Being John Malkovich, Director

In the past two decades, John Malkovich has acted in nearly 50 movies -- although to hear him tell it, some received a bit more of his attention than others. ''I've made films that I had nothing to do with, except I said some lines and I did what people told me to,'' he says. ''I've done films that I've rewritten almost totally and was completely involved with every aspect of. I've done films where I've spent whole days screaming about what the lens was, and I've done films where I think the director may not have even known my first name.''

Now the 49-year-old actor is taking a turn on the other side of the lens, directing a film adaptation of Nicholas Shakespeare's 1995 novel, ''The Dancer Upstairs.'' The movie stars Javier Bardem (''Before Night Falls'') as a policeman in an unnamed Latin American country pursuing the leader of a guerrilla organization loosely modeled on Peru's Shining Path; in the process, he falls in love with a dance instructor who may have ties to the group. Malkovich says he's long been fascinated by the region (''I'd always, as a child, wanted to go to Peru. I have no idea why'') and was drawn to Shakespeare's book by the complexity of its protagonist, who finds his loyalties to both his family and his corrupt government tested. The character ''wasn't the sort of hackneyed slop bucket you see in most things,'' he says. ''It was someone who had a chance of existing.''

In making the film, Malkovich drew on both a long career of directing in the theater and the lessons he's learned from the films in which he's appeared. ''I've done so many,'' he says, ''and so few of them were good.'' While the three he considers standouts -- ''The Killing Fields,'' ''Dangerous Liaisons,'' and ''Being John Malkovich'' -- couldn't be more different from one another, they were, he says, unified by one constant: ''Great scripts. None of them is remotely superior to the script.'' For that reason, he spent two years working with Shakespeare to adapt his novel, jettisoning major characters while trying to preserve its ambiguities. ''Normally if you did this film, you would have a cat-and-mouse game and [the policeman] would become obsessed by it and his marriage would break up and yada yada yada. I saw something more lifelike and more complex.''

Still, for all the time he's spent on the project, Malkovich acknowledges that a director can do only so much to shape its final outcome. ''When a good film happens, there's a great deal of accident,'' he says. ''And when a bad film happens, it's quite normal.'' So, does he feel he got lucky on this one? ''Yeah. I think it's lovely. I think it's complex and smart and it's very sad and more or less -- I hate to use the word exactly -- but it's more or less what I set out to make.'' (Feb. 26)