MOVIES : You’re Sydney Pollack. The movies you’ve directed--among them ‘Tootsie,’ ‘The Way We Were’ and ‘Out of Africa’--have gotten 43 Oscar nominations, and your latest film, ‘The Firm,’ is based on a mammoth bestseller and stars Tom Cruise. So . . . : Sydney, What’s With the Angst?

John Grisham’s novel “The Firm,” besides being a page-turner, is a parable of greed in the money-loving ‘80s. To bite the golden apple, it reminds us, is to invite poison. But what happens when it’s the only thing that shows up on the menu?

Sydney Pollack directed the film version, which opens Wednesday. For all the doubt and ambiguity and even mortal disconnect that often show up in the characters of Pollack’s films (usually men, such as “Jeremiah Johnson” or the Denys Finch Hatton character in “Out of Africa”), his gut sense is that the purgatory of dishonor is a terminally unhealthful place--which makes his film differ somewhat from the book.

“It’s a simple story, which puts someone in a Garden of Eden to be tempted by something that seems better than it is,” Pollack says. “It shows a man caught between lawmakers and lawbreakers. There’s nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer. No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren’t available to everyone in it. It’s when the lawyers themselves become bad guys that you begin to have a serious problem. But it’s not a cut-and-dried matter. As (protagonist) McDeere says, ‘How can you tell if you’re crossing the line when they keep moving it?’ ”

“The Firm” would seem an ideal project for Pollack, one of America’s preeminent directors whose work has been popular with both audience and critics. Certainly his agent, Michael Ovitz, thought so. One would think too that after a career in which his movies have earned 43 Academy Award nominations, including four for best picture, and in which he’s been nominated three times, winning once for 1985’s best picture, “Out of Africa,” nothing could faze him.

However: “After I read the book, I was beside myself. There was no way I could do this in a movie. It had so many characters and such a convoluted plot that it’d need a 300-page script that would translate into a five-hour movie. Dan Pyne wrote one version, which was good. David Rabe wrote another, which was also good. But they didn’t work for me.” (Rabe’s name remains in the final screen credit, along with Robert Towne and Pollack’s longtime collaborator, David Rayfiel.)

The making of “The Firm” presented him with a deeper parallel dilemma as well: Just where does a mature, sophisticated moviemaker at the top of his game, an industry spokesman and a member of its elite, find himself in today’s film environment? To the extent that the making of every movie creates its own emotional tone, this one was conceived in a state of near panic.

Granted, Pollack is a notoriously painstaking craftsman. “Relentless and meticulous,” says screenwriter Towne. “This is a mainstream movie and everything, but it wasn’t made like one. It was made by desperate men trying to discover something rather than duplicate something.”

Too, the dust still hasn’t settled from the critical 1990 implosion of “Havana,” and Pollack knows, like everyone else in the movie industry, that a flop is like a heavyweight championship fight, where a loss can knock you out of top contention for years. And to the normal doubt and uncertainty that go along with any creative enterprise--particularly a screen adaptation of a hugely popular work to which readers supply their own pictures--Pollack feels added misgivings far beyond his personal stake in the hit-or-miss ratings game.

The creative health of the film industry worries him. So does the cultural atmosphere of postmodern, postwar America, whose mounting rancor is chewing its field of dreams into a rubble of surly mediocrity--a bad place for art and an inhospitable place for Pollack’s main area of concern: the hopelessly complex struggle for understanding between men and women.

“I find directing enormously difficult,” he said recently one afternoon in his production office. “It’s very demanding. It provokes all kinds of anxieties. You doubt yourself all the time and worry like hell. I don’t know why anybody’d want to do it, or if the kids in film school know what they’re letting themselves in for. That’s why I’ve enjoyed the bit of acting I’ve done.”

Pollack was a bonus hit in “Tootsie,” and last year alone appeared in “The Player,” “Husbands and Wives” and “Death Becomes Her.” “I feel no terror when I’m acting. There’s no tension. It’s just a part. Of course, if I really wanted to be an actor and gave up doing what I do, I probably couldn’t get a job.”

Pollack grinned. He’s inherited a strong chin from his father, who was a professional boxer before he became a pharmacist in Lafayette, Ind., where Pollack was born in 1934. Otherwise there’s a dry economy of movement and expression that probably comes from years of having to arbitrate countless varieties of hysteria and dispute without tipping a nervous hand of his own. He is open and direct, but at the same time his level gaze is hard to read. A New Yorker’s edginess has supplanted any suggestion of Midwestern constraint. His heavy voice has a smoker’s rough astringency (he reportedly gave up chain-smoking years ago).

Pollack had committed himself to a release date for “The Firm,” but his persistent uncertainty about how to begin meant that time was running out. He called on Rayfiel, who wrote the screenplays for “Three Days of the Condor” and “Havana.” And he called on his friend and neighbor, Towne (“Shampoo,” “Chinatown,” “Tequila Sunrise”).

“I worked with Sydney on ‘The Yakuza’ years ago and we always talk about what he’s doing,” Towne said. “As the pressure built up, it became ‘Can you give me a hand?’ David and I had a ----load of trouble with this. We only had ‘X’ amount of time to work in. Post-production time was nil. Added to that was the degree of difficulty of a book that requires complex plotting. We wanted to honor the book but we took it in a fundamentally different direction.”

Both movie and book operate from the same premise: A Harvard Law School top gun named Mitch McDeere (played by Tom Cruise) makes his cocky rounds of a number of welcoming blue-chip law firms before selling himself to the highest bidder, a small but posh Memphis outfit that sweetens its Southern hospitality with a free Mercedes while picking up his home mortgage and student loan.

By the time he discovers the hidden clauses in his contract, it has become a binding Faustian pact. The firm is a mob front, and anyone who wants out disappears. Then there’s this fellow from the Justice Department--which is waiting to pounce--who sits him down on a park bench one day and tells him, “Your life as you know it is over.”

The book essentially deals with McDeere’s suspenseful and ingenious contingency plan--with the aid of his wife--to get himself out of harm’s way against impossible odds. For Pollack, the plot-driven film carries the heaviest engine since his “Three Days of the Condor,” but it touches on a more intangible moral fear: What goes crackling through a man when he violates his professional and marital oaths? In this instance, it’s Jeanne Tripplehorn as McDeere’s wife whose measuring eyes search his face for clues.

After noting a number of important changes, Towne said, “I think it’d be fair to say this is a reaction to the book. We wanted him (McDeere) not to have to give up his practice. Everybody was breaking the law. The FBI was coercing him with fear. The firm was coercing him with greed. But there’s a principle buried here: The only man-made thing you can count on is the law.”

Another area of critical concern was how to develop the McDeeres together. Pollack & Co. like character-driven stories. They are romantics who understand that the poignancy and tenderness and passion of romance are fueled by a certain hopelessness, if not by the fickleness of human nature, then by mortality. But they are all of an age, and sense that America ’93 is not a Brave New World for men and women together. In many of Pollack’s films, it’s the women who provide a moral compass for men at sea: Only commit, implied Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were.” It is possible to trust, suggested Faye Dunaway in “Three Days of the Condor.” In “Out of Africa,” when Denys Finch Hatton says to the aristocratic Karen Blixen, “I was beginning to like your things,” she replies, “I was beginning to like being without them.”

“It’s hugely difficult to write men and women right now,” Towne says. “We’re less certain of our roles in this society than ever before. I think this emphasis on what’s politically correct has underlined that uncertainty and has demolished drama in many ways, not to mention the language.

“You take these despicable changes in language that obscure meaning: ‘Chairperson.’ ‘Date rape.’ ‘No means no.’ It’s like revising history. No means no, no means maybe. No means yes. It depends. The ambiguity of relationships has been lost. The necessity of trying to read what somebody means, the emphasis on subtext in writing and acting, of understanding things unsaid, are missing. It means people are not real anymore.”

Pollack takes a longer but no less unhappy view. “The novelist John Fowles once said that there are two major categories of people in the world: Those born before World War II and those born after. I think he was talking about a reality and romanticism that’s been lost.

“When the war was over, I was 11. My real growing up was done in the ‘50s, the last decade of American innocence. I think that being from the Midwest has more to do with the way I see life than anything else. Those were the last few years before we became angry and self-critical, throwing out our parents’ values and questioning our authority as a nation with ideals. All of that began to happen in the ‘60s, and now you have the conditions Robert Hughes and Allan Blume write about--which affect movies along with everything else: the cultural relativism that says everything is of equal value. That’s fine, but it rules out excellence. If there’s no consensus on excellence, how do you strive for a higher standard?”

Bringing it back to Mitch and Abby McDeere, he said, “I really do believe man and woman is the metaphor for everything. If you have a man alone in a room and a woman walks in, it’s not just romance, it’s politics. Everything they say and do is a metaphor for how we get along as a society.”

If there was anything easy for Pollack about making “The Firm,” relatively speaking, it was working with his actors. Most directors feel the crucial ingredient in making a good movie is casting. In addition to Cruise and Tripplehorn, “The Firm” has Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, Gary Busey and David Straithairn. Steven Hill plays the Justice official who delivers his doomsday message. Tobin Bell plays a particularly sinister hit man.

“I like to talk to my actors at length,” Pollack said. “Here I used the word movie as a detriment. When I start a scene I say, ‘Let’s not make this a movie.’ It’s my way of wanting it first to be realistic. You’re not doing it to be observed. You’re doing it alone. I tell actors, ‘Watch “Candid Camera,” then flick the channel to something else, then turn back. You’ll see how phony the acting looks because real reaction so often means doing nothing.’ It’s always simple. The tendency with actors is to think that if you’re doing more, you’re doing more.”

If Pollack is comfortable anywhere, it’s in the realm of discourse like this. When he first arrived in New York from Indiana, a 17-year-old straight out of high school, he signed up to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse and soon became a protege under the legendary teacher and coach Sanford Meisner.

“It was just what I needed at the time,” Pollack recalls. “Every young man has that period when the right guidance means everything. He would say things you were thinking but didn’t know how to say yourself. He was the most influential person in my life in terms of my thinking about drama, about life itself. Everything I do is from the point of view of acting. I think of cinematography from an actor’s point of view. My scripts are from an actor’s point of view. Once you find the spine of a part, it becomes a wonderful mold for the whole movie. You measure every single thing against it. Does this fit? How? What is this about?”

His face lightened over a recollection. “There was also this great, great, great teacher, Louis Horst. A theoretician of modern dance. He had been a whorehouse piano player in the Midwest and was Martha Graham’s lover. A chain smoker. He’d play and this cigarette was always hanging out of the corner of his mouth.” Pollack mimed Horst at the piano, his mouth drawn down at the corner, his eyes squinched from imaginary smoke.

“He taught pre-classic dance. Now I was no dancer, but you had to take the class. He said, ‘I’m gonna give you two free bars, but in the next eight you gotta do this specific series of movements. Then I’ll give you another eight with a variation. Another eight where you integrate everything, then it’s back to the first eight.’ It was absolutely calculated. You couldn’t deviate, whether it was a saraband or an allemande. That’s where I learned my A-B-A form. You present something, then you present its variation, then you bring your characters back to the beginning, but with a different understanding. Between Horst’s objectivity and Sandy’s more organic, inner form, I subconsciously evolved the technique I’m still using.”

Pollack might still be teaching in New York had director John Frankenheimer not brought him to Hollywood as a dialogue coach on “The Young Savages,” which amused its star, Burt Lancaster, no end.

“Burt would say, ‘Hey kid, what’re you doing? What’s the acting teacher have to say?’ I’d blush. But I’d tell him, and every once in a while help him with his part. Then one day he said, ‘What’re you screwing around with this for?’ He called Lew Wasserman, who I didn’t even know. Lew was just being kind to me because of Burt. I was still based in New York. Wasserman said, ‘Come out and watch for six months,’ and I did, observing TV shows on the Universal lot. After about four months I got to direct a segment of ‘Shotgun Slade.’ So I was just sort of pushed into it.”

Pollack developed a quick fascination for the camera, both as a mechanical contraption and a means of telling a story, and spent a lot of time experimenting on his own. He soon developed a facility with it, and in five years, beginning in 1960, directed 80 shows, including episodes of “The Defenders,” “The Fugitive,” “Ben Casey” and “Naked City” (he won an Emmy for directing in 1966).

His first feature film was 1965’s “The Slender Thread,” co-starring Anne Bancroft and Sidney Poitier. His next was 1966’s “This Property Is Condemned,” starring an old acting buddy from “War Hunt,” Robert Redford--who has since appeared in seven other Pollack films, including “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), “The Way We Were” (1973), “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), “Electric Horseman” (1979), “Out of Africa” (1985) and, of course, “Havana.”

Pollack is still shocked and wounded over the barrage of scorn leveled at “Havana” after some promising early reviews. “I had a terrific 10 years and then got knocked on my ass.” (Actually, Pollack’s first major box-office success was with “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” in 1972.)

“Tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong I’d have fixed it. I still don’t know what’s wrong with it. But I’d do it again tomorrow. Sometimes I learn from critics, but they were so angry about ‘Havana,’ they thought I was ripping off ‘Casablanca.’ I’m not defending it, but we never talked about ‘Casablanca.’

“I have one area of confidence: acting. Redford did a damned good job in that movie. In my line of work, you can control certain crafts, like lighting or sound. But the syntax, the inner life, you don’t control. It was the same with ‘Tootsie’ and ‘Out of Africa.’ I can’t tell the difference. All I know is that when I think about making a movie, I first ask myself, ‘Do I want to spend a year of my life getting up in the morning and spending the day with these characters?’ I’d have dinner any night of the week with Redford’s Jack Weil.”

Pollack’s reputation as a top director is based on two things: the talent for making intelligent movies with broad appeal (in most cases, this is an oxymoron), and coaxing first-rate work out of high-octane stars, who have included Lancaster, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda and Sally Field. Some directors are strategists, war-room generals. Pollack reads the psyches of his players. He knows when to walk someone through and when to back off. “The director who tells you everything is fine is the one you’re not happy being in the hands of,” said Meryl Streep in an interview while making “Out of Africa.”

For “The Firm,” for example, Pollack credits Tom Cruise’s eagerness for direction, and likes the result. “People find it a great leap for Tom,” Pollack said. “I think he’s stripped away a lot of crutches that he could’ve used. It’s a very honest performance. I don’t see false notes in it, nothing bravura.” He admires Tripplehorn’s eloquent sense of quiet as well as Straithairn’s commanding self-possession. As for Gene Hackman, he said, “With someone that good, you don’t direct. You just try and make it comfortable for him.”

Hackman had in fact telephoned a few minutes earlier to hear Pollack say, with unmistakable solicitousness and warmth, “I just wanted to tell you you’re wonderful in the picture. It’s such a beautiful, simple and complicated performance at the same time. I hope you’re gonna like it. Call me after you see it.”

Later, Pollack summed up anyone’s feeling of being at or near the top when, in commenting on a movie he’s producing called “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” he mentioned its theme: “Maybe it’s not so good being No. 1. The better I play, the better I have to play.”

To Pollack at this stage of his career, the pressures of making movies aren’t just personal, they’re systemic in the industry. “It’s harder and harder to choose what to do, because your life rises and falls on one movie. Universal was the last hold-out against the trend that has made movie companies small divisions of multinational conglomerates. They read success by quarterly reports. This year has to be better than last year. So movies are created as repeatable products, like yogurt. Nothing changes about them except marketing strategies.

“But that’s not the way movies are made. You reinvent movies every time you make one, even if you’re remaking one. It’s not a measurable, quantifiable process. But the pressure is to push the envelope of sensationalism and exploitation in a company product you won’t see anywhere else. The businessman and the artist--nobody’s ever been able to make sense of that relationship.”

Pollack looked gloomy. From the perspective of a man of his generation and sensibility, the next thing he chooses to do could turn out to be the last thing he ever wants to do. All this has only served to enlarge his already outsized companion, worry, to sometime comic effect.

“He called me in Montana,” Towne said. “I heard ‘This is a (expletive) disaster. I know I’ve said this before, but we’re gonna get killed.’ So I came down nervously and sat through a screening. The first 15 minutes, not so bad. A half-hour goes by, an hour-and-a-half, I said, ‘This doesn’t look like a disaster to me.’ ” As it turns out, Pollack had been referring to the three-hour rough cut, before he had polished it in the editing room. Says Towne, “I couldn’t see what he was worried about and told him so. ‘It was a disaster,’ Sydney said. He put up his hands in this gesture of surrender. ‘Hey! I got witnesses!’ ”