Jarman Experiments With Tradition in ‘Edward’ : Movies: The filmmaker forgoes the surreal to make an accessible, modern-dress version of an Elizabethan tragedy.

For 20 years, Derek Jarman has been Britain’s foremost experimental filmmaker whose works have confounded and sometimes outraged audiences with their surreal style and frank eroticism. Only three have received local theatrical releases: “Sebastiane” (1978), about the life of a martyred saint in which everyone speaks Latin; “Caravaggio” (1986), his boldly innovative biography of the 16th-Century Italian painter; and “War Requiem” (1990), in which Jarman accompanied Benjamin Britten’s oratorio with a flow of anti-war imagery, presented as reminiscences by a World War I veteran (Laurence Olivier, in a fitting screen farewell).

Now Jarman, long an outspoken gay activist, has made his most direct and least abstract (but nevertheless stylized) film to date, “Edward II” (at the Beverly Center Cineplex), a modern-dress version of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedy that he has transformed into a timely, fiery attack on homophobia.

“I get the impression that ‘Edward II’ is much more accessible than my other films,” said Jarman, interviewed recently in a suite at the Chateau Marmont. “It has a good narrative line, and it’s pretty clear who everybody is. It’s much more traditional.”

In person, Jarman himself is in many ways much more the traditional Englishman than his films would ever suggest him to be. He is a warm, open man of 50, of much wit and typically impeccable British manners. Diagnosed with HIV in 1986, he went public with his health status in early 1987 and today has a vitality that belies his nearly yearlong battle against a host of opportunistic infections in 1990 that included tuberculosis of the liver and temporary blindness. Yet toward the end of that year, he recovered to resume his career and looks ahead to his next films.

“Yes, I’m healthy-ish,” he said. “I have to take a lot of pills, I have to be looked after, to be told when to take it easy.” This task falls to actor-editor Kevin Collins, who accompanied Jarman to America and to whom Jarman credits his present stable health.

“The doctors never did tell me whether I have AIDS. They’re much too polite. Still, I find the whole business so complicated. In a way, it’s a marvelous situation where people can make up their minds for themselves about it.”

Nevertheless, Jarman said that even before his own HIV diagnosis, AIDS, to which he has lost many friends, began to shape his work. “War Requiem” was preceded by his apocalyptic, surreal “The Last of England” (1987), envisioning a Britain after the fall of government, and followed by the even more dazzlingly surreal “The Garden” (1991), in which the story of Christ is juxtaposed with the fate of a pair of young gay lovers, who are similarly crucified.

Jarman’s images in this film may well be his most glorious to date, celebrating the beauty of nature and the joy of being alive, ever at odds with the forces of a darkly repressive society and church. In a sense, these three films form a trilogy singularly elegiac in tone.

Novelist Edmund White suggested to Jarman that he film “Edward II” some years ago, and eventually the BBC commissioned him to make it. His “Edward II” is yet another departure, more angry than despairing.

“The original text is very difficult to read,” said Jarman, who wrote the script with Stephen McBride and Ken Butler. “We altered it a great deal--only about half the script is original. We rearranged lines, changed a few words that were archaic, and we altered the ending--Marlowe had a much more negative ending. In essence, it deals with the open love between the king (Steven Waddington) and Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), a man of humble birth.”

Jarman opened up the part of Queen Isabella, Edward II’s rejected and vengeful spouse, who is played by longtime Jarman colleague Tilda Swinton in a manner (and in ‘50-ish gowns) reminiscent of Joan Crawford in “Queen Bee.” “Tilda’s Isabella could just as easily be inspired by Imelda Marcos,” said Jarman. “Tilda grew up with British royalty--she went to school with Lady Diana--and she’s in full revolt against all that. Her family is probably the oldest in Britain; 36 generations of Swintons, since 780, have lived in the same castle. I suspect her portrayal is a sort of revenge on that sort of world.”

In an act of revolt of his own, Jarman caused an international uproar last year when in a letter to the Guardian newspaper he criticized Ian McKellen, as an openly gay actor, for accepting a knighthood from the Tory government, which under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed an act forbidding local government funding of activities thought to “promote” homosexuality.

Jarman in turn was criticized by 18 individuals prominent in the British arts, who publicly declared their own homosexuality in support of McKellen. “The whole thing was rather like the Nazis giving an Iron Cross to a rabbi for saving Jews,” said Jarman sharply. “Somebody had to stand up and not be counted. Ian was co-opted, like all Shakespearean actors are. It is, after all, the Royal Shakespeare Company. Ian is a very nice man, and he’s very put out with me.”

Although a veteran iconoclast, Jarman, who’s been a designer and painter and is also a diarist, speaks with genuine affection of his late parents and their firm support of his far-from-conventional career. A bomber pilot who after the war ran Rome’s airport for the RAF and participated in the Venice war trials, Jarman’s father, as well as his adventurous mother, respected their son’s ability to make his own way in the world--without taking a penny from them. He said his younger sister as well as his parents--”a suburban family”--actually liked and understood his work. His eldest niece, Kate Temple, appears as a seamstress in “Edward II.” He suspects that the years he lived in Italy as a child have been an influence on his work, as have the Italian cinema of the ‘60s and the American underground cinema of the same decade.

Jarman is considering a number of projects. “There’s the possibility of doing ‘Dorian Gray,’ and I’ve been speaking to (novelist) James Purdy about a project. And I’d like to do a film of Tony Krushner’s ‘Angels in America,’ a very, very good AIDS-related play that’s now at the National Theater. I haven’t even contacted them yet; I’m not certain what my next film will be.”