After Seven Years, Director Babenco Is on Rebound

When Brazilian director Hector Babenco hit bottom in his brief Hollywood film career, there was not even the sound of one hand clapping. The silence, he says, seemed to reach his soul. One moment, he was on a busy promotional tour in New York and Los Angeles, talking about his $40-million major studio jungle adventure “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” the next, he and the movie were history.

The picture opened to mixed reviews and minuscule crowds, and newspaper ads for it disappeared in a week. Even the producer, Babenco’s close friend Saul Zaentz, had packed up and moved back to his home in Tuscany, Italy.

“I have never felt so personally rejected, ever, ever!” says Babenco, sipping an orange drink in the bar of the Majestic Hotel in Cannes. “I’m thinking, ‘OK, they don’t like me, they don’t want me. I’m doing something wrong.’ . . . I was totally depressed.”

That was seven years, a lot of silence and a near-death experience ago for Babenco, who’s returning to Cannes with a film in competition for the first time since the premiere here of his 1985 international hit, “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” His new movie, the largely autobiographical “Corazon Illuminato,” has its world premiere on Saturday.

“Corazon Illuminato,” or “Foolish Blood,” as Babenco translates it, is the story of a Los Angeles filmmaker who returns, after a 25-year absence, to his native Mar Del Plata, Argentina, for the funeral of his father and goes through a dramatic process of rediscovery. The idea for the movie had been gestating in Babenco’s conscience ever since his father died and he left Argentina, the day before the funeral, to begin rehearsals in New York for “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

“I felt at the time 100% right that my professional side was more important than my emotional side,” says the 55-year-old director. “I regret strongly that I could not take one more day to be with my mother.”

Babenco was planning to write a script about his relationship with his father, and of growing up Jewish in heavily anti-Semitic postwar Argentina, after “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” but the failure of that movie, which completed a two-loser parlay with his brilliant but unseen 1987 “Ironweed,” smothered his ambition. And cancer nearly finished him.

“I had a very strong lymphoma that didn’t respond to chemotherapy,” Babenco says. “It was moving very quickly, and the doctors told me that I had two months, six months, two years . . . they don’t say for sure how long.”

The best hope for his surviving the cancer was a bone marrow transplant, which Babenco, with marrow donated by his younger brother, underwent at the Fred Hutchinson cancer center in Seattle. He was there for six months during 1995, then spent a year recovering at his home in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

All the while, he was writing his new movie, casting it and arranging financing on what was to have been an $11-million movie, starring Willem Defoe, Nastassja Kinski, Irene Jacob and Stephen Dorff. And just when he’d regained enough strength to go into production, he heard a voice telling him not to allow career considerations to steer him wrong again. He decided that the movie had to be done in Spanish, with Argentine actors, knowing that he’d be cutting loose not only a name cast but his financing.

Nevertheless, he regrouped, refit the roles with Argentines and cut his budget in half. He filmed the movie in Mar Del Plato, where he’d spent the first 17 years of his life, before traveling around the world and settling in Sao Paolo.

In a way, Babenco is coming full circle as an artist. He began his film career in Brazil, establishing himself as a major voice of social criticism. His break as an international filmmaker came with his 1981 “Pixote,” a largely improvised docudrama about the abandoned street children of Sao Paolo. The movie found its way into U.S. distribution, and Babenco soon found himself in Beverly Hills, accepting an award for best foreign language film from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

At his table that night was Burt Lancaster, winner of the year’s actor award for “Atlantic City,” and though he spoke almost no English, the conversation between Babenco and the American star put him on the trail of “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” “Burt asked me what I was going to do next and when I said I was thinking of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ he was very interested. He knew the book, and invited me to his house to talk about it.”

According to Babenco, Lancaster wanted to play the part of the jailed transvestite that eventually earned William Hurt an Academy Award, and the movie was set to go with him in the role, opposite Raul Julia, when Lancaster had a heart attack. “Can you imagine that movie with him in the role?” Babenco asks.

No.

Anyway, the movie got made, and Babenco got an Oscar nomination himself. That led to “Ironweed,” adapted from William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about street people in Albany, N.Y. The movie earned Oscar nominations for stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, but it was too bleak for audiences of the late ‘80s and did little business.

“At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” from Peter Matthiessen’s novel about American missionaries in South America, opened like a panned Broadway play, and its U.S. distributor, Universal Pictures, got interested in other things. And Saul Zaentz, who’s won three Oscars (for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Amadeus” and “The English Patient”), let it go, as well.

“I called Saul in Italy and said, ‘Saul, you gave up,’ ” Babenco recalls. “He said, ‘Hector, I called [Universal President] Tom Pollock three times. He never returned my calls.’ I said, ‘But you can’t just give up.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. He never returned my calls.’ ”

After that, says Babenco, there was nothing but silence. That may all change Saturday when “Corazon Illuminato,” completed just a month ago, has its world premiere here. However they feel about the movies, Cannes audiences are never silent.