An Intimate Epic Out of Africa

So, how does an anti-epic filmmaker go from Lean to lean? Easy. Rafelson simply instructed his camera operators to limit all scenic shots to 51/2 seconds or less.

Back home in his office near the somewhat different landscape of Sunset Strip (one of the few safari jackets in Los Angeles that's actually ever been on safari hangs in a corner), Rafelson doesn't want to get bogged down in definitions of what really constitutes an epic.

''I never thought of the picture as having epic dimensions until somebody else said it to me. Is a picture like (Werner Herzog's) Aguirre: Wrath of God, an epic film? Or is it a small film done in an exotic locale that has epic struggle? I thought of this film as really being an intimate study of the people who are in it and was prepared to make it for less money along the lines of Herzog's. As the picture got made, more extras arrived, more wardrobe, so there were more people, more problems. I felt completely at ease dealing with larger numbers, but I certainly wanted it to be an intimate study.''

It was not waiting to capture the perfect sunset that tested the director's patience but rather another, minutely harrowing night-time sequence in which he had to coax a recalcitrant beetle to crawl into the ear of the game but tiring Iain Glen (playing Speke), a crucial incident which left the real-life Speke half-deaf. ''A f ---ing nightmare,'' Rafelson remembers. Although hundreds of bugs had been rounded up, they became rigid and immobile in the cool of the evening. As the night wore on, the crew was reduced to naming the buggers and betting on their next move: '''OK, Joe, here's 10 that says he can make it to Speke's face,''' laughs Rafelson. ''And then one decided to wander into Speke's ear. Just one of those miracles.''

Discussions of what is or isn't an epic aside, the physical conditions the crew faced during their 11 weeks in Kenya forced Rafelson to resort to some of the same bare-bones filmmaking that marked his earliest work. With rugged locations and hellish temperatures, he was sometimes forced to work with no more than seven or eight staffers.

''One of the things I asked of my crew was that they train the people below them, because sooner or later the top guy would take ill and his replacement would take over. Likewise, I asked a lot of people to cooperate with me and do more than one task. The actors were asked to do their own makeup and wardrobe. The assistant cameraman kept the continuity. I carried the lenses, and I've done that before on my earlier films.''

Whatever it took to get it done ultimately worked, because Rafelson's African adventure is over and Mountains of the Moon is up on the screen for audiences to see. For Rafelson, the trip was a definite success. And by the time the critical and box-office judgments are toted up, the dharma director will probably be hitting the road again. ''I'd like most of all right now to be in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. It's a time of agitation and discovery on the part of those countries and I'd like to witness it.

''I don't like to psychoanalyze why I travel, but perhaps one reason is that when you make a film, you're responsive to a lot of questions. You're giving answers to crews, art directors, actors. Afterward, it's a wonderful time to travel because you get a chance to ask questions in places where nobody knows what I do for a living. In fairly remote places, nobody knows what a film director is.''

How do you say 'cut' in Swahili?
You say kata. And when you're addressing a group of local Kenyan tribesmen brandishing spears during a nighttime battle scene, you hope that the interpreter who's translating the Swahili into the local dialect relays the figurative and not the literal sense of what's being requested.

That's the kind of situation Bob Rafelson encountered on location in Africa when he recruited members of the Turkana, Samburu, and Masai tribes to play the natives that Burton and Speke encountered on their trek. Some of these rural people had never even seen a movie, never mind acted in one, so Rafelson found himself explaining the whole process — and having it translated from English to Swahili — before he could even yell ''action,'' er, anzeni.

A somewhat different process than usual, but it worked out just fine. ''The African is by nature a pantomimic person,'' says Rafelson, ''and I would dare to say there is some theatricality in their day-to-day lives, having to do with myth-telling, religion, and daily rituals. When we called upon them to do certain pantomimic things, I would first try, through interpreters, to relate them to the culture that they came from.''

In one scene in which the Masai bestow a blessing on an astonished Speke by spitting a shared drink in his face, Rafelson drew on the tribe's own custom. ''I had been blessed that way myself and put it in the film,'' he says. ''Now, the effect of it might seem to be comical to an audience, but it's based as best as I know, and with the help of anthropologists who worked for me, on reality.''

Not so blessed was producer Daniel Melnick, who decided to instruct some natives enacting the attack scene on the properly threatening way to wield a spear. One of the actors went the Method route and got caught up in the moment, nailing Melnick in the leg. An infection developed and the producer was airlifted back to Los Angeles to recuperate at Cedars-Sinai hospital.

''It was scary, because my foot got very, very bad,'' laughs Melnick. ''But it's one of those things, when it happens it's annoying and an inconvenience, but in retrospect it becomes a very good story.''

Kata.