The Man Who Wouldn’t Go Out : For 20 Years, Gerard Brach Has Occupied a World Scarcely Larger Than His Room--the Prolific Center of a Screenriter’s Universe.

There’s an air of mystery about screenwriter Gerard Brach, and it makes just getting to see him something of an event. He doesn’t do power lunches, take meetings, or give interviews, as a rule. In fact, if you don’t know someone in his inner circle--directors Jean-Jacques Annaud, Claude Berri, Roman Polanski--forget it. You’ll never find him.

The mystery deepens when Brach opens the door to his Paris apartment and greets you with a cautious smile. He’s about five feet four, spry. Dressed casually in a blue LaCoste sweater, purple sport shirt and dark blue slacks, he looks more like a prosperous businessman from Cleveland than the elusive legend of French film that he is.

He’s friendly and polite in an old fashioned way: He shakes your hand and bows slightly. Then, just when you feel at ease, you catch his eyes. They are dark and honest and flood you with a torrent of conflicting emotions--fear, humor, pain, happiness, flashes of terror, laughter, grief, a curious optimism.

It’s disconcerting, but then he cheerfully sits down at his desk in a shaft of sunlight, offers you a chair and starts explaining the toys on his desk: a tray of small, neon-colored spinning tops; toy birds the size of baseballs that warble when you lift them up; kaleidoscopes.

“It’s fantastic for exciting my imagination, you know?” Brach, 67, says in his heavily accented English. “Because it’s true, I never go out of my flat. I stayed here, inside for seven years; I don’t even go to the elevator during that time. . . . So these help me travel visually.”

The idea of staying inside for seven years may sound strange, but not in Brach’s case. He’s an agoraphobic, a person who suffers from a fear of open spaces. And his dread of such everyday events as a walk in the sun or lunch with friends has been so intense that it has kept him in bed for weeks at a time and indoors for most of the past 20 years.

The illness descended on Brach like a black cloud out of nowhere in the early 1980s, and it has been known to make him break out in a cold sweat, shake and freeze in panic as soon as he steps outside.

“The first time this came over me, I felt like I had suddenly come down with this strange disease, only I don’t know what it is,” Brach says. “I am standing on a Paris street corner when suddenly--foo! I cannot move, I cannot cross the street, I cannot do nothing. For one half hour I do not move.”

“I’m extremely sensitive to perspective, that is my problem, a big part of my problem,” he adds. “It just seems to take me, you know, sweep me away. One day years ago, I go to the Eiffel Tower, walking underneath it. I look up and I have this awful sensation of vertigo--only in reverse. I felt like I was being sucked up! Is strange, no?”

His illness may have kept him inside, but it did not keep him from becoming one of the most remarkable screenwriters of our time. His first feature, “River of Diamonds,” came out in 1962, and since then 27 others have made it to the screen, establishing his international reputation for non-verbal storytelling, brilliant images and extraordinary range--from thrillers like “Cul-de-Sac,” one of his favorites, to lyrical adaptations of literary classics like “Jean de Florette.”

He’s perhaps best known as Roman Polanski’s screenwriter--or, as Brach likes to quip, “Roman’s idiot.” They’ve been as close as brothers (and as different as night and day) for nearly 34 years. They have also collaborated on 10 films--including “Repulsion,” “The Tenant,” “Tess” and “Bitter Moon.” They have just finished their 11th, a version of “Cinderella.”

Over the years, a Who’s Who of European cinema--Michelangelo Antonioni, Bertrand Blier, Ridley Scott, Roland Joffe--has beaten a path to Brach’s door.

Brach’s biggest success, however, has been with Annaud, 51. Berri introduced them in 1977 and they have collaborated on four offbeat films: “Quest for Fire,” a drama about prehistoric man; “The Name of the Rose,” a mystery set in the Middle Ages, based on Umberto Eco’s bestseller; “The Bear,” the story of a bear cub’s emotional development, told from the cub’s point of view, and “The Lover,” based on Marguerite Duras’ story of a young French girl’s coming of age in 1920s Indochina.

Each of these films has grossed more than $100 million worldwide, and they are not big-budget action pictures a la Spielberg’s or Stallone’s, but small, intimate dramas that are short on dialogue, long on visuals and connected by what Annaud calls “our silk red ribbon”: the quest for humanity in a world that has lost all sense of what being human is. Right now, they are finishing a fifth project: an untitled epic set among Eskimos and whalers in 19th-Century Greenland.

“I get very moved when I think the films I have done with Jean-Jacques have been the most successful for me,” Brach says. “Emotions I write here, in this room, take place in dark screening rooms and theaters in America, Argentina, South America, China. It’s a mysterious connection of human feelings . . . I wish I could know all the people who see my movies.”

To understand the real achievement of the Brach-Annaud collaboration, it helps to know about “ la guerre ,” the war. That’s what Annaud calls the 10-year battle he’s waged (along with Brach’s wife, Elizabeth) to get the man everyone calls Gee-rard outside. It hasn’t been easy.

“I stopped trying to change him long ago,” says his old friend Polanski. “It’s simply not worth it. We end up arguing and I say, ‘Look, Gerard, what is the problem?”

But Annaud was different. He understood the enemy well. He suffered from agoraphobia himself in his 20s. He knew the terror, dread, and humiliation it brings. And that understanding helped him wage a savvy guerrilla campaign of quick lunches and occasional trips that eventually culminated in a now-legendary event in French film circles.

“I was shooting ‘The Bear’ in the Dolomites,” Annaud recalls. “I was doing the scene where the big bear was confronting the hunter. It was a very, very difficult scene. Then suddenly the walkie-talkie on my belt goes off and it’s my assistant calling, ‘Urgent! Urgent!’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘Someone in Paris has seen Gerard in the street taking a taxi!’ And I said, ‘No, that is not possible.’ And my assistant said, ‘Yes, we guarantee it. It was Gerard. With a suitcase. Someone saw him and just called us. It’s that spectacular!”

That memorable cab ride in the summer of 1987 marked the first time that Brach had stepped outside his Paris apartment alone in nearly seven years.

And he has continued to improve. On good days, he eats lunch at a beautiful little restaurant about 100 yards from his apartment. And he cannot thank Annaud enough.

“Jean-Jacques has been very, very compassionate with me, he understands me perfectly,” Brach says. ‘With many people this is impossible. They will say to me, ‘What’s with you? You look well. Why don’t you go outside? You’re joking, right?’ “It is the situation of every man who is sick,” Brach says. “People who are well cannot bear those who are sick because the sick cut the beautiful ambience of--I don’t how to say it. It is like putting a crippled hand in a black leather glove on the table at a fine restaurant during dinner. It reminds people of their frailty.

“But not Jean-Jacques,” Brach adds. “He doesn’t judge me because I do not go out. He never judged me.”

*

Brach (pronounced Brahsh ) may be a reluctant interviewee--this is his first ever for an American publication--but once he gets going, he’s hard to stop. He speaks initially in French, translated by Annaud and Elizabeth. But as the interview rolls over several days, he becomes more at ease, and shifts into English.

He’s a born storyteller, and thanks to the cable television, the man who rarely leaves his Sixth Arrondissement apartment is an informed citizen of the world--and a master channel surfer. He’s also a huge fan of American football, even though he’s still not sure of all the rules.

“It’s very exciting for me, watching television in English,” Brach says, his eyes taking on the twinkling glow they get when he becomes intrigued. “I understand maybe half the sentences--and I love not understanding everything. Because for me, it is like a mystery, you know. I feel like I am an explorer. I like these strange situations. They are very interesting to me.”

His office is standard writer’s fare: a long monastery table (order and abbey unknown) dominates the room, facing a giant black television. Art books are everywhere: open and piled on his desk, stacked on the floor, spilling from two corner book shelves.

Then you realize this is the living room--or would be, but it’s been converted into his office. The same is true with the dining room, now Elizabeth’s office, complete with computer, copy machine and fax. The entire apartment is immaculate, even pretty, with hardwood floors and quaint little balconies overlooking the street. But it seems customized to do one thing: turn out scripts.

“For me, the only challenge each day is the challenge to fill a blank sheet of paper,” Brach says matter-of-factly. “It’s a fight between the will of an action and the power of laziness. . . . And day after day, I wonder which one will win.”

Brach doesn’t consider screenwriting so much writing as a kind of poetry: creating a series of images, like stones across a pond, that lead the audience to a very specific, emotional place. His most successful films often linger as a single, haunting image, such as Yves Montand as Cesar Soubeyran at the end of “Manon of the Springs” learning from a blind old woman at twilight that he has inadvertently destroyed his own family.

“A lot of people don’t understand his writing,” Annaud says. “They look at something like ‘Quest for Fire’ and say ‘How can there be a screenplay for that movie! There was no dialogue!’ So what ? When you read the screenplay, it reads like something you see. That’s the key. When you read something Gerard writes, you see .”

Brach talks frankly about his agoraphobia, often in a dark, wry humor that puts his many quirks in an upbeat light. At times, his adventures, as described by him and his friends, take on the surreal quality of a tale told by a Gabriel Garcia Marquez--particularly his dealings with Annaud.

“I remember days when he would only go from his bed to the desk and back again, he was so frightened,” Annaud says. “When we were doing ‘The Name of The Rose,’ he would just stay in his bedroom, in bed, wearing a stocking cap with a pom-pom on it. He would have on these gloves and dark glasses and he would just be there, in bed writing.”

“The strange story of Gerard Brach,” Brach cackles.

“It is only very recently that he’s accepted to have one of those,” Annaud says, pointing to a channel changer on Brach’s desk. “Because he invented le baton de la television . Where is it?”

Brach rummages around and eventually produces a long broom handle with a plastic claw attached at one end. “I am the inventor of le baton de la television ,” Brach says, proudly displaying the contraption.

“For five years, I could not convince him to get a channel changer,” Annaud says. “We’d be working, and every two seconds he was pushing the television set, changing channels with that thing.”

“Why not! It is mine!” Brach says defensively. “I’ve heard that the Greeks or the people in Egypt claim to have invented it. But they did not--I did!”

Brach’s main connection with the outside world is his striking wife, Elizabeth, a tall, lanky Laplander. She was born and raised in Finland, then came to Paris in the 1960s to study art. She met Brach in 1969 at the Cafe de Flore, the legendary Left Bank hangout, and they’ve been together ever since.

She’s a combination wife, agent, secretary, typist, investment banker, cook and translator. She speaks five languages. And over the years, they’ve become a finely tuned production team. He’s up and writing each day at 8, filling up blank sheets of white paper with his neat printing. He stops around 1 and turns the work over to Elizabeth. She types it up, and it’s ready for Brach when he sits down to work the next day.

There is no question the relationship has been challenging. They were married in 1980 in Gerard’s bedroom. But the inconveniences pale compared to the admiration Elizabeth holds for her husband and his work. “The thing about Gerard is, he is very easy with everyone--the poor, the rich, it makes no difference to him,” Elizabeth adds. “I remember once, we went out to a party full of extreme left-wing Communists. They were drinking wine in plastic bottles, eating off plastic plates, in this terrible apartment. That same night, we went to a party thrown by some corporate guy who ran a big shoe company. He lived on Avenue Foch. Everybody was wearing diamonds, and when we arrived they gave us champagne and caviar. We stayed a half hour at each party. For Gerard, it was absolutely no difference, no difference at all. For him, we are all suffering.”

*

Brach has never sought professional treatment for his agoraphobia, but he suspects the illness is rooted in the traumas of his early life. He was born in Brittany and grew up in extreme poverty in Paris. By 18, he had contracted tuberculosis and landed in a sanitarium as a charity case.

He spent nearly five years there, undergoing brutal operations that eventually left him with just one lung. The mental agony was equally intense; antibiotics were not readily available, and death was a regular event. “It was just after the war, and there was a very strange collection of people at this place,” Brach recalls. “Communists, anti-Communists, members of the Resistance, deportees. We even had some people coming in from the concentration camps--some Jews, some not. It was a fantastic school of pain.”

By the early 1950s, Brach had recovered and was working as a runner for Pierre Roustang, who would become a legendary producer of New Wave films. Brach did everything from movie publicity to bit acting, appearing as a studio photographer in “Breathless,” the 1959 cult classic made by his friend Jean-Luc Godard.

But Brach was so poor at times he often slept in production offices. Sometimes he would let himself be locked in the offices so he would have a place to stay for the weekend. To kill his hunger until the offices reopened Monday morning, he ate baguettes laced with vinegar. To kill his loneliness, he randomly dialed phone numbers, talking with anyone who picked up. A brutal divorce in 1955 had not helped: His first wife left him and their son, Eric. All this made Brach a memorable character when he met Polanski in 1961 in Paris, when the two began writing together.

“He was always scared of something--flying, driving, walking, swimming, the street, heights,” Polanski says. “I remember we were doing this story about a man who sold the Eiffel Tower, and I told Gerard we had to at least see the thing if we were going to write about it. So we went over there, got up to the first level--just the first level--and Gerard is shaking! So I said, ‘Let’s go up.’ And he just said, ‘No, no, no !’ He was gripping the railing so hard his knuckles were white. It was incredible. No matter how much I badgered him, insulted him, screamed at him, he would not budge.”

Despite Brach’s quirks, he and Polanski were inseparable during the 1960s--they lived in London, hung out in Gstaad and in Cannes. Polanski’s fast-lane lifestyle had little effect on Brach’s increasingly fretful nature: He never learned to drive, swim or ski and had absolutely no desire to visit America because he’s afraid to fly. Wherever Brach and Polanski went, Brach would often set up shop in a bedroom, in bed, writing.

By the time they finished “The Tenant”--the macabre story of a man who moves into a small Paris apartment and is driven insane by the specter of its former occupant--Brach had vanished inside. He and Elizabeth were living in a studio apartment just off the Champs-Elysees.

He only felt safe in bed, so that’s where he stayed. His head got cold, so he wore a stocking cap. His eyes, ever sensitive to light, would act up, so he donned dark, goggle-like sunglasses. His hands got cold, so he wore black leather gloves; then they’d get hot, so he’d wear mittens filled with ice cubes.

“For most of five years, Gerard worked in bed on this little lap table,” Elizabeth says. “The entire apartment was so small--20 meters square! You couldn’t set up table to dine on! So when someone would come to work with Gerard, then stay for lunch, we would have to clear off Gerard’s little lap table and eat on that. I can still see Ridley Scott hunched over that table, eating soup, talking with Gerard.”

While Brach was moving away from the world, Annaud was busy traveling around it. He was born outside Paris and picked up a love of film at the local cinema during Sunday matinees, and by 19 he was directing commercials.

By 28, he was one of Europe’s best directors, with several hundred commercials under his belt, a pile of prizes, a farm in the Loiret, and a reputation for never being at the last phone number he gave you. He was also completely miserable. He felt that he’d sold out. The prospect of making “poetry out of yogurt,” he says, precipitated a personal crisis. He, too, wound up trapped inside his apartment.

“I had the same disease as Gerard,” Annaud says. “I hated myself. I put on 20 pounds of fat around my hips and did not want to go outside. I grew a beard and refused to go out any more. My first wife eventually left me. Only then did I start going out again.”

Annaud’s salvation turned out to be film--and a love of faraway places, inspired by his military stint in Cameroon, Africa. He combined both passions in his first feature film, “Black and White in Color,” a farce about French and German colonialists in Africa during World War I. It won the 1976 Oscar for best foreign film.

“The first day we met with Jean-Jacques was in my studio apartment,” Brach recalls. “This was during the time I was not coming out at all. I was sitting in my bed, he was sitting on the floor, and it was evidently clear we immediately understood each other. Both of us got the same impression: that we could work together. And very quickly we discovered that we were fascinated by prehistory, and we knew a lot about it.

“On that same day we met,” Brach adds, “we decided to write a script from (J.H. Rosny’s) book ‘Quest for Fire.’ ”

Brach turned out a brilliant 100-page screenplay that had no dialogue but read like a book full of prehistoric pictures. But no sooner did Annaud start filming than one producer after another began backing out, each one misinterpreting the film’s theme. The end came on location in Canada when the ninth or 10th producer (Annaud isn’t sure) refused to let him shoot the crucial scenes: those dealing with the invention of fire. Annaud quit.

“I was so much in the middle of a nightmare,” Annaud said. “I called Gerard to tell him it was all over, and he went absolutely crazy on me, saying I couldn’t quit, we had worked too hard on this. And finally he said, ‘Don’t be stupid! It’s near the end. This is what you have worked for!’ ”

Annaud found yet another producer and finished the film. “I was so down at the time, I know if Gerard had said ‘Quit’ I would have. Instead, I went on. And I think it’s fair to say, had I not done this movie, my career would be very, very different.”

The trial by “Fire” helped the two men forge a deep friendship. Annaud would be flying in a helicopter, scouting locations in Greenland or British Columbia, and would call Brach in his Paris apartment just to tell him about the terrain. Brach returned the favor by filling in Annaud on what he was seeing on television.

As their friendship bloomed, so, too, did their filmmaking. Brach’s fertile imagination gave rise to poetic images that Annaud not only understood but also had the technical ability to translate into film. Together, they found the courage to make films they had only dreamed of before.

“Jean-Jacques would say, ‘What do you think, maybe we do a movie about the mythology of ancient Greece?’ And I would be stunned--I would say, ‘Is possible?’ And he would say, ‘Yes, of course it is. Anything is possible.’ He allowed me to make films with images that had filled my imagination since my youth, images of adventures, dreams, open spaces.”

About this time, Annaud began working to get Brach out. His first objective was small--dinner at a quaint restaurant 100 yards from Brach’s apartment. It took more than three months (three months, 17 days and one night, according to Brach) of constant cajoling and numerous broken dates before Annaud succeeded.

But no sooner did Annaud, his wife, Laurence, Brach and Elizabeth sit down to dinner than a fight broke out, the only restaurant fight Annaud has ever seen. The event terrified everyone, except Brach. He was fascinated by the commotion and figured it was just part of going out. They finished dinner, and he promptly returned home--to stay inside.

Undeterred, Annaud spent months persuading Brach to spend a weekend in the Loiret, at Annaud’s country place, 90 minutes outside Paris. Brach finally agreed, and it turned out to be an expedition.

“He would only travel with a small ice chest filled with ice cubes, an old-fashioned atomizer full of cologne water, a bottle of camphor,” Annaud says. “And a fan! He had this little Chinese fan he was always using then.

“I had to drive very, very slow, or else he became very nervous,” Annaud says. “When we finally arrived at my place, he grabbed Elizabeth by the arm and said, ‘Look! So many leaves!’ I will never forget that line--it had been so long since he had seen so many trees.

“I had one room in my house that was tiny and dark, and that’s where he stayed for all three days,’ Annaud adds. ‘He came out twice--to go on a little boat in a nearby river and to swing in the back yard. He liked the swing.”

This trip was just the first skirmish in la guerre, but it culminated in Brach’s now legendary solo cab ride in the summer of 1987. The question, of course, is, where did he go? On a trip? To the zoo? To see a friend? Wherever it was, Brach isn’t saying. He prefers to let the image speak for itself: him, with suitcase, in a cab, in Paris, traveling.

“Gerard has many, many secrets,” Annaud says with a sly smile. “And some even I do not know.”

*

It’s just after 1:30, and Brach is outside, on the street, leading Annaud, Elizabeth, and a few friends to lunch. He walks stiffly, like a man who’s been aboard ship on a long ocean voyage, but he’s clearly in a good mood. He’s whistling “We Are the World.” He looks smart in a dark-blue, smock-like jacket and could pass for an average Parisian--until a large sidewalk grate comes up. He hesitates for a second, discreetly steadies himself on a friend’s arm and keeps walking.

The restaurant is small and quaint, reminiscent of a French country cottage, and Brach is greeted like a visiting dignitary. Waitresses take his coat and lead him to his favorite spot, a corner table. He sits in the corner seat, just under a large mirror, a gift from Brach to the restaurant owner, a longtime friend. A small postcard of “The Lover” is wedged in one corner of the frame.

During the next few hours, Brach seems right at home. It’s only after awhile that you notice he tends to behave like a man atop a high ladder: He doesn’t look around much, just focuses on what’s right in front of him. But that doesn’t dampen his current obsession: CNN anchor Bobbie Battista.

“I love Bobbie Battista!” he says with a glee in his eyes that seems to add a permanent exclamation mark to the end of her name. “I am fascinated by her like the bird by the snake. Who is the snake, who is the bird? I don’t know.”

“You interview people in cinema,” Elizabeth says, “and most say, ‘Ah, I am fascinated with Elizabeth Taylor, or Catherine Deneuve.’ But not Gerard. He’s fascinated by Bobbie Battista! And most people here don’t even know who she is.”

On the way home, Brach seems a bit tired. He’s walking more slowly, holding onto Elizabeth’s arm. Then Annaud abruptly darts across the street to point out a favorite bookshop. Brach freezes for a second, looks both ways like a groundhog coming out of his hole, and scoots across the street. He makes it with ease.

A few minutes later, everyone is exchanging goodbys in front of Brach’s apartment building when he suddenly walks down to the corner, looks up at the sun, and waves.

He smiles, and for no reason at all, starts to laugh in the sunshine, a big full laugh that shakes his small, stocky frame. He then shrugs, says goodby to everyone, and heads back inside to work, whistling--leaving only the strains of “We Are the World” behind.