MOVIES : Taking the Reins for the First Time : Screenwriter Caroline Thompson parlayed her track record in Hollywood and her love of horses to become the director of ‘Black Beauty.’

Caroline Thompson’s career so far has been a tribute to the efficacy of dreams.

As a youngster in Bethesda, Md., she longed to be a child of the ‘20s, that delirious decade of the flapper, the frat boy and the tubful of gin; the Jazz Age of all-night revels from which someone would extricate himself Gatsby-like to step out for a breath of air and realize he’d been partying with a lost generation, separated from the old world by the Great War, and saturated with romantic yearnings toward the unknown, clamorous new.

Her other longing was to come to California, whose soft air, sensual shoreline and jasmine-scented nights gave credence to the myth that the place was once idyllic home to a glorious tribe of Amazons at rest and play.

“It’s an odd expression of America, where fantasy and self-invention can be realized,” Thompson says. “The freedom of the ‘20s was for girls to be able to take off most of the 19 pounds of underwear they had to wear before the decade began. In California, you were free of the past, free to undertake whatever it is you wanted to do.”

And she wanted a horse.

The object of her first longing was of course unobtainable--Thompson was born in the ‘50s. And the calamities of California life, both human and natural, have been enough to lacerate anyone’s Arcadian fantasies--although she has lived in Southern California for 15 years.

But eventually she did buy a horse, and became, as best she could, a full-time horsewoman--so knowledgeable about the world of horses that when Warner Bros.--which had been impressed with her scripts for “Edward Scissorhands,” “Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey” and “The Secret Garden”--asked her to do the screen adaptation of Anna Sewell’s 1877 children’s classic, “Black Beauty,” Thompson said, “Yes, but I’d like to direct it too.”

“It’s not that I meant to be opportunistic,” Thompson recalls about the film, which opens Friday. “But because I know horses and love them, I didn’t want anyone else to film a story who didn’t know how to work with them. It took Warners a while to make up their minds, but eventually they agreed.”

For a major studio to run with a first-timer who’s never even shot a student film is risky business, but a number of elements combine in Thompson that make her more than someone lucky enough to indulge a hobby. As a student of Greek literature at Amherst College, she had to have realized how far back men and horses go--far enough to a storied time when they were merged in the body of the centaur, and later became indispensable counterparts of knight and cowboy. They still exert a mythic pull.

“There’s no more aesthetically perfect being,” Thompson says. “They’re an embodiment of otherness, but not only do they tolerate us, they’re generous to us. They’re willing to work with us. What’s most astonishing is that when you’re riding a horse, it wants to dance. It’s like the tango, a form of communication.

“People say they’re stupid animals. I don’t know about that. One day I was riding my horse at Griffith Park. He stopped on the path and wouldn’t go around a corner. I had to force him. Then I saw the flasher, waiting to do his thing. These animals have senses we don’t have. They have a coded language; they’re always testing you.”

Sitting on her patio, she takes a drag on a cigarette and glances over toward Merrylegs, a white Welsh-Shetland pony who peers back curiously between the rails of a small outdoor pen. Merrylegs appears in the movie, gamboling through the woods with Black Beauty and his high-spirited girlfriend, Ginger. “He’s getting fat,” she observes.

Thompson, 38, hasn’t taken the earnings from her run of successes (six films since 1990) to pour into one of those leafy Westside duchies favored by the industry’s well-to-do. Instead she lives in a relatively small, unpretentious old-style hacienda near the Griffith Park stables, where the thin relentless wail of freeway traffic sounds nearby. The house is L-shaped, and strongly encourages the eye outdoors to its cluttered garden, which includes a giant topiary horse, a souvenir of “Edward Scissorhands,” rearing beside a fountain overrun with vines.

“Girlish” isn’t an adjective that would sit well with Thompson, who’s direct and unaffected, doesn’t wear makeup and walks with a purposeful stride. But her pale skin and inverted bowl of dark hair evoke the moppet she must have been as a kid, and the lightness in her handshake suggests a construction of bone china. A man’s plaid buttoned shirt and dark pants don’t conceal the length and delicacy of her frame--nor the muscles of hips and thighs built up from years of guiding a half-ton or more of horse.

“I wanted to honor what (“Black Beauty”) made me feel as a child,” she says. “Anna Sewell was a lifelong cripple who had to be pulled around in a cart--she lived near Bath. She was a spinster, as they used to say. Told one day that she had 18 months to live, she decided to write a thank-you note to the horse who pulled her. It took her six years. She died shortly after the book came out.

“Not only was it popular, it changed a lot of laws regarding horses. It did away with the bearing rein,” a carriage strap that yanks a horse’s head painfully and unnaturally high. “It led to water troughs put out for horses, and rest homes. It made people realize that the horse is not a mechanical object, like a car or a tractor--it’s a creature with feelings.”

“Black Beauty,” the story of a horse born into an idyllic manor life and then cast into the Dickensian brutality of Victorian London, where he appears left for dead, has had two other film incarnations. One was in the United States in 1946, and the other in Great Britain in 1971.

Thompson’s version comes straight from the book--and the horse’s point of view. If anthropomorphizing a horse takes away from its sizable mystery (“Mine is a story of trust and betrayal and learning to trust again,” Beauty says at the beginning, in Alan Cummings’ narrative voice), Thompson gives Black Beauty less and less to say as time goes by so that we’re closer to feeling the horse’s experience instead of hearing about it.

And in several instances, she suspends the plot for no other reason than to show horses running for the pure joy of it. “I got to express something I’ve loved for a long time. Think how seldom that gets to happen.”

As for directing--the film world’s version of assuming a throne, or at least earning the rank of field general--she took a course that was diplomatic and no-nonsense.

“I think the biggest mistake you can make in this instance is thinking you know someone else’s job,” Thompson says. “If I didn’t know what lens to use in a particular situation, I could convey the feeling I wanted, so that determined the shot list. Claire Simpson, my film editor, won an Academy Award for ‘Platoon.’ John Box, the production designer, is 80--he worked with David Lean and won four Oscars. These people don’t need anyone to tell them their jobs. I also got a cast of some dream people.”

They include Sean Bean, David Thewlis, Jim Carter, Peter Davison, Andrew Knott, Alun Armstrong, John McEnery, Peter Cook, and Eleanor Bron--an all-British roster in a wholly English shoot--which Thompson considers immeasurably helpful in her instance, as well as top animal trainer Rex Peterson.

“We were the only movie being shot at Pinewood (Studios) last summer. The actors really wanted to work. The didn’t say ‘Eeeeww, this is a kid’s movie!’ They didn’t resent playing second fiddle to a horse. A lot of these people came from the Royal Shakespeare Company, but they don’t have attitude. I don’t know that this could’ve been done here.”

Despite the ethereal nature of her work and her absence of a directorial track record, Thompson was no pushover on the set, and draws high marks for keeping everyone energized and focused.

“I think the studio felt there was no one better to direct,” says producer Peter MacGregor-Scott, who last worked on “The Fugitive.” “Everything she’s written has been made; she’s a lover of horses and an accomplished rider. In England, movie-making is much more of a craft. She had experienced hands around her, a very solid cast and crew. But it was clear from the beginning that she had the vision. The picture was in her head. She’s got a lot of energy and fortitude.”

“She’s a lot tougher than she looks, or else she wouldn’t be able to make it in this cutthroat business,” says actor David Thewlis (“Naked”), speaking on the phone from Wales, where he’s making “Restoration.”

“I thought she was very brave to take on a complicated work that involved animals and children. But she really held it together on the set. She’s good for an actor. She gives detailed, specific direction. There’s not a lot of vague discussion. In my limited experience of Hollywood, she struck me as not someone superficial. She’s got a good sense of humor. She’s easy to be with. We all had a lot of trust in Caroline.”

Thompson has a mixed attitude, part sanguine, part dread, toward directing. “I loved being able to follow through on a script, which you normally can’t do as a writer,” she says. “I do want to do it again, but not always. The metaphor you always hear about it is war. That’s true. I liked the responsibility and I think it helped that I don’t care to be lied to; I don’t like people telling me what they think I like to hear.

“But you can see how it developed as a male environment. No female would’ve invented it. A female would’ve made sure to create more reflective time.”

One of the things that may have helped Thompson is that, unlike a lot of industry types feverishly aspiring to be players, she isn’t tapped into Hollywood’s underground cable of fear.

“For reasons I can’t quite understand, I never operate out of fear,” she says. A lot of that may have to do with a solidly traditional East Coast upbringing in a house that had been in the family for 80 years. Her father is a Washington lawyer and her mother teaches kids with learning disabilities. Thompson has an older brother who’s an investment banker in Hong Kong and an older sister who is a doctor. She even went to the same Episcopal high school as her mother and sister (“a wonderful school, which had the daughters of a lot of congressmen and diplomats”).

Thompson remembers herself as a bookish kid who wanted to write, and took her practical-minded father’s advice, to pursue journalism. She interned for the Los Angeles Times her high school senior year, but never saw her life in the news business. “Editors always thought they were being objective,” she says. “I could never convince them that they were as subjective as everyone else.”

A brief period at Radcliffe followed, in which she grew impatient with classmates “impressed with themselves for getting into Harvard,” and finished up a happier academic career at Amherst. In 1983 she wrote and published “First Born,” which she terms “an odd, adolescent novel.” It was optioned by filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, for $1, if Spheeris would let Thompson write the screenplay, an irresistible offer if ever there was one. The film was never made, but Thompson found her calling.

“I fell in love with the screenwriting form. It’s as specific as a sonnet. I trust my instinct, which is smart or stupid, depending on how it turns out.”

“Serendipity” is what Thompson calls her success, but by any other name it’s been notable. Three of her movies came out last year, and she’s at work on a ghost story--set, naturally, in the ‘20s.

“I’m feeling a little arid right now,” she says, suddenly looking a bit downcast. “Maybe it’s just finishing the film.” She peered at a sheet of paper. “A friend sent me this: ‘Desiderata.’ Taken from the Paulist monks 300 years ago. It really says it, doesn’t it? ‘Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.’ ”

She looks up. “I do have one fear--that I won’t know when my time is over. I hope I know when it’s happened, and can come and go at the right time.”

It is an odd confession. But perhaps the thing that has infused her best work so far is the knowledge that what is most precious is most perishable as well.