HOLLYWOOD -- Breakdown is new, but the thriller exploits an old paranoia -- the freakiness of losing control in a strange land.

Steven Spielberg's truck-stalker telefilm, Duel, and John Boorman's feature, Deliverance, captured that sinking feeling. So did George Sluizer's kidnap melodrama, The Vanishing.

Writer-director Jonathan Mastow's Breakdown, starring Kurt Russell, is admittedly an amalgamation of those movie fears, a characteristic Russell found intriguing, given the social and political climate today.

In the film, opening Friday, Russell's husband searches desperately for his wife (Kathleen Quinlan) after she disappears on the way for help when their vehicle breaks down on a deserted highway in the American southwest.

"After you think about the specifics of the script, and you can relate," says Russell, a less-government Libertarian, "you have to ask yourself why?

He answers his own question.

"I think, these days, there is a pervading fear in our lives," says the 46-year-old actor. "And I think that fear is very primal about the we/they mentality.

"The irony is that the movie also deals with this subconscious class war, when in reality the 'we' and the 'they' are in the same class financially."

Russell, of course, exists as a they -- of the Hollywood actor class of very rich and famous. He and his wife Goldie Hawn don't match the dynamic duo earning power of Bruce Willis-Demi Moore, but they aren't far behind.

Still, Russell claims to be the everyman he plays in Breakdown. "I don't pretend to be one thing and act like another," he says.

The outspoken Quinlan concurs. "He got over being impressed with being a movie star a long time ago," says Russell's co-star.

However, signing him to the movie took some impressive negotiating.

To get Russell for Breakdown, filmed in and around southern California, the filmmakers had to agree to one of Russell's stipulations. They had to fly him, or have licensed pilot Russell fly, to his home in Colorado every night.

"They also promised they could be finished before school ended in the summer," says the father of four kids, who had previously appeared consecutively in Escape From L.A., Executive Decision, and Stargate.

Meanwhile, the former Disney child star has been on an extended vacation.

"I've been off for a year," he says proudly. "I haven't been thinking about anything, and it has been wonderful."

So what's next?

"I don't know," Russell says. Stargate 2 perhaps?

"It's a possibility," says the actor. "There is something interesting about that picture, but I never quite figured it out."

How about the freakiness of losing control in a strange land?


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