All about the "symbiosis": Dying Gaul director Craig Lucas with star Peter Sarsgaard (Photos: STV)

Craig Lucas just has to make everything difficult: His dark, challenging (and brilliant) new film, The Dying Gaul, slinks into theaters Friday; he equates the process of adapting his plays for the screen to "drinking his own urine"; and in referring to him, nobody can really agree exactly how much emphasis they should place on the "first" in "first-time filmmaker."

OK--maybe it is not that abstract. "It was my first time directing a movie, so I was extremely nervous," Lucas, 54, told The Reeler last month while promoting Gaul in New York. "But also, I was at the mercy of everybody because I didn't know things. So I kind of said to all the actors and crew and everybody, 'Please tell me if I'm wrong about something, or I'm missing something or I'm not doing something I should be doing. Or feel free to go, "Don't you need a close-up of that?"' The three of them probably could have done this movie without me."

By "the three of them," Lucas means Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard--the Gaul principals who scheme and scam their ways through Lucas' finely honed morality noir. Yet by invoking their formidable talent, Lucas provides only the latest in a career's worth of clues indicating he is anything but a rookie. A 30-year veteran of award-winning stage and screen work including Reckless, Prelude to a Kiss and The Secret Lives of Dentists, Lucas has been attuned to the Hollywood game since the late 1980s--when he and director Norman Rene battled the establishment to make the groundbreaking AIDS drama Longtime Companion.

The Dying Gaul, in fact, has much to do with that period's struggle (well, sort of, anyhow-- and pardon me stealing my own synopsis from the film's premiere event last June): Scott portrays Jeffrey, a closeted Hollywood producer who seduces Robert (Sarsgaard), a screenwriter to whom Jeffrey has paid $1 million for his latest script. The catch: Robert must "commercialize" the script by replacing the story's central homosexual relationship with a heterosexual one. Jeffrey's and Robert's trysts intensify even as Robert settles into a close friendship with Jeffrey's wife Elaine (Clarkson). When Elaine discovers their affair, however, she launches a perverse cycle of emotional blackmail against Robert.

Between Jeffrey's and Elaine's duplicities and Robert's self-betrayal, there is enough wrecthedness to go around for at least a couple of films. When she assumes his dead lover's persona, Elaine elevates Robert's chat-room fanatsies to the level of religious experience. Meanwhile, Jeffrey's professional fantasy bleeds over into everything great and awful that Hollywood has to offer. "To me, that's a film about something so obvious in today's world," Sarsgaard told me at last month's Lunchbox Auction launch. "One little lie, one little deceit, one little moment where you’re pushing the truth, but you're basically lying. You can end up having a real tragedy on your hands because it only takes one time to set you in motion going that way. That's the way great tragedy is, and I think that's the way this movie is. Whereas in the beginning, all you really did was sell your script for a million dollars and change it fundamentally in a way that's personally horrible."

But in adapting his 1998 play, Lucas eschews the easy moral high ground for something with a little more Hitchcockian flavor. And before you shout, "Notorious!" or "Rope!" at your monitor, let me just say I am thinking more along the lines of Rear Window's ambiguity and Vertigo's Day-Glo digressions; in their most adventurous moments, Lucas and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski literally fill the frame with the triangle's surfeit of raw love and sexuality. Apropos of Hollywood's essence and ethos, these characters look great fucking each other. But make no mistake, Lucas seems to say through Gaul's exquisite malaise--in Jeffrey's manipulations, in Elaine's projections (she is a recovered screenwriter herself) and in Robert's self-loathing, these characters really are fucking each other.

And while Lucas' allegory resonates with his trademark wit, fearlessness and honesty, the three lead performances engage the simmering, understated squirm that focuses The Dying Gaul's momentum from melodrama to thriller. Sarsgaard generates the best performance of his career (drawing off of Scott's own standard-bearing genius), and Clarkson--who has achieved varying degrees of horrible wretchedness from Dogville to Far From Heaven--pretty much breaks the land speed record here in her character's complex transition to femme fatale. "Elaine is, on the whole, a nice California girl," she told me. "This is why Craig is amazing. I think even Jeffrey, for a studio executive--they're kind people. They're not evil, bad people. But it's about glass houses and about Hollywood and wealth and how power and money always corrupt. It's not small what happens to her. I'm not trying to defend her actions. But I don't think you can try and defend their actions, either. Something... I'm not sure what is, but there is a shift in our lives, and we are gone. And our lives will never be the same. And all the money and all the accoutrements and my infinity pool and everything is useless."

Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson on the town for last summer's Dying Gaul screening: at Lincoln Center.

The metaphysics crackle amid classic suspense conventions and double-crosses, with the wicked dame in the white bikini and Jeffrey's early come-on to Robert, "You can call it anything as long as you don't call it what it is." Balancing his story's grave source against its narrative properties and a dream-eating, Aldrich-esque Los Angeles, I asked Lucas if it was fair to view The Dying Gaul as sort of revisionist noir. "I was mostly concerned that it looks appealing," he said. "That the world--this apple--that was being held out to this boy not look sleazy. Because it's one thing to take a million to live in that house and hang out with Patty Clarkson. It's another to take a million and you have to shop on La Cienaga. ... If you're rooting for him not to take the money, there's no story."

And then there's the whole first-time filmmaker thing. Lucas has often cited Rene's singular influence in the past, acknowledging a debt to Scott and Secret Lives of Dentists director Alan Rudolph as well. But he freely admits that knowing one's way around a lens package is the easy discipline to pick up; adapting from the stage is something else entirely. "When I sat down to write Longtime Companion, I knew I had the camera, and I knew that I could make it cinematic from the beginning," Lucas said. "Taking a play and turning it into a movie is horrible. It's a stupid job. It's like taking a building you made out of bricks, tearing the whole damn thing down and remaking it with Q-Tips, and trying to make it look like you did with bricks. And I foundered doing it before. I don't think I did a particularly good job on all the plays I've turned into movies. In this instance, I've tried to throw the play out and rethink it as if it were a movie and just take the bare bones story points as not even a given, but as a strong possibility.

"By then, I had a better grasp on how the camera is a moving proscenium--it's the thing that moves, whereas in a play the proscenium is fixed and everything moves in it. It's a simple notion, but it took me 20 years to figure out."

At any rate, Lucas did figure it out, and determining The Dying Gaul's aesthetic debt seems somewhat irrelevant in the presence of such accomplished, ostensibly effortless work. "When it's going well, it sorta happens by osmosis," said Sarasgaard, who is also attached with Clarkson to star in Lucas' next film, A Small Tragedy. "You don't even feel like its happening. I think only in the end do you realize that it actually happens, if you do at all. Not that there's any really great mystery there. But I think there's a lot of Craig that rubbed off on me. It's a perfectly symbiotic relationship when it works."