Movies : Decades Later, It’s All Adding Up for Him : ‘Blade Runner’ co-writer Hampton Fancher has long called himself a director. For ‘Minus Man,’ he is one.

A thin young man smiles passively from the upstairs window of a two-story house whose weather-beaten facade hints at the mental and moral decay inside.

The figure in the window--a friendly loner who happens to be a murderer--hovers a moment, then steps away.

Despite the day’s blistering sunshine, “You look like Anthony Perkins up there,” hollers actor Brian Cox to his co-star in the window, Owen Wilson. But this isn’t the set of yet another “Psycho” remake; it’s the Hollywood side-street location of “The Minus Man,” a low-budget thriller that opens Friday.

The film fulfills a 35-year dream for its writer-director, Hampton Fancher, whose most prominent credit until now was as the co-writer of 1982’s “Blade Runner.” The dark dystopian vision of that film, which Fancher initiated, made it arguably the most influential science-fiction film of the last 40 years.

Fancher, a onetime street thief, flamenco dancer, ‘60s studio contract player and poet, is no stranger to life’s dark side. Although he turned 61 in July, he retains the dark good looks, height (6 feet, 3 inches) and rambunctious energy that’s carried him from one reckless adventure to another for five decades.

“There’s never been a year in my life where I didn’t look back, grab my face and say, ‘How could I?’ ” Fancher admits in a typical burst of self-criticism. “I never took advantage of success in a practical way. But I couldn’t have done it right. I still don’t know how.” From his first day of school, when he was sent home for hitting a student and defying a teacher, “I was considered ‘incorrigible.’ I had learning disabilities. I couldn’t participate in the ordinary at all. Then measures are taken to set you apart. But that makes you feel self-confident, and powerful, because you walk alone.”

Fancher’s individuality impressed his cast and crew.

Notes stage and film veteran Brian Cox (“The Boxer”), “Hampton is someone who’s followed his own beat his entire life. He knows who he is and what his creative powers are.”

Wilson, the sandy-haired insomniac cynic in this summer’s “The Haunting,” agrees. “Hampton has the kind of curiosity that keeps you fresh and interested in life. He has no ego, and he has a great sense of humor.”

Fancher’s empathy for outcasts can be felt in every minute of “The Minus Man.” Adapted from Lew McCreary’s novel, it concerns a genial drifter (Wilson) who secretly poisons people at random. Among his potential victims are Mercedes Ruehl, Janeane Garofalo and singer Sheryl Crow, who makes her film acting debut in an effective cameo.

“I always wanted to do something about the humanness of evil,” Fancher explained. “I think we all contain it. I wanted it to be nonviolent, and with no psychological answers. Sort of like Chauncey Gardiner in ‘Being There,’ or [Herman Melville’s] ‘Billy Budd’--but what if Billy Budd did horrible things at night?”

Fancher has embraced his share of duality since his fantasy-filled childhood (“I thought I lived in a film”), swinging from artistic sensitivity to pugnacious self-destruction. After dropping out of school in seventh grade, he began dancing professionally, growing up fast through “easy sex and strong relationships with adults. I got arrested lots of times--grand theft auto, gang fights. My best friend is still in Folsom or San Quentin; he killed a couple of policemen.”

Around age 14, Fancher stole a book “that changed my life”--Ernest Hemingway’s bullfighting tale “Death in the Afternoon.” It inspired Fancher to write his own, “ridiculous” novel, “Plaza del Muerte.” He then gave up dancing, studied acting in New York, hitchhiked back to Los Angeles and decided to become a poet. By now, he had a wife and daughter.

In 1958, while preparing to move his family to his parents’ home in Mexico, Fancher was stopped at the corner of Sunset and Fairfax by low-budget film producer Bruno Visotto. “He said to me, ‘Hey, boy, you look like a wolf. Do you want to be in a movie?’ ”

Days later, Fancher made his acting debut playing a homicidal zombie in “Attack of the Brain Suckers.” Mexico--and family--were out, Hollywood was in, as Fancher moved from TV (“Gunsmoke,” “Perry Mason”) to features (1961’s “Parrish,” as Karl Malden’s son).

“It was all bad,” Fancher says of his work. “I was afraid of acting and of failure. I was an arrogant swine.”

Fancher’s notoriety increased in 1962, after his actress girlfriend Joan Blackman showed him an ad for the film “Lolita”--a provocative photo of 15-year-old Sue Lyon.

“Joan said to me, ‘Here’s your next wife.’ And I laughed--because I knew it was true. In my mind I said, you’re right that’s my next wife, I’d bet everything.”

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Months later, Fancher--a “Nabokovian” who “read ‘Lolita’ in one sitting, and I’m dyslexic”--discovered that a friend’s new roommate was none other than Sue Lyon. Fancher and Lyon met over dinner, and within months they were married.

“It was totally wrong,” he says. “She was in a horrible situation, a kid who was expected to grow up in all kinds of ways she couldn’t manage. I was an angry young [expletive] and chose her because of a fantasy. And I was vilified. But I probably deserved it.”

The marriage soon ended. At the same time, Fancher began harboring another fantasy: directing. As his acting career faded, he began making short films and writing screenplays. “I pretended to be a writer-director, and I surrounded myself with people who thought I was doing it. What I was was a frightened failure.”

Fancher achieved part of his dream in the late 1970s, when he optioned Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The resulting film, co-written by David Peoples, was the sci-fi milestone “Blade Runner”--and Fancher began a career as a screenwriter for hire.

“ ‘Blade Runner’ let me join the country club of Hollywood, and it gave me the confidence to be accepted. When I wrote it, I was enthralled with the idea of a person who had no concern about anybody but himself, who begins to unravel. The mystique of empathy permeated that; it sincerely chases something worth questioning, to discover what conscience is all about.”

Despite the film’s enduring success on video, Fancher struggled for 14 years to get financing to direct, until his 1996 adaptation of “The Minus Man” found funding last year through producers Fida Attieh and Larry Meistrich. Meistrich, who produced “Sling Blade,” compares Fancher to Billy Bob Thornton: “Hampton isn’t your normal first-time director. [Like Thornton], he came up as a studio actor, and his writing is understated but strong, with great dialogue.”

Adds Attieh, “Hampton doesn’t direct the reader to think what he wants them to think. People would say, ‘What is this movie?’ It’s not a serial-killer movie. There’s no violence; it’s all implied.”

“It’s a gamble,” Fancher concedes. “It breaks rules. But I don’t believe in rules. I’d make up a new rule and say, ‘Hey, it’s a good thing to have a passive character, and no plot.’ ”

Although Fancher finished on time and on budget, he’s typically brutal in assessing his directing debut. “I [expletive] up a lot. They weren’t huge mistakes, but I let certain things go by me. I bowed to pressure that I could only do eight takes for a scene.”

But the first-time director says the movie finally erases “the lie” he feels he’s lived for decades.

“I’ve been telling myself I was making a movie since 1962, and I haven’t done it. That hurts a lot in invisible ways. Now I can say that isn’t true anymore.”

Fancher also seems to be living the plot he’s told in almost every script he’s written, whether it’s Harrison Ford hunting androids in “Blade Runner” or Denzel Washington chasing a missing friend in 1989’s “The Mighty Quinn.”

“It’s always about finding the other half of yourself. Getting out of your own way and doing what you’re built to do. You [expletive] up, you see yourself and can’t stand it, then you accept it somehow and you do it right.

“Then you die.” *