MOVIES : ‘Georgia’ on Their Minds : This tale of two sisters who are musical rivals has personal meaning for actress Jennifer Jason Leigh and her mother, screenwriter Barbara Turner.

As the mother-daughter creative force behind “Georgia,” screenwriter Barbara Turner and Jennifer Jason Leigh have a unique relationship: Their professional partnership moves the fact that they’re so closely related to a distant back burner.

“It’s weird, I’m kind of able to separate,” Turner says during dinner at the Chateau Marmont. “The turning point for me was ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn.’ She sort of stopped being my daughter then, onscreen. [Leigh played a troubled prostitute who is gang-raped at film’s end.] Before that, it was, ‘Yeah, she’s talented, isn’t that great?’ And then ‘Last Exit’ happened, and I thought, ‘This is something else. This is someone else. This is an artist.’ So when I watch her work, yeah, she’s my daughter, but I don’t operate as a mother. Maybe I should.”

For Leigh’s part, she says, “I didn’t want to work with her because she was my mom, I wanted to work with her because she was the best writer I ever read. I grew up reading her scripts and getting my value off of what a good script was from them. . . . It wasn’t about being her daughter.

“Except for the love scene.”

Yes, Turner was banished from the “Georgia” set the day the love scene she had written for her daughter was filmed (which may be the first time in film history a mother has written such a scene for her daughter). Says Leigh: “There are always these lines that I say to myself that I will not cross, and that was one of them--even if you’re pretending making love, you don’t want your mother in the room.”

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“Georgia,” directed by Ulu Grosbard, is a sober, haunting tale of two sisters: Georgia (Mare Winningham), a successful musician with a seemingly happy family life, and the raccoon-eyed Sadie (Leigh), a nearly talent-free Janis Joplin wanna-be who loves singing but doesn’t have the vocal chops. Naturally, this leads to some tension between the sisters, as does the fact that the one area in which Sadie can compete with Joplin is in her substance abuse.

It says something about the nature of Hollywood that even after the film won major accolades at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and even though Leigh is currently being highly touted as a strong candidate for this year’s best actress Oscar, the movie had trouble finding a U.S. distributor. (Miramax eventually took up its cause: It opens Friday.)

It also says something about the women’s relationship that Turner speaks with supreme equanimity when discussing her daughter’s dropping out of high school--six weeks before graduation.

“She didn’t just do it--she asked, which I thought was very nice,” Turner says with a deadpan expression. “She said, ‘I swear I’ll get my GED, I swear, I swear, I swear!’ That’s never happened. I always say, ‘That’s too bad, because otherwise you might have made something of your life.’ ”

Only when Turner adds, “I expect she’ll get her GED,” does Leigh, 33, crack up.

Winningham, a longtime family friend, says: “Her mother’s work is so influential, so similar to how Jennifer does research for her films. Her relationship to Barbara is a mentor thing. I feel privileged to know them. Seeing them work together gives me great hope for my own kids.”

Though Winningham, 36, had appeared in a couple of telefilms Turner had scripted, mother-daughter collaborations had always stalled early on.

“We always wanted to work together, and tried often,” says Turner, who co-wrote Richard Lester’s highly regarded “Petulia” (1966). “There were images of her that I used in all my scripts; initially, it didn’t occur to me that she’d want to be an actress. Then, when she started to act, there’d be something, always, to get in the way. When she was just starting, they wanted a name, and then when she was a name, they couldn’t [afford] her.” She laughs. “What comes around goes around.”

Eventually, they put “Georgia” together independent of the studios, based on ideas they had been kicking around for years; the French production consortium Ciby 2000 (the name is a French inside joke referring to Cecil B. DeMille) agreed to finance the film if it could be done cheaply. “We said, ‘Great, tell ‘em $5.7 million,’ ” Leigh recalls, “and we didn’t have a budget worked out at all.”

All along, the two conceived of the role of Georgia with Winning-ham in mind--”I met her at camp when I was 14, I absolutely worshiped her,” Leigh says. “She was like my hero, and she was so kind to me. She was the best actress at the camp; she had this voice from God.”

“I was in at the inception, but by my own stupidity, almost weaseled my way out,” Winningham confesses. “At the same time the script came along, I was trying to make my own musical ambitions come true. The script made perfect sense, but I was nervous about appearing as a character with an inner life different from mine, but an outer life completely the same. I didn’t want to present myself as presented in the movie when I was trying to present this other me through my music.

“Barbara was hurt. She thought I didn’t like the script. Six months later, my album had come and gone, I was back where I started and the film was looking damn fine. I came crawling back,” says Winningham, who performs a couple of her own songs in the film.

Though they had known each other for years, Winningham discovered that she had never really understood Leigh. “I had felt lucky to know her as a friend, but hadn’t had the opportunity to hang and laugh and be drawn into her sense of humor, her aesthetic sense, how she works. It was the first time we really hung out.

“She has a facility similar to Georgia,” Winningham says of Leigh. “She’s private and self-contained, very solitary and true to herself. I’ve never seen her make a social error, say something she wished she hadn’t. All of us, we have these moments we have to apologize for, where we get out of control, but she’s pretty stellar about knowing the line, her own private line in the sand. That must have a lot to do with her ability to play the parts she does and come away OK.”

Indeed, though many of the characters she essays take her to extreme emotional and physical lengths, Leigh herself is level-headed and soft-spoken--no one would ever mistake her for a high school dropout. She shies away from most interviews and never discusses her personal life (her father, the late Vic Morrow, left the family when she was 2).

At the same time, it is this very wariness of stardom that comes in handy in engineering her chameleonlike make-overs from role to role. “I don’t know what it is about my face, I just think I don’t have very strong features, but it does change really easily, and I always like to look as different as I can for each part,” she says. “Because when I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself. I see something else; it just helps me to believe I’m someone else.”

Playing the completely dissimilar hookers in “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “Miami Blues,” which were released nearly simultaneously, snapped the film world to attention as to her prodigious talent. Leigh has time and again impressed and confounded critics--as the middle-class mother who worked phone sex lines while diapering infants in “Short Cuts,” the loony roommate in “Single White Female,” the cynical, Kate Hepburnesque reporter in “The Hudsucker Proxy” and the boozing, profoundly lonely Dorothy Parker in “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle”--and is still able to bask in the fact that she’s hardly ever recognized in public.

Still, “Georgia” has some autobiographical underpinnings for Leigh and Turner. Leigh’s older sister Carrie was herself a heroin addict; both Leigh and Turner were on hand to assist her as she kicked the habit (Carrie was a technical adviser on the film).

“It’s not really [about] Carrie; there are elements of Carrie in Sadie and elements of her life, but if you met Carrie, you would not see Sadie at all,” Leigh explains. “Carrie inspired a lot of it, but it’s not her.”

Turner: “The soul of Carrie is this ability to go out there and sort of be , without any censors. She says whatever she thinks.”

Leigh: “She’s incredibly courageous and spontaneous, very gut, all instinct. Now, she’s the most grounded of all of us.”

Leigh begins an anecdote about how her sister finally beat her addiction. “She was in her third program--”

Her mother interrupts. “Fourth.”

Leigh ticks off the first two clinics, and before she names the third, her mother interrupts again: “Then she went back to there.”

“That was kind of long and extended, I count that as one,” Leigh replies with a laugh, then returns to the subject.

“They were long go’s and we were there through all of that. The amazing thing is that I remember all of it, each single episode, so clearly. When someone you love that much is in rehab, you have this incredible hope. It’s also terrifying, because the person you love almost more than anyone could die. I remember every single thing, everything she said, everything we talked about, every laugh we shared, every song we sang . . . and she doesn’t remember a thing. “

The centerpiece of “Georgia” comes when Leigh, as a strung-out Sadie, takes the stage at a benefit headlined by Georgia and performs Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back.” (Turner pored over dozens of musicians’ work to find the music for the film. “When I found the song, I found the scene,” she says.)

Morrison’s recording of the number plays like a standard reverie, a nostalgia for a more innocent time. As Leigh sings the song, however, wavering frighteningly between triumphant passion and completely falling apart onstage, it’s a riveting statement of purpose, Sadie’s entire life wrapped up in 8 1/2 minutes.

“It was a phenomenal night, talk about an adrenaline rush--it was so hard that for the next three days, all of us were walking around like the walking dead,” Leigh says of the evening the scene was shot, in which she had to perform a wrenchingly emotional scene and play emcee for the assembled crowd, which had shown up at the promise of seeing some local bands. “Before I got up there, there was a mosh pit. In between set-ups, I was raffling off T-shirts and stereos and TVs. It was crazy.”

Before that evening, however, Leigh’s vocal limitations put her into a panic. “I got this little karaoke machine and started singing with it. I called my mother just sobbing. I said, ‘How could you have given me these songs, I sound like a dying animal!’ When you hear your voice opposite Gladys Knight’s on the karaoke machine, you want to slit your wrists. She said, ‘Throw that machine away. You have Sadie’s voice, it’s not about your voice, get inside the lyric, that’s what it’s about.’ ”

Not long after, though, Leigh was a committed rocker. “I loved it! I became Sadie in like a day! Thriving on all the attention and the singing and being part of a band. It made me want to work with musicians forevermore. Everything thrilled me, even the sound checks”--she mimics a roadie mumbling into a microphone before a concert--” ’Check, check, check.’ I just loved it!”

Leigh has already finished Robert Altman’s “Kansas City” and is preparing for “Bastard Out of Carolina,” but the role that clearly remains her favorite is Dorothy Parker in “Mrs. Parker,” for which many believed she deserved the best actress Oscar last year. And Leigh credits her mother with helping her develop the character.

“We’d go over the script and discuss it. She told me, ‘As soon as you put on the clothes and go up on stage, you’ll feel fine.’ I was, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’ But as soon as I got onstage, she was right, it was like swimming, which is something I love to do. It was that fluid and that easy. I loved being her; I didn’t want to give it up.”

“I was scared to death before I started shooting; I mean really, really terrified--she helped me a lot,” Leigh adds, nodding to Turner. “We’d go to bars together and I’d drink port and she’d drink white wine and we’d read poetry aloud to each other. I didn’t even know how to read poetry.”

Despite the professional distance that Turner has professed exists between her and her daughter, she simply can’t help but be Mom from time to time. When her daughter admits she didn’t know how to read poetry, Turner smiles, and insistently deadpans, “If you had your GED. . . “