MOVIES : Schroeder’s Dark Vision : In the view of a worldly director, influenced by great art and modern movies, man is not good

Director Barbet Schroeder grumbles about the food at the Sony Pictures commissary--there’s a private restaurant for studio brass where the food is said to be much better, he says with an indignant laugh--but his main topic is the emotional torment central to his new film, “Single White Female,” which he examines with a peculiar combination of empathy, insight and perverse wit.

Opening Friday, “Single White Female” is a psychological thriller starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason-Leigh as Manhattan roommates with neuroses that complement each other in a deadly way. Somewhat of a cross between “Fatal Attraction” and “Dead Ringers,” it showcases Jason-Leigh in a go-for-broke performance as a woman whose grip on reality disintegrates before our very eyes. Permeated with a lazy eroticism that Schroeder says was largely inspired by the paintings of Balthus, the film also reads as an inquiry into feminine coming of age.

“All young girls must struggle to find an identity for themselves--it’s a normal process and most of them do it by looking through magazines or observing their friends,” says Schroeder, who is married and the father of a 25-year-old daughter. “I’ve often heard stories of girls imitating one another, and that’s always fascinated me. It strikes me as both spooky and touching, and ‘Single White Female’ was the first time I’d seen this phenomenon addressed in a script. In our story, however, this process degenerates into something pathological because the two women involved are both obsessively needy.

“In a larger sense, this is a film about loneliness and the inability to be alone, and these are common problems in the modern world because most of us live isolated lives,” adds Schroeder, a tall, rangy man who eats his lunch with gusto, laughs often and easily and has an open, relaxed manner that distracts one from the fact that he actually gives away very little about himself in conversation. “People used to live together in communities, but today we’ve built walls around us. We’re alone in our cars or in separate little boxes watching television--television and the car have contributed enormously to this isolation, which I find to be more of a problem in America than in Europe.”

Asked if “Single White Female” is in any way a further exploration of themes introduced in previous films he’s made, Schroeder replies:

“It’s deadly for an auteur to examine his own work and look for some kind of recognizable style. That’s the beginning of the end because that kind of self-consciousness just feeds the ego and delusions of power, and ego and power are the worst enemies of film directors. There’s nothing I hate more than power, and that includes the power that comes to me as a director--I always try to make it disappear because I can’t stand it. When I see power exerted--and I must say this town is full of it--it strikes me as totally disgusting.”

If Schroeder’s dig at “this town” suggests that the 50-year-old director sees himself as a film industry outsider, the perception is entirely correct. A nomadic European who made a name for himself in the ‘70s as the offbeat documentarian responsible for such penetrating and wickedly funny films as “General Idi Amin Dada” and “Koko the Talking Gorilla,” Schroeder is an iconoclast whose distinctly foreign approach to filmmaking was anathema to Hollywood until 1990.

His eighth film, “Reversal of Fortune,” came out in October of that year, and it would go on to garner him an Oscar nomination for best director. Schroeder was subsequently courted furiously by the mainstream industry--a courtship that essentially boiled down to a deluge of mediocre scripts that left him with a mounting sense of exasperation that didn’t end until he found himself smitten with the two highly complex female characters central to Don Roos’ script for “Single White Female.”

Loneliness is but one of the dark emotions that plague the character portrayed by Jennifer Jason-Leigh. It was the woman’s psychological affliction, along with the involvement of Schroeder, whom she’d long admired, that attracted the actress to “Single White Female.”

“I was a fan of Barbet’s work, and I liked his conception of my character--we both wanted to get inside her and try to make her a fully fleshed-out person and not just a monster,” says Jason-Leigh, who read the writings of psychoanalysts Alice Miller and Melanie Klein to prepare for the part. “The thing that really intrigued me about the character, however, was that it forced me to deal with humiliating emotions that we perceive as unacceptable but that we all have nonetheless--things like envy, jealousy, self-hatred and insecurity. It was painful to delve into those things, but it was also oddly exhilarating to embrace emotions we usually struggle to repress.”

The film offered a different kind of challenge to Fonda, who is called upon to portray “a normal person,” as she puts it.

“In many scenes I’m required to simply respond to things, and that can be pretty abstract--throughout the shoot I was never sure I was doing enough,” she says. “Though I was uncertain about my performance, I loved making the film because Barbet’s great to work with--he gives actors credit for having a brain. He’s very honest about what he wants, so there are no games, and he’s incredibly specific but not at all controlling, which is an interesting combination. He’s a wonderfully strange man.”

While “Single White Female” is built on a finely drawn set of character studies, the film is designed above all else to scare the living daylights out of the viewer, and Schroeder has come up with some ingenious ways to do that. It is Schroeder’s hope, however, that the two aspects of the film operate in balance with one another.

“This is essentially a thriller rooted in anxiety about the potential for routine daily life to become menacing, and the challenge of the film was to make a genre movie that was different from others of its type,” he says. “In a normal film of this type the character played by Jennifer would just be a bad seed waiting in the dark with an ax and you’d never know why, and Bridget’s character would be a good, innocent victim. We tried to invert that by making the victim somewhat responsible for her troubles, while the killer elicits compassion because we sense her suffering and understand her psychological state.”

The central issue of the film--the quest for identity--is something we all grapple with; however, few of us deal with it in the lurid extremes of “Single White Female.” Asked if he believes that the graphic violence of the film might distance some viewers from its psychological content, Schroeder exclaims: “But I don’t find the film violent--the violence is very brief!”

If Schroeder doesn’t perceive the extremity of “Single White Female,” that may be because all his films have investigated extremes of one sort or another. Moreover, he’s led a rather exotic life. Born in Tehran, of German parentage, Schroeder was the elder in a family of two children and was raised in South America and France.

“My father was a geologist, my mother was a biologist, and both of them were very much against movies,” Schroeder recalls. “They were even opposed to books with illustrations--they wanted me to imagine my own images when I read a book, and I think that was a big advantage for me. Anything that makes you different from the rest of the pack is an advantage.

“I remember the first movie I saw very well. It was a big event because it was in Bogota, Colombia. I was taken to see ‘Bambi’ when I was 7 and they had to take me out of the theater because I was screaming--I was so terrorized! This is a very strong movie! When you see Bambi losing his mother, of course you identify, and this bad experience gave my parents an excuse for not taking me to any more films.”

When Schroeder was 12 his parents divorced and he moved with his mother and sister to Paris, where his love affair with film began.

“I started out looking at Bunuel and Eisenstein, but before too long I was looking exclusively at three American movies a day,” he says. “I saw all the greats--Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang--and at the age of 14 I knew I would be a director.”

Fourteen years were to pass before Schroeder directed his debut film-- “More” (1969), which he describes as “a story of love, sex, destruction and drugs”--and in those intervening years he developed several related creative skills. After studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, he worked as a photographer and journalist in India and wrote film criticism for Les Cahiers du Cinema and L’Air de Paris.

He worked as an assistant to Jean-Luc Godard on “Les Carabiniers,” in which he also played a role, and at the age of 22 formed his own production company, Les Films du Losange, where he produced and performed in several films by Eric Rohmer. Schroeder cites Rohmer as being the closest he’s come to having a mentor but says he actually learned the most about filmmaking from watching bullfights.

“The two experiences have much in common,” he points out. “In both cases you have this totally unorganized life force coming toward you and you have one split second to transform it into grace. Managing to do that is a question of timing, and the rhythm of the movement of the bullfighter’s cape has the same sensuality of a camera movement. There’s no way one can prepare for that moment of truth either--it’s a very magical blend of courage, intuition and feeling.”

In addition to Rohmer and the bullfight, Schroeder says, his creative sensibility was further shaped by “American movies, the writings of Baudelaire and Lautreamont, all the great painters--Titian and Caravaggio, in particular--and, of course, the Greeks. The Greeks formed everything. I also admire the writing of Flaubert--he was fascinated with stupidity and wrote a lot about it. I’m also fascinated with stupidity because although intelligence always has limits, stupidity is bottomless.”

Asked if he’s drawn any conclusions about life, having examined it from many different angles, he says: “Having had various life experiences and done a good deal of reading, I reached a point where I stopped believing man was naturally good. Man is not naturally good.”

After “More,” Schroeder directed “The Valley” in 1972; the documentary “General Idi Amin Dada” in 1974; “Maitresse,” a candid examination of the life of a dominatrix, in 1975; the documentary “Koko the Talking Gorilla” in 1978; “Tricheurs” in 1984, and “Barfly” in 1987.

Schroeder spent seven years struggling to secure financing for “Barfly,” the fictionalized portrait of writer Charles Bukowski. Today, the director tells funny stories about his ill-fated encounters with Hollywood money, which was consistently unable to relate to the wildly irreverent and bawdy Bukowski. In Schroeder’s view, the fact that America turns its back on nonconformist native sons like Bukowski is but a small part of an alarmingly pervasive social malaise.

“Movies are a barometer of what’s going on in society, and if one looks at the current crop of movies one can only deduce we’re in total decadence,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s the final stages but it certainly looks like it, and this country needs some kind of electric shock to wake up and start a new phase. Change is desperately needed now--it’s really gotten so suffocating.”

Do movies have any moral responsibility to try to bring about social change? “Absolutely not!” he insists. “Art has no moral responsibility to society, and to try to think about such things when you’re making a film is to put yourself in prison. You simply can’t function creatively within such boundaries.”

Pushing the point a step further, one inquires whether if in focusing on the dark side of human experience, an artist generates more darkness, and again he says no: “That’s like saying that fairy tales encourage more cruelty in the world. On the contrary, it serves as a release.”

As to what he plans to do next, Schroeder was to have left for Thailand to shoot a film long in the works based on a script by playwright John Steppling, but at the eleventh hour the financing fell through, so he will return to Paris instead. Though Schroeder’s production company is based there, he says he actually lives “wherever I’m making a movie.”

“In order to be a director,” he says, “you must learn to live without attachments of any kind, and that’s been very easy for me to do. I have few possessions, I travel all the time, and I never carry more than I can stow under my seat.”

Schroder has another film currently in development, slated to be shot on the East Coast of the United States, but basically he’s in between projects now--a period that all directors must suffer through and something he doesn’t like at all.

The success he experienced with “Reversal of Fortune” hasn’t made things that much simpler for him in terms of getting green lights for the films he wants to make, because he is still driven to make intensely personal movies that resist being comfortably slotted into box-office formulas. Though he says he was pleased to discover in making “Single White Female,” which is a Columbia release, that he can function comfortably within the studio system, he is still a maverick at heart.

On the stroll back to his office across the street from the Sony lot, the subject of the desert comes up and Schroeder comments that he is particularly fond of Joshua Tree and goes there frequently. “Oh? Do you stay at Two-Bunch Palms?” one inquires, referring to the hip spa featured in Robert Altman’s film “The Player.” “No way!” he says. “That’s for movie people! You’ll never see me hanging out there.”