Pair Hope ‘Destiny’ Will Smile on Their Film Work

Early in the film “A Time of Destiny,” the camera pans to a small boy hiding under a table and staring at the knees of bickering adults.

There is something in the quality of the boy’s stare that makes it clear that not only is he wondering what is going on, he is on his way to figuring it out. Which is why the adults quickly shoo him away.

It is a moment with which Gregory Nava, who directed and co-wrote the film with his wife, Anna Thomas, identifies.

“I’m like the kid under the table,” said Nava, who drew upon a wealth of childhood detail, both in writing the film and selecting the San Diego locations where much of it was shot. Nava and Thomas, who met in a UCLA film class about 15 years ago, live in Ojai, east of Santa Barbara, but Nava grew up with his Basque family in North Park.

It is hard to imagine Nava, a hefty 6 feet, 3 inches, under a table now. Yet the intense quality of quiet observation in the dark-eyed stare is the same.

It is a look that contrasts sharply with the bubbly demeanor of his blond, blue-eyed Polish-American wife, who achieved national recognition with her two-part cookbook, “The Vegetarian Epicure.”

Yet it is clear that this couple, both 39, are a team.

“A Time of Destiny” is their fourth film together; the first two were “The Confessions of Amans” and “The Haunting of M.” But it is the success of their last film, the 1984 Oscar-nominated “El Norte,” that made the financing for “A Time of Destiny” possible.

“El Norte,” the story of Guatemalans trying to escape their war-torn country for the relative safety and prosperity of the United States--was made independently, in Spanish and English, and cost $800,000. It became a minor hit on the art house circuit.

“A Time of Destiny,” a tale of generational conflict set against the backdrop of World War II, cost $8 million, largely because of the salaries commanded by their Oscar-winning stars, William Hurt and Timothy Hutton. It, too, was made independent of a major studio. Small Alive pictures, run by the same people who distributed “El Norte,” financed “Destiny,” and Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute it only after it was near completion.

The two films may seem utterly different, but the contrasts are deceptively superficial, according to Nava and Thomas.

“ ‘El Norte’ and ‘Destiny’ are both intimate stories set against an epic backdrop,” Thomas said. “Both deal with the immigrant experience and the survival of the family in a time of change.”

Thomas, whose parents emigrated from Poland, described the dynamic in both movies as one she grew up with, “a generation living in the old world with a different set of values from the generation growing up in America.”

For “El Norte,” Nava also drew on his childhood observations, this time focusing on his remembrance of relatives cut off from each other on either side of the Mexican-American border.

“I have uncles and cousins who live in Tijuana,” Nava said. “You observe this amorphous border, and when you’re a child you wonder why this exists--the poverty in Tijuana and wealth in San Diego. The child wonders why, and the adult makes ‘El Norte.’ ”

In both films, Nava shot San Diego scenes that were familiar from his childhood, even setting the family house in “Destiny” on Texas Street, where he grew up. But, although he concentrated on the squalid border areas of San Ysidro for the gritty realism of “El Norte,” in “Destiny” he lavished lingering, romantic attention on Pacific Beach, where a young girl, Josie, rereads a love letter from her young army husband, and on Julian, where Nava filmed a ranch similar to the one his grandfather once owned.

Much has changed for the couple since their budget jumped tenfold, including the growth of two children, Christopher, 4, and Teddy, 2. There has been a widespread increase in the marketability of the independent pictures they make, thanks to the growth of the video industry and American Playhouse as markets for the films.

Those changes are what has made the $8-million budget on “Destiny” possible. But, with that budget, has come increased responsibility and its attendant tensions.

What will happen to them if “A Time of Destiny” is a bust?

“We’ll continue to make films,” Thomas said firmly. Then she shook her head. “But we are telling everyone we know to see this one.”