Four Women Turn Up “Fires Within” : Writer, producers and director bring to the screen a story of anti-Castro ferment in Miami’s Little Havana

The sight is not a terribly familiar one in Hollywood. A 4-year-old girl dressed in pink and white and waving a miniature Cuban flag darts between the legs of grips and sound men as cameras are lugged into place for the next shot. It’s Saturday, and the little girl has come along to the set with mom, who happens to be the director on the picture, a tale of tangled love among Cuban exiles in Miami called “Fires Within.” Mom is Gillian Armstrong, the Australian director of “My Brilliant Career” and “Mrs. Soffel,” just then huddled with her director of photography in front of a fake Miami apartment building.

No sooner does Armstrong break free of the huddle than her daughter is clutching at her jeans, pulling her into another conference, this one to discuss the playground options offered by the sound stage. She solves this problem as efficiently as she seems to be solving all the other problems on this none-too-easy film of political intrigue that would once have been considered strictly a man’s job.

“Fires Within,” a Pathe Entertainment project starring Jimmy Smits, Greta Scacchi and Vincent D’Onofrio as a trio of lovers caught up in the anti-Castro ferment of Miami’s Little Havana, is one of two features now in production that represent Hollywood’s first attempt to deal with the questions of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. But the film carries a political significance of another kind: It is a movie conceived, created and produced in large part by a team of women.

In addition to the presence of Armstrong, the screenplay is by Cynthia Cidre, a Cuban-American from Miami, and the producers who matched one to the other are former casting directors Wallis Nicita and her partner, Lauren Lloyd. (The two are concurrently producing “Mermaids,” a comedy about a mother and daughter starring Cher and Winona Rider, for Orion.)

“I still think there aren’t enough women working in major positions of power, where they really have some creative control in Hollywood,” Armstrong says, stealing a few minutes before another shot at Raleigh Studios. “In Australia, we even have more women production managers and so on, and we’re a pretty chauvinistic country. But it’s because we’re a younger industry. A lot of Hollywood is old school and it’s harder for people to get in.”

Armstrong has made her mark with films about unusual women facing grueling tests of one kind or another, from “My Brilliant Career” to the more recent “High Tide,” the narrowly distributed 1988 prize-winner about a difficult mother and daughter reunion that starred “My Brilliant Career’s” Judy Davis. She is also known to be a favorite of Alan Ladd Jr., president of Pathe, who, as head of the the Ladd Co., invited Armstrong to Hollywood for her first visit almost 10 years ago.

On this trip to America, the director brought along her husband, a film editor, who is helping to look after their two daughters. They’ve all been in Los Angeles since last July. “My husband has taken a year off his career so we can keep the family together,” she says. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

When Nicita and Lloyd started their production company 2 1/2 years ago, they were, according to Lloyd, “looking for a woman who could write with a political flair.” An agent sent them a script by Cynthia Cidre that was 9 years old and was intended mainly as a sample of her work. But the two producers said, “We love this, let’s make this .”

The political element of the story proved problematic, however, for a number of studios where it was offered, Lloyd said. “They wanted less politics and more salsa music. We said no.”

Meanwhile, the growing visibility of Miami through the success of “Miami Vice,” as well as the rising career of Jimmy Smits, Nicita says, provided new commercial possibilities for the story, which is based on people Cidre knew while growing up in Little Havana, the huge Cuban sector of Miami.

Armstrong evidently agreed. When she first got the script, she was pregnant with her second child and unable to do anything about it. But the story stuck with her and, upon learning that Nicita and Lloyd were still looking for a director, she got on a plane to Los Angeles to meet them, then headed to Miami to begin her on-site research with Cidre as her guide.

“Whenever you tell a political story, there’s always the woman’s point of view,” Nicita says, “and that’s what we wanted to tell as women film makers.”

In her previous role, Nicita has cast such politically themed movies as “Under Fire,” “Missing,” “The Falcon and the Snowman” and “WarGames.”

The difference with this one, she emphasizes, is that the biggest decision in the story falls to a woman.

Smits, the star of “L.A. Law” and “Old Gringo,” plays the role of a Cuban writer imprisoned for questioning the repression of Castro’s regime. Scacchi, the British-Italian actress of “Heat and Dust” and “White Mischief,” plays Smits’ wife, who reluctantly escapes with their infant daughter to Miami. There, she falls in love with an American fisherman played by D’Onofrio, recently of “Mystic Pizza” and “Full Metal Jacket.” When Smits is unexpectedly released eight years later and arrives in Miami a hero to its legion of militant anti-Castro exiles, Scacchi suddenly must choose between the two men.

One of the first decisions the four women film makers made was to update the events of the story to the present day from its original setting at the time of the 1980 Mariel boat lift that brought thousands of Cubans to South Florida.

“One very important thing we hope comes out of the film,” Armstrong says, “is that this treatment of political prisoners is still going on,” a condition also being addressed by the human rights group Amnesty International. “There are many thousands still imprisoned and being tortured. We thought if we set it in the past, people would think, ‘Oh, that was then.’ ”

“Havana,” the other Cuban-themed film now being made, with Sydney Pollack directing Robert Redford for Universal, also turns on a love triangle but is set in Cuba in the years leading up to Castro’s overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. “Fires Within” was originally titled “Little Havana,” but the name was changed to avoid confusion with the Pollack film. Both movies are scheduled for release late this year.

“Years from now, I can imagine seeing the two of them on a double bill,” says Nicita. “You know, before and after.”

This view of “after,” even while it takes place largely in Miami, is likely to further tarnish the once shiny image of what Castro accomplished in throwing out the corrupt and tyrannical Batista.

Parts of the movie involve flashbacks to Cuba and the prison where Smits’ character is seen doing time for his “crimes” against the revolution. For the prison scenes, the movie company used a massive concrete bunker that once housed anti-aircraft guns at the now-abandoned Ft. MacArthur in Long Beach.

“When Batista was overthrown, everybody was with Fidel,” says Alex Torres, a 26-year-old Cuban-American technical adviser as he moves out from under a mist raining down from a set decorator’s hose wetting the bunker’s walls and floor. The day is warm and dry, but the prison must look cold and dank, as specified by Torres, whose interviews with ex-political prisoners have helped provide the details necessary to re-create a Cuban prison here.

“But people my age in Cuba are not with the revolution now,” says Torres, a student at UCLA. “They’re just going through the motions. Nobody likes the fact that you have to have a ration book to get food at the market or that there’s no freedom of the press.”

When the shot begins, Smits is seen filing humbly out of a tunnel among scores of other prisoners being led into a courtyard for a brief meeting with their loved ones on visitors’ day.

Smits, who travelled to Miami to meet real Cuban political prisoners as part of his preparation, explained, during a free moment, “One guy said to me, ‘If you want to know what it’s like to be in prison, just lock yourself in the bathroom for a month. That’s a start.’ ”

“I think that most of us had a sort of vague idea that it’s been a great success,” Armstrong says about the Cuban revolution. “And I certainly wasn’t aware of the treatment of political prisoners. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for what Fidel tried to do. I think it’s a sad revolution. The whole thing has been a major education for me. I’m only sorry I didn’t sneak in a trip to Cuba before Fidel was aware we were working on this script. I don’t think I’ll get a holiday visa now.”

Sitting in the bright winter sunshine outside her trailer at Ft. MacArthur, the director wears a long-billed yellow cap she picked up at Disneyland pulled down to shade her small features.

“It’s been an interesting process because when I first read it, I understood the moral dilemma, but I thought, ‘Is this politically correct?’ I had to do a lot of reading and talk to a lot of people so that I really understood what happened. In the beginning, everybody was for (Castro) and it was to be the ideal revolution. I mean, I do think the revolution happened for all the right reasons. It was to spread the wealth, feed and educate the poor, get better health services, stop corruption in government. It’s fascinating to see how what could have been an ideal kind of socialism and a better society went wrong.”

Armstrong’s research in Miami included visits to the House of Prisoners, a halfway house where she was able to meet and talk with Cubans who spent time in Castro’s jails, including in particular Eloy Menoyo, a general who fought alongside Castro and then served 23 years behind bars.

“A lot of the things he said, we put into the film, even how he survived in prison for that many years--the power of the mind and so on. He’s a wonderful man.”

She also drew inspiration from Cuban-born cinematographer Nestor Almendros’ two documentaries about repression in Cuba, “Improper Conduct” and “Nobody Listens,” as well as the books “Against All Hope” by Armando Valladares, and “Miami” by Joan Didion.

“The other thing that attracted me to the script is the central moral dilemma of any person having to decide between your principles and your family. Because that’s the issue that Jimmy’s character has to make a decision about, and she’s involved in that decision. I don’t think it’s a black-and-white situation.”

As the Australian intelligentsia tends to be much more left-wing than its counterpart in America, Armstrong says she doubts the film will be considered politically correct back home.

Before hurrying back to the bunker for an afternoon of shooting, she says, “I’ll probably have to do a lot of publicity to re-educate them.”

Cynthia Cidre’s father was a sugar chemist who knew Fidel Castro. “They went to the University of Havana together,” the 32-year-old screenwriter says. “It was tradition to plot revolution in school in Central and South America. But it really happened there. It was as if the hippies in America in the ‘60s had actually taken over the country. But my father wasn’t a revolutionary. He was an intellectual.”

Eventually, her father asked for permission to emigrate to the United States, and after a five-year wait he and his family resettled in Miami.

“I was in Cuba till I was 10 years old,” Cidre says. “So I lived through the revolution, and I remember that stuff. I remember the uniforms and being taught certain things that my mother would object to and keep me out of school, and the Committee of Defense would come to the house and say I must go to school.”

She has just flown in from another set in Texas where her adaptation of a book about an ax murder in Dallas, “Evidence of Love,” is now being filmed as a two-hour television movie for CBS. Most recently she did the screen adaptation (with Frank Pierson) of Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel “In Country.”

“I’m most definitely Cuban,” Cidre says when asked about the importance of her roots. “I’m here as a visitor. I eat Cuban food at my house. I listen to Cuban music every day.”

The differences between the two cultures show up in her script, particularly in the way that Cuban life is more firmly centered on the family.

“When I came out here 10 years ago, since I didn’t know what a script was, I thought I might as well write about something I knew. Although this is not my family, almost everything in the movie happened to someone I know. My best friend came on a boat during a storm and was rescued by the Coast Guard, and her father was a political prisoner, and her mother pretty much hated him, and then he got back. All that stuff is real. It’s all about my neighbors.”

Cidre says her father also thought Batista was “the worst thing that ever happened to Cuba. Everybody was for the revolution, you understand. It was only when it changed that people began to leave.

“The left-wing contingent in Hollywood thinks that if you’re a Cuban immigrant in Miami that you’re a fascist and that you were for Batista somehow. But that’s not the way it was. I mean, the first people who left the night of the revolution were that way, and maybe for up to six months. But not the tide that came over in the next 30 years.”

What would she like people who see the movie nine months from now to take away with them about the political situation in Cuba?

“That Castro is a bad man. But it’s also a love story, and hopefully people will just enjoy that.”

Armstrong’s last American feature, MGM’s “Mrs. Soffel,” the tragic love story of a Pennsylvania prison warden’s wife (Diane Keaton) who falls in love with a convicted murderer (Mel Gibson), was shot largely on location in 1984 in the snows of Canada and Pittsburgh. It was her first picture outside of Australia and as such carried the obstacles and initiations associated with working in another culture. It was also a disappointment at the box office.

“I suppose, finally, no one wants to see a tragedy,” she says, looking back. “But I wanted to make one, so I have no regrets. If I wanted to do a big commercial hit, I probably should be doing comedies.”

She admits she was somewhat reluctant to go leaping cultures again in “Fires Within,” actually more so. “When I first came over to meet with Wally and Cynthia and Lauren, the first thing I said was, ‘You should really be getting a Cuban director to do this or at least a Latin director. Why me?’ And they said, you know, ‘We like your work and we think you’d be the best person to do it.’ And I said, well, really I think the film should be in Spanish and I’m the last person who should be doing it. But they convinced me.”

Besides the cultural and political understanding required for “Fires Within,” the physical and logistic challenges turned out to be considerable.

Because of Smits’ schedule on “L.A. Law,” the company could only manage to shoot in Miami for two weeks. Armstrong and her Australian director of photography, David Gribble, have had to re-create Havana in Pasadena, film a quinceanera (a coming-of-age dance party) and a street carnival, enact a dramatic rescue at sea and an airport arrival scene involving hundreds of extras.

“With ‘Mrs. Soffel,’ ” she recalls, “I had two people behind bars for most of it, you know.”

Smits, whose mother is from Puerto Rico and whose father is from Suriname, says, “You might say, ‘Why an Australian to do this?’ But why not? I’m not Cuban. I’ve been through that with ‘Gringo.’ Gillian has a wonderful eye and a great soul.”

When talking about Armstrong, the actors, producers and crew of “Fires Within” keep mentioning the airport arrival scene shot in Miami in which Smits’ character comes “home” after being released from prison. Armstrong made the decision to hire as extras scores of Cubans who had been through similar experiences themselves and to put up a special cyclone fence separating them from their loved ones.

“We had to go looking for them,” the director says about the Cubans, “because they weren’t, you know, in the extras books doing a lot of commercial work.”

She purposely divided families, placing some on the plane and some of them behind the fence.

“The first rehearsal, they were all overacting a little bit, and I got them all together and said, ‘This is your story, and we want to get it right, but you must give us the truth. You’re the ones who’ve been there.’ And after that, my God, they were unbelievable.”

“We were stunned,” Nicita says. “All these extras started crying and shouting spontaneously, ‘Libertad! Libertad!’ This emotion just welled out of them.”

“I’ve worked with Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir and so on,” says first assistant director Mark Egerton, who has also been Armstrong’s chief assistant on three films, “and I don’t know what makes a good director. Gill is a good director, but I don’t know that I can tell you what makes her good.

“On ‘My Brilliant Career,’ there might have been a thing about whether she could do it or not, and perhaps she had a great feeling of responsibility in terms of the people coming up from film school, some of whom were ladies. So in terms of a feminist thing, she had a great goal to achieve there.”

Now, the goals are broader and have less to do with gender. On location in the Northern Hemisphere, Armstrong takes no special credit for what she achieved with the Cuban extras.

“You don’t really have to talk to them about Cuba for very long,” she says, “before there are tears in their eyes.”