MOVIES : OFF-CENTERPIECE : Behind the Clergy’s Closed Doors : A veteran British theater director and the creator of TV’s ‘Cracker’ paint a daring drama about two Catholic priests in sexual turmoil.

When director Antonia Bird says nervously that she’s expecting a phone call from the Pope any day now, she’s only half-joking.

But then if you make a film like Bird’s “Priest,” an angry piece of invective directed at the Catholic church’s hierarchy, you have to anticipate strong reactions.

“I’m sure the Pope has a screening room and will see ‘Priest,’ ” Bird says. “Who knows what he’ll say? But as long as he watches it, you know?” She smiles confidently, then mimes a gulp of pure terror.

The lead characters of “Priest,” a drama set in Liverpool, England, are Father Greg (Linus Roache), a closeted gay priest whose homosexuality is exposed by a sensation-seeking tabloid paper, and his colleague Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), a heterosexual priest who is defying his vow of celibacy through his relationship with his female housekeeper (Cathy Tyson).

All this alone might be enough to make Bird persona non grata at the Vatican. But there are other elements in the story of “Priest” that may alarm the faint-hearted. The film has a subplot about incest: A teen-age girl tells Father Greg during confession that her father is sexually molesting her, but because of the circumstances in which the priest learns this, he feels unable to act upon it.

“The film doesn’t come out against the Catholic faith,” insists Bird, a friendly, open woman with a dry sense of humor. “But it is against a hierarchy adhering to old-fashioned rules without looking at the way the world’s changed. One reason I wanted to direct it was because I was seething with rage when the Pope said again in 1993 that Catholics shouldn’t use condoms. In this AIDS-ridden world.”

Whatever controversies are stirred up by “Priest,” the film’s imminent opening in Britain is eagerly awaited because it brings together two of the country’s hottest talents--Bird and screenwriter Jimmy McGovern. (“Priest” opens Friday in Los Angeles.) Though both have been laboring at their respective crafts for several years, 1995 has finally marked widespread recognition of their skills.

Bird directed in legitimate theater for eight years, notably at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and was a contemporary of Danny Boyle, who also turned eventually to film with the recently released “Shallow Grave.”

She then directed drama for TV: “At last, I’d found my medium,” she recalls. “I’m much better with a camera than I ever was on a stage.” One of her BBC dramas, “Safe” (about homeless teen-agers in London), was shown at the 1993 Edinburgh Film Festival and won an award for best first feature.

Then George Faber, a BBC producer who was executive producer for “Safe,” showed her McGovern’s script for “Priest.” “I was bowled over by it,” she remembers. “I knew who Jimmy was, and the script grabbed me to the extent that I called George and said I’d direct it for nothing, if necessary.”

McGovern had spent seven years in the 1980s writing episodes for a soap, “Brookside.” Broadcast three times a week, it deals with the lives of residents in a middle-class Liverpool cul-de-sac. Unlike most soaps, “Brookside” has a strong leftist agenda and has dealt with topics such as unemployment, poverty, rape and domestic violence.

He quit “Brookside” in 1989 but came to prominence 18 months ago as creator of the British TV series “Cracker,” starring Robbie Coltrane as Fitz, a gifted police psychologist. The twist is that while Fitz is competent at getting inside the minds of people who have committed hideous, horrific crimes, the character’s personal life is a disaster: He has drinking problems, he gambles compulsively, his marriage is on the rocks.

Critics and audiences alike made “Cracker” the most highly rated, compelling viewing on British TV in recent years; only the “Prime Suspect” series with Helen Mirren has had comparable impact. “Cracker” was sold worldwide (in the United States it is shown on Arts & Entertainment cable) and it made McGovern Britain’s best-known TV writer, filling the vacuum left last year by the death of Dennis Potter. (In January, a “Cracker” episode on A&E; won a CableACE Award as cable’s best movie or miniseries, beating out such high-profile entries as HBO’s “And the Band Played On.”)

McGovern’s work has earned him a reputation as a dramatist prepared to say the unsayable. Various episodes of “Cracker” have enraged feminists, religious groups and racial minorities. In one, Coltrane’s Fitz theorizes that all men are potential rapists who secretly regard the act of rape as a taboo pleasure.

Similarly in “Priest,” the abusive father has a speech that offers a rationale for, if not quite a defense of, incest. “These are taboos, and you have to ask why,” McGovern shrugs. “Incestuous impulses exist, just as I’m sure the impulse to rape is there to a degree in us all. But it’s the fact people refuse to talk about them that’s interesting.”

He insists he does not set out to shock, but says the controversy in his writing comes from his ability to dissect people’s motives, even apparently altruistic ones, and to debase them by finding elements of selfishness in them.

“Priest” is a story that springs from McGovern’s home turf; he grew up the fifth of nine children in a Liverpool slum, the son of an unskilled Catholic laborer. He attended a Catholic school, and says he and his classmates suffered from the sadistic behavior of one particular priest.

McGovern, 45, still lives in Liverpool (“There’s no need for a writer to move”) and meets visiting interviewers at a pub near his home, where he will talk cheerfully over a few pints of beer.

“I always wanted to write a story about a priest,” he muses. “I wanted to introduce a priest on ‘Brookside’ who fell in love with a woman, but the producers wouldn’t let me.”

After “Brookside” he received a commission from the BBC to write a three-part drama about a priest, but the project stalled, then became a four-parter.

With time the story became more complex. “I’d met this one priest who changed the whole course of the script,” he says. “It’s easy to be a 45-year-old heterosexual white priest in Liverpool, active in trade union and community affairs. Everyone’s on your side. You have a nice modern interpretation of the New Testament, healthy contempt for the Pope’s teachings on birth control. You meet lots of priests like that.

“But then suddenly to encounter a young orthodox homosexual priest. . . . I was advised to meet this guy, and for the 45 minutes I talked to him, I was his priest. I was someone who could (write) something down about what this man felt. There was steam coming out of his ears after so many years of repression. I left him and thought, that’s what the story has to be. It was the wisest decision I ever made, to make someone like him the main character.”

But “Priest” was still going nowhere, and finally in frustration McGovern took the script and in one day chopped it down to a length appropriate for a single feature film. This act on his part gives “Priest” extraordinary strength, Bird believes: “There are four story lines going on at once in a dense, full plot and the characters all have huge, rich stories that had to be lost because they can’t be explored at feature-film length. But that makes them fascinating. Cathy Tyson as the housekeeper, for example. You long to know more about her.”

Though Bird’s commission to make “Priest” came from the BBC, she was immediately convinced it deserved a wider audience than British TV viewers: “I shot it as a feature,” she shrugs. “Even so it only cost 1.3 million” ($2 million). Because of her success the previous year with “Safe,” Edinburgh Film Festival organizers urged her to show “Priest” there last year; it won the Michael Powell Award for best British feature.

Bird then took it to the Toronto Film Festival, where it moved into a different ballpark; Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein saw it and paid $1.75 million for distribution rights. Suddenly “Priest” was a hot property.

Audiences have received “Priest” warmly, says Bird. “At the Sundance Festival in January, an audience of 750 got to their feet and applauded for three minutes. And those are industry types, so they’re not exactly easy to please. That was an amazing moment for me. Ever since I first read about Sundance, it was my ambition simply to get a film shown there.

“The same thing happened at the Berlin Festival. It got a standing ovation from over 1,000 people.” Before the Berlin screening Bird talked to them about Liverpool, parts of which are among Britain’s most deprived areas.

“Most people know it as the city the Beatles came from, but these days it feels like a raped place,” she says. “It’s as though the heart’s been taken out of it. The people are hanging on and surviving, and having sing-songs in the pubs. But the area in which we filmed has an unemployment rate of 60%. I double-checked that figure, because I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard it.”

Though “Priest” reflects the working-class, left-wing Catholic community in which McGovern has always lived, Bird thinks the story “isn’t limited by geography or religion or sexuality. The whole point of the film is that it’s a scream from the heart against intolerance.”

Bird is not Catholic, a fact she cites as helpful in clarifying the script: “I was continuously able to say to Jimmy, is it clear what’s happening? He’d go back and spell out matters relating, for example, to the vow of celibacy taken by priests, or conventions surrounding the confessional--things that are obvious to a born-and-bred Catholic like him.”

The commercial prospects for “Priest” have not been hindered by a spate of revelations about homosexuality in the priesthood recently. In November, British gay activist Peter Tatchell “outed” 10 Anglican bishops; a scandal over the delayed extradition of a convicted pedophile priest brought down Ireland’s government in December; accusations of pedophilia among Catholic priests in the United States have rumbled on now for years.

“The film doesn’t deal with pedophilia,” Bird says. “It’s probably enough that we have homosexuality and incest. But it’s clear to me the vast majority of priests are heterosexual. There’s also no doubt the (Catholic) church draws a veil over heterosexual relationships, but if gay priests attempt monogamous relationships with other men, they’re out.”

However “Priest” fares at the box office, both McGovern and Bird have seen their careers switch into overdrive as a result of their involvement with it.

McGovern’s “Hearts and Minds,” a drama series about an idealistic young teacher becoming gradually disillusioned by work in a tough high school, is airing on British television. He is writing a feature film script for Working Title about a man who has a heart transplant. “It’s a good story, full of passion and blood,” he says. He is creating a new soap opera for the BBC and writing a drama about a young man who contracts multiple sclerosis.

Bird has already completed her next film, which marks her Hollywood debut. Touchstone will open “Mad Love,” starring Drew Barrymore and Chris O’Donnell, on May 26. The story, by British TV writer Paula Milne, is about two teen-agers embroiled in their first love affair who break free of their Seattle hometown and head for New Mexico.

Still, her more imminent concern is probably the reception awaiting “Priest.” Bird reports that an ecumenical panel saw the film in Berlin, approved of it and wrote to the Vatican endorsing it. “The media representative of this group was an Australian priest, and he told me he thought it should be used by the church as a training film in seminaries,” she says, shaking her head in wonderment. “So perhaps the church will view it kindly.”

She pauses. “Did I tell you when ‘Priest’ opens wide in the States?” she says. “Good Friday. Sort of appropriate, wouldn’t you say?”