ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT ED HARRIS SINKS HIS TIME, MONEY AND SOUL INTO A BIO OF JACKSON POLLOCK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Funny how something can grab hold of your imagination, make you devote increasing time, energy, imagination and resources to it, and make you appear somewhat mad to outside observers.

It may well have been this quality - not to discount the decade and a half of research, years of practice and an indefinably intuitive commitment to how to do it right - that made Ed Harris the perfect person to star in and make a movie about the artist Jackson Pollock.

This labor of love has paid off for ``Pollock'' director-star Ed Harris, who earlier this week earned a best actor Academy Award nomination for his focused determination.

``The film is not a highly commercial vehicle,'' admits Harris, who sees his nomination and the one garnered by supporting actress Marcia Gay Harden as inducements for audiences to take a chance on a difficult and often unpleasant subject. ``A lot of people are like, Pollock, what does that mean? Once people get in there, they really dig it. It's an accessible movie. So, hopefully, now they'll check it out, and I think they'll be pleasantly surprised.''

But awards and box-office receipts weren't Harris' main motivations for making the film, although what were remain as mysterious as only true passions can be.

``The why is more about, if you're married, why do you love your wife?'' notes the 50-year-old character actor whose resume lists ``Apollo 13,'' ``The Truman Show,'' ``The Rock,'' ``The Right Stuff'' and many other impressive entries. ``If you start enumerating all the reasons, it's never going to add up to something that you just feel, that inhabits you. It's a need; you want to.''

Harris had the right attitude for playing and directing ``Pollock,'' that's for sure. Arguably the most significant American artist of the 1940s and '50s, Pollock defined the abstract expressionist movement with his breakthrough, drip ``action paintings,'' large canvases spattered with cacophonous splotches of seemingly randomly tossed color.

But the famous (and oft-satirized) paintings were pure expressions of Pollock's roiling id. (``The source of my painting is the unconscious,'' Pollock once declared.) A true misanthrope, severely alcoholic and probably manic-depressive, Pollock was a time bomb in any social or intimate setting, capable of the most obnoxious behavior and lashing out at his closest supporters, including his wife, the tough-minded Brooklyn artist Lee Krasner (played by Harden in the film). A drunk Pollock killed himself and a young woman in a 1956 car wreck when he was 44.

Although Harris became fascinated with Pollock after reading a biography in the mid-1980s, he never intended to also invest heavily in the movie nor to make it his directing debut. But after years of immersing himself in information about the artist and painting by the Pollock method - jumping around canvases stretched out on a floor, daubing paint on directly from tubes and cans - he decided, about a year before filming finally commenced, to take the plunge.

``It wasn't like I began to work on this because I wanted to direct a film,'' Harris explains. ``It was really from an actor's standpoint, thinking this could be a character to penetrate, investigate and pursue. But it became a bit of an obsession over the years.''

Several script drafts (one of which was 267 pages long), more than a few producing partners and some prospective directors came and went over the years. Eventually, Harris was ready to co-direct the picture with another actor-filmmaker, Charles Haid (``Buffalo Soldiers''). But then he started thinking ...

``From all the years spent with the material, working on the script, trying to get it as specific as possible and very detailed, wanting to get it as authentic as it could be, I realized that I appreciated Charlie's enthusiasm,'' Harris notes. ``But I also realized that his ideas weren't mine. I didn't know what mine were in particular, but I knew that they weren't his ... nor, most likely, anybody else's. So it was really kind of by default: If I wanted to make the film that I wanted to make, or discover what that film was, I decided I had to do it myself.''

Harris reckoned that he'd been on enough movie sets, run by enough great directors, to have figured out the rudiments of camera, lighting and style. The biggest problems shooting the film, according to him, were the same things the most experienced filmmakers tend to complain about: limited time and money.

But Harris quickly exhibited a directing method that was uniquely his own - or, perhaps, inspired a bit by the creative monster he was also immersed in playing.

``Ed was amazing as a director, because he was so generous and so brave and so willing to be unliked, in a way,'' Harden says. ``It wasn't about soft handling, taking you off privately and whispering suggestions. He'd keep the camera rolling and just shout, 'Say it again! Say it again! Now run around the room three times and say it again!' Once, he took a chair, and he banged it, and it shook me. But I had this little web that was sort of protecting something in me, and when he did that, that thing cracked and he opened something up for me that I probably wouldn't have gone to on my own.''

What did Harris find for himself in the gnarly, in many ways inscrutable character of Jackson Pollock?

``I discovered things about who he was, his fears about being a person on the planet,'' the actor-director says. ``His insecurities - I wouldn't even call it shyness or anti-social behavior, but just a lack of comprehension of how to be in the world. And something about his struggles as an artist, how important his art was to him and the fact that he couldn't really separate himself from it.''

Harris says that when Pollock got recognized by the media and began to become something other than this painter, it was one of the elements that destroyed him.

``I found that intriguing, as somebody who's been in public situations because of my work at times. I think that I probably have a little bit more ammunition in dealing with the world and myself than he did. But, especially when I think back to when I first started acting and it was all I lived for, I felt a real kinship with something that was going on here.''

The New Jersey-born Harris became interested in acting relatively late, well into a college career that encompassed stints at Columbia, the University of Oklahoma and Cal Arts. A fixture on both the Los Angeles and New York stage scenes, he became a major interpreter of Sam Shepard (``Fool for Love,'' a ``Simpatico'' production in which he first worked with Harden) and an all-around whiz with the classics, from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams.

Harris first came to moviegoers' attention as the latter-day King Arthur of ``Knightriders,'' horrormeister George Romero's oddball 1981 feature about jousting motorcyclists. Two years later, he earned more serious notices for his righteous ``Right Stuff'' portrayal of astronaut John Glenn.

While his subsequent leading roles - a troubled underwater researcher in James Cameron's ``The Abyss,'' Mr. Patsy Cline in ``Sweet Dreams'' - have been consistently impassioned and intelligent, Harris is probably better-known as a crack supporting or ensemble player, a reputation that's bound to be enhanced by his upcoming slate of appearances. He plays a German sniper in next month's Stalingrad epic ``Enemy at the Gates,'' opposite Meryl Streep in the adaptation of the literary hit ``The Hours,'' and will be what he describes as a mystery man in Ron Howard's mental illness drama ``A Beautiful Mind'' with Russell Crowe, among others.

``There are so many films coming out, it's kind of ridiculous,'' Harris says wearily. ``I would just as soon have finished 'Pollock' and not worked, but it's a financial thing, because I pumped a lot of my own bread into 'Pollock.' ''

Which, while a draining experience, was a rewarding one - although something he doesn't want to repeat anytime soon.

``Being involved with the whole process like that is really very fulfilling, regardless of the outcome,'' says Harris. ``All the steps, all the people you're involved with, all the creative decisions that are being made on a moment-to-moment basis - it forces you into really existing with all your senses going for a period of time.

``It's kind of neat. But my little girl's 7 years old, and I don't particularly feel like not seeing her,'' adds Harris, whose actress wife of 17 years, Amy Madigan, has a choice role in ``Pollock'' as art dealer Peggy Guggenheim. ``I would like to direct something again if I found something personal that I really felt I had to do. But it probably wouldn't be for a couple of years.

``It's just such, like, a diving-in thing,'' he says of filmmaking. ``It was this whole effort, more of a journey than it was anything else.''

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) painting Pollock

Legendary artist Jackson Pollock inspired actor Ed Harris' bold directing debut - and led to an Oscar nod along the way

(2 -- 4) Actor Ed Harris, top left, first read a biography of artist Jackson Pollock, top right, in 1980. In his film portrayal, Harris duplicates Pollock's famous drip-and-spatter method of painting.

(5) Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) confronts his wife, artist Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), in ``Pollock.''