Splatter movie star

By PETER CALDER

Ed Harris might have been born to play Jackson Pollock. It's written in the similar faces: deep brow, square jaw, and deep-set eyes that seem to hold an oceanic, puzzled pain. Certainly, the resemblance occurred to Harris' father, who spotted Pollock's picture on the cover of a book when he was working in the bookstore at the Chicago Institute of Art.

The book, To A Violent Grave, was a collection of reminiscences by people who knew the abstract expressionist American artist. "My Dad gave me the book," Harris recalls, speaking from a film set in South Carolina on his last day of work before a Christmas break.

"He told me it looked like me. And as I started reading about Pollock, I felt a kind of kinship. I dunno, I can't explain it."

The kinship - if not the explanation for it - is to be found in Pollock, Harris' on-screen portrayal of the tormented genius, whose frenzied, energetic drip technique wrested the crown of abstract modernism from the Europeans in the 1940s and re-sited the centre of the art world in New York.

The 50-year-old, grey-eyed character actor, who played the orchestrating puppetmaster Christof in The Truman Show and astronaut John Glenn in Philip Kaufman's screen version of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, plays Pollock as he was - a man full of passionate intensity but possessed by personal demons which would ultimately kill him.

Bringing the film to the screen was a labour of love which lasted more than a decade. Films about artists, especially tortured ones who die in the last reel, don't exactly fill studio moguls' eyes with dollar signs. It took a long time before Harris found two magazine publishers willing to front up with the meagre US$1.5 million ($2.9 million) he needed to make the picture.

All the while, Harris was getting to know the artist, reading everything he could lay his hands on and working on a script which started out at 267 pages - about 4 1/2 hours of screen time.

Somewhere along the way, he realised he was going to have to work on both sides of the camera. "I was always just interested in playing the part, but as I talked to other directors about it, I realised that I'd worked so long and hard on it and got so intimate with the material that I didn't want to hand it over to anybody.

"I would have been hard-pressed to articulate my vision to anybody else so I just kinda took a big breath and said, 'Let's do this'. And it was quite a trip, I'll tell you."

Harris' portrait of Pollock is not pretty. The film concentrates on the last 15 years of the artist's life, from 1941 when he met Lee Krasner, whose portrayal by Marcia Gay Harden was rewarded with an Oscar last year. It shows us a man who is a creative titan and an emotional infant ("You're all need, need, need!" Krasner bellows at him at one point).

And Harris admits to being unsure if he would have liked the real Pollock. "I don't know about 'like'. In his latter years he was a real son of a bitch, but he was making an effort most of the time. I admired him, I guess. He was like an underdog who achieved something and I was rooting for him."

He says Pollock's creative singlemindedness recalled for him his early acting days "when you're consumed by what you're doing. It's the only thing that gives you any comfort and puts you in a place where you recognise yourself on the planet."

Harris brought a veteran's maturity to his first directing job, shooting in a simple, unshowy style which allows the performances to breathe.

The most impressive kinetic sequences are those in which he depicts the artist at work. Muscular and energetic, they show a man who had taken the time to become familiar with the business of painting.

Harris built a studio in his Malibu home in 1994 and spent time teaching himself how to paint, or more accurately how to look like a painter.

"It was more a case of getting comfortable with the material," he says. "I wasn't trying to paint Pollock or paint my own, but just trying to find some rhythm and style and get a feeling of what it must be like to be a painter. I'd work on stuff for hours and then dream about it and then get out again the next day."

Pollock works were reproduced by a talented artist friend in copies good enough to withstand passing scrutiny from the camera, but when it came to showing Pollock at work, the verisimilitude of the painting was less important than the sense of the artist.

"It had to be about Pollock," says Harris. "I just wanted to inhabit this guy. It had to be an emotional journey with this guy. It's not an art-history lesson."

The emotional journey, which Harris says lasted most of the 90s but was at its most intense during the shoot, was harrowing. "We worked our butts off, and we never had time to reflect or look ahead.

"It was a moment-to-moment excursion. But that was pretty cool, actually. I was very alive. It was very exciting not just to come in and do the acting and go away. And I'm glad I did it. I really enjoyed being the person who says: 'This is the film'."

* Pollock is screening now at the Rialto, Newmarket.