He’s well suited to many tasks

Both of John Malkovich’s business enterprises are named after Mr. Mudd, the man who drove him and Julian Sands to the dusty Thai set of “The Killing Fields” 20 years ago. People had told them that Mr. Mudd was a murderer, so one day Malkovich and Sands decided to ask their driver about his past. Mr. Mudd peered at them in the rear-view mirror, and after what seemed like a long time, he spoke.

“Sometimes Mr. Mudd kill,” he said. “Sometimes Mr. Mudd not kill.”

A faint smile tugs at the corners of Malkovich’s mouth as he tells the story. “It just seemed to me to be memorable,” he says in that dry, almost distilled tone that has become his trademark, “so we just liked the name Mr. Mudd.” He liked it enough to use it as the name of his L.A.-based production company.

The distinguished actor would probably deny that he says things for effect, but he seems to enjoy the fallout anyway. When Malkovich is asked about his reported offer to outfit Col. Moammar Kadafi in his designs for his new men’s fashion label, Mrs. Mudd -- “Mr. Mudd in a dress” -- he says he meant it as “kind of a joke.”

On the other hand, he continues, the Libyan leader “does have a great sense of style, it’s true. You always see under the caftan he has a little Comme des Garcons paisley shirt.”

If Malkovich walks alone in regarding Libya’s strongman as some kind of fashion icon-in-waiting, that sort of independent-mindedness is typical of him. It hasn’t always been well received. Some in the press and Hollywood have taken his laconic delivery of such unpredictable Malkovich-isms and his dismissal of much that’s inside the box as a form of arrogance. People close to him say it reflects his complete and utter faith in his own worldview, which is often at odds with others.

“Sometimes what he sees as the foreground and the background in a picture is different from what other people see,” says Lianne Halfon, one of Malovich’s two partners in Mr. Mudd, which produced 2000’s “Ghost World.” “Sometimes what he sees in a landscape won’t be what’s most prominent, but for me it’s usually the thing that’s the most interesting.”

Now with his ambitious film-directing debut, “The Dancer Upstairs,” a South American political thriller cum love story that stars Javier Bardem and opens Friday, he has become one of the extremely rare American filmmakers to make what is in essence a foreign film. Not a film about Americans or British abroad, but one in which the protagonists actually come from the foreign country where the story takes place.

“I’m not really the ideal candidate to make a gringo film, where you put some white people in an exotic location, and the white people are human and the other people are phantom figures,” says Malkovich, 49. “They’re the local color, as it were. I don’t see the world that way. It doesn’t interest me.”

But what interests Malkovich didn’t interest potential backers when he began looking for U.S. financing for his filmed adaptation of Nicholas Shakespeare’s acclaimed novel six years ago. He found no takers for an unlikely love story between a dance teacher and a married police lieutenant investigating anonymous terrorists modeled after Peru’s brutal Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. The title refers to a character named Ezekial, a choreographer of violence inspired by the Shining Path’s Maoist leader Abimael Guzman, a rotund, psoriasis-ridden philosophy professor.

“Mostly people said, either it was foreign or it was set in a far-off land or it was political, who cares? Or it’s about terrorists, who cares? Or it’s about some obscure movement somewhere out there, who cares? Several people liked the script very much and responded to that, but when I said six years ago, ‘The cast is Javier [Bardem], Laura [Morante], Luis Miguel [Cintra], Juan Diego Botto,’ they said, ‘Who cares? Why are you calling me?’ ”

The starring role of the dutiful detective Agustin Rejas went to Javier Bardem, who was unknown to U.S. audiences until he went on to star in “Before Night Falls,” another rare foreign film by an American director: Julian Schnabel. The 2000 film about the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas earned Bardem an Oscar nomination. Malkovich was so adamant about his American-accent-free cast that he took the unusual step of writing Bardem, Italian actress Morante and Argentina’s Botto into his contract.

“Even though Javier in the ensuing years has become very well known -- he’s always been well known in Spain, as were several of the other actors -- in terms of an American audience, I liked presenting people who the public doesn’t know.”

Malkovich eventually secured $4 million from the Spanish producer Andres Vicente Gomez, who won an Oscar for Fernando Trueba’s “Belle Epoque” (1992). It’s now six years since U.S. producers told him no one would be interested in a film about foreign terrorists. Malkovich is not unmindful of the fact that, with fear of terrorism now a fact of life in America, “there’s probably some degree of irony” there.

The purity of fashion

MALKOVICH has flown to Los Angeles from his home in the Provencal countryside of southeastern France to promote “The Dancer Upstairs,” which is being distributed by Fox Searchlight, and he sips green tea as he discusses it. He is formally dressed in a simple beige Marcel Lassance suit and tie, his favorite silhouette.

His cream-colored crocodile attache case sits on a chair nearby. This is, after all, a man who has modeled for Comme Des Garcons and made two short films for his friend, the designer Bella Freud. This is a man who likes his fashion straight up. Indeed, the two-time Oscar nominee, for “Places in the Heart” (1984) and “In the Line of Fire” (1993), regards fashion as more pure than acting: “Just as a form of showing off, it’s a much quicker way to get to the point.”

A small run of Malkovich’s first collection was manufactured last summer in Prato, Italy, and sent to some of his friends, among them Bardem, Bernardo Bertolucci and Johnny Depp. His fall line will go on sale this summer at a handful of high-end boutiques in New York, Denver, Paris, London and Tokyo. He points to California men’s style from the early ‘60s as an influence -- that and the Taliban.

Yes, the Taliban. Malkovich calls a long, fitted overcoat Mullah ASZ, which he describes as a homage to the former Afghan government spokesman Abdul Salam Zaeef. “Again, that was sort of a joke,” he says. “Mullah Omar said a few days after the war started that the war was going extremely well, but it would be going better if some representatives of the government didn’t wear their turban in a topsy-turvy fashion, and this was the man he was referring to.”

While he speaks, Malkovich gently takes a tape from an interviewer struggling with the packaging and unwraps it before handing it back. He’s almost courtly in his manner and extremely soft-spoken, given to long, thoughtful pauses as he carefully crafts his answers.

Although “The Dancer Upstairs” marks Malkovich’s maiden voyage as a movie director, he is a co-founder of Steppenwolf and has directed nearly 50 plays.

Despite his primary public identity as an actor, he allows those he directs to find their own path to their parts. “He casts actors and then he lets them go,” says Mr. Mudd partner Halfon. “He never falters in his confidence....

“Javier does a tremendous amount of preparation, and he works with a different kind of meticulousness,” Halfon adds. “John is meticulous, but he doesn’t inhabit the character 24 hours a day the way Javier does. For ‘Places in the Heart’ [in which Malkovich played a blind war veteran], they wanted John to learn Braille and they dropped him off to do that. He went shopping at a bookseller’s instead because, as he says, he wasn’t really blind.”

For the past dozen years, Malkovich has lived in Europe with Nicoletta Peyran, whom he met on the set of “The Sheltering Sky,” where she was an assistant director to Bertolucci. They have two children (Amandine, 12, and Loewy, 10, named after the American industrial designer Raymond Loewy) but Malkovich said he had sworn off marriage after his difficult divorce from actress Glenne Headly in 1990.

In 1999, Malkovich attained the curious distinction of becoming that rare actor whose name appeared in a film’s title and cast list with the release of “Being John Malkovich.”

Malkovich says that he initially feared the consequences of accepting such an attention-getting role. “I’ve always had a pretty lucky life. Neither the public nor the press ever really targeted me as a subject of keen interest, nor were they ever really invasive in my life. I was worried that maybe this crossed the line. Also, I’m not a topic that interests me at all. So you could say, in a way, I didn’t even get it. I understand the point of the film. I don’t at all see why me and why not someone else.”