MOVIES : Bridget Fonda, With a Bullet : After four films in less than two years, the actress decided to go for the action in a remake of "La Femme Nikita"--will it pay off?

By HILARY de VRIES

March 14, 1993 12 AM PT

<i> Hilary de Vries is a frequent contributor to Calendar</i>

Through a fog of cold medication and plain tuckered-outness that comes from making back-to-back films--five in two years to be exact--Bridget Fonda is confessing. “Like when we made ‘Singles,’ you know, the same thing is happening to me right now. I’m sitting here sorta dizzy and dazed, like the way I played Janet whenever she was around Cliff.”

She raises her arms and stares between them as if she were sighting down a rifle. “Tunnel vision, whoooo. It’s weird, like one of those shooting days I could never describe, but it’s really fun to act like this.”

Fonda looks about as sick as a milk-fed kitten.

“That’s because I put a ton of makeup on,” she says, grimacing.

Fonda’s definition of a ton seems to extend to mascara on her upper lashes and a slight glaze on her lips.

“I just worked with a bunch of Buddhist lamas,” she says, dropping her arms and leaning forward with the kind of sudden intimacy common to teen-age girls at camp. “It’s a strange thing,” she says, sounding as if she’s swung her head over the side of the top bunk to confess to a sleeping stranger that she is scared of snakes and misses her boyfriend. “But I’m finding more and more, everything you don’t want, you have to do that thing. The thing you’re fighting against, you have to embrace it. I’m not at all psychic. I don’t have those connections. I’ve never been in tune. I always look at my horoscope and go, ‘That’s not me, it’s for everyone else but me.’ But it’s like this pattern is emerging in my life and it’s kind of frightening.”

This kind of soul-baring seems to demand a response even in a Hollywood deli. I reach for what is at hand, a half-eaten biscotti on the plate between us. Snapping this ad hoc communion wafer in half sends crumbs spraying. “It’s a rock,” she says.

Plunging on, “I was raised without any religion and I sort of had to come up with my own ideas about God and life. So when a pattern emerges it’s just sort of jarring. It defies known science. I keep trying to make sense of it, but I can’t. It’s a weird thing. . . .”

Yes, weird?

“It’s my state of my mind and the jobs that come my way. It sounds funny to boil it down to your work, but in a strange way, your work defines you.”

Early in her career, Bridget Fonda described herself as “no Molly Ringwald.” It was, at the time, her explanation for all the small, independent films she was making. “Shag,” “Strapless,” “Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound.”

“It wasn’t like my choice,” she says annotating her resume. “I auditioned for everything but I was losing out to people like Kelly Preston. And the parts I wanted to go up for nobody saw me as. They kept wanting me to play the popular girl, the girl the guy has a crush on. And I just didn’t feel that way.”

Fonda, if it needs be mentioned, possesses the kind of fine-boned, coltish looks of a young, Americanized Audrey Hepburn. At 29, and about to star in her 13th film--”Point of No Return,” John Badham’s remake of Luc Bresson’s “La Femme Nikita”--she seems much younger than her years and her tax returns might suggest. Dressed simply in a gray T-shirt and no jewelry, Fonda’s slenderness is offset by gawkishness, her milky skin dappled by freckles, her pale hair tumbling into her eyes.

“I’ve been made to look that way--the teen-queen situation,” she says, tucking an errant lock behind her ear. “But the reality is that I’ve got kind of a funny face. It was strange for me to play the cheerleader type, because when I was in high school I felt like I was always on the outside.”

For a while, Fonda played outsiders who looked like cheerleaders. She made her film debut in 1987 as a suicide victim with a penchant for nudity in “Aria.” She played call-girl Mandy Rice-Davies in “Scandal,” Blair Brown’s tarty younger sister in “Strapless,” and a smart-mouthed journalist who deftly bedded Andy Garcia’s Vinnie Mancini in “The Godfather, Part III.” Between films, she moaned to journalists that she didn’t have enough clout to refuse nude scenes.

Then Cameron Crowe, director of “Say Anything,” cast Fonda in “Singles,” his good-natured ode to twentysomethings. He had written the role of Janet, the sweetly dim waitress who dogs Matt Dillon, specifically for Fonda. “I don’t see you as a sexpot,” Crowe told the slightly flummoxed actress. “I see you as the soul of the movie.”

When Fonda showed up that same year playing Allie, another why-bad-things-happen-to-good-people victim in “Single White Female,” it seemed as if the actress had jettisoned her bad-girl image. Although Barbet Schroeder’s psychological thriller, which co-starred Jennifer Jason-Leigh, was not the summer blockbuster Columbia Pictures had hoped for, it was Fonda’s first starring role in a major studio film (and her first to carry a $1-million salary) and more than one critic agreed with Jay Carr when he wrote in his review in the Boston Globe, “We never stop looking at the two women, never stop wanting to.” As Schroeder summed up Hollywood’s reaction: “Many, many people (in the industry) are in love with Bridget.”

If that infatuation was relatively late in coming, it was not, however, unexpected. After all, as the most visible scion of Henry Fonda--Peter’s daughter and Jane’s niece--Fonda was already a member of Hollywood royalty. Although her parents divorced when she was 8, she grew up amid relative privilege, living with her mother, Susan Brewer, and her brother Justin in Coldwater Canyon, attending the exclusive Westlake School for Girls, spending afternoons with her grandfather watching him paint. But unlike many progeny of the famous, Fonda seems to wear her pedigree with ease. “I always knew my dad was famous, but I lived with my mom,” she says succinctly.

Now, with “Point of No Return,” (which opens Friday), Fonda seems ready to stake her claim. It is her biggest role to date and there are pitfalls aplenty. Not only does Fonda carry the film (risky), but it is a remake of a popular foreign film (riskier) and a rare action film that stars a woman (really risky). Warner executives are waiting to see if a kick-boxing, pistol-toting Fonda can go where few women, besides Sigourney Weaver (the “Alien” series), have gone.

But sitting in a deli just a few days before the film’s opening, Fonda seems only vaguely concerned with such career issues. “I don’t know, I’ve worked a lot, done a lot,” she says uncertainly. “But you never really think that way, about carrying a film. You just can’t think about it or you’re thinking about the wrong things.”

The right things include all the directors she’s managed to work with. She just finished filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha,” which will be released this winter (Fonda plays the mother of a 9-year-old American child boy who thinks he is Buddha), and she is a few weeks away from heading to Toronto to film “Camilla,” an inter-generational drama co-starring Jessica Tandy and directed by Depa Mehta. Next month, Fonda can be seen in the low-budget independent film “Bodies, Rest & Motion,” directed by Mike Steinberg and co-starring the actress’s real-life boyfriend, Eric Stoltz. She is, admittedly, nervous when she is without a job.

“This has been the year,” says Fonda, diagraming a circle on the coffee-shop table with her fingers. “Cameron to Barbet to John to Mike Steinberg to Bernardo.”

She looks up and smiles politely as if she had just handed in all her homework and was hoping for a gold star. “It’s a nice mix, don’t you think?”

When she first heard there was to be an American version of “La Femme Nikita,” Fonda thought, “Why are they bothering?” She had seen Luc Bresson’s 1990 suspense thriller on video (“I think I was working when it came out”) and couldn’t imagine anyone improving on Bresson’s direction or Anne Parillaud’s performance as the loopily anarchistic Nikita. “Anne really has the stuff,” Fonda says, and besides, “I hate remakes.”

Director John Badham was not the only one who, unlike Fonda, saw a massive marketing opportunity in reworking the French hit for American audiences. Bresson’s darkly comic political tale had a mildly feminist twist--a young drug-addicted woman convicted of murder is forced to become a professional government-sponsored assassin--and Badham recognized “a great story” when he saw one. But the director also knew “that 99% of Americans would not see this film because we refuse to go to movies with subtitles.” Eager to direct a slick, exotic thriller--Badham’s last film, “The Hard Way,” had under-performed at the box office--he phoned around to see who, if anyone, had acquired the film’s rights. He got as far as Warner Bros.

Art Linson, who had had similar feelings to Badham’s after seeing the movie in Seattle where he was producing “Singles” for Warner Bros., had already been assigned as producer. When Bresson turned down the offer to direct his own remake, Badham was given the nod.

Although Linson was aware that the track record for female action pictures was limited--”There was one horrible one (“V.I. Warshawski” starring Kathleen Turner),” Linson says--the producer was not overly concerned about a film starring what he calls “a girl with a gun. People underestimate that if you make it good, it transcends the genre,” he says. “We could have exploited it by casting one of those girls from the cover of Sports Illustrated, but we wanted to treat this like a good French play we were adapting. We saw this as a movie about redemption.”

Badham too was interested in taking the high road, albeit with some modifications. “Luc had created one of the most dynamic women we’ve seen,” the director says. “I’m sure you noticed the parallels to ‘Pygmalion.’ Well, they are quite strong. But we wanted to improve the focus on the woman in the film’s last third. This is the story of a woman who everyone wants to be someone else--a drug addict, an assassin, a nice person at home--and she has to devise a way to be on her own.”

Using a script by Bob Getchell, who had won Oscar nominations with his first two films, Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and Hal Ashby’s “Bound for Glory,” Badham began a casting search. Although he easily filled key roles with actors Gabriel Byrne, Anne Bancroft and Harvey Keitel, Badham found casting Maggie (code name Nina) difficult. He needed an actress--”not below 17 and not much older than her early 20s”--who could sustain the audience’s sympathies while blowing away innocent people with an Olympian target pistol.

Fonda had just finished shooting “Single White Female” when she was invited to read for the role that “everyone under the age of 30 had read for,” Badham says. Although Linson was familiar with Fonda’s work in “Singles,” nothing in the actress’s repertoire suggested she could carry a film of this size. Even Fonda had her doubts.

“I was scared,” she says. “Anne had done such a complete job and I am the most unphysical person I know. I’m not athletic and I have a hard time tapping into my anger. But it was such a great character and women never really get to play those kind of women and so the masochist in me said, ‘Yes, go into the fire.’ ”

It wasn’t until Schroeder showed Badham and Linson footage of Fonda in “Single White Female” as he was editing it that she was given “Point of No Return.”

To convincingly portray a drug-addict turned professional hit-woman, Fonda spent nearly a month training before the film’s shoot last year. She lost weight and worked with a professional kick boxer--”we hiked up to the Hollywood sign and I worked out on the (punching) bag”--and a stunt coordinator who taught Fonda to fire a gun. For the first third of the film, she also had to learn to wear a disfiguring set of prosthetic teeth. “They were actually very ingeniously made, but I couldn’t chew,” says Fonda, who adds that during one dinner sequence, “I spent most of the time thinking about how I was going to spit the food back out because I couldn’t swallow.”

Similar to the rest of the cast and crew who had been urged by Badham to avoid seeing Bresson’s film, Fonda did not review “La Femme Nikita,” but worked instead with her personal acting coach, Harold Guskin, “because I didn’t want to mimic Anne, because her performance was like, no way.” She concentrated on creating a sensation of physical pain to play the early drug-addicted scenes, but learning to portray a professional killer, Fonda concedes, was difficult.

Surprisingly, Fonda found the film’s earlier, gritty sequences to be her favorite “because I was able to be so unattractive.” And while Badham agreed with her, theirs was not the only opinion.

“I talked to people who were so sure those scenes would never make it in (the final cut), because they said, ‘You’ll never gain sympathy after that,’ ” Fonda says.

While Fonda says that “I’m glad when guys take their dates to see an action picture they’ll be seeing one with a woman in it,” she expresses reservations about the film’s glossy, titillating attitudes toward women. During the film’s shoot, Fonda, who has a reputation as a director’s dream actor, grew exasperated with some of the skimpy outfits she was required to wear. “Excuse me, but hot pants and thigh boots?” Frequently she disagreed with Badham over the staging of several scenes. “It would be like I would come back from lunch and they would go, ‘Oh, we blocked the scene while you were out.’ That was a famous one.”

A Venice boardwalk sequence in which Fonda wears a tailored business suit amid a swirl of bikini-clad roller skaters she found particularly onerous.

“ ‘Excuse me, but she’s an extra in a G-string,’ ” says Fonda re-enacting her objections. “ ‘Does she need her own cue?’ But that’s what they wanted to do, give the projectionist a thrill. It was a joke.”

Is the movie the one she thought she was making? Fonda sighs. “No, it never is,” she says, slumping in her chair. “Particularly if you have expectations or plans or dreams. It always changes from when I read a script, because in my head I make the movie and when you’re acting it, you only have control over one element: yourself.”

She brightens considerably when the conversation turns to “Bodies, Rest & Motion,” based on screenwriter Roger Hedden’s play about a group of aging twentysomethings trying to jump-start their lives. “I love that character,” Fonda says. “Beth is just so sad, someone who thinks it’s her duty to make it work. It kills me, but that’s the thing I’m really trying to break out of--sacrificing your own happiness because you think someone else’s should come first.

“As a child born to people in the ‘60s, what’s to rebel against? You grow up and there is this sense of excitement--people are doing things that matter--and here I am. There’s no place to go. I related to Beth living with someone and it’s not working out and it could stay that way the rest of her life. That’s scary, that kind of complacency can be really frightening.”

Phoebe Cates, her friend and co-star in “Bodies, Rest & Motion,” says Fonda likes to work “because she needs that structure.”

Or maybe Fonda makes back-to-back films as a way to prevent inertia in her own life.

“I work because it’s there,” she says with a shrug. “I can’t refuse the opportunities that are rising. They’re all too good and I have a tough time saying ‘No,’ because I keep thinking this could be the thing I was meant to do.”

Fonda looks around. She has been talking for nearly 45 minutes and now she wants something to drink. Given the fact that her face on the “Point of No Return” poster is plastered on nearly every bus stop from Hollywood to Santa Monica, one would think the workers would be falling over themselves to provide it. She looks wanly around the nearly empty room, chatting to fill the wait.

“I just had this conversation with Bernardo. I asked him, ‘How did you feel when you acted?’ and he said he couldn’t stop laughing and I said, ‘Yes, yes! And how great when that happens.’ ”

A lone busboy wanders listlessly in our direction and Fonda politely orders an iced tea. When he is out of earshot, she leans forward and turns whatever irritation she may be feeling into an improvised scene at her own expense. “Yeah, they send their least favorite guy to me,” she says mimicking an imagined argument among the waiters. “ ‘No, you go!’ ‘No, you go!’ ”

Fonda is the first to admit that “I’m not my biggest fan.” When she reads reviews of herself, her first instinct is to believe the worst ones. Seeing herself on screen, all she notices are “my hands are nervous and my mouth twitches. It still does,” she says, screwing her thin lips. “Like this. I have to sort of get past it.” It is not surprising that Fonda’s role models run to bony, acerbic types, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn, actresses “who were real people, smart and earthy at the same time.”

Cates says Fonda’s self-deprecation runs to touching extremes. “She makes you feel good about yourself. Like, after I had my son, she was the one who came over so we could compete with each other to see who had the grosser body parts. She’d pull down her pants and grab the top of her thigh and go ‘Look at this!’ She is being funny, but I don’t think she realizes how beautiful she is.”

Her iced tea arrives and Fonda sticks the straw in her mouth. “What is it with my low self-esteem?” she says a moment later, sounding genuinely distressed. She retells an oft-told story of how she used to burst into tears as a child whenever people commented on her looks. “Sometimes I feel like I can make myself look the way that I’m happy with, but I get really depressed if I think of the big picture or compare myself to movie stars who are supposed to look like Veronica Lake or Lauren Bacall. Like you’ve got to be a model. It’s a weird pressure.”

Cates had cautioned that “there is something very childlike about Bridget, a certain fragility that is surprising especially when you consider the roles that she’s done. I worry about her every time she drives off in the car.”

Although Fonda initially turns cheerful when the conversation turns to the many directors she has worked with--”I was lucky to get cast by Bertolucci; I would have played an extra, the person they run past to be on his set”--she turns somber when Schroeder’s name comes up.

“Barbet loves actors. What he did (showing Badham footage of “Single White Female”) was unheard of. It made me get sort of choked up,” she says, stirring her tea furiously, tears flooding her eyes.

When it is suggested Fonda might want to bring the interview to a close, she is insistent. “No, no, I feel bad that I’m so unfocused and such a dud. It’s very important to me that I say something that makes some sense, get out of this fog in my head.”

OK, what about living with Stoltz? She and the actor, whom she has called “the love of my life,” have been living together for more than two years. Clouds part.

“He’s got a good peace about him, which is new for me and which I’m benefiting from. But we don’t talk about marriage. We’re trying to keep it special.”

Fonda spends a moment talking about the possibility of having a child--”I want to, but I don’t know when”--and her existing family. Her mother, father and brother all live in Montana. Her famous aunt is married to Ted Turner and spends most of her time in Atlanta. Los Angeles is finally Fonda’s alone.

“Yeah,” she says smiling shyly. “That whole part of who you are relative to your family is something I’ve been dealing with now for the past few years. There is something in me that is saying, ‘You haven’t done it yet, you haven’t gotten it out.’ I may be getting lots of jobs and that’s satisfying to an extent, but I haven’t done the thing that would make me relinquish that quest.

“It’s very strange because in this film (“Camilla”), I play a character who is frustrated by her inability to express herself--a musician who can’t bring herself to perform before an audience. It’s weird, but it’s this feeling of needing to devote your life to someone else, so the other person can live their dreams. I do that in this movie with Jessica Tandy and in a strange way it’s like fulfilling what I do with my family, my father.”

Fonda has finished her tea and wandered out to the parking lot, but she seems intent on finishing the long confessional narrative she began hours ago.

“I have this fear that I’m going to be lax in my struggle to better myself. I got that from Mom. She always said, ‘You’re not doing enough, you’re not working hard enough.’ I’m sort of trying to be happy with my career. I think I should give myself a break, but I’ve got this bug that rides me. You know, you should be doing better. So every time I work, I’m frustrated with my physical inability to catch up to my mental picture.”

Fonda pulls her parka around her, her fingers brush the tiny laminated map of Tibet she has pinned to her jacket. She looks down and smiles at this remembrance of the Buddhist lamas. “The biggest thing is that I can’t be afraid to fail,” she says almost to herself, “because it’s the exact thing that I need to do.”