Ray Pride

What does it take to shed a heart of darkness?

In Antoine Fuqua's first picture since the Oscar-winning "Training Day," the 37-year-old director attempts to meld archetypal action filmmaking to social conscience, with stirring results. "Tears of the Sun" tells the story of a reserved Navy Seal (Bruce Willis) whose unit is dispatched to Nigeria to "extract" a volunteer nurse (Monica Bellucci) who is married to an American. She doesn't want to leave her patients, and complications lead to a trek through the jungle toward the Cameroon border by Willis' squad and the hardiest of Bellucci's charges.

Who would believe an apocryphal apocalypse about war waged in a small nation over its oil? There are quiet strengths to Fuqua's strange, liberally dark movie, mostly lit in machined greens, blues and blacks, beginning with a matter-of-fact montage of murder and atrocity news footage. Its swift violence is trumped later by the horrific tableau of the aftermath of the slaughter of a village by ethnic cleansing. Despite occasional gnomic action-dialogue exchanges like "Go with God" or "God already left Africa," it's also bracing to see an actress holding her own in a movie like this. Even if the movie relies on archetype, it asks a plain, timeless and utterly topical question: how can you turn your eye from senseless slaughter?

"This is a fictional film," Fuqua quickly states, "but it's a collage of different things that have taken place in the last thirty, forty years in West Africa. It's not like I'm picking on Nigeria. The idea was to set the story in a major city having civil unrest. Immediately, my mind went to Lagos, populated as it is with different ethnic groups and different dialects. It's to represent pretty much all of Africa. It could have been Rwanda, Zaire, Sierra Leone."

"It was mainly about character," he says when I ask about the grainy, grimy palette. "You look at the movie, Bruce's character is a dark character. I didn't want him to be the guy you saw in `Die Hard.' I told Bruce every day, you have a black heart, you've seen a lot of things. You're not a happy guy, you're not cracking jokes."

After two movies with major stars, both dealing with dark social issues, Fuqua doesn't seem scared of the job. "I'm cautious, "he says. "You want to do it right. But not scared. I want to base the environments of my movies on real environments, real politics. Corruption in police forces is a real situation; ethnic cleansing and Navy Seals going and doing these jobs are real. Dealing with sensitive subjects, there's a pressure I put on myself."

What about the carnage? Where do you draw the line, how do you avoid aestheticizing violence? "It's tough. It's tough. You can imagine when people witness violence every day, your tolerance goes up. When it comes to filming it, you have to take care. We trimmed it down quite a bit, actually. There were things I still felt was OK, Joe Roth [the head of producer Revolution Studios] would come in and go, `Oh God!' Other people would come in, `Whoa!' Obviously I've seen too much. So we'd bring in fresh eyes. But it's necessary. At some point, I just wouldn't cut any more of it. The whole point is you have to show the Navy Seals witnessing something that was that tough to watch to make them turn, to bring out their humanity. It has to still have a punch in order for you to understand what happens."

A veteran of commercials and videos, Fuqua says he discovered directing "totally by accident." He grew up in Pittsburgh, son of an H.J. Heinz employee. He's quick to point out he's not complaining. "In this country, we have our ghettos and we have our hard times. But you sit and talk to some of these kids we cast who can still smile, these boys from Sudan, and what they went through, it puts it in perspective real quick. Most of them don't know how old they are, they don't know where their parents are, most of their friends have been eaten by crocodiles and lions and they can still smile, get up every day and laugh at jokes. That's some heroism."

Fuqua studied to be an electrical engineer, but a professor pointed him toward art, where he discovered work by the likes of de Kooning, Vermeer and Dali. Needing a job in New York, he became a production assistant. "It happens to a lot of filmmakers. It's an escape. I used to go to the movies, stay in the movies, three or four a day. I'd stay up till two or three in the morning and watch Kurosawa movies before I knew who he was. I watched all the old David Lean movies. I couldn't wait for the directors and producers' names to get off the screen!"

He cites one unexpected influence: Giorgio Armani, for whom he did twenty-minute commercials--"They were stories"--to mark the opening of his Emporio Armani stores. "He still sends me clothes. When I was a kid, I used to live in my grandmother's basement. It was crowded; it was just a place in the house. I read an article where he talked about being a craftsman. And that's not a word used often in ghettos. He talked about, whatever he would do, if he was a shoemaker, whatever he was, he was going to try to be the best at that. He gave me ideas about the possibility finding a craft that I would be passionate about. When I got to school, electrical engineering, I wasn't passionate about that craft. So I'm glad film found me."

"Tears of the Sun" opens Friday.

(2003-03-05)

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