Hackman, Beyond It All : On the set of his 62nd movie, Hollywood’s Tight-Lipped Loner Contemplates Retirement--Even as He Faces the Camera for Yet Another Take.

There won’t be a lot of talking, that is a given, but his taciturnity still comes as a surprise. “I might,” he says, setting the terms of his availability with great economy, letting his blue eyes scan the room with that elusive, shuttered quality seen in his films.

Think about it: Buck Barrow in “Bonnie and Clyde,” Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection,” Bill Dagget in “Unforgiven,” even Avery Tolar in “The Firm,” all men tight as safes, ulcers in the making. This much is true: That bottled-up quality girding all of Gene Hackman’s performances springs from a deep personal reticence, a loathing of exposure. Talking to the actor, even over lunch in his trailer here in the Arizona desert, even at what is arguably the apex of his career, is like robbing a bank. Whatever goods to be gotten will be under duress and passed through a very small window.

“Well, only because I don’t like talking about myself,” he says, pausing to swallow some ice tea, pensive in the winter light pooling on the little Formica table, on his restless, ruddy hands. “I just, I don’t know--I guess I’m a private person. For me, acting is a kind of private thing, and I just don’t like sharing it.”

For those who know him, this is nothing new. Hackman, they’ll tell you, is one of the champion loners, hellbent on not keeping in touch. Acting is his escape and his solace, his craft, as he likes to think of it; he is happiest when he has some acting problem to resolve, but wary when his job is examined too closely.

“When I’m doing it, I think it’s great and I like doing it,” he says. “But to watch it or any of the other parts of the business is so alien to me, I don’t get it. There is part of you emotionally that says, ‘I don’t know why they bother to ask me to work.’ The intellectual part says, ‘Well, you have a body of work and and you’ve done this, that and the other, so they’ll ask you to work again.’ ” He grips the glass between his hands, staring into its blue plastic depths. “When I do see my films, I’ll say to my son, ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t understand why I’m doing this and why they keep asking me.’ ”

UNTIL HE MADE “THE FRENCH CONNECTION” IN 1971, GENE HACKMAN worried that he would never work again. This despite the fact that, at 40, he had starred on Broadway, made 13 films and been twice nominated as best supporting actor, for “Bonnie and Clyde” and “I Never Sang for My Father.” But it wasn’t until he won the Best Actor Oscar for playing the raging New York City police detective Popeye Doyle that Hackman crossed that line in his own mind. He was finally a star. “Once I got through ‘French Connection,’ I felt pretty good about what I was doing.”

Hackman, now 63, with 60-plus films to his credit and a second Oscar--for best supporting actor in “Unforgiven” last year--is in demand enough to no longer fear unemployment, to even contemplate retirement. He is known for working a lot, maybe too much. “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Lucky Lady,” “March or Die,” these he made for the money, he has said. Sometimes he regrets that, “but only for a minute or two, because it really doesn’t mean that much.” Mostly, he says, he doesn’t want to become one of those guys who hang around “out of ego because they could not stop.”

Not that that seems remotely likely. If his name no longer sells tickets on its own, you hear him described in hushed reverential tones as one of the greatest American actors, a modern-day Spencer Tracy. Warren Beatty, who hired Hackman to play his brother in “Bonnie and Clyde,” considers him one of the best American actors working. So do Dustin Hoffman and Clint Eastwood. Robert Duvall has called him America’s “Everyman.” Even now, two of Hackman’s co-stars on his current film, “The Quick and the Dead,” Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, agreed to do the film largely because of the chance to work with him. “I don’t know when you get in the league of people like that,” says DiCaprio.

“Right now he’s at the top of his form,” adds Sydney Pollack, who directed Hackman in “The Firm” last summer. “Almost at a Zen-like place in his acting where you don’t see the effort, he’s so comfortable with himself.”

While many of his contemporaries resort to age-parodying comedies--”Grumpy Old Men” and “Finding Ernest Hemingway”--Hackman presses on, armed with an ambassador-like stateliness, playing generals, sheriffs and lawyers, regal tough guys. He had a less-than-happy experience on Broadway in “Death and the Maiden” in 1992. But his performance as the coolly cruel sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” was a most-public rebound after a two-year film hiatus due to an attack of angina and subsequent surgery that left the actor and sometime sketch artist contemplating a move to Italy, to Carrara and its fabled marble quarries, where he would become a sculptor. But “Unforgiven” changed things, reminding Hackman how much he likes to shoot long, complicated, dialogue-rich scenes. And the Oscar brought renewed attention that was, predictably, seductive. “You’re offered a lot of things,” he says, “and it’s attractive in a way, then you get tired and you think, ‘I don’t really need to do this.’ ”

He does, however. When friends tell him to cut back, be more selective like his pal Hoffman, Hackman rebuffs them: “Dusty doesn’t like to act as much as I do.” He can’t sleep past about 5:30 anymore, so eager is he to attack some sort of artistic problem, some puzzle, redesign yet another house or build an aerobatic airplane with his 31-year-old son, Christopher. But mostly Hackman wants to solve the perennial challenge of bringing a script to life, finding those ideas, the behavior “that will convince the audience that this could be a real person. That’s what interests me about acting,” he says. “Playing the game.”

Hackman has become a regular player in the current craze for Westerns, turning out four in the past two years--including the upcoming “Wyatt Earp” and “The Quick and the Dead.” In the latter film, co-starring Sharon Stone, Hackman plays Herod, an outlaw with a penchant for killing friends and family. If he doesn’t think the genre suits him particularly well--”I think the best scenes are always interior scenes. You have more control as an actor. Just by definition, Westerns have to be shot outside”--it is not surprising, given his subtly shaded, emotionally dead-on performances.

When he started acting, an ex-Marine and fabled barroom brawler, Hackman’s work was distinguished by a manic energy, a tangible unease. He was such an avid fan of Marlon Brando that he would play the bongos on the roof of the Pasadena Playhouse with Hoffman, a fellow student, “just because we knew Brando did,” recalls Hoffman. His technique, too, was Brando-esque, seamless, invisible, slightly menacing, perfect for playing wired, instinctual men like Buck Barrow and Popeye Doyle, less perfect elsewhere. He was fired from “The Graduate” because he had “so much juice and vitality,” recalls director Mike Nichols, energy that was all wrong for the burnt-out man he was supposed to portray as Mr. Robinson. Even when Hackman appeared in comedies, most vividly as the prissy Lex Luthor in the “Superman” movies, his mania was filtered through an implied sense of threat.

“Gene always has an element of danger about him,” says Pollack. “You’re never completely sure of what he’s going to do.”

Indeed, it was his less flamboyant roles, including his two favorite performances--the paranoid surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” and the eccentric ex-con in “Scarecrow”--where Hackman used his flinty unpredictability in subtle yet more daring ways, turning it inward on himself. Some have called it honesty, but it goes deeper than that, to that rare talent that separates him from the Jack Nicholson-Warren Beatty-Clint Eastwood school of bravado--a willingness to show his characters’ disappointment with themselves. An Everyman.

He seems to recognize it himself: “I figure that there is probably something in me that the camera sees that people relate to that says, ‘This is an OK guy’ or ‘He’s probably not that bad.’ ”

Off-duty on the set of “The Quick and the Dead,” the line between the performer and the man blurs. It isn’t that Hackman looks as imposing as one of his film performances--although dressed in his fancy gunslinger’s costume, the bleached white of his shirt spangled with gold studs and a few drops of fake blood, his sandy hair tousled and face flushed, Hackman resembles a 19th-Century circuit rider or a wealthy homesteader just in from checking out his acreage.

That blurring has more to do with the psychic restlessness he evinces off-screen. Hackman has a reputation for being difficult, for having run-ins with directors that, if not quite legendary, are well known. His authority problem, as he still refers to it, dates to his troubled youth--his mother’s alcoholism, his father’s desertion--the source of the anger that colored his early years and still fuels his acting. Despite Hackman’s aloofness, his demurrers about his personal life, there is a melancholy about him that suggests an ongoing ambivalence about his sepia-toned past in Danville, Ill., a lonely youngster caught in an unhappy household in a dead-end Depression-era town. While acting was his ticket out, it also became the lightning rod for all those turbulent memories.

Even now, when Hackman says he is more relaxed than at any point in his career, he still keeps his distance on a set. Production assistants on “The Quick and the Dead” whisper that the atmosphere grew sober the day Hackman arrived. “I’ve never worked with an actor of this caliber before,” says director Sam Raimi, whose last film was “Army of Darkness” with Bruce Campbell. “I feel like a kid trying to hang onto a kite.”

And the terms of this interview suggest a persistent uneasiness: two lunch meetings of approximately 30 minutes each and whatever other casual conversations on the set he is prone to. That’s it. No dinner, no drinks, no rides in the limo. Not even a follow-up phone call. “Gene is the kind of guy who thinks a 10-minute conversation is too long,” says Dick Guttman, the actor’s publicist for nearly 25 years.

Indeed, privacy is what Hackman craves, whether on a film set or at home in Santa Fe, a modest two-bedroom adobe he restored himself that he shares with his second wife, Betsy Arakawa, a former classical pianist. He is selfish, he says, with his time. He doesn’t see many people, mostly just his grown children, his son and two younger daughters, Leslie and Elizabeth, and he likes enclosed spaces, reading for six hours straight in his living room, hunkering down in a race car or the cockpit of an airplane. “He’s not your basic extrovert,” observes Eastwood.

Hackman can be abrupt, given to awkward silences. Although he is courteous and not unkind, it is difficult to spend any time with him without feeling his impatience. Forget small talk; he is pained by attempts at false intimacy. Even obvious questions, like why so many Westerns now, are greeted with a sigh--”Who cares anyway?”--that devolves into laughter, not derisive exactly, but a pointed reaction to the silliness of trying to rope some larger meaning out of his life now. He doesn’t care, he says, about his professional ups and downs, his reputation for being difficult or about being liked for his knotty, problematic characters. “I don’t care if (a guy) is sympathetic or not, that’s not important to me,” he says, sounding almost angry. “I want to make you believe this could be a human being.”

He says this, his eyes registering impatience, boredom and sorrow. For all his success and visibility, Hackman seems plucked from a John Cheever short story, a former star athlete resigned to a life of commuter timetables, alimony payments and golf outings. His real life exists just out of reach, in memory or imagination.

MID-DECEMBER ON THE HIGH DESERT JUST EAST of Tucson, the wind can really kick up, enough to drive cast and crew of “The Quick and the Dead” to don hats and parkas and transform the set’s main street into a bitter, snowless winter resort. Not exactly ideal conditions for the complicated series of shots Raimi wants to get this day--tricky, tilted close-ups of Hackman and DiCaprio drawing their guns, shots that require a special camera and motorized dolly and what seems like endless technical adjustments.

“It’s something Hitchcock used, and it will either be really cool, or they’ll kick me out of the Directors Guild,” says Raimi, scanning his storyboards. He has already shot several frames of Hackman, formally outfitted in boots, topcoat, silk tie and an enormous felt hat, drawing his ebony-and-gold-handled revolver. But actor and director are unhappy with the gun’s position in the shot. “I’m going over to shoot a bit,” says Hackman, turning from the camera and heading across the street.

Thell Reed, a champion quick-draw marksman and consultant on the film, is already putting DiCaprio through a few practice rounds beyond the corral when Hackman strides up, spurs jangling. “Hey, I want to check Gene out,” says his slender 19-year-old co-star, pushing his corn-silk-colored hair out of his eyes.

Hackman faces the distant mountains, plants his feet and squeezes off a few rounds, yanking his gun from the holster with a practiced thrust of his hips.

“When did you first start quick-drawing?” asks DiCaprio, squinting up at Hackman.

“This is the first time.”

“But you did it in ‘Unforgiven,’ right?”

“No, I just drew that one time. There wasn’t even anybody on the set.”

Hackman fires in silence for several minutes, the shots echoing across the vast plateau. After the round, he probes Reed about cavalry draws, butt-forward twist draws, fancy stuff. Hackman’s shots clock in at 35 hundredths of a second. “The fastest on film,” says Reed.

Hackman lets the remark pass, but the implication lingers in the stillness, that more than 20 years after “The French Connection,” he has returned, in some measure, to the kind of violent films that first brought him prominence, the kind he wasn’t going to make anymore. Because of his kids, or maybe it was his agent’s advice, he says, he turned down the Hannibal Lecter role in “Silence of the Lambs,” and when Eastwood came calling with “Unforgiven,” he initially refused. “(His agents) didn’t want him to do it,” says Eastwood, “but I needed Gene because he can make an unsympathetic character sympathetic.”

For Hackman, taking a role has to do solely with the inherent acting challenges. “When I read a script and I think there is no way I can make it come alive, I don’t do it,” he says simply. He is famous for crossing off stage directions, finding his own ways to bring angry, inarticulate guys to life. He almost quit “The French Connection” because he couldn’t figure out how to play the rage of a New York City narcotics cop. Now, on “The Quick and the Dead,” he is playing an almost abstract portrait of evil for the sheer pleasure of being able to do it.

“I look for something that isn’t written down, some behavioral kind of business that my character can relate to and makes him emotionally accessible to the audience,” he says. Oh yeah, he adds, and you have to be relaxed about it.

BEHAVIORAL FLEXIBILITY , EMOTIONAL ACCESSIBILITY , RELAXATION , THESE ARE the buzzwords of a Method-trained actor. A disciple of the fabled Stanislavsky technique, Hackman as a young acting student would stand on Manhattan street corners with Hoffman and Duvall and argue technique. “We’d get into these huge fights about whose acting teacher was more right,” recalls Hoffman. “Gene was always quite stubborn about what was acting and what wasn’t.”

He was adamant because, after a frustrating year trying to master the by-the-numbers approach taught at the Pasadena Playhouse, he had blossomed under George Morrison, an alumnus of the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio in New York.

“Gene is a brilliant character actor,” says Morrison, who currently teaches at his own school, the New Actors Workshop in Manhattan. “But when he first came to me, he was in that insecure place. He had virtually no education, couldn’t pronounce a lot of words, and he was a little cowed by people.”

Morrison helped Hackman discover the usual Method tools. But his breakthrough didn’t come, he says, until Hackman began to work in improvisational theater and Off-Broadway comedies in the early 1960s. “That’s when he learned to use his own energy.” By the time Hackman appeared with Sandy Dennis in the 1964 Broadway comedy hit “Any Wednesday,” he had become a star, eliciting Walter Kerr’s famous line about his “wonderfully light-footed habit of stepping off a joke before it begins to complain.”

His transition to tough-guy roles came later, in his first films, including “Lilith,” where he met Beatty. Then came “The French Connection,” a film that frightened Hackman, according to Morrison, “because he was afraid of playing his own anger.” Sticking with the role, playing through his fears and subsequently winning the Oscar, Morrison says, “was the turning point for Gene.” Hackman, he adds, is now “way beyond technique.” The only classroom habit he consciously retains: “Before every shot, Gene sits in a chair and relaxes like he has done a thousand times before.”

Or, as Hackman puts it now, having finished gun practice, “I guess I better get back there and concentrate a little bit.”

Back on the set, Hackman resumes his place in front of the camera. He is supposed to be squaring off in a gunfight with DiCaprio, who plays his son, but the younger actor is not in the shot, and Hackman, his face a mask, stares at a sea of milling crew members.

For several minutes, Raimi shoots take after take as Hackman scowls and draws, again and again. “This is unusually technical, a lot of waiting around for minuscule things to happen,” says Hackman during a break. He is clearly frustrated by the day’s hurry-up-and-wait pace, but the delay seems to loosen something in him. While Raimi huddles with his crew, Hackman stands off to one side, breathing lightly, his leather boots squeaking as he shifts in the wind. He is almost conspiratorial, whispering even, as the conversation becomes, for a few moments, intimate. “Most people think acting is doing something overt, but that isn’t necessarily true,” he says. “If you can make a character understandable, audiences perceive that as acting. To give you a for-instance, I might do a transference to my own son at a time when I was upset with him, so that would be a real thought of mine instead of some idea I had about the character.

“I don’t have a big emotional bank,” he adds softly. “I think it’s difficult for men; their emotions have more layers on them, so they’re harder to get to.”

He likes to keep his distance from other cast members. “I think it’s better to stay alone or at arm’s length. You’re more apt to be easy with someone if they’re a friend.”

The same goes for directors, he says. While he prefers to work with men of his own age and experience--Pollack, Eastwood and Arthur Penn, who directed him in “Bonnie and Clyde”--he says the relationship is never wholly comfortable for him. “I’m a funny guy,” he says, chuckling softly. “I didn’t have much of a dad, so directors are always authority figures to me.” Even when they are, like Raimi, about his son’s age? His chuckle deepens. “I always have a little suspicion about them. It’s sick, but. . . .”

“Gene?” Hackman is summoned back to the camera. Instinctively, he reaches up to adjust the brim of his hat. “You have to have a certain amount of ego in filmmaking because the camera will pick up a lack of energy quicker than almost anything. You have to get in front of the camera and think that it’s all about you.”

He gazes out at the crew, his face tightening, his eyes distant. “If you’ve done that, it’s really hard to shift gears and be a decent person. Sometimes you just don’t bother.”

BECAUSE HE IS SO TALL AND STILL MOVES WITH THE ATHLETIC GRACE OF his Marine days, Hackman tends to walk on ahead. On the set, you can spot him striding along, either alone or with somebody dogtrotting along trying to keep up. You see a lot of his back, like now, when he leaps up the tiny aluminum steps into his trailer, some 35 minutes from being sprung for the weekend. When he emerges from the trailer bedroom a few moments later, Hackman is dressed in his own clothes, casual trousers and V-neck sweater with a logo from the Gleneagles resort in Scotland where he recently played in a celebrity golf tournament. He seems embarrassed by this admission, that even his hobbies are the source of scrutiny. But in his pastel-hued sportswear, he seems older, less exotic, less able to hide behind his film persona.

“I played all the normal things in high school, football, track, basketball,” he says, adding that in a lot of ways he takes after his mother’s side of the family.

He was taller than his father, for one thing. And while they shared the same name, Hackman was known back in Danville as Gene Allen to distinguish him from his father, the first Eugene Hackman, a pressman at the local paper. Hackmans had staffed the Commercial News for generations; his uncle and grandfather had been reporters, but his father didn’t carry that kind of rank. He worked the machinery in the back room, the hot lead needed to make the plates. “My Dad dropped out of school in the fourth grade or something like that,” says Hackman. “He wasn’t very well educated.”

Danville was then a central Illinois border town of front porches, local factories and neighboring farms. But even by those modest standards, the Hackman household was a poor one. The family lived with Hackman’s maternal grandmother. There were fights, he has said, among all the adults, and his father often took after him with his fists. Hackman spent a lot of time in the basement, trying to find some space for himself.

“I would make up this little cardboard room that would be all contained and cozy,” he says. “I had a little telephone system setup with a can and a string pulled taut with the guy across the street.”

Saturdays, he escaped to the movies, entranced by the serials and actors like Errol Flynn and James Cagney. He identified so strongly with what he saw on screen that he was shocked to see his own face in the mirrored lobby. “I would see this kid there. I would be so stunned,” he recalls, “because I really felt I could do what they were doing.”

If he treasured any dream of becoming an actor then, it would be a long time in coming, years in which Hackman would join the Marines, nearly cripple himself in a motorcycle accident, bounce around the country on the GI Bill and try his hand at various jobs--radio announcer, TV cameraman. He even studied painting for a while in New York. Much of it now seems like a long, anguished prelude to the career that would eventually channel his restlessness, his anger, into art--anger that crystallized when Hackman was barely a teen-ager, on the day his father drove by him as he was playing, gave him an odd little wave and never came back until after Hackman himself had left home at 16 to join the Marines.

“I don’t mean to belabor that,” Hackman says now, “but it was just a very vivid memory of him.” His father had left behind a wife with a drinking problem and two sons, 13-year-old Gene and 6-week-old Richard. “Acting,” says Hackman, promised the means “of finding some way to get this thing inside me out, whatever it was, or is, if it’s art or energy or whatever. That’s all I ever thought about and to some degree still do.”

He won’t say it, but that anger has served as his artistic ballast. He was busted in the Marines for fighting, a practice that continued to dog him years later when he was getting acting jobs in New York and working part time as a mover, hauling refrigerators strapped to his back up six flights of tenement stairs to support his first wife, Fay Maltese, and his baby son.

“We’d go see a movie, get some dinner, and then Gene would stand on a corner and say, ‘I gotta go,’ ” says Hoffman. “He had to get in a fight. He’d go into some bar, and the next day I’d see him like nothing had happened.”

Later, when he was a successful movie star living in a succession of big houses in Los Angeles, he took up expensive, risky hobbies--racing cars, flying airplanes. And like that kid in the basement, he would still withdraw. He took a two-year hiatus, moved to Monterey and painted in earnest after lackluster commercial receptions to “The Conversation” and “Scarecrow.” Once, when his father, who had moved to Los Angeles and kept in infrequent touch with his son, rode a motorcycle to Carmel to see him on the set of “Zandy’s Bride,” Hackman never once spoke to him, never came out of his trailer.

There were even worse times. The suicide of Norman Garey, his lawyer and closest friend. His own divorce, a long time brewing. The death of his mother in a fire in 1972, set accidentally by her own hand. She died an alcoholic in bed.

Now Hackman will only speak about his children, the guilt of having worked so much and so far from home all those years. “That was selfish and unfair,” he says. “But at this point there is nothing I can do about that.” About the rest of it, his mother and father, his divorce, he is silent.

“Gene’s dealt with some of his past,” says one longtime friend. “But not all of it.”

Some of those close to him think Hackman has finally found in his career a measure of peace, not only as an actor and an artist but also as a man who has unconsciously replicated his father’s own peripatetic life. “Acting,” says Morrison, “is Gene’s way of being with others and yet still being alone.”

That may explain Hackman’s ambivalence about working as much as he does. “We’re trained as actors, and maybe that’s what we should think in terms of, that there is no retirement,” he says. “But I really think it’s time for me to stop. Films take so much out of you.”

Hackman lets his voice trail off. It is near the end of the last lunch conversation he has agreed to. When he confesses he wants to get his hands on a “serious sailboat,” it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Just so long as there is no crew. He did that once, on his first boat, a trip to the Bahamas. “The crew was sitting around drinking beer and having a great time,” he says. “They were nice guys and all that, but it was not what I wanted to do.”

So he will go alone, and you can picture Hackman that way: a solitary figure on his deck, content finally, unreachable.