The Patience of a Saint
Radiant in her beauty, a teenage girl in medieval armor paces her horse before a mounted army and shouts a call to battle for the unity of France.
“Be of good heart, my friends,” cries Joan of Arc. “Today our noble king will have a great victory, because we’re guided by the king of heaven.”
An aide hands her a long pole with a military banner, and after Joan poses with it briefly, the scene ends--for the fourth time. But the director and most of the film crew are preoccupied with a camera problem, and no one thinks to yell out the standard “cut” allowing the cast to relax.
After a few moments of silence, Joan--played by 16-year-old Leelee Sobieski--gives an unplanned demonstration of her leadership. “Uh, cut!” yells out the teenager, provoking a wave of laughter through cast and crew for the CBS miniseries “Joan of Arc,” due to air starting May 16 as the centerpiece of the network’s May sweeps programming.
Later, away from the mud and carefully controlled chaos of the battle scenes, Sobieski describes the character she wants to project. It’s clear that Joan of Arc--who in 1431 was burned at the stake as a heretic--still resonates today with idealistic significance for this teenage actress.
“She wants to unite France so there’s no more fighting, no more killing of women and children,” says the American teenager, who first drew critical attention for her starring role in last year’s film “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries.” “She has to be strong. You can’t be a weak person that’s leading an army. But she’s not doing it for the fact of ‘Ooooh, this is great. Power! Money! Respect!’ ”
Ultimately, Joan, whose actions have been motivated by what she believes to be divine voices, dies at the stake “calling Jesus and God,” Sobieski adds. “No sorceress could ever do such a thing.”
Snapping back from the historical narrative to the present, Sobieski deadpans: “Maybe I’ll become a nicer person [from making] this film, because she’s so good.”
One of the climactic events of Joan’s saga--the battle of Les Tourelles, a fort blocking entry to the city of Orleans--is filmed here along a riverbank about 25 miles north of Prague, in the village of Kozarovice. It is one of more than a dozen locations in the Czech Republic used for the miniseries.
Wounded by an arrow during the fighting, Joan’s determination to carry on drives her men to victory in this fight against the English occupiers.
For the stars and extras alike, the two days of filming in near-zero temperatures are cold, muddy and uncomfortable--yet almost everyone seems to be having fun. Sobieski looks serious while reciting her battle lines, but much of the rest of the time she has a joyful smile that says this is the coolest thing she can imagine doing.
Even the more experienced adult actors get caught up in the mood.
“It’s a playground,” said Cliff Saunders, who plays the role of a French soldier named Bertrand De Poligny. “We’re on horses. We’re sword-fighting, we’re playing with arrows and bows.”
The discomfort, however, is often very real.
“It was a lot of fun, but sometimes it’s not good,” says Zdenek Lebl, a 21-year-old student from Prague working for three days as an English archer, while huddled with other extras around a bonfire of scrap wood in an old barrel. “I’m very cold and sometimes very hungry.”
At one point, Peter Strauss--who plays the French commander La Hire and has already spent a long foggy morning in chain mail--rushes to an assistant declaring: “We’ve got to get this fixed.” The two men fuss with the cloth meant to protect Strauss’ neck from direct contact with the freezing cold metal.
A bit later, Strauss spots some warm food. He’s already snacked on cold salami but is still hungry and chilled. He’s also just a touch slap-happy.
“What’d you get?” Strauss bellows with melodramatic envy, as he views the steaming plate of fried potatoes and deep-fried breaded cheese patty. “Oh, my God! And it’s hot! Excuse me, could I just wear that? I don’t want to eat it, I just want to put it in my tights.”
It turns out there is a plate for Strauss too, and as he eats, standing in mud at a filthy table used as a camera platform, he confirms that, yes, he truly is cold and uncomfortable.
“Really beautiful [medieval] armor took eight months to a year to fit,” Strauss says. “We just kind of fit into it and deal with it. . . . The Middle Ages were not a comfortable period to live in, and it will show.”
The only cast member with custom-made armor is Sobieski--and hers, handmade in Italy, cost $60,000 for both metal and gray rubber suits, says executive producer Ed Gernon. The metal armor looks better, but the rubber suit is used for some scenes.
“Women don’t wear armor--it’s not like we can go to a costume house,” Gernon says. “The male actors are being fitted from costume houses around the world.”
Even at $60,000, Sobieski’s armor isn’t a perfect fit.
“The armor is metal, and it’s not shaped for me to have my leg completely bent,” Sobieski says after a morning spent shooting a scene in which she must climb onto the parapet of the fortress. “My knee is bruised.”
Sobieski mentions the discomfort, however, only because she was asked which scene had been most difficult to film. Her reply, which seemed to show a maturity beyond her years, is: “Always the scene at the time is most difficult. And then the next one, and the next one.”
Strauss stresses that discomfort on this set is more something to be coped with or joked about than a matter for real complaint.
“It’s a very macho environment,” he says. “No one complains.”
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Filming is continuing with Strauss on the sidelines, and he jerks his head to yet another charge by 70 horsemen, with a double standing in for his character. Director Christian Duguay--a competitive rider in his youth and a cameraman at the start of his career--is on horseback near the back of the charge, holding a Steadicam to film the scene himself from a rider’s perspective.
The Steadicam enables its operator to get smooth shots even when the camera is bouncing up and down. Creative use of this equipment is one of Duguay’s special talents, noted as it was in his 1997 fast-paced spy thriller “The Assignment,” which starred Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland and Ben Kingsley.
“Look at him!” Strauss continues. “He has been, certainly for me, the most inspirational director I’ve ever worked with. His enthusiasm, his energy, his determination to do it right. His courage. He’s been a leader for all of us. If he’s going to hold a Steadicam all day without complaint, actors are going to be a little less intent on their own needs.”
The combination of strenuous effort and a certain light touch is a common theme for cast and crew.
For the filming of Joan’s dramatic death--the burning at the stake--there was even some gallows humor. That scene was “otherwise known affectionately as ‘Joan’s barbecue,’ ” says Deb LeFaive, a line producer. “We tend to be pretty irreverent about everything.”
The burning scene is done with three actresses--Sobieski and two doubles--plus a dummy that ultimately goes up in flames.
Initial shots at the stake, and the detail work, are filmed with Sobieski. Then as the flames move in on Joan, “it was first me and then the stuntgirl, and then a figurine,” says Eliska Sladkova, 21, a Czech student of physical therapy at Charles University in Prague, who is one of the Joan doubles. “It was great. It looks really nice.”
The professional stuntwoman, who was closest to the fire at the stake, was protected on her face, hands and feet with a standard fire gel, says Benjamin Robin, the makeup and hair designer. “It retards the heat--not for very long, but it gives some time. . . . The men with the valves [for the fuel powering the flames] had to be very dexterous to turn it down if the flames blew on her.”
Despite its potential for horror, the burning is filmed with considerable restraint, says Duguay, whose relationship with CBS preceded “Joan of Arc”; he directed the well-received “Million Dollar Babies,” a two-part ’94 movie for the network about the exploitation of Canada’s Dionne quintuplets.
“I didn’t play [the burning] graphic at all,” he says. “I played it very lyrical, like a symphony. It’s a dance of emotions; it’s a vortex of your whole life that passes by. . . . Nothing graphic, nothing close.”
Duguay says he was attracted to the Joan of Arc story because “the story itself is just fascinating--the fact that a 16-year-old girl [raised] a sense of hope for a country that had lost hope after an 80- or 100-year war.” The death of the historical Joan of Arc came 94 years into the Hundred Years’ War, which actually ran from 1337 to 1453, a time of intermittent Anglo-French struggle. Her bravery contributed greatly to France’s ultimate victory.
The historical events surrounding Joan’s life were “a soap opera at the time,” Duguay says. “Through the journey of Joan, to try to understand the politics of the time was really our biggest puzzle--to make it accessible to the audience, to find a narrative drive that is exciting enough for the audience to follow. Slowly, as this journey unfolds, you see this young, innocent child getting more and more confident and being, at some point, even a victim of her own empowerment, falling into the hand of corruption.
“She lost her voices and got them back. But what are the voices? Is it really the voice of God? My intention is not just to make it clearly just God, that she was, like, touched by an angel. It’s really not about that. We’re going much deeper into the psychology of that character.”
Duguay’s aim is most of all philosophical.
“I didn’t want to make it an overly pious film,” he says. “At the end of the film you’re asking yourself universal questions. They are themes that will never stop. . . . What is destiny? Who guides it? Why are we here on Earth? Why are you suddenly pushed to do something? Is it you? Or is there a God?”
With his continuing love for hands-on camera work, Duguay also brings his own visual style to the making of this film, which faces the challenge of bringing an epic to the small screen of television rather than the larger canvas provided by movie theaters. (Two feature films about the young martyr are currently in the works. “Joan of Arc” starring Milla Jovovich and John Malkovich, is set for release in November, while “Joan of Arc: The Virgin Warrior,” starring Mira Sorvino and Albert Finney, is due to begin production this month.)
“I’m a guy who moves the camera a lot,” Duguay says. “I can with one sweep give the scope and still go in and get your performance close in. . . . When you play on a small television, sometimes you have to go tighter to get a sense of their expression, of what they feel, and to allow the audience to be privileged to understand what is going on. A lot is played in the eyes. A lot is played in the expressions, so you can’t play things as wide as you would normally in a feature.”
The film has a large cast, with more than 80 speaking parts and up to 450 extras on any given day. The list of stars also includes Jacqueline Bisset and Powers Boothe as Joan’s parents, Neil Patrick Harris as the young dauphin Charles, Olympia Dukakis (Sister Babette), Robert Loggia (a priest) and Peter O’Toole as the powerful Bishop Cauchon, whose inquisition ultimately leads to Joan’s death.
Working with Sobieski “is refreshing, because she’s young and innocent,” says Chad Willett, one of the ensemble cast of the 1993 film “Alive,” who plays Jean De Metz, a key supporter of Joan who develops a touch of unfulfilled romance in the relationship. “It’s all from the heart. There’re no tricks of the trade going on. She’s worldly at 16. But, of course, when you’re 16, you’re 16. It comes out sooner or later.”
For some battle scenes, it will look like Joan’s army exceeds 1,000 men, thanks to sophisticated, computer-assisted techniques.
The battle of Les Tourelles, for example, is filmed with a column of 70 horsemen and about 300 foot soldiers charging a specially constructed wooden fortress built to look like stone. The field is divided into three strips with bright orange ribbon, and takes are filmed of the army charging up each third of the field, with the extras’ positions changed so that it’s virtually impossible to spot the same people.
A computer is used to merge three takes of different charges together, replace the orange color with mud--and out comes a battle scene more impressive than the live-action version.
Such efforts are cheaper than hiring and outfitting three times as many extras but still are expensive. Alliance Atlantis, which is producing the $21-million film under contract, will recoup only about half its costs from CBS, executive producer Gernon says. The U.S. network is licensed to broadcast the film twice over a two-year period, with the first airing of the two-part series set to begin May 16. (The network will air the second part May 18.) The production firm is also selling it in overseas markets, bundled with other projects, Gernon adds.
While initial consideration also was given to France or Hungary as shooting sites, scouting of the Czech Republic led to a quick decision to film here. That was based mainly on the availability of castles and other medieval sites for filming, competent and enthusiastic local technical crews and costs that run less than half the French level, Duguay says.
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Filming of the stake scene may have been hardest on Sobieski’s mother, Elizabeth, who tries to be on the set whenever her daughter is doing anything at all dangerous, like riding a horse or being near fire.
“Every motherly instinct is against having your daughter barefoot in the snow and surrounded by fire,” she says. “She did more of the burning scene than I would have liked. They were going to use someone else’s feet, but she insisted on doing it herself. I said, ‘You’re going to be cold.’ She said, ‘I can do it.’ She had a burlap sack dress and many layers of thermal [underwear] under that.”
The special-effects crew is “very good . . . so I wasn’t worried in that sense,” Leelee Sobieski says. “But the fire was there. So that helped and added to my emotion. . . . I couldn’t actually feel the heat from the flame, but still you look around you and you see fire, and you sort of are afraid.”
During the filming, Sobieski says, she wasn’t concerned about whether the scene might be too horrifying for a television audience. The final result stays within family-viewing limits, she says. “You don’t really see my skin burning. It’s not that gruesome, because it wouldn’t be pleasant to watch.”
For Sobieski, leading an army of actors or getting filmed burning at the stake resonates, at least to a degree, with the extraordinary experience it must have been for Joan of Arc to find herself a player in politics and war. While Sobieski’s acting world can’t seriously be compared to Joan’s real-life battles, this kind of filmmaking still goes way beyond the ordinary experiences of a teenager.
“When I’m working, it’s my life, and it’s not strange,” Sobieski says. “Like when I’m done with this film, it’s going to happen to me in one month: I’m going to say, ‘What was I doing? This is the strangest thing in the world!’ But when I’m working, it’s completely normal. Like, this makes sense. I’m in the front of the army, and there’re horses behind me, and I’m charging, and I’m in my armor, and that’s the way it is: ‘That’s life, and I’m sorry. That’s my life, and I’m OK with it, and I’d like a hot chocolate please.’
“I really feel like I’ve gone through all these different experiences in my life. . . . Emotionally I’ve really gone through them, at least for two hours. I think sometimes, ‘I’ve really done nothing. I mean, I haven’t really been on the stake. I haven’t really led an army. But in a way, yes, I really have been on the stake, and yes, I really have led an army.’ So that’s always sort of going through my mind.”
Gernon says the reality of Sobieski’s personality merges with the character of Joan that the film seeks to project.
Sobieski “is both worldly, sophisticated and strong, and at the same time innocent, naive and untouched,” Gernon says. “Her ability to balance those two sides of herself so easily and with such grace is what makes this movie work.”