Mr. Larraín comes from a politically connected family, with parents who have been involved in right-wing politics, though he himself leans much further left. “How they feel about that is a question for them, but I think they’re very proud,” he said of his relationship with his family.  “They did something I would find it very hard to do, which was to raise someone who thinks so differently than yourself,” he said. “I have two children, and I don’t know how I would take it if at some point they have different ideological perspectives. You would have to accept it, and they did.”  “Jackie” is political, too, an intersection of the personal and political at a singular moment in history, but in many ways it is a departure: It is Mr. Larraín’s first movie in English, his first set in the United States, his first with a woman at the center. He knew about Jacqueline Kennedy of course, but not the way an American would.  A preview of the film.  “Sometimes the most interesting perspective comes from the outside,” said Darren Aronofsky, a producer of the film, who approached Mr. Larraín about “Jackie” after “The Club” won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. (Mr. Aronofsky was chairman of the jury.)  “It was clear he was a very diverse, but also extremely precise, auteur, and he’s extremely smart and not afraid of layering on lots and lots of different levels to think about in a film,” Mr. Aronofsky said by telephone. “He’s very close to the actors and to the characters, and he’s unflinching.”  Mr. Larraín’s first response to the offer, he said, was “Are you crazy?” But then he got to thinking. “Jacqueline Kennedy to me was probably the most unknown of the known women of the 20th century,” he said. “There’s so many biographies of her but still nobody really knows who she was, and there’s an incredible amount of mystery to that that I find very sensual and attractive.”  He agreed to do the film, on the condition that Natalie Portman take the title role. “Of course you need someone who resembles her, who has her style, elegance, beauty, sophistication — O.K., she has it, fine,” he said. But with Ms. Portman onscreen: “You would look at her, and there would be something else that you know is going on, but you don’t know what it is. It’s as if she’s always about to explode, but she holds it back.”  The film’s centerpiece is the interview Mrs. Kennedy gave a week after the assassination to Life Magazine (the reporter was Theodore H. White; here he is referred to simply as “the journalist”), in which she force-fed him the metaphor that went on to define the Kennedy presidency: that it was an American Camelot, “a brief shining moment” tragically lost.  Working from a script by Noah Oppenheim, Mr. Larraín added a crucial element, Mrs. Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House, after its refurbishment, in 1962. He had the tour resurrected shot by shot. Parts of the tour are shown in flashbacks, interspersed with the Life interview and scenes before and after Kennedy’s death, as Jackie goes head-to-head with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s new administration and deals with her private grief. It’s a complex structure that leaps around chronologically and approaches the subject almost as a Cubist painter would, from all sides.  Ms. Portman said that Mr. Larraín encouraged her to go way beyond the obvious. “Pablo kept pushing for her humanity,” she said by telephone, “and looking at her through all these different lenses, through different relationships which allow her to take on many different roles — the public first lady, the private person struggling with her faith, the mother having to break the news to her children.”  She said the director brought an intensity she had not been prepared for. “He’s a combination of being a very daring person and a very poetic person,” she said. “It makes you want to grab him by the hand and jump into the very deepest water you can, without fear.”  If “Jackie” was a challenge because Mr. Larraín had to learn so much about her, then “Neruda” presented the opposite problem, “a different kind of fear,” because Mr. Larraín knew too much already, he said.  “He’s in my bloodstream; his words describe my nation,” he said. “Neruda, in Chile, is in the water, is in the earth, is in the trees. So when you approach him, it’s hard and challenging and frightening. You realize that he’s ungrabbable, that he will never be yours.” Foreigners tend to know Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, through his love poems and possibly through the sentimental depiction of him in the 1995 Italian film “Il Postino.”  But there is much more to him than that. Mr. Larraín had been talking for years about making a movie about Neruda. He decided to look at the subject sideways, veering from the literal as a way to liberate himself from his anxiety about the subject. The outline is there: Neruda went on the run when the Communist Party was banned, eventually escaping through mountains into Argentina; and he passed the time in part reading detective novels, charming everyone he met and producing some of the most resonant poems of his life, poems blending emotion with politics and ideology.  But the filmmakers have provided an artificial frame for the story, inventing a police inspector (played by Gael García Bernal, who also starred in “No”) who tries to catch him but ends up chasing him all over Chile, always one step behind. In the end, the plot kind of folds up on itself in an almost Borgesian way, but Neruda is left to go on.  When he made “No,” Mr. Larraín was criticized for injecting fiction into it, for not strictly adhering to the truth, but he says that that is not his goal nor is it the particular responsibility he sets for himself. A director is “like a kid with a bomb,” he said; when he films a movie, he is not sure exactly what the result will be.  “I think responsibility is a very delicate word for an artist,” he said. “Sometimes people expect you to make a responsible work when you deal with historical facts. Other people expect that you will legitimize whatever they think or whatever they think the person did or was.”  He continued: “I think I’m responsible in terms of what I’m expressing, but I think I’m hiding the message as much as possible. I don’t want to deliver all the answers. I want the audience to discover it for themselves.”  An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the screenwriter for Pablo Larraín’s film “Jackie.” He is Noah Oppenheim, not Oppenheimer.  A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2016, on Page AR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Reaching Back With Deft Hands. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The movies follow protagonists trying to write their own histories in the midst of events over which they have no control.