The View from the Bridge (27 page)

The film had been offered to me via my agent by Ismail Merchant of the famed Merchant Ivory filmmaking duo. They specialized in intelligent, literary adaptations but evidently were looking to branch out into more popular fare and widen their stable of directors, as well. I am certain Ismail, a charming man, originally from Mumbai, had no idea who I was, but once I was on his radar (being warm, if not hot, for the moment), he arranged to meet me in New York. Ismail originally had an American actor in mind for the role of the English officer but I demurred.

“Here's a story about an Englishman who disguises himself as an Indian,” I reasoned. “If you cast this actor, you will have an American disguising himself as an Englishman, disguising himself as an Indian. We will be lost in the stunt, even if he pulls it off, and not pay attention to the story and the things we want to take for granted, i.e., that it concerns an Englishman.”

In the end, Pierce Brosnan and I met in Los Angeles.

“Good grief, your eyes are blue,” I exclaimed without preamble at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “You'll have to wear brown contact lenses.” Brosnan blanched. He's a gent who takes things slowly, and we probably hadn't even sat down by then. Actors always start wary.

“I have a pathological fear of putting anything on my eyes,” he objected.

“It's nothing,” said I, staring to yank out one of my own lenses by way of helpful demonstration, causing him to turn very pale. Indians, excepting Pathans, do not have blue eyes, Amy Irving in
The Far Pavilions
notwithstanding.

One could write an entire book about making
The Deceivers
, and in fact there is one with Ismail Merchant's name on it, though I am not sure who the author really is and don't find it especially accurate. How could it be when neither Ismail nor his ghostwriter was there for most of the filming? (Commenting on music allegedly composed by Frederick the Great, Voltaire observed, “Never criticize music by a monarch; you may never know by whom it was written.”)

The Deceivers
was four months of backbreaking work, but I loved making an old-style, Alexander Korda-type movie. Once I discovered that there was a cavalry charge in the script, I was a goner. My wife felt the same way, provided she got to ride in the charge, which she did, swaddled in a hot, red, woolen uniform among India's crack 101st cavalry. People were alarmed at the prospect of our taking a nine-month-old child to India. “Why?” Lauren asked. “They have lots of kids there.” I loved India, with all its color and contradictions, the staggering wealth, the appalling squalor—this is shorthand, I know, but if I start on India, I won't stop, and this isn't a travel book, it's a memoir. Besides, I am haunted by the suspicion that my travel writing may come out as hilariously as Robert Newton's Inspector Fix, bullshitting to Cantinflas's gullible Passepartout in
Around the World in 80 Days
. “India? Few know it as I do. The mosques! The minarets! Indian maidens! Statuesque! Barbaric! Ah, the Road to Mandalay . . .”

Despite our awkward early meeting Pierce Brosnan and I got on wonderfully. He responded to my exuberance, and I to his courtly hipness. He even mastered brown contacts, delivering a wonderfully self-effacing performance as the schizoid protagonist who goes searching for the worst thing in the world, only to discover he's carrying it in his pocket. In the hands of a lesser talent, the transformation of a white man into an Indian could have easily become a stunt, calling attention to itself as an act of empty virtuosity. In Brosnan's hands, it becomes part of this unlucky man's tragic descent into madness.

As I became friends with Brosnan, my wife became friends with his. Late at night, he would read Irish poetry aloud while we three sat and listened. Some of us were stoned. Beneath the suave, tuxedoed exterior for which he became known as James Bond, Brosnan is a Yeats-quoting beachcomber.

India was an adventure from start to finish. Ismail had promised to be on site for the entire shoot, guiding Tim Van Rellim, our producer, and me through the tricky intricacies of Indian culture, politics, and what have you. But in the end we were left much to our own devices until the last weeks of filming. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Merchant Ivory Films, and Ismail and James Ivory were busy taking bows at the Kennedy Center while Tim and I ran afoul of such characters as the head of the local Jaipur mafia, who, when we declined to deal with him, had to save face by making sure that our shooting was disrupted if not destroyed. Scores of hooligans stormed through our sets while we were rolling; equipment was sabotaged or stolen; “cultural” societies were founded for the sole purpose of suing us, alleging pornographic distortions of Indian culture.

But nothing could prevent the total exhilaration of our shoot, of India itself, where you can tack superlatives onto anything and be accurate. It was the most, the best, the worst; it was inspiring, dispiriting, colorful, irresistible—you name it. It was also a labyrinthine bureaucracy, whose economic models were India's long-time ally, the USSR, for whom economics (to paraphrase John McCain) was not a strong suit. This meant, among other things, that everything you brought into the country, you had to take out again when you left. A vacuum cleaner, for example, might deprive a sweeper of his job, so it had to go back with us. There was no Coca-Cola, only their poisonous approximation, and no cars except the ones they manufactured, called Ambassadors. (Driving in India makes you believe in karma.) The crew was great at improvising solutions to the endless problems that presented themselves. One day when we needed our tulip crane for a big shot, I was flummoxed to learn that four of its bolts had been stolen, incapacitating a vital piece of equipment. I don't deal well with last-minute alterations to The Plan, but my Indian crew managed to mill four new bolts by the time we were ready to roll.

Indian actors are terrific, and Indian people among the warmest, fastest (those superlatives again) friends you will ever make. One of our stars was Shashi Kapoor, the Paul Newman of India, so memorable in other Merchant Ivory films, notably opposite Greta Scacchi in
Heat and Dust
, where he was just about the handsomest (est!) man I'd ever seen. Now, even weighing in at about three hundred pounds, he drew thousands of enthralled observers wherever we set him before a camera.

The film was designed by the great Ken Adam, whom I'd met on
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
, and shot by the eccentric Walter Lassally (
Tom Jones
,
Zorba the Greek
, etc.).

One of the paradoxical ironies of the movie business is that, if you do your job really well, your price goes up, and people can't afford you. Ken Adam, designer of
Barry Lyndon
and all those James Bond films, was thought to be too expensive to hire on anything less, by this point in his career—the irony being that as a production designer, it was his
responsibility
to make things look more expensive than they really were. Adam took the job at Ismail's bargain basement prices to prove that this was (still) what he was good at.

Ken was the film's artistic conscience, ready to lie down in front of the train if that's what it took to preserve its aesthetic integrity. We needed a Georgian church in which our hero marries at the start of the tale—essentially, Jane Austen's India. Find a Georgian church still extant in India, if you think you can. We drove hours on someone's recommendation and came upon what was self-evidently a Victorian church. “Let's go with this,” I declared. “No one will ever know.”

“
I
will know,” said Ken Adam, with a glint behind his enormous, thick-lensed glasses, “and if you use this church, I take my name off the picture.”

We kept looking and eventually discovered an exquisite Georgian church in Agra—and I learned something about what makes a great production designer, and how to keep your integrity.

Back in London, where the film was edited, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that my little family had fallen in love with the city, a passion that was to have far-reaching consequences.

The bad news was that I had picked the wrong editor. To be fair—to me—I had chosen him by default, over the phone from Mumbai, when my original choice had inexplicably bailed while I was hunting locations. Maybe his departure was not entirely inexplicable. I had learned only relatively late in the production of Ismail's reputation. He had his fans and his detractors, and like many independent producers was sometimes late with checks and low on salaries. In the beginning I was dismayed when the owner of our editing equipment would call, threatening to repossess same. I would call Paul Bradley, who ran the Merchant Ivory office in Soho, in a state of high alarm, relating these dire tidings. Paul always had the same answer: “Really? This is the first I heard of it” (i.e., the unpaid bill). Gradually, I became accustomed to this roller coaster, but Ismail's modus operandi was more than some people were prepared for. (Again, to be fair, the world of the independent producer is a precarious one. Checks are frequently late or go missing. Sam Spiegel, producer of four of the greatest films of all time,
The African Queen
,
On the Waterfront
,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and
Lawrence of Arabia
, was notorious for being dilatory in the check department.)

My editor was a different problem altogether. With the loss of my original first choice, I panicked over there in India and chose a persistent substitute in whom I hadn't quite believed. Although Bill Dornisch ran a cutting room that resembled a madhouse, with torn, scratched workprint trims dangling everywhere, my editor on
The Deceivers
, by contrast, ran a surgically pristine editing room where nothing was out of place and the workprint didn't have a scratch. Unfortunately, he could not, to my way of thinking, cut film. Or, to make allowances, he couldn't cut
this
film, and I didn't do what I should have done in response. Why not? A good question. My congenital reluctance to confront? To make waves? My inability to find an available substitute? In the end my brother-in-law, Roger Spottiswoode, the director of such classics as
Under Fire
(and former editor for such as Sam Peckinpah) flew to London and made what sense he could of the footage, though by this time Ismail's funds had indeed run out. The film was not a commercial success but remains very watchable and gratifyingly dark, and Brosnan's performance remains a standout.

Following the completion of
The Deceivers
in the spring of 1988, my wife and I found ourselves driving down the M4 motorway outside London. “This road makes me sad,” I declared abruptly. “Because this is the road to the airport,” I explained when she asked me why, “and one day we'll be traveling it in only one direction.”

She thought about this and then said, “I didn't realize you felt this way.”

“Neither did I,” I conceded, but I did. There was silence in the car as I realized we were both wondering the same thing. What if we didn't go back? Was it possible to earn a living out of Hollywood if you didn't live in Hollywood?

WINDMILLS REDUX

We decided a
reality check was in order and returned to Los Angeles in July, still paying rent on our Soho house and me keeping the key and my passport in my pocket, telling myself that we could return at a moment's notice. In Los Angeles Tanen was still enthusiastic about
Don Q
, the script for which he found hilarious. The question now was, Who should play the Don? I suggested one actor and he scowled.

“I'd rather give the money to the American Cancer Society.”

The question was answered by Ron, who had just seen John Lithgow on Broadway in New York in
M. Butterfly
.

“He's the Don,” said Ron.

I had, as it happened, directed Lithgow in
The Day After
. Paramount sent me to New York to witness his astonishing performance in David Henry Hwang's play, and I went backstage to see him afterward.

“God no, not a starring role,” he protested, when I explained why I was there. “I've never carried a picture. I couldn't carry a picture.”

“Will you at least
read
it?” I begged. Lithgow was nothing if not polite. He promised to read the script, but I knew the planets were slipping out of alignment and phoned Lucchesi, trying not to sound desperate.

“He says he can't carry a picture,” I reported. “How can we make him do it?”

Lucchesi thought and said, “We'll stage a reading of the screenplay on a night when his theater's dark. Get any actors he names to be in it with him and make a contribution to Actors Equity or something.”

This ploy actually worked. On an insufferably hot, muggy August afternoon at the Minskoff Rehearsal studios in New York, with a roadshow company of
South Pacific
practicing next door and “Bloody Mary is the girl I love” thumping through the walls, I assembled my cast around a group of trestle tables, scripts in hand, and gave them the only stage directions for which there was time, all too aware of a clutch of Paramount executives who had flown in from LA and were watching the proceedings skeptically.

“Think
Wizard of Oz
,” I told them. “And have fun.”

With Lithgow as Don Quixote and Jerry Stiller as Sancho, along with Joe Morton and a host of other notables doing this out of the goodness of their hearts (and a substantial contribution by Paramount to an actors' charity), we launched into the Don's odyssey.

The script was a sensation. I sat there, no longer aware of
South Pacific
, in a state of pleasant astonishment. The small audience (also astonished) laughed heartily, the actors were clearly enjoying themselves, and at the end no one wanted to leave, a sure indication of success.