'Tears' of frustration

Action adventure or deeper story about ethnic cleansing in Africa? "Tears of the Sun" is both, after some conflict between star Bruce Willis and director Antoine Fuqua. Columbia Pictures

By John Horn
Los Angeles Times

From left, actors Chad Smith, Paul Francis, Bruce Willis, Johnny Messner, Nick Chinlund, Cole Hauser and Charles Ingram are Navy SEALs sent to rescue an American doctor in Nigeria in "Tears of the Sun," which opens today. The drama was filmed on O'ahu last summer in sites that substituted for Africa. Columbia Pictures

"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, most 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 today, 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.

Constant revisions

When you shoot a movie in the middle of a dense and muddy tropical rain forest, the hazards include jumping spiders, flying termites and six-inch centipedes. But on this summer day on the "Tears of the Sun" set in the shadow of the Ko'olau Range on O'ahu, 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 his character no longer follows every order.

But the back story was excised, and during an intermittent sprinkle on the Hawai'i 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 9/11 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 adviser 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. Although 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.

An actor with ideas

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 filmed it anyway.

Bellucci — who 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.

Hawai'i subbed for Africa

Virtually the entire movie is set outdoors.

In the wake of 9/11, Fuqua reluctantly decided against filming in Africa, or even Costa Rica or Australia. Hawai'i is a good match for much of Nigeria, but its tropical storms are unrelenting.

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 nonengagement 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 re-enactment.

"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 went 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 dying, a line of people being shot, graphically dismembered bodies, and of a maimed goat writhing on the ground. The movie tested better.

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.

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."