A thriller hinging on a chemistry test

BRAZILIAN director Fernando Meirelles had already teamed up with distinguished cinematographer Cesar Charlone for a vivid portrayal of the gritty, violent world of a godless Brazilian slum in the Oscar-nominated “City of God.”

But in the upcoming film “The Constant Gardener,” the men faced a far more nuanced challenge: how to imbue an unconventional love story with the deep urgency that makes defending the relationship seem worth facing death.

Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a staid British diplomat who is determined to solve the murder of his firebrand activist wife, Tessa, portrayed by Rachel Weisz. Creating a larger-than-life love story between these opposites who attract was critical: It had to drive Quayle’s journey into an international intrigue involving profit-hungry pharmaceutical companies -- as well as a feverish investigation into the authenticity of his own marriage.

“This was my biggest fear,” Meirelles said in his Portuguese-inflected English. “I was really afraid of this relationship, and I thought it would be hard to make it work. If you don’t buy [it] ... there’s no plot.”

This is no exaggeration. This convincing alchemy of love and destiny is the driving force behind the most memorable romantic thrillers, from “Casablanca” to “Indochine.” The failure to conjure this elusive but unmistakable chemistry has resulted in innumerable film flops.

To Meirelles, it seemed formidable.

So he turned to Fiennes and Weisz.

Meirelles said he gave them free rein to translate the script, to improvise entire scenes, to build the small moments of tenderness, tension and humor that constitute the intimate daily life of a couple.

“You really had to establish a good relationship,” Meirelles said. “This didn’t come from the script or the directing, it comes from the acting. It was Ralph and Rachel who made their chemistry work. [Justin and Tessa] are really very different from one another. But they connect.”

And he relied on the fluidity of Charlone, whose verite shooting style is guided by a meticulously controlled technical dexterity that allowed him to follow an improvised scene wherever it went.

As a result, when Tessa appears to laugh spontaneously at one of Justin’s jokes in the film, it’s because Fiennes sometimes threw in his own on the spot. “It was like jazz. Like jamming,” Weisz said. “Anything could happen at any moment. Some moments made it into the movie, some didn’t. [Charlone] just went with it.”

On one sun-addled day, Fiennes drove around the Kenyan bush with Meirelles and Charlone, ad-libbing a monologue about his feelings for Tessa, footage that was edited into a memorable soliloquy in the film. “Fernando’s got a very relaxed spirit,” Fiennes said. “He’s not bound by the script. To make this relationship work, he encouraged us to play, to experiment in getting the kind of intimacy and casualness of a couple.”

The relationship was the focus, too, for screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, who teased the love story from John le Carre’s 500-page novel.

“I wanted to concentrate on the human story and make the pharmaceutical mystery a little more peripheral,” Caine said.

“This is a man who, in investigating his wife’s death, becomes committed to her cause and comes to understand her better than he ever did when she was alive.”

“If you’re going to kill off a character early and care about the character left behind,” Caine said, “you have to care about that dead person.”

Perhaps the film’s keenest critic, Le Carre, thought the movie had not only succeeded in capturing his story but had refashioned it into an intrinsically unique work of art that was “wonderfully different” from his novel.

“Somewhere in the movie, the earth moves,” said Le Carre, veteran of numerous film adaptations -- from “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” to the critically panned “Tailor of Panama” -- and who was famously quoted as saying that having a book turned into a film was “like having a cow turned into a bouillon cube.”

“I have never in my life come across such a surge of passion in secondary material,” Le Carre said. “Fernando was able to transfer all of that feeling and get it into the heart of the movie. It works superbly.”

‘A bit of a throwback’

JUSTIN QUAYLE is the sort of gentleman of privilege that only many generations of the British class system can produce. Fiennes said he spent a long lunch with Le Carre in March 2004 to pick his brain on fleshing out the character, from his clothes to his mannerisms.

“Justin is a bit of a throwback,” Fiennes said. “He’s not a career diplomat. He’s come into it because his father did it, but he’s not pushing to get ahead, or become an ambassador. He is a passive and literally gentle man, and he has that grace of a well-bred English schoolboy.”

When the couple first meet, Justin is obediently delivering a dull lecture he didn’t even write, defending -- with little conviction -- British involvement in the war in Iraq. A woman in the audience boldly challenges him: Tessa, an activist, who is as young and shrill as Justin is refined and tactful.

“From the beginning, I never understood precisely why a guy like Justin would be involved with someone like Tessa,” Meirelles said. “[Justin] was older than her, and very different. He’s a gentleman. And when [Tessa] first met him she’s so impolite and she challenges him in front of people. He’s a diplomat. He does everything the official way. She wants to fight against the established order.”

But Justin secretly agrees with Tessa, and besides, she’s beautiful. They go for a drink and fall into bed.

“What put them together is really physical attraction,” Meirelles said. “After they first meet, we cut to the bed immediately. You see that there is a physical connection.”

Simon Channing-Williams, the producer of “The Constant Gardener,” felt that fast-forwarding their relationship was an effective way of establishing their connection but “also a very truthful way.”

“People do get into bed with each other, for any reason, if the chemistry works,” he said. “Fernando was absolutely right. Grasp the moment.”

It also prepared the groundwork for a key plot contrivance: A short but torrid while later, when Tessa asks to accompany him on his next posting to Africa, it’s obvious why Justin is powerless to refuse. He’s been living a bland, orderly existence. Tessa is living in the moment; he wants to live there with her.

Once in Kenya, Tessa becomes a tireless advocate for the poor and rattles the diplomatic community. Then Tessa turns up dead, on a trip with a handsome, now-missing African doctor -- one of the men with whom she may have been unfaithful. Or was she?

Justin’s quest to know transforms him into a sort of anti-James Bond, an ordinary man turned tanned, tough crusader who delves deep into the less-than-honorable intentions of multinational pharmaceutical companies.

“What Le Carre suggests in his book is that that doesn’t work anymore, the people who are decent and nonconfrontational,” Fiennes said. “He deliberately sets up Justin as something that doesn’t work anymore.”

As played by Weisz, Tessa too is a throwback -- to the strong female characters of 1940s movies.

Tessa and Justin are attempting a marriage of equals, upsetting a social order in which the wives of the mostly male diplomats are expected to do nothing that might threaten their husbands’ careers.

“To want everybody to like you is just such an insignificant thing to her,” Weisz said. “She knows what she’s doing is so much more important. She just can’t stop herself from losing her temper for what she believes in.”

Fiennes’ Justin is supportive of Tessa, though he is often embarrassed by her: She shows up at cocktail parties looking ravishing and confronts a Kenyan health minister about why pregnant women are not getting the drugs needed to prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus to their unborn children. But Justin finds himself silently cheering her on. Tessa does the things he would do if he had the courage.

Justin is not the only one enriched by their union. Tessa’s relationship with Justin, Weisz said, “is like a rock she holds onto. He’s got stability and integrity and constancy. She says to him, ‘I feel safe with you.’ They express things that the other lacks.”

Somewhere along the line, “The Constant Gardener” was imagined as a more commercial venture, with a bigger budget and a role for someone like Hugh Grant, according to one key player involved -- though Channing-Williams denies a substantively different movie was ever contemplated.

Meirelles wasn’t the first director on the project.

But by fall 2003, when the final team was ready for production, director Mike Newell dropped out to direct the next Harry Potter film. Meirelles happened to be in London at the time, and Channing-Williams, the producer, invited him out for a drink and showed him a copy of the script. By the following January, the two were in Kenya, beginning preproduction on the $25-million project.

The Kenyan government and the British High Commission were deeply supportive of the project, despite the film’s portrayal of collusion in an unethical program in which Africans are used as guinea pigs to test a drug with lethal side effects, a plot that in the novel is set during a previous government.

“They were fantastic,” Channing-Williams said. “They accept that corruption does exist. They were very grown up about it.”

To shoot in the Kenyan bush, he had to get approval of an entirely different kind: from the tribal elders of the region. By the end, they had made him an honorary elder of the tribe, and the tribespeople showed up at the wrap party in July 2004 with a detachment of warriors for a night of drumming and dancing, Channing-Williams said.

Anchored by cinematography

IF Charlone’s technical skills allowed Fiennes and Weisz to take risks in portraying intimacy, his cinematography also created the visual authenticity that anchors the geography and psychological suspense of the film.

“I tried to translate the mood of what was going on at that period, what the characters were feeling at every moment,” Charlone said. “After Tessa’s death, for example, everything is harsh and dark.”

At some points in the production, Charlone said, he actually handed the camera to Fiennes.

“When we cut to his point of view at the morgue, it’s Ralph doing the camera,” Charlone said. “It’s about trying to do film in a different way and not to put so many technical obstacles in the way.”

In Le Carre’s novel, the taut, spare prose leaves much of the physical world to the imagination.

But through Charlone’s lens, Justin’s Europe is gray and monochromatic. Tessa’s Kenya seems to step off the screen. A volcano caldera rears up like a perfect terra cotta bowl. A wetlands is revealed as a shimmering mosaic of pink wading birds. The savanna is a sun-drenched maze of red rock and ochre brush. Even Nairobi’s notorious Kibera shantytown glows with sheer visual energy.

Charlone escalates the visual tension as Justin adopts his wife’s crusade against a corrupt conspiracy of international drug companies and foreign aid entities and begins a sweeping journey from Africa to Europe.

When Justin roams through cities, the skyscrapers loom menacingly overhead with an ominousness that recalls the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as the physical world mirrors Justin’s internal turmoil and the tension swirling around him.

“Everything in Justin’s diplomatic world is told in green hues,” Charlone said. “With Tessa, red comes into his life. In the end, Justin is portrayed more in red, because he has entered Tessa’s world and left behind the green world.”

“I don’t expect the audience to feel it or get it,” he said. “But I think maybe it conveys a subtle feeling.”

Making the film itself became something of an existential cause celebre. Meirelles and Claire Simpson -- who won an Academy Award for editing Oliver Stone’s Vietnam film “Platoon” -- tried six ways to begin the movie before delving into the story at Tessa’s death, like the novel. They kept fine-tuning the cut until close to the time it was to begin screening.

“We never stopped creating new scenes,” Meirelles said. “At the end of March, we were mixing in one room, and in the other room I was calling actors and changing lines.”

The plot too twists and turns until the very last moment, and when this runaway train finally shudders to a halt, Justin’s transcontinental odyssey has become a journey into the heart of his deepened love for Tessa.

“I found it very big,” Fiennes said of his final scene as Justin. “It goes beyond throwing yourself in front of a truck for your wife but facing death. It’s really quite profound.”