A war of compromise

Movie directors find all sorts of diversions to unwind between camera setups. Some play basketball. Others listen to music. A few get massages. Between takes on the set of “Tears of the Sun,” director Antoine Fuqua studies photographs of genocide.

“Here, take a look at this picture,” the filmmaker says as he leafs through the Gilles Peress book “The Silence,” pointing out an image of a young Rwandan child slain in ethnic cleansing. “It takes a lot to bring tears to my eyes. But when I saw what happened to this 9-year-old, which is the same age of my son, I said, ‘I have to do something.’ ”

In an age of comic-book superheroes, Hollywood directors aim for escapism, not atrocities. Fuqua has different sensibilities and wants to challenge audiences. His last film, “Training Day” (2001), had at its center a corrupt police officer. The backdrop of “Tears of the Sun,” which opens Friday, is the unchecked slaughter of innocents caught in an African civil war. “Both movies are about the abuse of power,” Fuqua says. “And that someone has to do something about it.”

But shining a light on the world’s worst problems is not the typical subject matter for a $90-million movie, especially one starring Bruce Willis. Fuqua’s challenge was to craft a film that neither trivialized ethnic cleansing by piling on Hollywood hokum, nor played like a “Frontline” documentary by emphasizing an international crisis over an exciting narrative.

“That was the big balancing act,” Fuqua says. “I was definitely walking a tightrope the whole time.”

That’s a diplomatic spin. Just as tribes fight for power in “Tears of the Sun,” two strong factions clashed during its making. By the time the film was nearly completed, the sometimes testy relationship between Fuqua and Willis had deteriorated to the point where the two were engaging in a shouting match over the film’s tone.

Willis downplayed the disagreements about the film’s tone and was vague about any conflicts. “This has been a difficult film for us to make physically,” he says. “But we are not flying by the seat of our pants. We are continuing to explore things. We are working on keeping the script honest.”

The basic plot of the screenplay, credited to Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo but rewritten by several others including Fuqua, suggested several possible interpretations. Willis plays Lt. A.K. Waters, the leader of a Navy SEAL squad sent to rescue American doctor Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci) from vicious Nigerian rebels. Soon after the soldiers parachute in, they witness atrocities that alter their mission. They are still trying to rescue Kendricks, but now they must confront their personal response to genocide and decide how many Nigerians they should attempt to save.

But what story is more important -- the heroism or the horror? One group, led by Fuqua, pushed for an uncompromising parable about the price of indifference. Willis and his camp wanted more “African Queen” romance and gung-ho bravery -- the kind of role that tracks the popular persona Willis established in movies like “Die Hard.”

“They are both passionate about what they want,” says Joe Roth, whose Revolution Studios produced “Tears” for Sony’s Columbia Pictures. He also was the film’s unofficial U.N. peacekeeping force, spending so much time working with the filmmakers in post-production that he took an executive producer credit. “You have a director with vision and an actor with clout, two very strong voices.”

Scraps between filmmakers and actors are as old as Hollywood itself, but Willis and Fuqua’s arguments are especially noteworthy because they dramatize how difficult it has become to make an action movie that is not about fantasy, but about real life.

Increasing degrees of peril

When you shoot a movie in the middle of a dense and muddy tropical rain forest, the hazards include jumping spiders, flying termites and 6-inch-long centipedes. But on this summer day on the “Tears of the Sun” set in the shadow of the Ko’Olau Mountains, the real peril is not the environment but the film’s ever-shifting screenplay.

After Lasker and Cirillo first sold the script to Universal Studios in a bidding war seven years ago for $800,000, the screenplay passed through several revisions, all in search of the right balance of motivation and action. Some of the original script’s action set pieces and political statements -- such as a subplot about the region’s critical oil fields -- were lost in the process.

Directors from Ron Howard to Andy Davis flirted with the project, but it eventually drifted from Universal’s priorities and landed at Revolution. Willis came on board, and Lasker and Cirillo added a back story set in Bosnia to explain why Lt. Waters no longer follows every order.

But the back story was excised, and during an intermittent sprinkle on the Hawaii set, Fuqua wants to restore some complexity to the script. The previous night, the 37-year-old director drafted some scenes in which he killed off some SEALs who a day earlier had lived. The way Fuqua initially wanted to make the movie, none of the American rescuers would get out alive, Willis’ character included. “People die in war,” he says. “But I guess people don’t want to see that in movies.”

What seems more accurate is that audiences want an uplifting counterpoint to the body count. “Black Hawk Down,” which was made by the same studios behind “Tears of the Sun,” managed to take a story about a failed Somalia military mission and turn it into a bloody but uplifting tale of bravery. Released three months after the Sept. 11 attacks, “Black Hawk Down” collected more than $108 million at the box office and four Oscar nominations, winning two.

Fuqua is trying hard to give the audience something or someone to root for. Not far from where he sits, his personal assistant, Dawn Kelly, and military advisor Harry Humphries are huddled over a notebook. They are scribbling out a new scene for Bellucci’s character, in which she picks up a hand grenade and tosses it toward the enemy.

At this point in the film, Lt. Waters is a changed man. While his team initially refers to Dr. Kendricks as “the package” and goes about its business with political disinterest, Waters and his SEALs have started to realize the mission should not be limited to her rescue. But Bellucci has little to do but run for her life and look stunning; her character doesn’t get to do anything meaningful.

“Maybe I will use five seconds of this,” Fuqua says of the hand grenade toss. “But I have to do something to keep Monica’s character interesting.” Ultimately, he deletes the scene.

Kelly and Humphries aren’t the only ones revising the screenplay. Willis has his own ideas for the script. He is interested in making Waters more heroic. Willis and producing partner Arnold Rifkin want a new title, too. The movie at this point is called “Man of War,” but Willis and Rifkin tell the screenwriters they prefer the title “Hostile Rescue.” Fuqua says Willis also wants more of a love story between Waters and Kendricks, urging the director to film scenes of the two of them kissing. Rifkin says he and Willis were opposed to the kiss, but Fuqua films it anyway.

Bellucci -- who stars in the graphic rape drama “Irreversible,” also opening Friday, and will be featured in this year’s “Matrix” sequels -- suspects the smooch won’t work. “This is not an action movie,” she says. “It’s more of a dramatic story about how people have been dying for years in civil wars. These are people who are raped and killed in the worst possible ways.” She even vetoed some gushy dialogue between her character and Willis’. “I can’t talk like that,” she says.

Fuqua cuts the kiss from the film.

With the screenplay in disarray, little else goes right this morning. Fuqua looks cool and collected in a crisp T-shirt and military fatigue pants. But he is seething. He wants to film a reaction shot of Bellucci’s recoiling from the deafening sound of ordnance and grenades. But it has taken the film’s camera and pyrotechnics crews more than two hours to set up the short sequence, and as lunchtime approaches they are still not ready to begin the day’s first shot.

Even though he has been suffering from laryngitis, Fuqua loudly curses the delay. “This is ridiculous!” he shouts, his anger reverberating through the palm trees.

Once filming commences, Bellucci’s earplugs prevent her from hearing any direction. “Wait, wait. I can’t hear anything!” the actress says while explosions rain dirt upon her, the camera operator struggling to find her in his lens. The entire morning yields nothing more than a two-second shot in the finished film.

It is a minor mishap compared with what happens several months later. Stuntman Michael Barber disappears into the California surf while performing a “Tears of the Sun” parachute jump. His body washes ashore three days later.

Challenges: location, theme

Virtually the entire movie is set outdoors. In the wake of Sept. 11, Fuqua reluctantly decided against filming on location in Africa or even Costa Rica or Australia. Hawaii is a good match for much of Nigeria, but its tropical storms are unrelenting.

In one day, the skies dumped nine inches of rain on the production, and Fuqua’s crew didn’t even try to stay dry, looking as if they had just climbed out of a swimming pool.

The toughest scene to film, however, was not complicated so much by weather as it was by content. Halfway through the film, Waters’ rescue squad and the evacuees come across a village being raided by rebel soldiers. The sequence is the film’s dramatic centerpiece, challenging not only the squadron’s non-engagement orders but also its conception of what horrors one person can inflict on another.

Using his books of genocide photography as thematic storyboards, Fuqua filmed a harrowing progression of brutality. Some of the African extras, he says, broke down in tears after watching the reenactment. “It was really disturbing, just dreadful, really difficult days of shooting,” Willis says. “You couldn’t see it and not be affected by it.”

Although it lasted but a few pages in the film’s early screenplay drafts, when Fuqua first assembled the ethnic cleansing scene, it goes on for a grueling 21 minutes. Revolution feared it was simply too much for an audience to take. “His cut of the movie was so horrifying to me and so tough,” Roth says.

Revolution asked Fuqua to show the film to an audience, concerned the ethnic cleansing would be so difficult to watch that the rest of the movie would suffer. The studio was right. Fuqua recut the scene to 18 minutes (the final cut of the film is slightly more than 2 hours). He eliminated footage of a baby’s dying, a line of people being shot, graphically dismembered bodies, and of a maimed goat writhing on the ground. The movie tested better.

Revolution asked that Fuqua trim the scene even more, and he shaved it to 14 minutes. By then, he had cut too much. The movie’s third act, propelled by the incident, no longer made dramatic sense.

“It played badly,” Roth says. “The audience didn’t have a rooting interest in the story.” The sequence was restored to 18 minutes.

All the same, the scene is not featured prominently in the film’s advertising, and to watch the “Tears of the Sun” preview you wouldn’t know ethnic cleansing is at the film’s center.

Revolution and the film’s screenwriters also wanted to change the setting from Nigeria to a fictional African country. If the country were called the “Republic of West Africa,” as it was first dubbed, it could stand in for every African nation in the midst of civil war, the thinking went. By specifying a country, Fuqua risks the same criticism leveled at “The Hurricane” and “A Beautiful Mind,” movies that mixed fact and fiction and suffered the consequences.

But Fuqua insisted Nigeria remain, believing it is the world’s next flashpoint and that he can help focus attention on the country’s plight. “I said, ‘Why should we change it? This is what is happening right there, right now. It’s the next place to explode.’ ”

Ethnic and tribal violence have gripped Nigeria for years, and during the country’s civil war more than 1 million died, most from starvation. It’s but a fraction of Africa’s total devastation. Some 2.5 million have died in the Congo, as many as 1.5 million in Rwanda and Burundi. All told, according to the United Nations, 7 million Africans were killed in 32 wars between 1960 and 1998.

How will it be received?

As the United States worries about war in Iraq, “Tears of the Sun” will test moviegoers’ resolve in watching a movie filled with the realism of violent conflict. Sony recently decided to postpone the film’s European release from March to at least October, in part because the movie’s celebration of U.S. military might play badly with anti-American sentiment running so high.

The response in the States so far has been positive.

“I think people by and large like to distract themselves from real events when they go to movies,” says Roth. “But people were able to separate the movie from what is going on in the rest of the world,” he says of preview screenings.

“Training Day” was postponed by the Sept. 11 attacks. “Everybody was afraid of it because it was about a dirty cop when cops were heroes, and said it wouldn’t do well,” Fuqua says. The film not only was a box-office hit with a gross of $76.3 million, but also won the best actor Oscar for Denzel Washington. “I would hope [with “Tears of the Sun”] that people would want to see a little more reality than we give them credit for,” Fuqua says.

But not too much reality. “We didn’t want to make a political film,” Rifkin says. “We wanted to make a movie about heroic men.”

Back on the Hawaii set, Willis says the movie still deals with an issue that news reporters have ignored. “Why hasn’t the media gone into Africa?” he asks. “They have completely neglected what has happened in the last 10 years. They won’t take a camera in there,” the actor says in Fuqua’s trailer, rattling off statistics about how many people have died.

“We have stuff that is going to shock people, and we have some of the traditional Hollywood things,” the actor says before he goes back to film a battle scene. “There are action sequences, yes. But the film we ended up making is far closer to what I originally wanted to get made.”