VIRTUES OF A FILM MAKER’S PATIENCE

Patience has to be the most draining of the virtues, ranking right up there with purity and forgiveness. A producer determined to make an uncommon and difficult movie could probably squeeze along minus purity and even forgiveness, but without patience he or she is probably doomed.

Checking my dusty and dog-eared archives, I see it was more than 11 years ago--in August, 1975, in fact--that I wrote about an Italian producer, newly arrived in Hollywood, who had already put three years’ worth of research and cajolings into a film project he then called “Guarani,” and that has now been made as a film called “The Mission.”

His name was Fernando Ghia and, as head of production for Franco Cristaldi, he had made 16 films, including Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord,” Marco Bellochio’s “China Is Near” and a tough docudrama, “The Mattei Affair,” about the curious death of an Italian industrialist. Solo, Ghia had produced “Lady Caroline Lamb,” written and directed by Robert Bolt and starring Bolt’s wife, Sarah Miles. He has also been a theatrical producer and an agent.

The “Guarani” project in 1975 looked absolutely go. Bolt had agreed to write the script and Ghia had made a deal with Paramount for the development money. But, as these things transpire in the industry, it was another nine years before Ghia finally got his dream into production. Paramount loved Bolt’s script but apparently couldn’t see its commercial viability.

Thereafter, Ghia produced two more films in Italy, all the while keeping his “Guarani” project in endless circulation, but the high grades for the script were never linked to adequate financing.

Then David Puttnam, in post-production on “The Killing Fields,” came across the project and thought it a natural next assignment for Roland Joffe, who had shown high skill at handling both scale and intimacy in the Cambodian drama. In February, 1984, Ghia flew to London and watched a three-hour rough cut of “The Killing Fields.”

“I said,” he reported later, “that if I had seen this film for any other reason, I would run to this man and say, ‘Please direct my project.’ ”

Additionally, and crucially, Puttnam was able to engineer, with Goldcrest as a principal partner, a budget of $27 million, which was twice the best (but woefully inadequate) offer Ghia had thus far been able to come up with on his own.

The germ of the project had been a Time cover story in 1972 about the Jesuit order. A paragraph on “the Jesuit reductions,” as they were called, caught Ghia’s eye and he began to research them, and their fate. These were some 31 utopian, self-governing cooperative communities the Jesuits established 250 years ago among the Guarani Indians in the jungles around Iguazu Falls, at a point where present Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet.

The communes succeeded all too well and fell victim to the political struggles between Spain and Portugal and to fears of the power of the Jesuit order, which was banned internationally for 40 years. Even after the Jesuits left, the communes struggled on until they were abolished by an early Paraguayan dictator in 1848.

To persuade Bolt to write the script, Ghia had taken him to the location, leaving until last Bolt’s first glimpse of the falls themselves. “He sat and stared at them for an hour,” Ghia remembers, “until the light was gone. Then he said, ‘It’s as if God for a day had decided to be a production designer.’ ” Bolt went back to London, thought about it for seven months and agreed to undertake the writing.

“I told him, ‘Please, please, don’t give me the king of Spain, or Madrid, or the Pope or the Vatican. This isn’t a period piece in that way.’ I told him he’d done ‘Man for All Seasons’ about Thomas More, who wrote ‘Utopia,’ and this was Utopia.”

Production began amid anxieties: Argentina was a first location and the financing was principally English. But Britain was and is still technically at war with Argentina over the Falklands. “But Argentina is also half-Italian,” Ghia says, and there were in the end no problems. The company needed the cooperation of the army in the difficult environment of the falls, and got it.

Ghia and Puttnam share producer credit on the film, and shared the producing chores in the field. Inevitably, the journalistic shorthand mentions the admirable and more conspicuous Puttnam and tends to skip Ghia, which he accepts philosophically. “It is not David; David is most generous always with the credit. I sit with him, I listen to him in conferences.”

The point for Ghia is that after 14 years the project is on the screen, offering what he has from the beginning regarded as its remarkable contemporary relevance as a commentary on freedom, suppression, power and faith. The ultimate irony, as he noted in 1975, was that the Guarani communities, as a successful demonstration of pure altruism, proved unacceptable and indeed intolerable to both church and state.

Ghia is remarkable in his patient persistence, and in his vision of the producer and the medium. “The thing that’s important to me is that there should be a social commitment. We provide entertainment but we should also provide food for thought. My question always was who can I find to make this film entertaining and with meaning as well.

“With some directors it would have been too dialectic. You know, Costa-Gavras is very good--or bad, almost unbearably, if he is too political.

“Cinema was once a ritual celebration, like the Mass, a celebration in the dark of imagery and sound and emotion. I think that day will come again. Now we are only labels--children’s films, funny films--and cinema has gone down the drain. We’ve dismantled film into a bag of tricks. I want to make projects that recapture the celebration, and when it happens you won’t hear of age groups or marketing. The risks will be rewarded.”

Now his need for patience continues. “The Mission,” generally well received at Cannes, opens in November, with Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro in the leading roles, and Ghia will see if his 14-year itch was worth it.