A coming of age for director Duchovny

David DUCHOVNY looks remarkably relaxed for a man directing his first feature film. Dressed in bluejeans, a white T-shirt and sneakers, and sporting a small goatee, he says one reason he is relatively calm is that on this day he is only directing. “On the days when I’m not also acting, it feels like a day off.”

Later, he admits, “I’m not feeling real happy today.” No reason in particular, just some inner malaise -- maybe because his family is far away in Malibu. But he’s already an attuned-enough director to know not to show it. “I’m afraid if I let down my guard and energy for one minute, the kids will too.”

The “kids” are the actors he is directing in “House of D,” which he describes as a “fable” about a young man’s coming of age in Greenwich Village in the ‘70s. Duchovny, who also wrote the script, plays the boy as a grown man looking back on key childhood relationships -- the movie jumps in time from the ‘70s to the present -- including one with a mysterious woman (played by singer Erykah Badu) incarcerated in the imposing Women’s House of Detention: “A woman,” Duchovny says, “who dispenses advice and seeks weed simultaneously.”

Part of an Upper West Side church has been transformed into a private school classroom, and the all-boys class is in the middle of an amusing scene wherein their hapless French teacher faux pas her way into the students’ hormonally charged minds.

“House of D,” on first look, appears to be in the “Dead Poets Society”/”Good Will Hunting” family. Indeed, Robin Williams is in this one as well, playing a mentally disabled janitor who befriends the main character (played by Anton Yelchin, 14). But this one comes from sharp memory, loosely based on Duchovny’s experiences growing up in New York in the time portrayed in the film. Though he had written and directed occasional episodes of his hit TV series, “The X-Files,” Duchovny had never attempted anything this ambitious.

“David spent five days straight virtually shut into the office over our garage,” says his wife, Tea Leoni, who plays Yelchin’s mother in the film. “The kids [the couple have two] would go up for visits or to bring food, and he’d come down every once in a while and throw pages at me.”

Leoni, in rehearsal for a James Brooks film (with Adam Sandler), was also amazed at her husband’s seeming ease once he moved behind the camera. “There was no panic in the white of his eyes,” she notes. “On the other hand, there was so much stress for me because I really care about this result. I thought if I [do badly] in this, everyone will say I only got the part because I’m sleeping with the director.”

For his part, Williams says he feels relieved to be part of an ensemble, not the star: “Carrying a movie creates so much pressure, while here I can just focus on my piece.” In keeping with the family feeling on set, his daughter Zelda portrays Yelchin’s first love interest. Williams says he was charmed but not surprised when he read Duchovny’s script.

“I knew David was quite intelligent,” he says. “I just thought this is such a sweet coming-of-age story, sort of a younger version of ‘Mice and Men’ -- more like ‘Rats and Boys.’ I liked the idea of my character and the boy’s starting off the same mentally if not chronologically.

“I also remember hearing about the House of Detention when I was living here, a place where boys got an early sex education. They’d bring a pack of cigarettes, and the girls would show them their [breasts]. I also like that it’s an independent project -- no studio executives walking around saying, ‘Are we excited? Should we crunch numbers and find out if we’re excited?’ ”

This role, by its nature, allows Williams little opportunity to improvise. But that doesn’t mean that when he’s off screen, he is not entertaining the young troops. “You bring up one subject and he can go crazy on it,” marvels Mark Keith, 14. “He can just turn it off and on so quickly, going right back into his part,” adds Gideon Jacobs, also 14. “But we can’t!”

A breakout role

Should this small film do well, the people it will likely help most are Duchovny and Yelchin, who, on the face of it, seems a Robert De Niro in the making, even resembling the latter in his “Godfather 2” days. “The kid is a natural,” Williams says. “He combines intelligence with innocence, before the cynicism has set in.” Leoni, who plays his emotionally disturbed mother, agrees that this is a young actor on the rise: “I’m just a backup to Anton’s incredible performance. I’ve never seen focus like that. Such a pure talent.”

The only child of Russian figure skating champions who moved here when Anton was an infant, Yelchin, who played opposite Anthony Hopkins in “Hearts in Atlantis,” doesn’t even relate to the idea that by this time next year he may be adorning teen magazines.

“I don’t care about those things,” he says. “I hate living outside of making the movies. There’s no way to describe how much I love acting.” One reading of “House of D” and he was sold: “I love that this character literally grows up in the story and learns what it means to be responsible.”

Like many independent films these days, this one is being brought to you by a mixed bag of entities. Producers include Jane Rosenthal of Tribeca Films; indie producer Adam Merims, a classmate of Duchovny’s when both attended the Collegiate School here as teens; and Jeffrey Skoll, a founder of EBay. Skoll, who left EBay to start a foundation that supports nonprofit enterprises, is making his film debut here.

“I met Richard B. Lewis, who runs Ovation Entertainment [another of the entities behind the film], and told him I was interested in projects that are 100% socially meaningful,” Skoll explains. “ ‘House of D’ is about a boy’s coming of age when parents are no longer there. It’s also about the beauty of mentors and what it really means to be handicapped.”

Two things all creative and business entities agreed on were that costs had to be held down to indie size (between $5 million and $8 million) and that early suggestions that the film be shot in Canada were unacceptable. At first that seemed a contradiction, but sacrifices were made.

“We just decided New York is too important a character in this film to be faked,” Merims says. “I said, ‘We’re going to beg unions for concessions, we’re going to learn to live without things like limos and basically match our appetite to our resources.’ ”

Despite his apparent ease as a director, Duchovny has moments of self-doubt: “Hey, I was secretly hoping this would fall through so they wouldn’t figure out that it’s a sham and I’m a sham. I’m preoccupied and I’m not sleeping much, but I’m vigilant, and I keep telling myself that I’ve been an actor and a writer, and if I put them together I should be a director.”