There's no life there." By Raissa Dorff in New York City Irish actor and film star Gabriel Byrne has starred in over 35 films, including "The Usual Suspects," "Little Women," "Defense of the Realm" and "Miller's Crossing." Equally at home on stage he was nominated for a Tony Award in 2000 for his performance in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" and won critical acclaim for his 2005 Broadway turn as Cornelius Melody in Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet.

" His latest film is "Jindabyne", directed by acclaimed Australian director Ray Lawrence (Lantana) and starring Byrne and Laura Linney. The haunting story, based on a short story ("So Much Water So Close to Home") by Raymond Carver, deals with the turmoil that erupts in a remote town in Australia after Stewart (Byrne) and his friends go on an annual fishing trip in isolated high country and discover the body of a dead Aboriginal girl in the river. Their decision to stay on and fish rather than to immediately make the long trek back to report the death begins a controversy that has far reaching effects.

I sat down with Mr. Byrne to discuss the film at a recent press day in New York. Q: What are some of the main themes or issues that "Jindabyne" deals with?

A: Well, the central story point is when the men find the body. From their perspective what they do is there is a very brief discussion and only from a logical practical point of view they decide that by the time they get back to report this incident, the girl will either be washed over the cliffs and suffer some other indignity, or if they take her out of the water the body will be desecrated. They've come a very great distance to fish, so they take what they believe to be a logical practical decision but as the audience watches there's a very subtle kind of change in terms of the relationship between the audience and the men.

The audience become the moral judges of the action. So it turns from a logical practical solution into a moral problem. That brings up questions for an audience whether they get time to completely analyze that or not.

What would I do in that situation? Would I have behaved differently? If three women had found the body would they have reacted differently?

If it had been a young boy would they have reacted differently? A really interesting question. So when they return to the city or the town where they live, they are already involved in a moral dilemma which they never could never have imagined.

And the film opens up into an examination of how men and women differ in relation to how they deal with complex emotional issues, and how they react to trauma and crisis. The women confront things in a very direct way. They sit around the table and say, "This is what happened to me.

" The men become distant and withdrawn. They sit with one another and tell jokes about lesbians and, you know, eat sandwiches. And that doesn't make the men simplistic nor does it make the women deeply evolved but in the language of emotion, women seem to be much more adept or at least they are encouraged much more to be forthcoming about the hidden depths of our emotional selves.

Q: Your character Stewart finds the body and becomes the focus of the controversy, both in the town, and in his marriage. It's hard to tell if he's "right" or "wrong" in what he chooses to do. What was it like playing him?

A: Well another thing that really interests me about the film is that in a mainstream conventional film, the idea of "innocence and guilt" are pretty clear cut, but not so here. The discovery of the body also examines the nature of what we perceive to be "male", "macho", movie behavior. If that body was discovered in a mainstream conventional film, it wouldn't have played out like that.

The body would have been discovered and the hero's function in cinema is to reimpose order on disorder. To take a chaotic situation and say, "O.K.

Here's what we do: you're off the case whatever way they have of dealing but it's usually about the male imposition of order on disorder and I made a decision in finding that body to become the opposite of what I would imagine a conventional hero to be." I, for example, do not know how I would react if I came across the dead body of a raped girl in a river. I decided that I would make it as unheroic as I possibly could and that's why the guy is terrified to touch the body.

[He] doesn't want to turn it over, becomes hysterical, starts to shout, blesses himself and the reason he blesses himself there is because in moments of great crisis you go back to things from childhood that say, "This'll protect ya. This'll make you safe" and so we filmed that and Ray said, "Yeah think that is the way to go" and so we left it like that, and filmed it as it was. Q: And I understand that everything with Ray is filmed in one take, including that scene?

A: Yes and I said to Ray, "Look, I'm really nervous about this scene. When the body comes down the river, is it possible for me to see the body for the first time and not have to do take twelve?" He said, "O.

K. we'll shoot it that way that the first time you see that body is when it comes down the river." Q: The central relationship of Stewart and Claire (played by Laura Linney) is an intense one and this controversy brings up all sorts of question of forgiveness for them and for the community.

Can you talk about that? A: Yes, Stewart and Claire's marriage - to go on being married to the same person, all your life, giving up part of yourself, and having the part that says, "This is who I married for the rest of my life and this is who I stick with" and to go through that kind of a relationship day after day after day after day is heroic. And to inflict a great hurt on the person that you love, ask for their forgiveness and be forgiven is not as simple as it seems either which is why somebody who says something that they regret and goes on national television and says, "I really regret what I said and I want to be forgiven.

" I look at that and I say despite the best intentions in the world, how easy is it to be forgiven? How easy is it to accept forgiveness? And on a deeper level when my character at the end goes to the tribal guy to be forgiven; he's not forgiven.

There's sand thrown in his face with such hatred, because it's five hundred years of "you took our language, you took our culture, you took our future. You took our economy. You took our land.

You took everything and now you're asking me to forgive you?" Q: There's a real lack of resolution in some ways at the end of the film don't you feel? A: This film begins in a landscape of utter calm tranquil beauty and behind a rock is chaos waiting to happen.

Despite all the rituals and all the forgiveness and all the hurt and all the damage, that's how the film ends: a guy in the same place, waiting to do the same thing again. And the reason I think the film is unsettling is because it presents a world that we all know. Whether we can articulate that on a regular basis or not, we live in a tremendously unpredicable and chaotic world where we do not know when the next awful thing is going to happen.

Three days ago, you have a situation which who could have predicted that? It's happened before but who could have predicted that that guy who lives down the corridor is the guy who kills 33 people because he's enraged. That's the guy hiding behind the rock.

There's a beautiful moment in the film where the mother trys to comfort the child and she says to him, "don't worry it'll be all right" and at 7 years of age the child turns to the wall and says, "crap." So I think that the film itself is not just a town that takes place in a small town in Australia but it really deals with a lot of issues that we face here in America. I believe, living in New York, that there's a pall of invisible fear that hangs over this city, that we don't talk about very much but it's there.

Because we know that the ordered world that we believed in up until 9-11 is now a distant myth. It's no longer that kind of a world. Q: So that's part of what drew you to the film?

A: Well all these things drew me to the film because I think that Raymond Carver was a genius. And what his real talent as a writer was to be able to express the most profound and complex and provocative thoughts in incredibly simple and accessible language. Even if you finished it the story after 5 pages it sticks with you for 4 or 5 years and you think, why is that still in my head?

Because great art does it's most powerful work in your own concience. Q: I read that Ray Lawrence suggested that doing the film would be not only a work experience but a spiritual one for you. Did you find that it "worked on you" in that way, more than other projects you've done?

A: Yes, well I've now begun to believe that every experience you have now has to a greater or lesser extent the potential to be some kind of instrument of change on what you carry inside you, the spirit of inside you. And I don't think he knew what he meant. He said when you come over and you meet these aboriginal people who have lost their land, their culture, their voice, their everything, he said you'll see how much has been taken from them, and you'll also see how much we are losing.

And I thought that was an interesting comment. And after making the film, I realized that it taught me one of the most profound lessons of my life was that what death is. Trite and all as it might sound, [it] is the stunning absence of life and that's what death is.

There's no life there. There's no eyeball looking at you, there not hearing anything, they're not breathing, they are without life and suddenly life started to make sense for me, because in Eastern religions they have this thing where you cannot truly live your life unless you truly embrace death. But that's the truth.

All the things that were in the film I understood all those things after I came back. So I called him up six months later and I said, "I've gone through a lot working on this film, and maybe 10 people will see it, but it has made such a profound difference to my life that I can't thank you ever enough for having given me the opportunity to do the film" The way I look at it is every kind of film that I do I say, " O.K.

I"m going to learn something from this." No one's going to go through this journey but me; these group of people will not be together, and we will not be working on anything else apart from this and we will be working on something that will make me look at my life and figure out who I am. And then I realized that maybe that's what it's all about.

"Jindabyne" is playing in New York City and Los Angeles and will expand nationally. Original content articles 1997-2007 by Cinema Confidential. All images, trademarks, and other film-related material are property of their respective studio.

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