Is there something unique you do to get performances like Bening's (in "In Dreams") and Moore's here and Beverly D'Angelo's in "The Miracle"?

I write! Seriously. I do write, and when the actors read through it I often write again. You get into a relationship with the actors where their parts are part of a film's texture. When I cast Bob Hoskins in "Mona Lisa" back in the mid-'80s, I rewrote the whole script; even the rhythms of his speech were so important to the pent-up fury he had, and the humor. That must be what's important, because other than that I don't do a lot!

Stephen Rea is better than he ever has been as Sarah's husband, Henry.

He is good, isn't he? It's the most difficult part to make work, and in some ways the most rewarding. Greene made Henry in the novel a figure of fun; he's unforgivably cruel to the character. I wanted him to grow in stature through the film, till in the end you've got to ask a question. You're faced with a possessive lover swallowing this woman alive rather than have her with anyone else. Is that the best way to love this woman? Or is it Henry's way? He may not recognize her sounds of passion, but you could say he loves her more deeply than Bendrix does. If he feels she should be with another man, he'll enable that to happen. It's heartbreaking.

Ian Hart is also wonderful as Parkis, the detective.

There's a whole class thing going on in Greene's book with him, isn't there? You really see the detective character as someone that Greene would never ordinarily associate with. Very British that, don't you think? Thank you, the writer says, and Parkis obediently goes. ["A last pressure of the hand ... and he was gone. He was not one of those whom one expects to see again."]

Ian plays him so that he's observing all this passion, yeah? And he loves the job for this passion in a strange way, doesn't he? In that new scene I wrote where he meets Bendrix on the promenade in Brighton, he's kind of sad that something as sordid as divorce is going to intrude on their lives. Ian's a wonderful actor; he can do two contradictory things at once. Ian plays the detective so that he's the agent of their destruction yet he's also their guardian angel.

And that's what I think you have to do when you're dealing with something like aesthetic reality or art or whatever you call it -- present two mutually contradictory facts which have to live together without any stress. That's why people make movies or write fiction with passion. Otherwise they'd just do monologues.

It's ironic to think of former movie critic Greene, in what I think is his best "serious" novel, using a detective out of comic movie mysteries.

Greene was tremendously jealous of movies, wasn't he? He hated Hitchcock, didn't he? And it's a terrible pity, because if Hitchcock had done some of Greene's things -- of course, he never would have, because so much of the broader world enters into Greene, and Hitchcock was more about pure form.

But the entire thing in this movie is about looking. When Henry is thinking of hiring a detective, he's trying to imagine how he'd look in the waiting room with all the other wronged husbands. And Bendrix needs a pair of eyes to follow Sarah around so he can reinvent her image for himself. He uses Parkis to do that. They're all unreliable narrators. Even Bendrix, telling the story as it happens to him, gets it wrong. Everyone is telling a flawed story. That must be what's cinematic!

When I mark my ballots for best actress of 1999, they'll include Julianne Moore for this movie and Annette Bening -- not for "American Beauty," but for your film, "In Dreams," in which she co-starred with Robert Downey, Jr.

Annette Bening for "In Dreams" -- well, thank you for that; she was marvelous in it.

Yes, but she wasn't the whole movie. It was really a bold attempt do a horror film revolving around -- well, not just paranormal visions of a serial killer, but also a mother's worst grief. Yet a year ago, when the movie was scheduled to come out in January, critics couldn't get Dreamworks to screen it. And you still have a deal at Dreamworks. What happened?

I know. They dumped it, didn't they? I'm aware of that. There were a lot of things -- Robert Downey was getting in and out of jail, I don't know. Look, they asked me to do it. It was a script that belonged to Amblin' [Steven Spielberg's production company] that Bruce Robinson ["Withnail and I"] had done. I found it fascinating for its themes, and used it as a kind of touchstone. But I had to write a new draft to see if it was something I could direct. When they saw my script everyone got terribly excited and put it into production.

I don't think any movie can recover when a kid is killed in the first third of a film. There's something so deeply unpleasant about a child-killing, I had problems even thinking about directing it. It creates this gaping kind of narrative upset. But I loved working out the mad internal logic of the film. This was a movie that had to be visually based -- you couldn't rely on words.

I think "In Dreams" has one of the greatest deep-focus long shots in the history of movies. Way off in a reservoir divers are recovering the girl's body while police and the girl's mother, Annette, line the road leading to the water; then Annette abruptly takes off right when her husband, Aidan Quinn, has come to meet her. It's this long line linking death and life and the perils of a family.

I know. I know. And it's all on a crane -- I really worked that movie. That's really beautiful, when the car comes driving down.

Look, don't ask me, what I can say? The big horror explosion was yet to come. I said, OK, I'm going to make a horror movie that's not "Scream" -- not a slasher movie and not tongue-in-cheek -- a nonironic horror movie. And that's what came out last summer! Maybe if my film had been handled more carefully, in that way ....

Still, killing the girl didn't allow anyone to engage. The movie presents this idyllic-looking American family -- they have problems, but they're idyllic-looking, with this little blond girl -- and when she gets killed, you get upset at the filmmakers and it throws you out of the movie.

For me, it was delightful to do. And Annette is a wonderful actress. Of necessity, she plotted her course out very precisely, because her character was in a state of madness. She was amazing to work with.

The narrative was the pictures in this movie; the themes were in the images, not the dialogue. When Annette was escaping from the mental hospital and went inside the brain of the killer and followed the route he took to escape when he was a kid -- it was like two forms of narrative meeting, taking the past and the present and merging them in the final bit. It was wonderful to do. I really liked that.

Pure cinema.

Yes. [Laughter.] And they don't like that today, do they?

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