COVER STORY : ON LOCATION : Into the Rain Forest : ‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord’ is the most ambitious Hollywood production yet filmed in the Amazon, but it’s merely the first in a rash of films set in the lush, mysterious, but rapidly disappearing, rain forest region

If it were a scene in a movie, the first image might be a tight close-up of an insect, a black ant, scurrying across a dark brown background. Then, as the camera pulled back, you’d see it was actually one of dozens of ants--no, hundreds--crawling like rush hour traffic over the bare legs of a teen-age boy slapping furiously at them from his perch in a tree 20 feet above the floor of the Amazon jungle.

But it’s not a scene in a movie; it’s a scene from the set of a movie, producer Saul Zaentz’s “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” and it’s just one dynamic among many going on simultaneously here under the canopy of the Brazilian rain forest some 30 miles west of the Atlantic port city of Belem.

Look around. You’re in a small clearing in the dense, claustrophobically hot jungle just above the Tabiocaba River, one of the thousands of muddy capillaries that twist through the Amazon. There is a dilapidated mud-wall house and an equally derelict chapel, both built and “aged” by the crew, and there’s activity everywhere.

The boy in the tree, sent up there to hack off some branches, is fighting his battle with the ants almost unnoticed. A few yards away, about 20 other locals--laborers recruited from the wood huts that line the banks of wider tributaries--are building a thatched-roof shed to house some of the film equipment. Others are working inside the larger of the two “mission” buildings while members of the regular film crew set up for the next shot outside. A couple of small motorboats are chugging up the narrow river with supplies.

On one side of the clearing, actor John Lithgow is strumming a guitar and singing, though only he can hear himself above the construction noise. Zaentz and Brazilian director Hector Babenco are huddled with cinematographer Lauro Escorel. Actors Aidan Quinn, Daryl Hannah and Kathy Bates are sitting in directors’ chairs near the main mission hut doing what actors usually do on exotic locations--watching and waiting. The film’s other stars, Tom Berenger and Tom Waits, are back in the United States on a break.

Meanwhile, about 50 yards away, a small, thin man with a stick and a wad of plastic bags tucked under his belt is staring intently into the thick undergrowth. This man, Pedro Cerveira, is known to the crew as the “bug wrangler,” but that understates his duties. An expert in identifying venomous Amazon creatures, he is on loan from the Butantan Institute in Sao Paolo to help ferret out danger at the films’ various jungle locations.

Cerveira isn’t interested in the kinds of nettlesome creatures about to drive the boy with the machete out of the tree and into the river; he is after--and finding--bigger game. So far, Cerveira has collected a lethal coral snake (the bite neither hurts nor bleeds, he says, but paralysis sets in immediately and without an antidote, you’ll be dead in hours), a poisonous tarantula, numerous scorpions and plenty of one-inch-long black fire ants. The snake was found under Kathy Bates’ trailer; the tarantula was bagged a few feet from where the actors are now sitting.

“The animals won’t bother you unless you step on one or come too close,” says the Portuguese-speaking Cerveira, through an interpreter.

How do you know how close you are if you can’t see them?

“That’s the problem,” he says.

That the Amazon is a hostile world for outsiders is the theme of both the movie and the making of it. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” adapted by Babenco and French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere from Peter Matthiessen’s 1965 novel, is an adventure story about seven Americans--four Presbyterian missionaries, a child and two gun-runners--whose lives are radically altered by their forays into the jungle (see story, Page 24). It’s a story of spiritual and personal discovery that operates on several dramatic levels, not least as a cautionary tale against the wisdom of imposing one culture’s values on another’s.

“At Play” is not the first film to be shot in the Amazon, but with a budget of nearly $30 million, it’s easily the most ambitious, and when it is released late next year, it may be the first in a rash of movies with a South American rain forest setting, since deforestation, the greenhouse effect and the murder of Chico Mendes shifted world attention here. Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki’s “Amazon,” shot near Manaus and in the dangerous gold-mining areas of Roraima, was completed earlier this year, and several other films are scheduled, including David Puttnam’s biography of Mendes, the itinerant rubber tapper whose fight against cattle ranchers made him the unlikely leader in the fight to save the rain forest.

“At Play” is not about any of these contemporary issues, but in the mind of the film’s director, it predicted them. “The book was a model for the new era in Brazil, a new momentum in which a new piece of the country was being discovered,” says Babenco, who spent his childhood in Argentina and most of his adult life in Brazil. “Until the revolution of 1964, the Indians were living in a very peaceful way. Now, it is not so peaceful.”

Matthiessen’s novel is a tightly structured story about people who, with both good and bad intentions, threaten the delicate balance of the forest. The mysteries and riches buried in the world’s lush equatorial belt has always drawn those who would exploit it, but since the military junta in Brazil in 1964, there has been a virtual bounty on the Amazon. In trying to shift the surplus populations of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro in the south to the vast expanse in the north, the Brazilian government gave private industry and major ranching interests a green light to tear down the forests.

Now, filmmakers are coming here to either document attempts to save the Amazon, or to take a look at it before it’s gone. “At Play” does the latter, but no one can accuse Zaentz of exploiting a hot social issue. The 69-year-old record industry executive and film producer has been after the rights to the book since 1969.

“When my partners and I decided to make movies 20 years ago, they said ‘What do you want to make?’ ” Zaentz recalls. “I said, ‘There are two books: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” ’ We couldn’t get the rights (from MGM) to this one so we made the other one.”

“Cuckoo’s Nest” won the Oscar for best picture in 1975, and Zaentz won a second Academy Award for “Amadeus” 10 years later. But through all those years, he says, “At Play” is the film he wanted to make, and half a dozen administrations later, MGM let him have the rights. “It’s just a great story,” he says.

Zaentz has made things as easy on the crew as possible. For most of the shooting, the cast and crew have been put up in the Belem Hilton, a first-class hotel in a Third World city, and transported to locations each day by boat, plane or car. During the few weeks of shooting at the mission set, which is too far away from Belem for commuting, he rented a pair of cruise ships from the Brazilian government and the company stays in staterooms that are clean and air-conditioned--and about as wide as coffins. The production will wrap next month, three weeks behind schedule, but only one day of that is because of illness.

Still, the jungle fights them. Intestinal disorders are common and chronic, several people have endured minor stings and bites, and one person--English sound engineer David Sutton--almost died from a rare tropical virus that invaded his central nervous system and left him paralyzed for weeks. He was flown by Red Cross jet from Belem to London in July and has just recently begun to walk again.

“David was seriously, seriously ill and we didn’t know why,” says Zaentz, over lunch of black beans, rice and chicken on the mission set. “We have taken every precaution we can think of here, but this is a very exotic place. There are things we can’t control. There are funguses in the air that you can breath in.”

The air does have its own personality--dense and aromatic. The vegetation and animals that die in this massive hothouse seem to simmer in the moist earth rather than replenish it, and by midday the rot rises in an invisible steam to sear your nostrils and taint your own perspiration. The Amazon is no tropical paradise, at least not for those who don’t belong in it. It’s sticky, uncomfortable and foreboding; not for nothing did the cast and crew have to take shots and medications for yellow fever, malaria, tetanus, polio, typhoid and hepatitis before coming.

Yet, who knows this who hasn’t been here?

“When we were negotiating for the actors, some of their agents were asking for 30-foot Winnebagos,” says Zaentz, shaking his head. “Others wanted TV sets, VCRs and stereos in their trailers. They wanted air conditioning and private baths. I said, ‘Do you know where we’re shooting?’ I said, ‘You have my word we’ll do the best we can for them, but I won’t put it in their contracts.’ ”

Most of the actors acknowledge being seriously uncomfortable on the locations and bored in Belem. The exception is Hannah, who was hired two weeks before filming began after Laura Dern pulled out, and who sees the whole experience as being away at camp: “I’m having so much fun, I feel guilty,” she says.

On the mission set, Hannah sleeps each night in a hammock hung in a wooden shack that she shares with a girlfriend and an assortment of scorpions, tarantulas and bats. She sneaks off whenever possible to swim in river water that has such a bad reputation Laura Dern’s agent had it written into her contract that the water be tested two days before she’d be required to jump in.

Aidan Quinn and Kathy Bates, who play newcomer missionaries Martin and Hazel Quarrier, are less sanguine about the adventure. Both have had chronic stomach problems, and both find the trashing of the land frustrating.

“People throw garbage out the window--paper, fruit, just anything,” says Bates, a veteran stage actress. “I’m trying to understand but you look around . . . our stray dogs are healthier than their stray dogs.”

“Everybody here litters, I mean everybody!” says Quinn. “This morning, I saw this massive load of trash being dumped into the river from our boat. Our boat! Our trash! I couldn’t believe it.”

Lithgow, the veteran of the group, is playing the morale booster of both the missionaries in the film and the actors playing them. They call him “Scoutmaster” and credit him for keeping spirits as high as they are on the set. But even he has found the going tough.

“Movie making is such an incredibly dull, ponderous business, you have to have other things to do,” says Lithgow, who spends his free time on the set playing his guitar and, in Belem, painting. “When you get to an extraordinary place like this, you’re thrilled by the differentness of it. But ultimately, it grinds you down.”

“This would be a tough picture to make anywhere, but it’s especially tough here,” says Zaentz, who has lost 35 pounds since arriving in February. “But there was no other way to make it.”

Despite the physical problems and the language and cultural clashes that frequently occur among the multinational crew, “At Play” does seem to be a film on its own mission. Babenco, whose previous films have dealt with discarded children (“Pixote”) and discarded adults (“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Ironweed”), says he only agreed to make the film because of the passion of Zaentz, but it is the passion of Babenco that is raising the temperature in the jungle.

“This movie means so much to him on a very, very deep level, I hesitate to even speculate,” says Lithgow. “It’s so important that he’s directing this film, not that it’s out to get colonialists or anything like that. But he is so deeply on the side of the Indians.”

Babenco had never been to the Amazon until he began preparing for “At Play,” and those early trips into the jungle had a profound effect on him. He says he decided to use the primitive Yamomani tribe as his model for the film’s Indians, but an incident at one of their villages convinced him not to use the tribe in the movie. Babenco says he saw an old lady lying on the floor, naked, with a pile of wood tied to her back. She was trying to carry the load, but didn’t have the strength to stand up. He started to help her, then pulled back, not knowing whether she wanted his help.

“Later, I was telling this to (an anthropologist) who had worked 15 years with these Indians,” says Babenco, with a thick Portuguese-Spanish accent. “She said, ‘If you helped her, it would be very bad for her because it would be a real testimony that she’s not capable of managing herself.’ . . . It’s the normal cycle of life. She has to get used to knowing that her life is changing into another moment. This is not bad, this is life. Understand? To say ‘I must help you,’ this is us thinking. We have not that right.”

Babenco says he went to San Francisco to meet Zaentz and tell him he would not use the Indians in the movie, as they had planned. “I told him, ‘This is something we have to discuss. The Indians would love to have the movie there. They knew it would mean gifts, things to trade, maybe they could buy boats. But if we did that, we would be doing the same thing as these (expletive) missionaries are doing to the Indians. I would be trying to explain our concepts of time, obligations, hierarchy. . . . Not me. I am not going to use people and throw them away.”

There are still as many Indian roles as before; to solve his casting problem, Babenco hired Indians living in Belem and had them trained by the same woman--a Sao Paolo social worker--who coached the street children he cast in “Pixote,” the low-budget Brazilian film that vaulted him into international prominence 10 years ago.

The walls in Babenco’s suite at the Belem Hilton are covered with photographs of Amazonian Indians. The emphasis is on their faces, the purity and innocence as visible on them as the desperation was on the faces of the kids in “Pixote.” It takes only a few minutes with Babenco to learn that he is far more concerned with the people inhabiting the rain forest than with the trees that surround them and he has little patience with affluent outsiders for whom he says “ecology has become the new tofu.”

“I don’t believe in charity parties in Beverly Hills with invitations printed on recycled paper to gather money for the rain forest,” he says, his voice rising. “When you start to care more for the trees in Amazonia than the poor Salvadoran lady who is cleaning up after your dog, you are wrong. People are more important than trees. That’s the only way I can think. I’m a person, not a tree.”

His temperature rises even higher when you mention specific celebrities associated with saving the rain forest. Bring up Sting and the name sticks in his throat like a dart.

“Sting? I’ll show you Sting,” he says, rummaging through some of books and pulling out one called “Sting: Fighting for the Amazon.” He thumbs through it, pointing out pictures of the English rock star among Indians. Sting in tribal paint. Sting in tribal costume. Sting promoting Sting. “This is bull,” he says, slamming the book shut.

The director changes directions quickly, saying he doesn’t condemn the celebrities for throwing their weight behind what they see as an important issue, but he sees uninformed do-goodism as more of a danger than a help. After all, the American missionaries who have imposed their values on the Indians--along with their diseases--did so with good intentions.

When film producers began scrambling for the rights to Chico Mendes’ story two years ago, Babenco seemed to many to be the obvious choice to direct it. Babenco acknowledges trying to help producer David Puttnam land the rights, but he says it’s a project he has no interest in.

“Chico Mendes was a poor man coming from a small place to become a world name fighting for something so apparently simple as a tree,” he says. “I hope it will be done with respect. I think David Puttnam will not make it a Hollywood Western. But I would rather make movies about the bad people. They are more interesting to me.”

Opinions vary as to whether the missionaries in “At Play” are bad, and some of the actors are concerned that their characters may be stereotyped in the film.

“Not all missionaries are fanatics,” says Quinn. “I talked to a 56-year-old missionary here who danced with the shamans. Some missionaries think that’s the devil. He said it was one of the most spiritual things he’d ever seen. Missionaries are every type of person and they don’t all feel the same way.”

Says Kathy Bates: “The book gave a very unflattering portrait of the missionaries and the script has inherited that. That concerns me. . . . I’m not particularly in favor of ramming religions down somebody’s throat. So much damage has been with the ‘our way is the only way’ thinking. Cultures lost. But (the missionaries’) lives are very complex and I hope we’ll convey that.”

Lithgow sees “At Play” as a “David Lean kind of movie.” “The scope is vast, and the issues are unfathomable, and yet it’s about six people and their interactions,” he says, sounding like a director himself. “Like every good movie, it has a hidden agenda that stays hidden. This is a movie about missionaries trying to convert Indians and getting it all wrong. Only by extension, it’s about one culture exploit ing another. . . . It’s not going to open our minds, but that’s not the way the best drama works. The best drama works as a conflict between characters that your care about. Big realities and big truths.”

“At Play” is a unique film production in many ways, and probably could not have been made by anyone other than Zaentz, who is serving as the producer, financier and studio all in one. The movie is the first in a relationship with Bank of America providing Zaentz’s company with an uncollateralized line of credit and him with sole authority to make decisions on spending in Brazil.

“In the past, my partners and I had to put up our building in Berkeley as collateral and sign personal loan guarantees,” says Zaentz, a short, stocky man with a snow-white Hemingway beard. “The Bank of America wants to get back into movies. They checked our books and went over our financial statements for the past five years, then made a multi-year financing deal.”

Zaentz is a one-stop chief executive on “At Play.” “He is the studio,” says Lithgow, who has worked on many studio movies. “It’s such a different thing, not waiting to hear what the big boys think. The big boy is on the set.”

“Having a producer who is only looking over your shoulder to see what you need is unbelievable,” adds Babenco. “This movie is very important to Saul; it is his vision and he deserves a good movie.”

The film’s $30-million budget is a huge amount for an independent production in a Third World country. It has a large ensemble cast with major stars, but about half the money is being spent in Brazil. The crew built three major jungle sets--a tribal house, the mission and the town of Mae de Dios--within 30 miles of Belem. By far, the most elaborate of the three is Mae de Dios, a full-scale Amazonian trading center built on stilts on an inlet of the Pirelli rubber plantation. Zaentz got free use of the site in exchange for removing a sunken barge that was blocking the waterway. The town, its boardwalks already crawling with crabs, cost $1 million to build and is strong enough to hold the weight of hundreds of extras.

Mae de Dios, where the missionaries and the gun-runners meet at the beginning of the story, was a revelation to the taxi drivers who were occasionally asked to haul people there over the rough dirt road from Belem. “This one guy’s eyes almost popped out,” says Zaentz. “He said he’d been driving a cab for 30 years and didn’t know the city was here.”

It will all come down in a few weeks, Zaentz says. The Pirelli people don’t want squatters moving in when the film company moves out.

Back at the mission set, Babenco is rehearsing a scene where Lithgow’s Leslie Huben is attaching speakers to a tree. When he comes down from the ladder, he notices his Indian servant, Uyuyu, is wearing a crucifix--given to him by the Catholic priest who was here before--and he flies into a rage. In the script, the scene ends there and then cuts to later when a hymn is pouring through the speakers into the jungle.

Babenco has suddenly decided to blend the two scenes, to create one shot in which Leslie will throw his tantrum, then be lifted out of the mood by the music and lead the others down to the river bank where--framed by the jungle and a wooden cross protruding from the river--they will look back at the speakers, immersed in the spirituality of the moment.

It’s a complicated sequence, both technically and artistically. Babenco has to figure out how to cover the sequence in a single shot. “If ever a scene cried out for a crane, this is it,” he says, “but you can’t get a crane in here and the cameraman can’t fly.” For Lithgow, there is the task of making Leslie’s radical mood shift plausible. The scene is going to add half a day to a shooting schedule already weeks behind, but after conferring briefly with Babenco, Zaentz approves it.

“It’s a very crucial scene and it wasn’t even in the script,” says Babenco, later that day. “The scene ends a cycle in the story where (the missionaries) have finished the renewal of the spot where they’re going to start their new life. I didn’t know until today how to do it. If I had to stick to the script, the opportunity would have been lost.”

Lithgow, who helped design that scene during the rehearsal, says he considers it the creative high point for him in the movie. “It was a weird transition that I thought was a great discovery,” he says. “Hector kind of performs without a net very often. It’s an interesting way to work, it’s very exciting, but boy, it keeps you on your toes too.”

Kathy Bates, who belonged to Christian youth groups while growing up in Memphis, says the scene caught her by surprise.

“I did start to feel all that coming back when the music came on and I heard those voices and the familiar harmony and saw the cross down there,” she says. “I was tremendously moved by that. I thought, ‘Look at the peace we’ve brought to this clearing and look at the order we have created here.’ When you’re here and see this and realize that if it weren’t for the movie crew, you’d be doing all this--clearing the area, dealing with the snakes and the tarantulas--yourselves, it gives you respect for what they go through physically. Nothing out here is as simple as it seems.”