HOLLYWOOD -- It took a trip to Alaska to help Jim Carrey put his life in perspective.

"It's such a harsh, demanding environment. I told people I met I didn't know how they did it because they risk their lives every day. Then someone told me I risk public humiliation each time I make a movie, and that was a real eye-opener for me," says the 39-year-old actor, who seems to have been doing a lot of soul searching.

"From the time I was a child I wanted to be an entertainer. When I first started out in stand-up, I'd sit in my room asking myself what people needed and what I could do that would fill those needs.

"That's where my brand of comedy came from. I wanted to help people escape. Now I also want to be the mirror they can see themselves in. Movies are about dreams and dreaming.

"You see people up there on the screen making decisions and observing how these decisions affect their lives. It's what helps us in our own lives. It's what makes movies so important."

What has Carrey analyzing movies and his relationship to them is his role in the holiday fable The Majestic, which opens Friday.

Carrey plays Peter Appleton, a blacklisted '50s Hollywood screenwriter who emerges from a car accident suffering from amnesia. He wanders into the small coastal California town of Lawson, where everyone thinks he is Luke Trimble, a young man who has been missing in action since the D-Day battle of June 1944.

Luke is the son of Harry Trimble (Martin Landau), the owner of the Majestic, the town's once glorious movie theatre, now in disrepair.

Accepting that he probably is Luke, the stranger helps Harry and the townspeople return the Majestic to its former glory.

"The first movie I ever saw in a theatre was The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," Carrey recalls. "I went with my brother to a theatre on Yonge St. in Toronto. It was an amazing experience. I was the kind of kid who laughed loudly, cried loudly and screamed loudly. Movies worked on me and for me."

Carrey says that if Hollywood made a movie of his life to this point, it would probably be called The Frenetic.

"That is certainly how people perceive me -- and for good reasons -- but that's certainly not the whole me. I'm a much more full human being. I've known as much agony as joy and I've experienced extremes of most everything in between.

"I was reluctant in the past to do serious work on screen or to be too serious in interviews because I felt people would think I was damaged or broken. I had to learn to admit I am not a super-being."

Carrey acknowledges he has been in therapy on and off since he came to Los Angeles in 1979, and says "it was a symptom of wanting to know myself better. I've always wanted to know more about myself. When I started making movies, they became as much about therapy as therapy itself."

When he was filming Man On The Moon, about Andy Kaufman, Carrey felt he was actually channelling the spirit of the self-destructive comic.

"I immerse myself entirely in my roles, so I have to want to go to certain places or I just won't do the film," Carrey explains.

That's the reason he backed out of Phone Booth, the stark drama Carrey was supposed to make for director Joel Schumacher. It's the story of a man trapped in a phone booth that has been rigged with a bomb.

"I started getting bad dreams just thinking about that movie," Carrey says. "I wasn't prepared to live with that dark place at that time in my life."

After working with him on The Majestic, Landau says Hollywood doesn't really know Carrey yet.

"They think of Jim as this elastic being, but that is only a very small part of what he has to offer," Landau says. "He's so perceptive, bright and intelligent.

"I believe Jim when he says he has finally embraced the pain in his life and there has been a great deal of it.

"This is a boy who has had a life filled with pain," Landau continues. "His family lived in a car for three years because they were homeless. When he was starting out his career as a comic, he played in saloons, strip joints and nightclubs.

"Those are not easy memories to deal with, let alone dispel, but Jim is working on it and the fact he has come to grips with so much is why his career is going in a whole new direction."

And The Majestic is a big step in that direction, Landau says. "The Majestic showcases Jim's most economical, deep, insightful performance to date.

"He wants to be a leading romantic man. He has the chops. He has the looks. He has the brains. He has the talent.

"I've been teaching acting all my adult life and I have learned that the best actors go to that pain in their lives and that's where Jim is brave enough to go these days."

Carrey admits his life was filled with sadness and pain after his father lost his job and the whole family was forced to work as security guards and live out of the family camper.

"There were many things missing in my life, but certainly not encouragement. My parents encouraged me creatively and believed in me at all times, and when I left home I was so very lucky to find other people who did the same for me."

The Majestic director Frank Darabont, who earned Oscar nods for The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (both based on Stephen King stories), feels "all of Jim's work to date has been about hiding behind masks.

"The genius of his performance in The Truman Show was that it was false sincerity and in Man On The Moon it was a great performance funnelled through another character," Darabont says.

"With The Majestic, Jim had to throw away his bag of tricks. He had to go against every instinct he has as a performer. He couldn't put on his clown nose and clown shoes this time. I told Jim he was a home-run hitter, but he had to learn a new swing for this game."

Having started as a comedian, Carrey knows he's fighting an uphill battle in Hollywood.

"Comedy is about doing everything that doesn't earn you respect in this town. You earn big money for these people, but they still don't see you in the same light as the dramatic actors."

When reminded Jerry Lewis had to go to France to receive any respect, Carrey insists, "I don't feel like Jerry Lewis. I feel like Steven Spielberg. It took a long time for Hollywood to take him seriously."


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