MOVIES : Bound for Stardom? Maybe . . . Jason Patric’s in No Rush : The up-and-comer focuses fiercely on his roles and on keeping much of his life off camera

Coming off of their Oscar-winning “Driving Miss Daisy,” producers Lili Fini and Richard Zanuck had a lot riding on “Rush,” the story of two Texas narcotics agents swallowed up by the lifestyle they set out to combat. They had, after all, paid $1 million for the rights to Kim Wozencraft’s first novel. And when the Zanucks announced that the project would be Lili’s directorial debut, Hollywood skeptics came out in full force.

Casting 25-year-old Jason Patric, a talented up-and-comer without proven box-office appeal, upped the ante even more. But the Zanucks, who, along with a segment of the American public, discovered the actor through his compelling and critically acclaimed performance as a down-and-out boxer in last year’s “After Dark, My Sweet,” decided to go with their gut. “Like the young McQueen, Brando and Mitchum, Jason projects ‘man,’ not ‘boy,’ ” explains the director, whose film opens today in Los Angeles and New York. “Nothing about him says ‘high school.’ Something about him says ‘history’--he’s been somewhere, seen something. Unlike any other actor in his age group who emerged in the past 10 years, Jason is vulnerable, but very grown up.”

One hitch, however: Patric, then known in some circles more as the man in Julia Robert’s life than for his talent, rejected their offer outright.

“I’ve always turned down jobs before I had the status supposedly needed to turn them down,” Patric explains in a tone which smacks more of confidence than cockiness.

Both soft-spoken and imposing, understated and ambitious, he’s digesting the rules of Hollywood but determined to play the game his way.

“They’d been talking about a ‘director’ in the third person,” the actor continues, piercing blue eyes focused intently on the interviewer. “When they told me it was Lili, I felt bushwhacked a bit. We were all together in this room and I didn’t like being put in the position of having to judge someone else’s wife--especially since, as a first-time director, she had nothing I could base any judgments on. I liked Lili and Dick, but they threw me a curve and I didn’t respond to that.”

Further conversations with Lili brought him around, however, and a few weeks later Patric signed on. The movie, his seventh, may be the actor’s best opportunity yet to show his stuff: that Brando-like intensity, the startling good looks, the “emotional purity” on which critics have remarked.

“I can’t figure out what people respond to in me--and I hope I never do,” Patric states. He’s dressed in black slacks and a navy cabled ski sweater, which adds bulk to his muscular 5-foot-10 frame. White socks and shiny black penny loafers give him a clean, neat look at odds with his streetwise cinematic persona. “If you’re not hitting deep enough or honest enough, it’s too easy to use those things to get you out of a scene--’they like that little eyebrow twitch.’

“All actors really have is instinct, and I’m trying to protect mine. I’ve never used my nose, eyes or face to get me into a character, never ridden on a horse bare-chested. If you see the camera and a mirror behind it, you’re in trouble.”

James Foley, who directed Patric in “After Dark, My Sweet,” concurs. “Good looks and good acting are often considered contradictory,” he says. “The expectation is that the best actors--the Hoffmans, the Pacinos--have those quirky character faces. But Jason, I discovered, is totally free of vanity, which is particularly liberating when you’re as handsome as he.”

Self-promotion of any sort is anathema to the actor. He’s self-contained and somewhat shy. (“I don’t even like to hang out with more than three friends at a time.”) He’s afraid of sounding pretentious. (“Don’t put me on a pulpit,” he pleads.) And, as the grandson of Jackie Gleason and the son of Jason Miller--the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“That Championship Season”) and Oscar-nominated actor (“The Exorcist”)--he’s not unaware of the pitfalls posed by fame.

“I’m very focused, aggressive within myself, and I don’t want to be distracted,” Patric says. “Hollywood is one big Hollywood sign and it’s so easy to be seduced. I’m not putting blinders on--knowledge is power. But I remind myself that clippings get yellow and the fans get old and have kids and at the end of the day you’re sitting with yourself.”

Interviews, to which he subjects himself very rarely, are particularly discomforting. “You’re put in a room with a stranger and forced to prove not only your worth as an actor, but that you’re an engaging human being,” he asserts. “People are always trying to peek in, see your cards, suss you out. . . .

“I don’t want to give away any parts of myself,” he continues. “I’d rather they serve my characters rather than the pages of Vogue. I’m trying to keep as clean a palette as possible but the public puts speculative paints out there for everyone to see. The more successful you get, the more baggage you acquire. I’m just trying to keep a couple of pure summers.”

It may already be too late. When Julia Roberts--the highest-paid actress in the business--called off her wedding to Kiefer Sutherland last June, it was Patric’s arms into which she fled. Since then, the two have lived a fishbowl existence, every move they make (and some they don’t) fodder for tabloids and paparazzi .

“Jason more than holds his own, so it’s a shame that he’s referred to as Julia Roberts’ boyfriend,” observes Kevin Reynolds, who directed the actor in “The Beast,” the tale of a Soviet tank crew in Afghanistan during the early years of that war. “I think he’s coping with life under a microscope as well as anyone can.”

“The fact that she’s so far along in her career compared to him can’t be easy,” adds Lili Zanuck. “An imbalance is hard both ways, but particularly when the man is the less successful. In a perfect world, Jason would have met her after ‘Rush’ so people would be more aware of what he can do.”

Patric, who refuses to discuss the intimacies of his relationship, rails instead against the system that intrudes on it.

“People seem to need stars on whom they can project themselves and live their lives through,” he begins. “You become a mannequin in a municipal square. Then, because you hit home how much smaller they are, they have a need to destroy you. Everyone has the right to privacy. I’m not an elected official or a corporate CEO. I’m not accountable to anyone. I won’t give in to those people who are behaving in a subhuman way. Standing and taking a nice picture for them would just subsidize their disrespectful terrorism.”

Richard Zanuck, who also grew up in the business, understands the price it exacts. But he suggests that Patric use some of the boxing skills he’s retained from “After Dark” to better roll with the punches.

“You can’t be a motion picture actor and turn in wonderful performances--and at the same time be Howard Hughes,” the producer notes. “If Jason can duck some of the punches, bob and weave his way through it, he’ll have an easier time.”

The elements of Patric’s early life are sketchy, at best. Talk of Dad or Grandpa is off-limits. “I’ve been so careful not to connect with my family ties,” he says. “I didn’t want to have it help open doors. I don’t want that extra paragraph or sentence in those stories about me and that always comes at the top. I respect my lineage, sure, but I refuse to grab it or cling to it.”

He will confirm the basics, however. Born in Queens, he moved to New Jersey at the age of 7 soon after his parents split up. He, his brother Jordan, and his actress-mother, Linda, came out West when Patric was 16. He appeared in plays at St. Monica High School. It was out here, the summer after 11th grade, that the acting bug took hold, and the Vermont Champlain Shakespeare Festival that clinched it.

“I was the youngest person there,” the actor recalls, appearing to enjoy the memory. “And it was theater in its truest sense: the dust, the smell, the amateur aspect. I built sets one day or played Soldier No. 3 in a fight scene the next. There was something cheesy and wonderful about it.”

His family neither opposed nor encouraged his ambitions. “Probably best to say they forewarned me,” he says cryptically. No matter. He plunged into show business, bypassing bit parts altogether.

His first outing, “Toughlove,” a 1985 made-for-TV movie that teamed him with Lee Remick and Bruce Dern, was, he says, “the best TV had at the time.” But his debut film, the futuristic roller-skating fantasy “Solarbabies,” proved to be a major disappointment--the first of several experiences which hit home the gap between intention and implementation. “It was supposed to be like ‘Road Warrier,’ ” Patric recalls, “produced by Mel Brooks, who did ‘Elephant Man’ and ‘Frances.’ What it turned out to be was four months of hell. I never did see it, which was salvation--not self-control. I thought about never acting again.”

Joel Schumacher’s “The Lost Boys,” which Patric calls a “teen-age coming-of-age vampire beach movie,” was, in his mind, only slightly better. In the 1987 film, he played a high school student who becomes fresh meat for a group the Washington Post film critic called a “blood-sucking Brady Bunch.” The film’s allegorical subtext got lost in the wash. Six or seven of Patric’s scenes were cut. Critics, for better or worse, overlooked him.

“Let’s just say it wasn’t the best movie for me,” says Patric. “I wish there were more Elia Kazans around, talented people making movies for young unknowns. ‘The Godfather’ was made with an unknown Al Pacino. ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ which would now be a $150-million film, was ‘introducing Peter O’Toole.’ We need more people confident enough to fill the part and not the marquee, people who want to make films, not ‘vehicles.’ ‘Vehicles’ are something you drive . . . and they’ve obviously been driven to death.”

“The Beast,” released in 1988, was a welcome course correction, a morality play about the struggle for the conscience of a humane tank driver played by Patric.

“I needed someone who could play a thinking man’s soldier,” says Kevin Reynolds, “and Jason, on and off camera, isn’t someone who will blindly follow orders. Along with Alan Rickman (whom Reynolds directed in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”), he’s the most intelligent actor with whom I’ve worked. Sure, he’s a perfectionist, sometimes tough to work with. But I’d much rather butt heads and trade ideas with him than with someone who has nothing to give.”

Put into the pipeline by ousted Columbia studio chief David Puttnam, “The Beast” became a casualty itself when the Dawn Steel regime came in. It received virtually no publicity, according to the director, and was in and out of theaters in a couple of weeks. Still, Patric received a measure of professional respect and a development deal from the studio. “Dawn gave me a slap and a handshake, at the same time,” he recalls.

“Loon” (1989), the story of a tortured relationship in which Patric was paired with Robin Wright (“The Princess Bride”), fared even worse, bypassing theaters for video under the title “Denial.” His 1990 cameo as Lord Byron in Roger Corman’s “Frankenstein Unbound” was another stint he’d like to forget--and did, when “After Dark, My Sweet” came along.

The role of Collie, a boxer and escaped mental patient ensnared by Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern into a kidnap scheme, seemed tailor-made for the actor, vindicating his decision to turn down more commercial parts in “Young Guns” and “Flatliners” in the interim.

“I identify with (novelist) Jim Thompson and the ‘underbelly,’ ” he explains. “There are more failures in life than successes. True heroism isn’t measured in the leaps and bounds shown in films today, but in the small struggles of human beings every day. Thompson believes that man is depraved at birth and becomes dirt at the end of his life. But within that depravity, it’s still possible for shattered souls to find communion, to grasp the light.”

The steamy sex scene between Patric and Ward, the actor maintains, was embarked on purely for dramatic effect. “I told the director I would be opposed to it unless it said as much as or more in the amount of time as dialogue would. We decided that, unless the character gave himself over totally and felt that final connection, the betrayal the next morning wouldn’t be complete.”

The picture, Patric acknowledges, changed his life. “Someone gave me the ball and said ‘go’ and I did,” he recalls with a smile. New York Magazine’s David Denby noted that “Patric has the smoldering looks of a European model and the courage and inventiveness of a major American actor.” According to the Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson, “Patric dominates the screen . . . and demolishes the conventions of the role with breathtaking skill.”

The $17.5-million “Rush,” which documents the downward spiral of two undercover narcotics agents (Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh) into a world of drugs and delirium, is the sort usually offered up to male directors. In opting to go with Lili, Richard Zanuck concedes he was “leading with my chin, putting myself and my career on the line.”

Watching Lili in action, says the notoriously wary Patric, put his doubts to rest.

“ ‘Rush’ isn’t a big bite. Her mouth was made for this type of thing,” he says, displaying the slightly sarcastic edge that, colleagues say, informs much of his humor. “She’s a buzz saw with a ponytail who’s drawn to the same naked, truthful struggle as I am. This material is rough, full of grit and ambiguity, but Lili was up to it. The film is almost without a signature. You can see her assured, unimposing hand.”

Patric’s primary challenge was fleshing out a role only thinly developed in former narcotics agent Wozencraft’s first-person novel. To effect the lean and hungry look of an addict, the producers recall, he went on a low-fat diet, worked out daily at 4 a.m., and dropped 14 pounds.

The actor politely but firmly refuses to elaborate. “People want it both ways,” he explains. “They want the magic, but then they want to know how the magic is done. I don’t like to talk about what I do. What counts is whether or not I managed to breathe life into the character. Whether my boots were too big or too small when I was playing him is beside the point. That’s just actors patting themselves on the back.”

Patric is, once again, in a holding pattern. To help matters along, the actor--a big Notre Dame fan--is developing a project of his own about the team’s George Gipp. “This character, bastardized by Ronald Reagan,” he says, “was a real raging bull character who ushered in the golden age of sports. He was Middle American when America was defining its heroes and establishing its myths--part of the American idiom.”

Down the road, say his colleagues, he should show more of his range. “Jason has nailed the intensity,” says Reynolds, “and I’d like to see a bit of that rapier wit of his. As he gets older and more comfortable with himself, he’ll have much less need to be serious.”

“Rush,” meanwhile, may deposit Patric on the cusp of stardom: a gold mine for most actors, but a cross this one must bear.

“Jason has utterly separated from any lust for celebrity and the things that come with it,” says Foley. “He’s the least interested in money of anyone I know. A guy that good looking has all the credentials necessary to be ‘Mr. Hollywood,’ yet he’s sidestepping all that.”

Patric’s is a courageous course, the director continues, because he could easily slip through the cracks.

“The system doesn’t always reward talent,” Foley explains. “Cream doesn’t always rise to the top. Yet Hollywood is catching up to Jason--not he to them. That fascinates the hell out of me.”