FROM:Boston Globe December 1991

NEW YORK -- Three years ago, when Sean Penn showed up at the publicity junket for Dennis Hopper's police buddy movie, "Colors," he looked guarded, wary, drained. Now meet the new Sean Penn. More open, more focused, more centered, more -- dare one say it? -- settled and mature.

"I've learned how to shut one eye," he says, "the one that tells me it's all for naught." Dressed mostly in black, Penn, 31, sits in a hotel suite clinking the ice cubes in a glass of milk. The suite's decor comes in shades of gray. Penn's disposition is anything but. One reason, he says, is that he's switched jobs. Now he thinks of himself as a director: No more acting, he swears, at least not in the foreseeable future. No more acting out, either.

He's making his directing debut with "The Indian Runner" (which opened Friday at the Coolidge Corner). Made from his own script, it was inspired by the Bruce Springsteen song "Highway Patrolman." It's about a cop who makes his peace with society, and his troubled-Vietnam- vet brother who can't. Shot in Omaha, with David Morse and Viggo Mortensen in the leads, the film embodies themes with which Penn has been -- and still is -- grappling, he says. Not in any simplistic, autobiographical way, he hastens to add, "although the brother relationship crept into a very important place in my feelings about things." It wou ld be trivializing "The Indian Runner" to take it too literally, even if Penn clearly feels close to his two younger actor brothers, Christopher and Michael.

More fruitfully, it can be read as a tug of war between Penn's old and new selves. What do you lose if you make compromises? What do you lose if you don't? Apart from its intensity and seriousness of purpose, the thing that distinguishes Penn's work as an actor (in films ranging from "At Close Range" to "Casualties of War," from "The Falcon and the Snowman" to "State of Grace") is that it almost always inhabits a moral universe. "The Indian Runner" is no departure from this pattern.

"We get conditioned to obey a set of rules and restrictions that are set out there for us," Penn says, "because there's a presumption that we'd violate them if they were not there. But in a lot of cases these restrictions keep us from fulfilling things that we feel deeply and want deeply. There is in everyone a fascination with whatever choices they didn't make. It's a matter of making choices that don't put us in a position of compromise that we can't live with. That's one of the obstacles and conditioners of the conflicts that come later.

"The other concern is simply survival -- keeping a roof over our heads and the heads of our family." Audiences won't have much difficulty seeing where Penn is aligning himself in this highly personalized film, though he refuses to take pointer in hand. "I don't like to put answers to these questions in people's minds. I don't feel my answers will be any better than the answers they'll get for themselves," is the way he puts it.

Part of his attitude, he says, stems from his impatience with Hollywood. "We're pandering to an underestimated audience," he says. "Candy movies may well have had their place, but it's time to start sharing dreams with each other rather than contriving them for the masses. It's owed by the movie industry to put some thought into their movies."

These days, any anger Penn feels is -- no pun intended -- directed. "When I get angry, I start to get a knot in my stomach," he says. "Then I go to the typewriter and start to write." He's written four scripts. It took him about a month to write "Indian Runner," he says, but it had been percolating for years. "When I write, I'm starting to work as a director," he says, adding that, since taking up writing, "I've got my eyes open wider. It enlivens my concern about the world."

Still, when it comes to some things, he's the same clenched fist of stubborn purity. When he finished the "Indian Runner" script, Penn told the producer he showed it to that it was written by a prison inmate named J. Claude McBee. It was enthusiastically received, Penn says, adding that he doubts he'll ever have such a trouble-free moviemaking experience again.

The initial anonymity wasn't playfulness, he adds. "I wanted an honest opinion," he says. "There are an awful lot of preconceived ideas about me and what I was about, and I didn't want to encumber the reader. If it doesn't speak for itself, then you've probably been dishonest." The only regret he has, he says, looking back over the tempestuous decade of a career that began in 1981 with "Taps," was making "Shanghai Surprise" with Madonna, who was then his wife. "I regret having done 'Shanghai Surprise' becuase I knew I was doing it for the bread. If I took a job now for money, I would be doing it without fooling myself. I wouldn't do it as a director. I would have to feel that any movie was not negative propaganda -- emotionally or politically." His parents are director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan (she has a small role in "Indian Runner"). Penn actually began as a director, he says, making 8mm films. "I was so fascinated with acting as an observer that it made sense to become an actor. That initial feel ing of fascination and excitement with it came as an observer. I wrote off my discomfort with it to particular experiences, to particular movies or plays, or things that were going on in them and were frustrating.

"I never was able to confront it head on as the work itself. And directing, on the other side, is the professional version of being an observer. You're like a professional audience. The trouble didn't have to do with expressing emotions. It had to do with getting to those emotions. I just found myself uncomfortable most of the time. I'd find myself with a sort of sick feeling. I never had stage fright. I never was nervous about going out on stage. It was the process itself. Part of the appeal of directing is that you have a degree of anonymity. I can't say how much of all that stuff that was going on with me for a couple of years there with the press -- you know, taking constant potshots and so on -- had to do with my decision. I don't think it was an overriding factor.

"It's just nice to be able to work in a medium that's interesting to you and not be on the screen, where I think audiences and press alike get a false proprietary sense, which is something I always resented. Once there's a public perception of you, the sheep start to follow," he says. No more paparazzi- bashing these days, he adds. No need to. "From the time I got divorced, it got a lot easier, really," he says of his relationship with the press -- and he has the relaxed manner to prove it. "As soon as I wasn't Madonna's husband any more, there wasn't a lot for them to say." He is not inclined to match Madonna's public declarations that she's still carrying a torch for him.

One reason he's more mellow these days is fatherhood. He and actress Robin Wright have a 2-year-old daughter, Dylan Frances. "I enjoy being a father," Penn says. "When I looked into that little girl's eyes, I saw something I was convinced was magic, complete wonder -- that's who she is. We get corrupted. Ten years from now, I'd like to be able to look at my daughter's face and be able to believe her smile as much as I believe it today. . . . With Robin, our deal is very simple. She does one a nd I do one. Right now, she's working on an Irish story, 'Playboys,' a romantic film with Albert Finney and Anthony Quinn.

"I don't go to the movies often. I loved 'Vincent and Theo.' Also 'My Life As a Dog' and 'Betty Blue.' And John Casssavetes' films, and Hal Ashby's. Cassavetes is one of the people who inspired me. He embodied a spirit of passion and a great love for a life. I admire Muhammad Ali for speaking out in his day. And David Bowie for pursuing things beyond success, or, despite success, what they love to do. And women at large for their way of maintaining a sense of instinctual truth that I've long sinc e lost touch with. It's very easy to get distracted. Everything petty comes from distractions, including violence. Right now, I'm fiddling with a new script. And I want to direct a script John Cassavetes wrote, 'She's Delovely.'

"With directing, I can think about the things I care about and not personalize them so much that it becomes a perpetual depression, but an exorcism or a purging. I've always been able to console myself that any pain I've suffered is tied to growth. Or at least allowing you to say, 'It's pain, but it ain't nothing but pain.' On top of that, all my bills are paid. Nobody suffers like the poor, and that's all there is to it. Am I a political activist? No, I believe in anarchism. Society is a place that tells and teaches you how to live your life. It's like teaching an eagle how to soar. Soon you'd have a lot of grounded eagles."