Always out on a limb

JEAN-LUC GODARD once famously proclaimed, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” That would be Rose McGowan.

In “Planet Terror,” Robert Rodriguez’s opening segment of “Grindhouse,” his latest collaboration with Quentin Tarantino and fetishized paean to the B-movie universe, McGowan stars as Cherry Darling, a plucky exotic dancer and burgeoning stand-up comedian whose twin career paths are tragically cut short -- literally -- when her right leg is eaten by flesh-craving zombies.

This being Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films, innovator of the boutique horror film and home of the “Scream” and “Scary Movie” franchises, where the embalming fluid of art-house irony was first sluiced through the quiescent corpse of splatter cinema, there is a ready fix at hand: first a wooden table leg, then ultimately a 50-caliber machine gun is snapped onto a metal rod protruding from her swaddled stump, courtesy of the miracle of CGI. It’s like Lt. Dan on the deck of Forrest Gump’s shrimp boat, his phantom limb foregrounded by its absence -- except, of course, with strippers and heavy artillery.

“When they wrote it, they didn’t have the technology for it,” says McGowan, sitting at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, as the first rays of a cruel sun illuminate the morning after her first screening of the film. “I did a lot of my own stunts, which was great, because I have a body that is really quite delicate and made for sipping tea with a parasol. But I was Scrappy-Doo. There’s the Irish in you: Suit up and show up, pull up your bootstraps and keep a-going.”

In person, McGowan speaks very, very fast, as if the metronome on the set of “His Girl Friday” were ever-present in her head. She also seems to rethink every situation four or five times before it even registers with anyone else. “I’ve actually hurt myself,” she says. “I’ve shut my head in the car door three times, I’ve shut my hand in the car door four times. I injure myself constantly and I think it’s because my brain is always onto the next thing and my body’s left behind.”

Not only does this phenomenon lead her wildly off-topic in the course of a single interview (her prized photo of Tennessee Williams and a Boston terrier, the road not taken of forensic pathology, her schoolgirl crush on Wally Shawn), it also seems to propel her into behavior that might be considered rash or arguably brazen, save for the countervailing evidence of herself in person. Much more likely, such behavior is merely the byproduct of a wicked sense of humor.

“Maybe back in the day, it was more the provocative bravado of a young twit,” says McGowan. “I always say I was probably smarter at 15, and I’ve kind of gone downhill since then.” As an example, she offers up Exhibit A -- the dress she wore to the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards on the arm of then-beau Marilyn Manson, the shock-rocker and roadshow Satanist -- and once again, an artifact noted for its conspicuous absence.

“I thought it was quite funny,” she says. “But I also made that decision when I had a 103-degree fever from a sinus infection and I took TheraFlu, which I know now never to do and make any sort of decision.

“Also, at the same time, I was reading this book on Carole Lombard, and she was an inveterate prankster -- there was one incident at the Chinese Theatre where she was late for a premiere and this ambulance comes screaming up to the red carpet, and they pulled her out nude with just bits and pieces of masking tape. But that is so not me, in any way, shape or form. I realized I can’t do things that I think are funny, because it doesn’t translate. My inside jokes -- not so much.”

From early on, quick to question

McGOWAN was born in Florence, Italy, to an American mother and an Irish father (she claims the name means “blacksmith” -- “How not sexy!”). Until age 10, she was raised in a commune run by the Children of God, of which her father was the resident municipal custodian, and spoke primarily Italian. After some child modeling in Europe, she moved with her mother and five siblings to Oregon and legally emancipated herself at 15.

But like the young Preston Sturges, who recognized no less than Aleister Crowley as a pompous charlatan once his mother had fallen under the proto-Satanist’s dubious thrall, McGowan pegged her utopian neighbors early on as falling far short of their professed ideal.

“I think kids know a lot more than they’re given credit for,” she says. “They can’t exactly articulate it, but they know that it’s wrong. And at a very young age, people’s actions didn’t go along with the ideology that was coming out of their mouths. So I have the attitude of ‘beware false prophets,’ basically.

“I had my own rules at 3; I was my own little Nazi general in my head. It happens when you have zero parameters and nobody looking out for you, so I created my own. I remember being on an airplane when I was 9 and some lady -- I must have obviously told her my life story up to that point -- said, ‘You should really write a book.’ My biggest excitement of late was being a guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies -- I’m a huge old movies buff -- and ‘Night of the Hunter’ is one that I picked. And I’ve played it for people who’ve had a more picket-fence sort of life and they don’t get it, they don’t understand the terror of it.”

McGowan appears in both halves of “Grindhouse,” which she had to audition for separately, but really -- if you’re playing a character with a machine-gun leg, that’s probably the one the audience is going to remember. “It’s a rollicking good time,” she says of the film in her best movie trailer voice. “I did miss some stuff, because I was hiding behind my hand a lot: I have no problem watching a 900-pound woman have a hundred-pound tumor removed, but I have a very hard time watching blood and guts. And it’s a stupid thing of mine -- if I see myself cry, I start crying. It’s really quite pathetic.”

Describing Rodriguez, her primary director, she says: “He was a taskmaster -- as well he should be. We had a very limited amount of time, and the first two months I was doing days on ‘Charmed,’ ” -- the late Aaron Spelling’s ethnographic study of teenage witches, or “Macbeth” Act I, Scene 1 in high school, which ended last spring -- “and nights in Texas. I got really underweight, which was nice, except the tabloids said I was turning into one of the bobble-headed anorexic girls. No -- in fact, it was just massive stress and the fact that I hate smoked meat, which seemed to be the only thing they were serving. Maybe it’s just the contrarian in me.”

But for all her sex-bomb persona and sardonic running commentary, McGowan’s darkest secret may be that she was born in the wrong time. In “Planet Terror,” Tarantino, playing a character identified only as “The Rapist” (and reprising Michael Madsen’s line to Harvey Keitel in “Reservoir Dogs”: “I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan, aren’t you?”), says to her, “Do you think you look like Ava Gardner?”

Asked again in earnest, she answers, “No, but I think she was hauntingly beautiful,” then proceeds to relate behind-the-scenes stories from “The Barefoot Contessa” and tales of MGM’s mistreatment of its stable of beauty queens. Her speech is studded with references to Clara Bow, about whom she had a script commissioned, and Bette Davis, to whom she has been compared. (“I don’t think anyone would describe me as the little brown wren,” she says, “but I would have had a career much more like hers, in terms of probably being suspended a lot.”) Describing working with Peter O’Toole on the horror film “Phantoms,” she notes “all the stories I sponged off of him -- about working with Richard Harris or whatever.”

“I saw him this year at the Oscars,” she says, “and for some reason I thought he might not remember me. But he grabbed me and started singing ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’ and then we waltzed all the way around the room.”

McGowan played Ann-Margret in the 2005 CBS miniseries “Elvis” and a Hollywood starlet (a word she hates) who was the best thing in Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia.” And she will portray ‘50s B-movie actress and real-life tragic figure Susan Cabot in the just-announced “Black Oasis.” Can a turn as Lana Clarkson in the long-rumored Cameron Crowe-Tom Cruise rendition of the Phil Spector story be far behind?

“The things that suit me most are pretty much 180 degrees from what I’ve done,” says McGowan. “But I know I’ll get there. It takes a long time to get through the glass ceiling and I hope my brain doesn’t crack before I get there. So maybe a Jane Austen film is the natural next step.”

She laughs. “That’s actually more me than anything else. I love movies about repressed emotions.”