Through the Looking Glass

Laurence Fishburne is late for his lunchtime interview because he’s spent the morning scrambling to find a house to sublet in the Pacific Palisades. Striding into the Four Seasons hotel dining room wearing a Chinois-style forest-green shirt-jacket, he’s stopping in Los Angeles for only a day on his way back from the Chicago Film Festival, where his new film, the gritty, low-budget drama “Once in the Life” debuted and where he was also the subject of a retrospective--which at age 39, he says, “made me feel a little like Stevie Wonder.”

Like the precocious singer-songwriter, Fishburne has been a performer for most of his life, during which he has appeared in such films as “Apocalypse Now,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Along the way he has picked up an Oscar nomination (for his indelible Ike Turner in “What’s Love”), a Tony for his performance on Broadway in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” and an Emmy for the short-lived Fox TV series “Tribeca.”

After he finishes promoting “Once in the Life,” Fishburne returns to Los Angeles to submit to four months of rigorous physical training before he dons that long black coat again to play Morpheus, the mystical warrior he so memorably introduced in “The Matrix.” For the better part of the next two years, he will be involved in the production of back-to-back sequels (one is reportedly a prequel) to the blockbuster sci-fi film that made him an international star.

“The Matrix” has also given Fishburne the clout to pursue more personal projects like “Once in the Life,” in which he makes his feature directorial debut. He adapted the screenplay from his own successful 1994 three-character stage drama “Riff Raff,” which he also directed.

Fishburne also stars as 20/20 Mike, an atypical character for the tall, physically commanding, assuredly cool actor--a none-too-bright tragicomic screw-up, whose alleged sixth sense for being able to foresee trouble is put to the test after a drug score gone sour.

“Once in the Life” is about “all the guys who didn’t make it out of my neighborhood,” says Fishburne, who continued to live in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn for several years after becoming a professional actor at age 10. Fishburne’s characters are desperate con men who live on the periphery of society, not that different from the parts he portrayed on his way up, during a period when the available roles for young African Americans were limited mainly to troubled inner-city youths.

“Before [Spike Lee’s] ‘School Daze’ in 1988, marginal characters are all I was asked to play,” he says. “They were always on the outskirts of the story. I tried to bring a certain humanity and dignity to them. But I was bothered because I always thought they should be the focus of the story. I never got the chance to do that. So I think this story came out of my trying to show these people as human beings, to show that the decisions they make are not as cut and dry as you see in the media, to show what really happens, so that you feel for them and their dilemma.”

‘Get a Pen and Paper and Start Writing’

The impulse to write a play--and, subsequently, a screenplay--grew out of scribblings in a journal he started keeping at the behest of Wilson, one of his idols. Fishburne describes how the playwright took him aside after the 1992 Tony Awards and said, “ ‘You’ve been holding out on me. You’re a writer. Now get a pen and paper and start writing.’ ” Fishburne laughs. “The fact that he said that, that he could see that, told me that I should be writing.”

But the impulse goes further back, he recalls. “I’ve been threatening to write since I was 18. I wrote all my own dialogue in ‘Apocalypse Now’ [at age 14, he was the film’s youngest cast member]. Francis [Ford Coppola] came to us with outlines of scenes on index cards, and we had to work out our own dialogue.”

The play, “Riff Raff,” grew out an eight-page scene, a dialogue between two characters, and within a month he had completed a first draft. It was staged successfully in Los Angeles at Theatre Geo in 1994 and then went on to a sold-out engagement at Manhattan’s Circle Rep theater.

In transferring the play to the screen, Fishburne introduced characters and locations that are only spoken about by the three central characters in the play. “I knew I had to give the audience some relief from those three guys. So I opened it up out of one room--not too long, just enough to allow the audience to breathe and laugh.”

Though two of the central characters played by Fishburne and Eamonn Walker (HBO’s “Oz”) are African American, they are never referred to as such. Titus Welliver (CBS’ “Brooklyn South”) portrays Fishburne’s half-brother--they share a white father.

Other subsidiary characters are Latino and Asian American. But ethnicity is never discussed in the film--except for an interlude with deliberately cruel racist taunts--and in his preface to the play, Fishburne writes that the three main characters can be played by anyone “as long as you sound like you’re from Brooklyn.”

The environment in which he was raised, he explains, was a true melting pot, and how people were regarded and spoken of had less to do with their ethnic origins “than the clothes they wore and the way they moved.” He wanted to reflect that attitude in the play and the film.

‘I Can Now Call Myself a Writer’

The reaction to “Once in the Life” at the Chicago festival was heartening, he says. “The audience listened very intently; that was the biggest surprise. I was nervous that people would get bored. There’s no sex, no car crashes, no special effects, no quick cuts, just meditative language and good acting, which are not really popular right now.”

After almost three decades as an actor, he relishes the idea that “I can now call myself a writer as well.” As for screenwriting, “I learned that the writer takes a beating in the editing room,” he says, letting loose a booming belly laugh. But directing was the most pleasant surprise. “My first time out I didn’t bite off more than I could chew, and I stayed out of my own way and let the material come through. I think I’m a good director. I’m at home with it. I might even be a better director than I am an actor.”

That sounds ironic for someone with a list of such impressive credits, who seems to be just hitting his stride. But Fishburne is considering giving up acting and slipping behind the camera as a writer and director. “I just think there’s a lot for me to do as a writer and director. I feel like after playing Othello [he recently became the first African American to play Shakespeare’s melancholy Moor on the screen], one of the best roles in the English language, I can quit.”

But when he ponders the fact that he’s never had the opportunity to star in a comedy, a romance or a western, he stops short of formally announcing his retirement.

And so much more is possible because of Morpheus, a character to which he’s likely to be as closely linked as Harrison Ford is to Indiana Jones or Alec Guinness to Obi Wan Kenobi in the “Star Wars” movies. It has given him the name recognition--not to mention box-office viability--that could lead to more high- profile roles.

Nonetheless, during his downtime on the upcoming “Matrix” sequels, Fishburne is planning to stage his next play, “The Complex,” which is set in L.A. and deals with marginal characters of a different nature--”the types people out here don’t want to know about,” he says, “the people who come to Hollywood with a dream and don’t make it--which is the majority. And no one wants to think about them.”

And what is August Wilson’s assessment of Fishburne’s attempt at playwriting? “I sent him my first play, but he never commented on it,” he says. “When I told him I’d completed a first draft of my second play, he said, ‘Send it to me. This time I’ll even give you some criticism.’ ”

Fishburne sighs, and a nervous laugh pops out. It’s the only time during the discussion that there’s even a little crack in his prepossessing exterior.