For Director, the Proof Is in the Acclaim : Movies: With ‘Proof,’ Jocelyn Moorhouse becomes the latest female director from Australia to make her mark abroad.

Jocelyn Moorhouse answers the door barefoot, clutching one black suede shoe in her hand. “I lost the other one--can you wait a minute while I find it?” she says, with an engaging grin, as she hustles off to search under the bed at the Chateau Marmont.

Moorhouse, 31, has been riding enough of a whirlwind to have been blown right out of her shoes. Her first feature film, “Proof,” opened the Directors’ Fortnight at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won a special mention from Cannes Jury de la Camera d’Or--and a standing ovation.

“My husband told me later that I looked like I’d won the Miss World contest, because I was clutching this microphone, going ‘Thank you!,’ looking terrified,” she says, seated, both shoes on, in a suite overlooking Sunset Boulevard.

That was the first time Moorhouse had been out of her native Australia, and the first time “Proof” had been screened before an audience. But since then, she and her film have crisscrossed the globe, winning acclaim at film festivals from Tokyo to Stockholm. “Proof” recently opened the New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where critics compared “Proof” to such Harold Pinter-Joseph Losey collaborations as “The Servant” and “The Accident” and Moorhouse’s sensibility to Michelangelo Antonioni’s in “Blow-Up.”

“Proof” is a three-sided story about love, hate and distrust involving a blind photographer, Martin, his housekeeper and his only friend.

Moorhouse began writing it after a friend told her about a real-life blind photographer: “She said she didn’t know why he did it, but his kid described these photos to him. When she said that, I don’t know, but something must have planted itself in my mind, or in my heart that really moved me about his predicament. He was obviously a very sensible and a very brave man. He was refusing to be left in the dark, basically.”

And, she adds of Martin, who rejects Celia romantically: “I think I’ve always been really interested in Martin’s sort of men. Not blind men, but bastards who are somehow attractive, who manage to attract women who feel that they have a capability of healing those souls.

“When I was a teen-ager I used to love the Bronte books, ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jane Eyre.’ In those books the women do usually manage to heal the men, but in life, I’ve found it’s often the woman gets wounded. Instead of healing a man, she gets affected by his cruelty.”

Although the relationships in “Proof” are close to tragic, the film has moments of sly, unexpected humor. In that, it parallels the Moorhouses’ recent history. Two days after she and producer Lynda House heard they’d received funding to make “Proof,” Moorhouse found out she was pregnant. “It was an accident,” she says, smiling. “I thought about it for a couple of days, maybe trying to conceal my pregnancy or do it pregnant. . . . I’m so grateful I didn’t, now that I know what a beached whale I became. The last few months of my pregnancy there’s no way I could have made a film.”

Sure that her filmmaking career was over, Moorhouse flew from her home in Melbourne to Sydney to tell members of Film Victoria and the Australian Film Commission, the government bodies financing the movie. They agreed to delay the start of the film until after she gave birth. But because Moorhouse had turned down other work in order to direct the movie, she and her husband, a fellow filmmaker named Paul Hogan (not the Paul Hogan of “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” fame), found themselves in such dire financial straits that they could no longer pay their rent.

“It was devastating,” she says. “We were living check to check. I mean, that’s what this business is like. Especially in Australia--if you’re a filmmaker, you’re largely poor. We watched our savings drain away until we had no money left at all. . . . So we stayed with my poor sister, who has a family as well. We moved into one room and life became a black comedy.”

Besides her baby, Moorhouse found another silver lining in the situation: She says “Proof” became a much more cogent film. “I had a profound change as a mother. That sounds like New Age speak, but it’s not. I did actually become a different person. You can’t become a mother without changing radically: Your heart, your emotions change, and because this is a very emotional piece, I think that helped me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be as raw as I was when I was directing ‘Proof.’ ”

She knew she wanted to become a director after seeing Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” at 17. “I went because I was obsessed with David Bowie, as was everyone else in my age group. Everyone else was saying, ‘Weird movie’ and I just thought it was fantastic. I thought, ‘You can do that with film?’ ”

At the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, where she was in the same class as director Jane Campion, Moorhouse specialized in dark cerebral student films with twists of absurd humor. Upon graduating, she wrote for various Australian television series, while working on the screenplay for “Proof” in her spare time. “The hard part, I guess, was getting to the point where I’d be taken seriously as a director. I would always get a lot of work as a writer, but that wasn’t what I wanted to be. For me, I was only doing half of what I really wanted to do--write and direct.”

Despite economic difficulties in the Australian film industry, Moorhouse believes her homeland provides a more nurturing atmosphere for new talent than the United States. “It’s absolutely more supportive of women,” she says, rattling off the names of other female directors--Campion, Gillian Armstrong, Nadia Tass, Ann Turner and Jackie McKimmey--as examples. “And I’ve only named a few. There’s a lot of women directors and they’re making the films that people go and see, they’re not just on the fringe.”

Los Angeles, she says, is unfamiliar territory. “I’m not used to being courted anywhere. I’m just used to believing in myself and making films my way. So I’m quite guarded. But it’s fun. I feel L.A. is unlike anything I’ve experienced. It’s nice when I can relate to people, but that’s not very often. I know they’re out there, but I feel that there’s a very big pressure here to be seen as being gorgeous and special. I don’t think there’s the same pressure in Australia.”

Moorhouse is working on the final draft of a screenplay for an erotic thriller called “Snake in the Grass,” which she hopes will be her next film. She doesn’t discount the idea of directing someone else’s script someday. But it would have to be the right script.

“I wouldn’t do it just for the money because it takes too much out of you,” she says. “I’ve got to love the film, not the money. Because I know what it’s like not to have money--you still survive.”