Back Home . . . on the Range : Sam Shepard Returns West to Direct His New Film, ‘Silent Tongue’

Red dust whips over the desolate landscape on the plains of southeastern New Mexico. Rattlesnakes take shelter from a relentless sun under thorny mesquite bushes, and tarantulas roam at will. Not much has changed here since 1893, the year in which Sam Shepard’s “Silent Tongue” is set. Except now the land belongs to ranchers instead of Kiowas and Comanches, and it’s parceled out in sprawling sections, 640 acres each, marked off with grated cattle guards and swinging gates.

“This was probably the most terrifying piece of real estate west of the Mississippi. It was absolutely scary,” declares Shepard, who is here directing his second feature film, a Western ghost story set on the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains. “It’s a flat table of land with no vegetation at all except burned-out mesquite and cactus. It’s wide open. In order to cross it, you were totally exposed to these raids that were pretty persistent up until the Texas Rangers came in.”

Fertile ground for a tale of revenge and mysticism that is swathed in all the familiar Shepardian themes--families unable to communicate but inextricably linked, insanity, passionate brother-sister bonds and painful father-son shackles, horses, alcoholism, buried secrets that fester--yet all disturbingly fresh.

“Silent Tongue” takes its plot from the attempt of a distraught Irish-American youth, played by River Phoenix, to guard the corpse of his half-Kiowa wife. His vigil leads to a battle with her vengeful Indian ghost, and destroys what semblance of peace existed in both their families.

“I think it has more to do with lostness than anything else,” Shepard says.

The film is “about family and regeneration, about madness and the differing degrees and differing causes,” suggests Dermot Mulroney, who plays the half-brother of Awbonnie, the woman who has died. Along with their father, played by Alan Bates, Mulroney is drawn to Awbonnie’s burial site after their sister, Velada, is stolen by Richard Harris, who believes he can staunch his son’s grief by providing a replacement love interest.

It is a “Western redefined,” says executive producer Gene Rosow. Rosow’s company, French-based Belbo Films, orchestrated funding of the $8.5-million independent production from Studio Canal + and Hachette Premiere, making this auteur effort an entirely French-financed American production.

The French adore auteur director Shepard. Now 48, clean-shaven and rangy, Shepard is as attractive as ever, his widow’s peak unseen under a beige cowboy hat and that broken front tooth no more than a mark of hard living.

He grew up a rancher and bused tables at New York’s Village Gate, toured with the Holy Modal Rounders and Bob Dylan, lived with Patti Smith, did his share of drugs and drink, and penned one off-Broadway play after another before swearing off city living and moving into filmdom. He speaks quietly. He’s the type of guy who urges a wrangler to come clean with a piece of cowboy poetry stuffed in his pocket, who barely chokes down a guffaw in correcting the spelling of “know” from “no,” then hastens to add, “But it’s good, I like it.”

In extending respect, Shepard earns it back in spades. “One scene we did,” remembers Jeri Arredondo, who plays Velada, “Richard Harris tells me my sister is dead. We did it for hours. On the last take, I broke down. Sam pulled me off the horse, held me, carried me across the prairie, and he was crying too. ‘Damn, you just broke my heart,’ he told me. He definitely has a handle on the human condition.”

And yet, despite the generosity of spirit, despite the “you bets” and “I get you’s,” the easy laughter, the teasing and the country twang that’s more reflective of the Virginia farmland where he now makes his home than the Southern California ranchland where he grew up, despite the jeans and cowboy hat that cause him to vanish into the crowd of wranglers working on the film--Shepard intimidates almost everyone on this set.

It’s not that they can’t forget that he’s America’s most-produced living playwright, that he’s won the Pulitzer and 12 Obies, that he’s made an indelible impression as the idealized American cowboy-farmer-loner in 13 feature films and that he is the man who settled down with Jessica Lange.

Shepard’s salt-of-the-earth exterior belies his brilliance. He wrote “Silent Tongue” in just 10 days, revised it half a dozen times, then handed it out replete with camera directions and location sites. “I had just finished the mix on ‘Far North’ (his initial film directing foray) and was driving back from L.A. across the Painted Desert. It started to occur to me then and sort of unraveled as I drove east,” he recalls. The setting, he says, “was always the llano ; I wanted something stark. The area here is so malevolent, it really is kind of ruthless country.”

Influenced by John Ford’s 1956 “The Searchers,” which he terms a great book and a halfway decent movie, “Silent Tongue” was initially rejected by a number of, as he puts it, “money heads.” “The reasons for turning my script down had to do with its commercial potential,” Shepard notes, “then like two years later an Indian film wins the Academy Award (“Dances With Wolves”) and a ghost film (“Ghost”) is number one (at the) box office. That was kind of an odd twist of fate.”

What he doesn’t mention is that his 1988 “Far North,” in which Jesica Lange returns home to bicker and bond with Tess Harper, and to debate whether to shoot Brian Dennehy’s horse, garnered scathing reviews along the lines of “an absurdist lament for the lost honor and eccentricity of rural life,” and didn’t exactly overflow box-office coffers.

“The biggest difference between that film and this one,” Shepard says, “is I didn’t shoot enough footage with ‘Far North.’ I just didn’t have enough material for that one. When I sat down to cut it, I was forced to get stock footage, which was an awful predicament. I’m shooting a lot more on this one and printing a lot, a lot more angles and coverage.”

Irish cinematographer Jack Conroy (“My Left Foot,” “The Field”), here making his first American film, was amenable to Shepard’s decision to shoot with a wide-screen anamorphic lens, the type John Ford used on his Westerns. Conroy was recommended by producer Carolyn Pfeiffer (“The Moderns,” “Choose Me,” “The Whales of August,” “Far North”).

In addition to Shepard’s expanding technical base, his storytelling is also more robust with this script. Where his more than 40 plays and four earlier film scripts, “Zabriskie Point,” “Paris, Texas,” “Fool for Love” and “Far North,” repeatedly shunned the concept of resolution, “Silent Tongue” exhibits a matured sensibility that takes a stab at resolution and retribution, at things and people restored to their rightful place.

Stunt coordinator Dutch Lunak (Rodney Grant’s stunt double in “Dances”) and all the actors playing Kiowas are American Indians, as are the three female leads, including “Thunderheart’s” Sheila Tousey as the ghost. “This is the first time Dutch and I have gotten L.A. scale, and we’ve been involved in some big-budget films,” remarks assistant stunt coordinator R.J. Joseph, recalling productions where he and other American Indians received one-tenth to 1/15th the salary of their Anglo counterparts.

“I mean, we’ve worked on productions where we’ve eaten cold oatmeal in the morning, where we were treated less-than. These guys are from Montana, South Dakota; I’m from Canada. They’re Blackfoot, Sioux; I’m Cree. We just put the jaw cords on the ponies, we’re gone. My grandfather rode like that, no saddles, no bridles, just hair and a feather. It’s pride, it’s why people did this. If it wasn’t for this . . .”--he motions around the set at the horses painted with carefully researched war paint, circles around their eyes to enhance their sight, coup marks striped across their noses for every enemy their rider has touched--”that would be a dream; it’d be forgotten.”

Still, “Silent Tongue” is a far cry from the current Hollywood trend toward romanticizing American Indians. Here, Indian mysticism, in the form of the vindictive ghost, exerts its power by plunging medicine knives in wolves, by smashing heads and tearing a corpse to pieces.

Shepard hired his cast through their agents. “I just gambled,” he laughs. “I don’t believe in a lot of schmoozing and buttering up. Not that you don’t become friends in work. But I think it’s a misconception that you have to do a lot of hanging before you work.”

He isn’t in Hollywood much anyhow, he doesn’t fly and it’s a long haul from Virginia. Nor has he bothered to get his Directors Guild card yet, which might make him ineligible come awards season. But awards haven’t mattered to Shepard for a long while. “I’ve always found it embarrassing to receive awards,” he reflects. “I’m really genuinely not doing it for achievement anymore. It might have been the case when I was 19, but it’s so different now than it was then.”

What motivates him now is what moves him, tales from the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke and Jim Harrison. “I absolutely think that there’s a level of storytelling just around the corner that you can tap into, that I’m really interested in now. I can’t explain it very clearly but it’s different from anything I’ve ever done before. I used to think it was about images and visions. Now I’m convinced it’s about storytelling,” he says, “storytelling for the purpose of the human deal and not dragging (people) down, for supporting the fact of persisting and going on.”

But directing isn’t just a career move for Shepard. “Careers don’t interest me, the only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing,” he insists. “Directing feels great; I’m really happy to be doing this. It’s rough going, we’re working our butts off, we’re doing 40 set-ups a day, but it’s still better than working in a bank,” he chuckles, “or cleaning horse stalls.”

Cast and crew disassemble, and Richard Harris protests loudly, “C’mon guys, where’s the van? I want to get out of here, I want to get to L.A. I want my eggs Benedict.”

Most folks are plodding down the road now, the more enterprising ones having clambered up into the electricians’ truck. “We need some vans up here,” the second assistant director requests into his walkie-talkie, “and a car for Richard.”

Shepard, meanwhile, has mounted the nearest horse. He’s riding it over the ridge to the next location.