an intellectual--who go on the road looking for their father, a former Dodger shortstop turned anarchist who has been living underground for 20 years.

How has all this work and success changed him? “I have health insurance now,” said Hartley, who still lives in the same one-room East Village apartment in Manhattan that he’s inhabited for the last 10 years. “And I guess it’s easier to meet women.”

Hartley said he has not ruled out making that big jump into Hollywood, but he is not rushing to leap, either. Until now he has enjoyed absolute freedom and control over his films and he refuses to relinquish that. Hartley said that he has spoken with a few Hollywood producers, but some of them “just don’t get it.

“I would love to have the money to do a crane shot that lasts 10 minutes and have lots of action and horses,” he said, “but I know that I would be the biggest pain in the neck to some studio. I’d be impossible. I’d refuse to listen to some boss telling me to make this funnier or cut this out. My films are too idiosyncratic to bank a lot of money on. I understand that. And since I don’t like to be unhappy, since I don’t like to be stressed out, if I have to, I’m willing to make smaller films for the rest of my life.”