Andie MacDowell's Dark 'Flowers'

Mud, Rape Scenes and Tanks Made Filming War Picture an Ordeal For Former Fashion Model

By: HUGH HART | Globe Correspondent

LOS ANGELES - Andie MacDowell is no diva. ''I don't need to be treated like a starlet. In fact I prefer not to be,'' she says. But shooting ''Harrison's Flowers'' for nine weeks on the muddy plains of the Czech Republic proved to be about as grueling a filmmaking experience as she could handle. ''I'd phone my manager and tell him, `You don't know where you put me. I hope I make it home. I may die.'' She pauses. ''And not be back.''

MacDowell, perched on the couch in a Los Angeles hotel suite, wearing bell-bottoms, high heels, and a pale blue sweater, recounts the ordeal with a kind of perverse pride. The burning-building scenes at 3 a.m., the unrehearsed explosions, the sleep-deprived cast-mates, the gun battles filmed without benefit of earplugs - all contributed to an appropriately chaotic atmosphere for French director Elie Chouraqui's harrowing look at the Bosnian war.

In ''Harrison's Flowers,'' which opened Friday, MacDowell plays Sarah Lloyd, a New Jersey photo editor who travels to the fragmented Yugoslavia in search of her husband, Harrison (David Strathairn), a photographer who had disappeared while covering the civil war there. In Croatia, Sarah and a band of maverick photojournalists (Adrien Brody, Brendan Gleeson, Elias Koteas) encounter rape, massacres, and carnage. Based on a nonfiction account by a photojournalist, Isabel Ellsen, several of the film's scenes, including the slaughter in 1991 of Croatian civilians by Serbian forces in the village of Vukovar, are re-creations of historical events.

''Watching the film now still scares me, and I was there, shooting it,'' MacDowell says. Referring to graphic shots of an artillery assault on a hospital filled with young patients, she notes, ''That scene with the children, nobody had to `act.' It was repulsive. Elie did an incredible job of making it real. He really liked shocking us.''

One jolt, MacDowell says, hit while shooting a scene in which her character is raped. ''The actor playing the rapist seemed to hate me,'' MacDowell says. ''He wouldn't communicate with me on any level. I felt completely violated.''

That was intentional. Chouraqui wanted his star to be caught off guard. ''I always tried to put the actors in a little danger,'' he says. ''I told the soldier and the people around Andie to do certain things, but I didn't tell her what they were going to do. I tried to put Andie in a position where she was never comfortable, because if you explain to an actress precisely what is going to happen, she thinks about the way she would react, and suddenly it becomes something fake. Here, I got the truth.''

A narrow escape

MacDowell also experienced a close call when a tank crushed the back of a car she was driving, narrowly missing her. ''I still get chills, thinking about that scene where we drive into town,'' she says, describing her character's first few minutes after crossing into Croatia. ''It's that eerie feeling, everything's quiet, then the next thing you know, it's hell.''

Serbian troops suddenly appear, causing MacDowell's car to crash. The collision was no stunt, the actress says. ''They kept putting more cameras on the front of the car, and I really did crash because I couldn't see.''

Then it got worse. ''I looked at the rear-view mirror and there goes the tank right behind me. And later, someone tells me, `You know, those tanks can't stop on a dime,' and I'm thinking, `This is just a movie - don't kill me in the process!' That's why I really wanted to get out toward the end.''

The hardships on the set, of course, pale beside the suffering of the Bosnian conflict, inflicted on both civilians and journalists. Chouraqui dedicated ''Harrison's Flowers'' to the 48 photojournalists who died from 1991 to 1995 while reporting on the war.

Among the survivors: Ellsen, who served as an adviser on the set. She has been shot twice. While documenting tribal warfare in Africa, Ellsen fended off a machete attack with her camera; the lens still has a dent. ''She was fascinating,'' says MacDowell, ''Very feminine but also extremely capable. I'd ask her, `Would you ever do that kind of reporting again?' and she'd say, `I'll never go back.' Then the next week, you'd hear her talking about the pull to go out there again.''

As detailed in ''Harrison's Flowers,'' journalists initially had a hard time getting their Bosnia datelines into US magazines and newspapers. ''Imagine the frustration, which you see in this movie, of all these photojournalists who are risking their lives and they know their stories aren't going to get onto the front page.''

In the climate after Sept. 11, and particularly with the killing of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, the issues informing ''Harrison's Flowers'' assume heightened poignancy, MacDowell says. ''I hope generally what's changed in America is that we're going to care more about making important news front-page news.

''I know we all want to escape, but we need to know what's happening in the rest of the world because eventually it will have some impact on us. We need to pay attention, even if it's painful.''

Changing the mood

When she'd finished ''Harrison's Flowers,'' an exhausted MacDowell called up her agent. ''I said, `You've got to find me a comedy.''' Four months later she was in England shooting ''Crush,'' which opens here April 19. MacDowell stars as a proper schoolmistress who shocks her friends when she embarks on an affair with a handsome former pupil.

MacDowell says, ''We have to have movies that are intense - in `Sophie's Choice' there were images I'll never forget - but at the same time, I want to laugh. I saw `Bridget Jones' and laughed so loud it was obnoxious. We can't sit around and be depressed all the time. You want to have a balance.''

In her own career, MacDowell has alternated light fare like ''The Muse,'' ''Green Card,'' ''Groundhog Day,'' and ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' with challenging films such as ''sex, lies, and videotape,'' Robert Altman's ''The Player,'' and ''The End of Violence'' by the German director Wim Wenders.

''I'm not a big superstar, but I have carved out my own place,'' she says. ''I don't have to be the highest-paid actress or be in the biggest hit. The thing that was really important when I started out was that people take me seriously as an actress. That's what I've become, so I'm really happy.''

Of course, for an actress, good genes never hurt. At 43, MacDowell still bounds into the room with the cheekbones, the wild mane of hair, and the perfect posture you'd expect from a onetime fashion model. But her longevity might also be credited to a certain distance MacDowell has maintained from Hollywood. She lives in North Carolina with her three children and second husband.

''It'd be way too much pressure for me if I lived in Los Angeles, having to see people in the business all the time,'' MacDowell says. ''I like to turn it off. I want to be a mom and be able to say, `Leave me alone. I'm not going to read a script, I'm going to drive my kids to school.' I need that.''

''I always thought perhaps maybe being away from Hollywood made things harder, but last year when we were making `Dinner With Friends,' Greg Kinnear told me, `No, it's good. It keeps people guessing.'''