MOVIES : Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Streep : Meryl Streep takes to the white water. Was her action debut smooth sailing? How ‘The River Wild’ star and director Curtis Hanson took the plunge.

When Meryl Streep was announced as the star of “The River Wild,” the suspense-adventure film opening Friday, some Hollywood insiders were surprised. Why would this formidable actress, two-time Oscar winner and master of a million accents want to do a mere action flick in which the extent of the drama seemed to be shooting the toughest rapids in the West?

Many figured it was a bid for broader commercial appeal; her recent films, such as “Death Becomes Her” and last spring’s “The House of the Spirits,” suffered at the box office. But as Streep, 45, and director Curtis Hanson (“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”), 48, recently discussed on a stormy morning in New York, there were other challenges and goals at hand, including their joint collaboration to create the character of Gail Hartman, a mother and former river guide who takes her family on a rafting trip partly to help save her marriage to David Strathairn, and then has to fight both the river and a couple of menacing strangers, Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly, to keep them alive.

As Streep admits, this strong, determined character is closer to her own persona than any she’s played onscreen. She even got to use her own accent. But as Bacon observes, she still achieved something transformational: turning herself into such an expert oarswoman after only two weeks of training, steering her raft down such dangerous rapids, on location in Oregon and Montana, that she regularly earned applause from the crew.

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Question: Meryl Streep as action hero?

Curtis Hanson: I know. When it was announced that Meryl was doing this movie, the take that everyone had on it was Meryl Streep doing a Bruce Willis part, an Arnold Schwarzenegger part, like it was sort of a gimmick, putting her in an action movie. Why Meryl?

Meryl Streep: (Smiling) Well, it wouldn’t be appropriate to have Bruce Willis as a mother from Boston.

C.H.: But I don’t like to think of this as an action movie. It’s a movie with action, a suspense picture with action. And for a suspense picture to work, you have to care about the characters. So the idea of having Meryl play this character was fun because we’d have this fabulous actress in a suspense movie and the audience would invest in her emotionally to the degree that we must to have a suspense movie work.

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Q: Did Universal immediately sign on to the idea of Meryl in this part?

C.H.: Some people questioned it. One studio executive . . .

M.S.: (With mock fury) Who? Whooo ??!

C.H.: . . . Referred to it as a fish with feathers, neither here nor there. Because they’re so used to feeling that action movies appeal to young males and Meryl Streep movies appeal to females and the two don’t cross. But they can if the movie is really good. So if this movie can be successful and make these parameters a little less narrow, it would be very good.

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Q: Meryl, why were you drawn to this film?

M.S.: To be honest with you, when I first read the script, the possibilities of who the character might be in terms of a multidimensional person, someone recognizable to me, weren’t as obviously there. She was a bit of a cipher, more plot-driven: Things happened and she fought back. But Curtis was willing to listen to what I felt were the shortcomings. I was interested in the interior lives of the characters, what they were grappling with beyond their physical challenges. And Curtis was kind in letting me help shape that.

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Q: The physical aspects of the plot are so overriding, though, that that must have played a part in your decision.

M.S.: Oh, it did. I wanted to be outside. Of course, what was supposed to be a summer in Montana turned out to be a fall in Oregon. (Laughs) And I wanted to do something physical. I used to go off the diving board and do a one-and-a-half and I remember five years ago when I stopped wanting to do that. There’s a fear that sets in and I wanted to challenge it. I learned to ski when I was 35 so I’d have something in common with my son. And I loved it, the newfound addiction to speed and danger. And before it’s too late, I wanted to do that again. Challenge that, to see what I could do.

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Q: Do you consider yourself athletic?

M.S.: No! I’d much rather sit down, given the choice.

Q: You underwent a very grueling training effort (see story, Page 40). Have you kept up your workout?

M.S.: No, No! But I do weights--I have a 3-year-old, so I do weights. I just have to remember to lift on the right side occasionally. (Streep has also continued her river adventures, taking husband Don Gummer and all four children out on a river in Massachusetts that, she said, looked easy after her experiences out West.)

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Q: Even with your training, you must have felt some trepidation facing the river. (It was actually three different rivers, the Kootenai and the Flathead in Montana and the Rogue in Southern Oregon.)

M.S.: No, my real anxiety was not about the river. It should have been; I was ignorant about what it would really be like. My real anxiety was about the first few frames of the movie. I was fixated on the sculling (in the opening scene, Gail is shown sculling by herself on the Charles River in Boston). It’s really obvious if you’re not doing it right.

C.H.: And we were prepared to fake it. Prepared to put Meryl on a little barge (a prop platform in the water that would make it appear as if she were rowing in the water). . . .

M.S.: (Emphatically) That’s a lie! I asked where the barge was. That’s a flat-out lie. There was no such preparation. I got there and . . .

C.H.: It was shocking, actually. She’d been practicing but I hadn’t seen her. I had no idea how well she would do and after the first little stretch, I turned to my cameraman and said, “We’re in great shape.”

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Q: But the river must have been a completely different situation.

M.S.: It was, it’s all wild, coming at you.

C.H.: And Meryl was the one getting (the boat into) position all the time. She continued to get better as an oarsperson too.

M.S.: Well, I got more and less confident as the process went on. I started it as a 20-year-old who thinks they can do anything, all buffed and ready and totally fabulous. And then I had a couple of experiences during the shooting (laughs) that humbled me. Made me recognize the real danger of what we were doing.

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Q: Such as the time you’ve talked about where you hit a hole in the river and were thrown out of the boat and under the water?

C.H.: Which was totally appropriate for the movie, actually (though that scene is no longer in the film). Because in one way, this picture’s about the conflict between a woman who knows enough to be afraid of the river and a guy, Kevin, who doesn’t. And because he doesn’t, he makes bad things happen. Meryl went through that education herself. She started off cocky, thinking she could do whatever, and then ended up like a surfer standing on the beach looking out on the waves, thinking, maybe we shouldn’t go out today.

M.S.: (Interrupting) Not really, Curtis. We’d have negotiations. Like, “I’ll do it three times and that’s it.”

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Q: But when she hit the water, you must have thought, “Oh, my God, I’ve done away with Meryl Streep.”

C.H.: Oh, there were definitely times when I thought “Oh, my God. . . .”

M.S.: The first time it happened--

C.H.: The first time Meryl went over--

M.S.: I was holding my breath underwater deliberately, to scare you.

C.H.: But it was that heart-in-your-mouth situation. First of all, it’s Meryl Streep. Secondly, I had asked her to go back and do it again when she didn’t particularly want to do it again, because we’d had a camera malfunction. She was tired after this long day. So you see her go into the water and on one hand, there’s this personal concern growing out of my affection for Meryl (Streep laughs wildly) and at the same time there’s the professional concern of “there goes . . .

M.S.: . . . My movie” . . . and then he says, “Let’s do it again.” (Laughs)

C.H.: We had a lot of mishaps, but, luckily, no serious injuries.

M.S.: It was a miracle, Curtis. After the fact, you realize just how much.

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Q: Were there any stunts that you simply refused to do?

M.S.: There was one that we watched a demonstration of, involving a helicopter. (The raft) was in a narrow canyon with deep walls on either side, the river condensed at that point, becoming roiling and fast moving, and the helicopter swooped in to this narrow cavern. It was harrowing because the back rotor was always in danger of clipping the side wall, it could pitch into Arlene (Burns, Streep’s double and an expert kayaker who was piloting the raft) and everyone would be Cuisinarted.

Plus, the helicopter was creating so much wind in this tunnel that it was pushing the raft against the walls of the canyon. And as I was watching, I was thinking, “What is Kevin thinking?” because I can’t be the one who says (in mousy little voice), “Curtis, I really don’t want to do this,” because this is three weeks in and I’ve been saying this a lot to Curtis. And Kevin walks up to Curtis, stands in front of him, smiles and says (in tough voice), “No (expletive) way.” Thank God, someone else wimped out besides me.

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Q: Did your family think you were nuts for doing some of these stunts?

M.S.: No, they have absolutely no sense of danger. They’d say (in child’s voice), “ I want to do that.”

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Q: But they must have come out of it with a new respect for you.

M.S.: No, nothing will give them more respect for me. (Laughs) Still, I have three girls and a boy (Henry, 14; Mamie, 11; Grace, 7; Louisa, 3), and I thought it was good for them to see a girl hero, a physical hero, using her wit and her strength, mind and body to get through something difficult. That’s rare.

C.H.: It’s true. We’re not used to seeing movies, especially with physical action, when it isn’t the man who comes in to save the day.

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Q: If this movie is a success, do you think that might change?

C.H.: I hope it encourages people to make more movies with characters like that, to be less boxed in by certain givens or formulas.

M.S.: I don’t have a larger agenda, just that people go and like it. I don’t have a feeling that it’ll change the world.

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Q: What about the effect it could have on your career, broadening the image people have of you, broadening your commercial appeal?

M.S.: No, I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a plan in general. I don’t have a clue, you could say. (Laughs)

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Q: If the movie’s a success, would you consider a sequel?

M.S.: I don’t know. Maybe they could send us out on the Brahmaputra River (which crosses China, Tibet and India).

(Laughs) That would be cool.