Impassioned Missions : Director Joffe’s ‘City of Joy’ Faced Obstacles at Home, Abroad

“I want this film to touch people’s emotions but some people don’t want their emotions touched,” says British director Roland Joffe of the difficulties his new film, “City of Joy,” may face in finding an audience.

Set amidst the brutal squalor of the slums of Calcutta, “City of Joy” is an unabashed celebration of hope and fraternity--sentiments Joffe believes are unfortunately out of vogue. “It’s become fashionable, particularly in the media, to be cynical and the main implication of the 20th-Century novel is that mankind is barely worth considering,” he says. “There is innate evil in the world and some people do seem to welcome it, but I’ve always believed mankind is redeemable.”

The themes of redemption and cultures in collision have been central to Joffe’s previous films--”The Killing Fields,” “The Mission” and “Fat Man and Little Boy”--and they’re very much at the heart of “City of Joy.” Loosely based on Dominique Lapierre’s best-selling novel of the same name published in 1986, the film revolves around the relationship between an American doctor who has lost all sense of meaning in life and has cast himself adrift in India, and an Indian rickshaw driver struggling against the harsh circumstances he was born into.

Made in Calcutta for $27 million during a 13-week shoot in fall, 1990, the film has taken Joffe through a maze of obstacles that included vehement opposition from the Indian government. Joffe also had to contend with a trumped-up murder charge against two crew members and accusations that he was “a racist pornographer of poverty” exploiting Calcutta and creating an unfairly negative impression of conditions there.

Joffe had problems back in the States, too. Virtually nobody supported his decision to cast in the leading role Patrick Swayze, who professes eternal gratitude to Joffe for the chance he gave him.

“My insides were screaming for work like this,” said Swayze, speaking from a car phone in Manhattan, where he was en route from a mobbed book signing for “The Making of ‘City of Joy,’ ” which was published this week by Newmarket Books. “I was desperate to find the next level as an actor and see if I had the ability to get there, and I’ll always be indebted to Roland for giving me the most important opportunity of my life.”

Says Joffe: “Patrick was right for the role because he’s very human and vulnerable. I knew he wouldn’t shield himself from the country, that he’d open himself to India and have the experience it offers.”

Warner Bros., where the film was originally slated to be made, was less than thrilled with the casting of Swayze, nor was it keen on the film’s subject. Just as cameras were set to roll, Warner pulled out. Joffe co-produced the film, now a TriStar release, with Jake Eberts.

“Warners was terrified of doing a film about lepers,” says Joffe. “They said, ‘Who cares about lepers?’ I said it’s not a film about lepers, it’s a film about life and about any outsider--it could be about AIDS, because the way people respond to lepers isn’t that different from the way people with AIDS are treated.”

Talking with the 46-year-old director at the home in Bel-Air where he’s lived for five years with his second wife, one is struck by the contradictions in his life. Slender and intense, Joffe is a highly educated and refined man who was obviously to the manner born. A fluent conversationalist who leaps from one arcane topic to the next with ease, he lives a life of privilege in a house filled with art and books. In his work, however, he seeks out the harshest places on Earth and maroons himself there.

“People say to me, ‘You’re crazy! Why do you go to these difficult locations and lay yourself open to these things?’ ” says Joffe with a laugh. “I reply, ‘Because it’s there and the doing of it will test me.’

“Every artist who goes to Calcutta creates a huge uproar,” adds Joffe, who was aware of what he was getting into in deciding to shoot “City of Joy” on location. “German writer Gunter Grass just wrote a book called ‘Stick Out Your Tongue’ based on his experiences in Calcutta, and the Indians went crazy because he said there were turds on the pavement. Calcuttans are a funny blend of pride, vanity and insecurity. They don’t want to acknowledge the reality of their existence and see the truth itself as an insult.”

Joffe seems eager to clear up the controversies that erupted around his film while it was in production and he addresses them one by one. Of the complaint that he made “a token white Westerner” the lead in a story ostensibly about Indian life, he says: “I didn’t want to make a film just with Indians because the interaction between the two cultures interests me. I also wanted Patrick’s character to function as a kind of guide through this culture because India can be a shock for people unfamiliar with it.”

One of the chief criticisms raised by the intellectual and political communities in India is that Joffe positioned two Western characters in the story as savior figures, thus implying that Calcuttans are incapable of helping themselves.

“The white Westerners are not depicted as saviors by any stretch--it’s the interaction between people that’s a healing force in this story,” says Joffe. “Many people both in India and in the West are unduly conscious-laden and are protective of less industrialized countries to the point that they’re not very honest. I’m not interested in espousing the politically correct attitude that this is a Third World country, therefore we can’t criticize it. The 18th-Century belief was that if you’re poor you must be bad because you lack the strength to acquire wealth, while liberal thought of the 20th Century takes the opposite view, which is if you’re poor or a minority you must be good. Both positions deny the humanity of the poor. My film says you must look at them as people; some are good and some are bad.”

As difficulties mounted, Joffe attempted to enlist Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray to stop the protest against his film, but Ray wanted Joffe to go home too.

“Ray is territorial about Calcutta . . .,” says Joffe. “He had no moral objections to my film, but as he did with ‘Gandhi,’ and ‘Passage to India,’ he wrote letters to the government recommending that they not allow these films to be made there. He said, ‘ We can make this kind of film but they can’t.’ ”

A dissenting voice amid all the protest was that of writer Dominique Lapierre, who was confident his book was in good hands despite the fact that Joffe took considerable liberties with it (for example, the doctor played by Swayze is a minor character in the book).

“Oliver Stone wanted to do a film of my book--he even went to Calcutta and did some preliminary production work,” says Lapierre, speaking by phone from his home in St. Tropez, France. “I’m sure Oliver would’ve made a great film, too, but having seen ‘The Killing Fields’ and ‘The Mission,’ I knew Roland would know how to honor the spirit of my book and of Calcutta and he hasn’t disappointed me--he’s made a wonderful film.”

Joffe’s ability to immerse himself in foreign cultures is traceable to his childhood. Born in London, Joffe recalls: “My father was a very smart man who took his doctorate in philosophy, and I was brought up in the home of my stepgrandfather who was a sculptor who’d amassed a great collection of art from around the world. Being exposed to that art made me aware early on of what a huge and diverse place the world is.”

Joffe fell in love with movies as a child--”I saw three or four a week when I was growing up”--but enrolled at Manchester University as an English major, where he immersed himself in Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Tolstoy and Flaubert.

After graduating from college, Joffe spent 15 years in British theater and television, which led to his securing financing for his 1984 debut film, “The Killing Fields.” Like “City of Joy,” that film is a harrowing story of human beings pushed to the very limits of physical and psychological endurance.

Asked how he reconciles the extreme human suffering he’s witnessed with the luxurious life of Bel-Air, he replies: “This is a question I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking seriously about. We’re sitting in this beautiful garden and I’m not against that, nor do I feel guilty about it. I’m not an ascetic--I love life and in my view we should be doing our damnedest to bring everybody’s standard up. But the truth nobody wants to face is that the ecology of the planet simply will not support it. In light of that, the only solution is to embrace the idea that sharing is a significant human activity. Our best resources should be put to work not in guarding what we have, but in how to share what we have. ‘City of Joy’ is essentially a story about sharing, and for me that’s what makes it valuable and necessary.”