In The Storm of 'An Eye'

Still, Schlesinger lost the location battle. "We'd set this up from the beginning as a New York story," says ex-East Coaster Amanda Silver (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), who cowrote Eyewith her husband, writer-producer Rick Jaffa. "There's traffic in L.A., but there's something claustrophobic about midtown Manhattan at rush hour that's unmatched."

Levy says Paramount, which last year embarked on a string of modest-budget thrillers that included the flops Nick of Time and Virtuosity, insisted it couldn't afford to escalate its $20 million budget. Schlesinger's film Dead Giveaway, which was to have starred Field as the mother of a murderer, had fallen apart a year earlier at Savoy, and the director was "deeply depressed. If we tried to make L.A. stand in for New York, how could I so much as move the camera for fear of catching a f---ing palm tree?" But then he decided to "turn it to our advantage."

Out went Midnight Cowboy-style city grit; in came an emphasis on L.A.'s deceptively placid surface. "It's a strangely unnerving place," says Schlesinger, who currently resides in both Los Angeles and London. "Everything seems so ideal. The weather, the ripeness of everything. So it was much more alarming to have all this unpleasantness lurking in a nice green garden instead of a cement alley."

But what's ultimately growing in Schlesinger's cinematic hothouse —flowers or stinkweeds? Critics say both. He's earning love-letter notices for his "first feel-good Þlm ever," the 1994 BBC-TV movie Cold Comfort Farm (opening theatrically here in April). Schlesinger adapted the film "for very little money"—£1.7 million, about $2.6 million—from Stella Gibbons' comic novel of rural English life. Meanwhile, Eye for an Eye has drawn mixed-to-pugilistic reviews. ("Never. has he made a film as mean-spirited and empty," spat Janet Maslin in The New York Times.)

For his part, Schlesinger seems unconcerned with Eye's reception. "I never was a critics' darling," he says, impishly reporting that he once tore up a mid-'60s notice by The Village Voice's Andrew Sarris and used it to "wipe my bottom" (he can't remember if it was the big hit Darling or the dud Far From the Madding Crowd that Sarris savaged). Schlesinger still aspires to make an AIDS drama "about survival" but says that "because I'm known to be gay, and because I have all that baggage, it would have to be a terribly good script." For the most part, though, the judgments of others weigh little on him. "There's an awful lot of s--- talked about the film business," he says. "When the auteurists and the academics get hold of it, it's just as bad as when gossip columnists prattle on. I've had my fair share of praise, awards, and success as well as failure, and I very seldom look back."

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"The studio kept saying 'More violence, please,'" says Schlesinger