MOVIES : Walken’s New Turn : The actor who has made a career playing brooding psychos is in London making a romantic comedy; he calls it a nice change of pace

“I’d love to make a movie where there were no guns,” Christopher Walken once said in a magazine interview. “Or a comedy with a woman. Jokes, a happy ending and all that.”

Well, here he is, looking sleek and affluent in a tuxedo at Royal Albert Hall as he strolls off the set of a new romantic comedy, “A Business Affair.” Walken relishes this detour in his more than 20-year career.

“It’s a good part--I hope,” Walken says. “Hopefully, it’s very light spirited. I haven’t done anything quite like this.”

Since appearing in Sidney Lumet’s 1971 film, “The Anderson Tapes,” (1971), Walken has been in a score of movies for a variety of directors, including Woody Allen, Michael Cimino, Jonathan Demme, David Cronenberg, Abel Ferrara and Tim Burton. Many of these films share a decidedly off-center quality, and Walken’s performances are original, intense, brooding.

In “A Business Affair,” Walken plays Vanni Corso, a brash Italian-American book publisher living in London. After Vanni signs Alec Bolton (Jonathan Pryce), an author highly esteemed in literary circles, he then meets Alec’s wife, Kate (Carole Bouquet), a glamorous model who is working on a novel of her own. A love triangle is soon established as Kate, to Alec’s dismay, ends up in Vanni’s bed and on the bestseller lists.

Walken and the cast and crew of “A Business Affair” are at the vast, 6,000-seat Albert Hall to film a scene in which Kate, who has split from her husband, arrives at a theater with Vanni (hence Walken’s tux) and spots Alec across the crowded foyer with a new date. Beneath her coat Kate wears a revealing outfit, and on seeing it Alec gazes at her with regretful longing.

For this scene Bouquet, the French actress best remembered as the cultured, attractive wife deserted by Gerard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier’s “Too Beautiful for You,” has been poured into an extraordinary glittery dress. It plunges so low at the back that it exposes the cleavage of her buttocks, a fact Pryce registers with an eloquent arching of his eyebrows. Walken looks on, his eyes twinkling with humor.

After the scene is shot to the satisfaction of Swedish-French director Charlotte Brandstrom, Walken returns to the empty circular auditorium to talk. He is not given to chatter, and answers questions economically and cautiously. In the words of one of the film’s producers, he’s “a hard man to draw out.”

Walken, noting his tendency to be picked for heavy, tough-guy roles, says: “Any thing similar I might have done (to “A Business Affair”) has been in connection with something ultimately darker.”

He cites his work alongside Mickey Rourke in the 1988 film “Homeboy”: “I played a crazy nightclub performer and crook, and there was funny stuff in that.” Much of the rest of the film, he acknowledges, was quite grim.

“Comedy’s hard to play,” Walken notes. “Some of the best actors around are comic actors, people like Mastroianni. They’re not always recognized for it--Cary Grant appeared to be doing nothing, but just try it. I’ve been impressed by people you don’t always think of. For me, Alan King is terrific. Billy Crystal’s a wonderful actor. Comedy’s quick, and it takes a real intelligence to do it.”

Walken has gradually developed a cult reputation over 15 years. After his work with Lumet, he appeared in Paul Mazursky’s “Next Stop Greenwich Village” (1976) and Allen’s “Annie Hall” the next year. But his work in Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” (1978) helped set the course for his movie career; he dazzled as a young Pennsylvania steelworker who went to fight in Vietnam. At the beginning of the film, Walken is a shy, awkward bridegroom; by its end, he is a traumatized war veteran, playing Russian roulette in a Saigon opium den. It won him an Oscar as best supporting actor.

Cimino later recruited him for 1980’s “Heaven’s Gate,” which was infamously withdrawn from release, and the odd meanderings of Walken’s career began. He co-starred in “Brainstorm” (1983) with Natalie Wood, who drowned before the film’s completion. In Cronenberg’s “Dead Zone” (also 1983), he played in heartfelt manner a man blessed and cursed but finally destroyed by his gift of second sight. In “Biloxi Blues,” Mike Nichols’ 1988 adaptation of Neil Simon’s stage play, Walken was chillingly memorable as a martinet drill sergeant. And in Ferrara’s “King of New York” (1990) he delivered arguably his most remarkable performance to date as the doomed Frank White, a gangster just out of jail who sets about wresting control from an underworld elite, and who aims to use huge drug profits to prevent the closure of a neighborhood hospital; he’s public enemy as pillar of the community.

Even in the more tongue-in-cheek films Walken has graced, his contribution has been to darken the atmosphere: as the villain in the 1985 James Bond film “A View to a Kill” who wants to destroy Silicon Valley and as the megalomaniac Max Schreck for director Burton in last year’s “Batman Returns.”

Walken is agreeably modest about this body of work: “I hear all the time that I’ve made ‘interesting choices,’ as people call them. But it’s not as much choices as you’d think, it’s often just doing what’s offered--sometimes in the absence of anything else.

“The fact is, I like to work. I have no hobbies, and though I’ve been married for a long time, we have no kids. So I work. I’ve done four movies this last year, and I’d work as much as that all the time if I could.”

Some actors in Walken’s position might complain about being typecast, given his run of dark roles. “But I’m pragmatic about it,” he says. “Films cost so much these days, producers want to know what they’re getting when actors are cast.”

Still, he jumps at the chance to play against type, as he proved when he played the widower Jacob Witting in the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” TV movies “Sarah, Plain and Tall” and its recent sequel, “Skylark.” “Glenn Close, who was an executive producer, really wanted me for the role,” he recalls. “At the time, I think it was seen as an unusual choice on her part. But if an actor’s going against the grain, that can be interesting to watch.”

And invigorating to play? “Absolutely.”

Not that TV is a big part of his plans. “There’s a play on in London, Agatha Christie’s ‘Mousetrap,’ that’s been running over 40 years,” he says. “In that time, an estimated 8 million people have seen it. But I understand 10 times that many people saw ‘Sarah, Plain and Tall’ on one night. You have to be careful not to wear out your welcome if you want to go on acting until you’re an old man, like I do.”

Walken is emphatic on this last point: “My father, who is now in his 90s, was a baker in New York, and he worked until he was 80--he only gave up because he was tired and he absolutely felt like it. I don’t want to retire just because I’m at a certain age. European actors go on till they drop; that’s the way to go. I remember seeing Ralph Richardson on stage in his 80s with John Gielgud. And he was wonderful.”

Walken, who turned 50 last month, says: “I’m getting to an age when things change. Maybe I’ll get to do a whole lot of different things in the future.”

Certainly when he started out, he played anything but heavies. He played light, romantic roles onstage as a young man and, though tall, danced in several chorus lines. He was plucked from one to play the King of France in the stage version of “The Lion in Winter” with Robert Preston and Rosemary Harris.

“I got to wear tights and boots, I looked quasi-Elizabethan, and that got me cast as Romeo in a Canadian production. I’d never read Shakespeare in my life,” he says, shaking his head with wonder.

The role that became his big movie break, in “The Deer Hunter,” came equally unpredictably. Walken auditioned for Cimino and was asked which role he would like to play. “I never dreamed I’d get the movie, and I named one of the very small parts. I don’t remember if the guy who played it even got a line. Instead they gave me this terrific part. I was amazed.”

He also likes talking about “King of New York,” which he characterizes as “an unexpectedly good movie”: “I liked it. Abel Ferrara makes films on a pretty low budget and works fast; time is money. He just hits the street with a camera. He has a crew he works with all the time; it’s a family operation. A lot of times we just composed the dialogue on the spot. Most of the people on the film were friends. Larry Fishburne’s role as my best friend was originally for a white actor, but Larry read the script, convinced everyone it would make sense for the character to be black, and talked his way onto the movie.”

Walken is refreshingly democratic when he lists his recent work; he doesn’t edit out the smaller gigs. Thus he will mention a movie made with Lorraine Bracco called “Scam” and a French film, “Le Grand Pardon,” but also adds that he played a single scene with Dennis Hopper in Tony Scott’s upcoming “True Romance,” which he is careful to stress was written by Quentin Tarantino. He even mentions that he has appeared as host on “Saturday Night Live”:

“Oh, and I did a video with Madonna, for the song ‘Bad Girl.’ I played her guardian angel. It’s only four minutes of film, but it was kinda fun.”

Most of his life Walken has been immersed in acting: He and his brothers went to a school for performing arts, most of his friends are actors, and his wife, formerly a dancer, is now a casting director. Despite this, he is not remotely precious about his profession.

“I was not born to be an actor,” he says bluntly. “It has never been something I did naturally. If I couldn’t make money at it, I wouldn’t be an actor. At some point you must decide what to do for a living. I couldn’t think of anything more enjoyable or lucrative. If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be nothing much, I suspect. So it’s a good thing I am.”