‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’ (PG)

LOS ANGELES—Against the backdrop of Sunset Boulevard, noisy and dusty with midday traffic, Tom Stoppard can't think of a thing to write a play about.

"The thing is that I don't have a stock of great ideas for plays," says the author of a dozen, including "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" and "The Real Thing," the hands-down master of wordplay and one of the best-known living playwrights in the English language. He claims the last time he had a good idea for a play was 1987. The result was "Hapgood," and he hasn't written for the theater since.

"Whenever I write a play, that's it. I've got nothing -- nothing left to write about. And if I wasn't doing other things, I wouldn't be doing anything."

So he writes a screenplay here and there, the most recent being his film adaptation of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern," which allowed him his first directing job and which brings him here to this sidewalk for the obligatory interview portrait shot.

"It doesn't scare me," he says of the intermittence of inspiration. "You know -- what could happen to me? On the other hand, it makes me edgy about what I'm doing with my life. My feelings about movies have changed in the last year or two. I used to think of movies as something I did just because I didn't have a play. But now I'd really like to write something for cinema -- which I've never ever done. All the stuff I've done somebody else wrote. I was just doing an adaptation -- which is also true of 'Rosencrantz,' really."

He spies the perfect backdrop for the photo.

"How about me and Sean?" he asks, glancing toward a towering billboard displaying outsize likenesses of Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer in "The Russia House" -- the screenplay for which he just happened to write.

"Now, listen," Stoppard instructs the photographer, "I don't want him in focus."

Tom Stoppard wears his fame well. And he's worn it for a long time now. "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern," the play that catapulted Stoppard -- as well as those two minor characters from "Hamlet" -- to renown, became a hit in London in 1967. The play, which focuses on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and presents their cheeky perspective on Hamlet and their own ill-fated lives (would you believe his agent suggested the idea?), made the 29-year-old Stoppard one of the premier young playwrights of Britain. He became rich, well-known and critically celebrated.

"You should have such problems," quips Stoppard, who at 53 still bears a vague resemblance to his pal Mick Jagger. The playwright has now wandered back to his table in a bustling restaurant on Sunset, a few recent copies of London newspapers on the table, his latest book purchase (Allan Gurganus's "White People") in a bag at his feet.

A more neurasthenic celebrity would fret about the early onslaught of attention. Stoppard simply enjoyed it. "It was great. I loved it. It sort of gave me a kind of identity for myself."

Before he became a full-time playwright, the British-reared Stoppard (Czech-born, he took his British stepfather's surname as a youngster when the family moved to England) toiled for six years as a journalist in Bristol. He never attended college and his newspaper jobs ranged from reporter to drama critic. The vintage Stoppard story about being an automobile reporter even though he couldn't drive is true. "I was only a pinch-hitter," he recounts. "The guy was on holiday for a month and I took over the motoring column. Then, about the first Tuesday, someone said, 'You have to test this car.' I said, 'No, I can't drive.' " He laughs gleefully. "So I reviewed the upholstery." These days, Stoppard drives a BMW.

He's actually been writing screenplays for about 15 years -- his first was an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's "Despair" for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although Stoppard is fond of movie people, he's never hunkered down on the West Coast for any lengthy period. Instead, he dabbles in Hollywood, coming into town long enough to do some work or publicity interviews, see some friends, maybe hit Fred Segal or Theodore for clothes, and then he's out, back to England. He has a flat in London, a house outside town, and a wife (his second) of 19 years, a doctor who does television programs about health issues.

"She's also the author of a book called 'How to Stop Smoking,' he offers completely deadpan as he takes a drag on his umpteenth Dunhill. "She stopped a quarter of a million people from smoking."

Her husband was not one of them. Nor has she tried to break Stoppard of the habit. "She says, 'I'm only interested in helping people who want to stop smoking,' " Stoppard explains.

Stoppard is the father of four sons -- two by each marriage -- scattered from here back to England. He's taught them all to trout-fish, and they sometimes ski together. "Work and family take care of my life," he says. Left by himself, "I probably read more than anything else."

Once "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern" was a theatrical hit, the film rights went through the usual ups and downs -- they were first sold in the late '60s to people at MGM who then left the studio.

For the next two decades, says Stoppard, "nobody was trying {to make the picture}. I wasn't trying. I never thought about it. I don't even think of plays as being something which should be filmed. They're not written for that." He was persuaded to change his mind when film producer Michael Brandman called him several years ago and said he liked the play. "And I said, 'All right, we'll have a go.' He wanted to film the stage text and I said we should try and do a screenplay and he said that's even better. And that's how it started. But if it hadn't been for Michael calling me ... I certainly wasn't trying to get anyone to make a film of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern."

Nor, he says, was he initially angling for the director's chair. "The reason I ended up directing it was that for the first time I'd written a screenplay that was my own -- it wasn't John le Carre's. And I began to feel proprietary toward it. You can't ask some other guy to make your movie. He wants to make his movie."

He glosses over the fact that it's quite remarkable for a novice to be allowed to use other people's money to direct a film -- especially when you've never done it before. Being that he's Tom Stoppard -- and that the budget was a blushingly modest $5 million -- helped.

"The fact that I was going to do it myself -- and also the fact that I'd never done it before -- gave the enterprise a certain kind of piquancy," he says.

His assessment of the task: "It wasn't as stressful as it was supposed to be. It was physically tiring, but that sort of state of anxiety that one lives in when one is rehearsing a new play was absent in this."

Whenever possible, Stoppard relied on the experienced hands around him. "You don't have to know how to light a scene," he says. "There's this guy who won an Oscar for doing that. You don't pretend you know it all. I had nothing to prove, so I had nothing to lose, really. I certainly wasn't out to behave like somebody who -- 'My vision ...' -- It is your vision. But you need these other collaborators -- including the actors -- to bring it about."

In fact, Stoppard has a difficult time describing how exactly he brought it about.

"A lot of it is common sense, to be honest," he says. "You don't have to be the Dalai Lama or some spiritual descendant of D.W. Griffith to know how to make a movie. The area of real decision and choice is actually comparatively narrow. To make a difference between a reasonable film and a really good film, there are a lot of these moments but they're very localized."

He pauses and sputters. "Listen -- I don't know. I'm making this up."

At any rate, he thinks the movie turned out well. "I'd like it back for a week," he says. "To do tiny things -- just in three or four places. I'd put the dog in. There's a Pink Floyd track at the front and the back with a howling dog on it. I didn't know I'd use the music so I didn't have a dog. I regret that."

For the auteur of such a non-mainstream film, he has some surprisingly mainstream tastes. After seeing "Witness," he became an enthusiastic Peter Weir fan.

"When I saw 'Witness' I thought, 'Right, that's my kind of film,' " he recalls.

He was delighted by Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and the way the movie played against expectations at every turn. "It was like an anti-movie." And he's fascinated by Steven Spielberg. Stoppard wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun." "Steven -- I'm just completely in awe of him," Stoppard says. "I love master craftsmen. You read something and you think, 'Well, good luck,' and then it's on the screen -- however difficult it seems, however extraordinary. I admire that enormously. He understands the language of film and the techniques of film. But for that, you have to be making movies with a super 8 when you're 12 years old. You can't just show up when you're 50 and do a movie in Yugoslavia {where 'Rosencrantz & Guildenstern' was filmed} and think you're a movie director."

Stoppard muses that he might direct again if the screenplay was his. "I wouldn't know how to direct somebody else's work," he confesses. "If, for one reason or another, I didn't want to write anymore or couldn't write anymore, then, yes, it would be an interesting thing to undertake. But I consider myself a writer. Directing is a present somebody gave me just that one time."