WAR & REMEMBRANCE




By Rebecca Ascher-Walsh
Entertainment Weekly
Issue 354, p58, 4p
Features/Holiday Movie Section
November 11, 1996.
AN UNCINEMATIC BOOK, A DOOMED ROMANCE, AND A LOT OF SAND--THE ENGLISH PATIENT WAS NO EASY SELL. LUCKILY, THE FILMMAKERS FELT AN UNDYING PASSION FOR IT.






The peril of passion gone awry can be an aching heart--and that's assuming no heavy lifting is involved. On this February afternoon in Rome, Ralph Fiennes, who has spent several of the last 105 days hauling the limp body of his English Patient costar Kristin Scott Thomas around Tunisia's desert, is feeling the ruin of romance in his back.

Looking especially slight and vulnerable in khaki shorts, a button-down shirt, and a back girdle, the pale Fiennes makes his way onto a Cinecitta studio soundstage with such gingerly steps that he might be balancing a phone book on his head. Producer Saul Zaentz, a smiling Orson Welles look-alike who needed no padding to fill out the Santa Claus costume he wore for the cast and crew during the holidays, dodges a snack table that's laden with jugs of red wine and plates of pizza to offer his leading man a sympathetic smile and the name of a local masseuse. "I always panic, but I'm an optimist by nature," says Zaentz, 75, as Fiennes slinks off behind the four-story fiberglass construction that serves as the exterior of a desert cave.

If the producer is taking the situation in better stride than his leading man could dream of having right now, it's because the four years it's taken to bring Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel to the screen have been so fraught with troubles--including director Anthony Minghella breaking his ankle two months into production--that Zaentz has become immune to trauma.

The English Patient is a mosaic of love stories in Italy and North Africa during World War II--one an illicit affair between explorer Count Laszlo de Almasy (Fiennes) and the married Katharine Clifton (Thomas) told in flashbacks, the other between Almasy's nurse (Juliette Binoche) and a British-trained bomb specialist (Naveen Andrews). It's the kind of pitch that makes studios shudder: a period piece with expensive costumes and locations and a nonchronological narrative offset by angst rather than action. But where Hollywood fears to tread, the Berkeley, Calif.-based Zaentz--who has won 13 Oscars and, with such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a reputation as an artistic standard-bearer among independent producers--rushes in.

When Minghella called Zaentz in 1992 and said he was interested in directing the inherently uncinematic English Patient, he trusted that the producer's literary tastes would override his concerns about the book's unfilmability, and he was right. "Cuckoo's Nest was available for 13 years, but they wanted a big star. Even asking for no money, we still couldn't get it made," Zaentz says with the confidence of one who has been proved right. "With Amadeus, one studio head said, 'Costume pictures don't do any business.' Another said, 'A picture about classical music?' and threw up his arms."

"Everyone is interested in pain, passion, and war," insists Minghella. But not everyone was interested in the filmmakers: Minghella, who had directed the critically acclaimed ghostly love story Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1991, was coming off the less stellar Matt Dillon romance Mr. Wonderful; Zaentz, who had impressed audiences with 1988's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, had lost $20 million with the missionary drama At Play in the Fields of the Lord, a blow that left his eponymous company unable to finance a film without backing from a distributor.

As Minghella began to write The English Patient's screenplay, making the novel's parallel love stories more linear, he and Zaentz appealed to actors to come on board for what they knew, at $31 million, would be a less-than-Hollywood budget. Much to their surprise, they got their first choices. Fiennes, who was making Kathryn Bigelow's futuristic thriller Strange Days, agreed to costar with Binoche, with whom he had made a British adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 1992. "I wouldn't do it lightly," says the star of his decision to take a 50 percent salary cut from his usual asking price, "but I thought these were exceptional circumstances."

Fiennes, 33, who describes his character as "difficult" and "remote," seems well suited to the role: The toll of the last five months of filming, as well as a recent separation from his wife of two years, actress Alex Kingston, has left him emotionally exhausted, and he rarely glances up from the floor of the soundstage. "These are people who lay their feelings and their lives on the line in impossible circumstances. Even if they survive them, they leave in their wake other destroyed people. Feeling all of these things is very upsetting."

As Fiennes sits still, seemingly intent on expending as little energy as possible, Thomas, brunet hair dyed blond for the role, bounces around the soundstage. "This part is my dream come true," says the 36-year-old actress, who came to the filmmakers' attention with her role as Fiona, the elegant British aristocrat who pines for best friend Hugh Grant, in Four Weddings and a Funeral. "I wrote letters, begged and pleaded for the role. To give in to a passion like that, to get swept up like that...I want to be Katharine forever and ever."

But 20th Century Fox, which had agreed to put in most of the remaining $26 million alongside Zaentz's $5 million in return for distribution rights, wasn't sure it wanted Thomas to be Katharine for even a moment. Just before shooting was to begin in August 1995, unsure the film could recoup its financing with the assembled cast, Fox pulled the plug.

"They wanted names," says Zaentz, settling into a chair on the set in Italy. "Someone at Fox said, 'I want four stars on this picture.' But we were making our film, we weren't making theirs. The cast and crew were here, and they all took a three-week vacation without pay."

Zaentz, who was in Berkeley at the time, and Minghella, who was in Rome, panicked. "We were on our knees," says Minghella. "And then in came the unlikely angel of [Miramax's] Harvey Weinstein." Weinstein got the okay for the $26 million investment--more than he alone could approve--from parent company Disney; the production got the money it needed to film in Tuscany, Venice, Rome, and Tunisia, where getting to one set required a 20-minute hike and donkeys to carry the equipment.

"Locations are where locations belong," says Zaentz. "Being in the desert, that's the place you find out how far the actors can stretch."

Fiennes has been stretched thin. While Thomas plans to return for a vacation with her husband and two children, her costar is dreaming of lying on a beach. "It's exciting to be in so many places," he says with a smile, "but it's not the same thing as being on holiday. I knew there would be desert locations; I just didn't know they would be for this long."

Nine months later, Miramax may be having the same reaction: Patient's running time of 2 hours and 39 minutes is enough to make any distributor anxious. "The people who love it want another half hour," says Minghella. "The people who don't, want it to end a lot earlier. But this has to be perceived as a feast, and we don't expect people to eat quickly."

If few audience members want to make that kind of sit-down commitment, "I won't be disappointed, I'll be heartbroken," Zaentz says in the spirit of a true romantic. "But one of my maxims is, Don't kick yourself in the ass the rest of your life saying 'I should have done this.' That way, you're still heartbroken, but you can live with it."


 

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