The rich soil of truth

BRINGING the haunting romantic drama “Sweet Land” to the screen was an arduous, 16-year odyssey for its writer-director, Ali Selim.

“Writing the script was hard and lonely,” said the former director of commercials. “Raising the money almost killed me.”

The Minnesota native read Will Weaver’s short story, “A Gravestone Made of Wheat,” when it was first published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune one Sunday in 1990.

“I thought it was very simple and found it had some of those underriding political themes I am interested in -- immigration, religious, sociopolitical,” Selim said.

So he bought the rights and set out to teach himself how to write a script.

By the late ‘90s, Selim felt he had something strong enough to send out to actors and producers.

“I sent it to [actor] Gil Bellows, who was doing a workshop here in Los Angeles,” he recalled. “He selected it for his workshop and that’s when it started to take off. That’s the first time I started looking for money. I spent four years banging around and figuring out if a studio wanted to do it. None did.”

And with just cause.

There are no special effects, R-rated language, quick editing cuts or rock music in the film, which opened here Wednesday. The action is primarily set in the early 1920s in rural Minnesota. Dialogue is sparse; what little there is is primarily in German and Norwegian, without subtitles.

The story is about Olaf Torvik, a taciturn Norwegian immigrant working a farm in Minnesota who learns the meaning of love after a young woman, Inge, arrives from Norway to be his wife.

Because she is of German heritage -- it is only two years after the conclusion of World War I -- and she has no immigration papers, the small town looks upon Inge with suspicion. The two are forbidden to marry. But she stays, and their paths continue to cross. Romance blooms.

When the studios turned him down, Selim looked for independent financing. “I found a guy in Minnesota to get it started and, lo and behold, I think every penny in the budget came from him and his friends,” he said.

With the money in place, Selim set out to cast his good friend, Dan Futterman, as Olaf. But Futterman’s script of “Capote” was also ready to roll and he was no longer available.

Futterman suggested Tim Guinee.

Elizabeth Reaser was chosen to play Inge. She had just nine days to learn German phonetically before production began.

“It was insane,” she said. “I lost my mind. Everybody around me ran for the hills. I found a German translator in New York and then I started transcribing [the dialogue] phonetically. Then we had a woman in Minnesota, but she wasn’t on the set every day.”

Selim decided not to use subtitles because he believes most men and women don’t speak the same language even if they both speak English.

“I wanted to really reduce the language to the point where the thing that happens between them is really emotional rather than intellectual,” Selim said. “I wanted the audience to feel the same confusion that everyone around them felt. I wanted the actors to find another language and to tap into that other language.”

Shot on location in Minnesota, the film features the lyrical, expressive cinematography of David Tumblety that recalls the work of such painters as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.

Guinee said that filming in the country informed their performances. “The land is so gorgeous that it inspired a kind of an awe and reverence,” he said.

The two leads spent their rare downtime working together on their parts.

“Elizabeth and I were the only ones in this motel,” Guinee said. “There was nothing else to do but work.”

“Tim is a total workaholic,” Reaser said. “We didn’t have trailers, so we would sit out on these farms all day, always talking in these weird accents.”

Reaser relished the opportunity to play a part that didn’t allow her to hide behind the language.

“You really have to listen and be vulnerable and open to the other actors and the environment,” she said. “It was incredibly physical -- even the listening was physical. It forced us actors to really connect with each other.”

Though “Sweet Land” is being released alongside the studios’ high-profile holiday films, Guinee believes that audiences are hungering for a pure love story.

“[Director] Lasse Hallstrom used to tell me that we have seen so many movies now that we almost have this kind of shorthand,” he said. “And the shorthand for a relationship [movie] is, I go into the grocery. I look across the bananas. You look across them. And then it’s close-up, close-up. And then we are sleeping together. I think this is much more subtle and real.”

susan.king@latimes.com