ALAN PAKULA: Filmmaker, Award-Winner

Alan Pakula's living room feels very, very far away from Los Angeles. Of course, it is: Mr. Pakula lives at Georgica in East Hampton, which is just about as far away from L.A. as one can get. The distance is more than geographic; it is intellectual.

Mr. Pakula, who will receive the Distinguished Achievement Award here Saturday at the Hamptons International Film Festival, is one of Hollywood's most successful and revered directors. His success, though, has been won without the sacrifice of integrity, intellect, or taste that so often attends a director's ascent to eminence in the American film industry.

Mr. Pakula speaks eloquently about a career that has spanned roughly 40 years and included producing and/or directing some of the most compelling films to come out of Hollywood in the second half of this century.

His Films Ask Questions

"Klute," "The Parallax View," "All the President's Men," and "Sophie's Choice" are a very small number of the films he has directed. And, while all his films have been born out of mainstream Hollywood financing and production, none has failed to pose serious questions about our culture.

"I've hardly had an avant-garde career," he said without apology. A self-described "populist," Mr. Pakula works in an idiom that is both challenging and widely accessible. He is able to share his intelligence at a very broad level and to avoid being entirely controlled by mainstream interests.

A persistent probing of the surface of things wedded to a sensitivity to narrative, both realized in striking manipulation of cinematic form, characterize Mr. Pakula's filmmaking.

Discussing his personal methods, Mr. Pakula is at turns precise and poetic.

Desire For Change

"If you're going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you're doing it for the first time," he said during a recent morning interview at his East Hampton house.

"There is something infantile about doing anything creative. . .you have to need the work to complete yourself. . . . You're constantly remaking your life."

The fullness of Mr. Pakula's approach to film and his ability to articulate his approach sound very different from the commercial claims of Hollywood.

He is possessed of his own brand of restlessness, which he describes as the avoidance of "Lot's Wife's Syndrome": He refuses to be trapped by the conventions of his past successes. While in retrospect he sees structural consistency among many of his films, he is resolute in his desire to tell new stories with new methods.

Newest Film

His newest film, "The Devil's Own," is a thriller that doubles as "the final loss-of-innocence film," he said. It stars Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt as "two men essentially doomed to conflict." Mr. Pakula said the film is "as character-driven a piece as any I've ever done."

Mr. Pakula has just finished editing the film, one of the processes of filmmaking he most enjoys.

"Editing is God's gift to the filmmaker. It's like suddenly entering the monastery with your film," he said.

Sitting alone with only the equipment and his editor, Mr. Pakula said he is able to extend his creative powers in a demesne of almost primary satsifaction. While deciding which footage to keep and which to scrap, Mr. Pakula said, the child he once was takes over. "Am I bored, or not?" he thinks, as if he were at the movies in Long Beach, where he grew up.

The conversations conducted in the privacy of the editing room between this filmmaker and his unfinished work must be very productive, for the quality of Mr. Pakula's art is of the highest order.

Screenplay On F.D.R.

Few other directors with the respect Mr. Pakula commands would be currently working on a script about Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidency and the "Byzantine" nature of its power structure.

This screenplay, to be produced some time hence, appeals to Mr. Pakula in its contrast to the poverty of the contemporary political scene, he explained.

"There has been so little successful leadership since that time," he said.

Mr. Pakula calls the last few decades some of the "most conservative" in recent memory, speaking with political conviction that is scarce in most of Hollywood.

Mr. Pakula is unsure, however, about the ultimate success of producing "a film about a man who could hardly stand up, at a time when people are obsessed by action. . . . We live in a time when every technique is used to keep an audience from being bored."

The Local Landscape

Mr. Pakula relishes being able to live on the eastern tip of Long Island, and has been a resident of East Hampton since 1979. He said he had been fascinated by the physical landscape here since he was taken by his parents to see the Montauk Lighthouse when he was 8 years old.

"Living near the ocean is sustenance to me. . . . We have the most beautiful graveyard in America. Driving past it in winter when the kids are skating on the pond makes all the chaos of summer worth it."

The chaos alludes to the crowds of summer in general, of course, but also to the recent migration to East Hampton in the warmer months of so many entertainment-industry movers and shakers, avatars of a Hollywood that is far from the thoughtful, warm, and intellectually generous milieu in which Mr. Pakula and his wife, the author Hannah Pakula, live.

"The day after Labor Day to the day before Memorial Day is my favorite time of the year," he said.