Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The sun is setting fast and early over Yarbeshe, a hillside neighborhood of
crumbling brick houses, dark alleys and a creaky wooden drawbridge that
sways uneasily over a stream in this fabled gateway city that links far
western China to the recesses of central Asia. Winter is arriving. You would
know it instantly by looking at the director Marc Forster, who is bundled in
a parka as he paces the chilly interior of a smart two-story villa built
specially for his film in one of the poorer parts of town. But it is not
arriving fast enough for the demands of this evening's scene, which is set
in Kabul. So a crew on the villa's rooftop busies itself operating an
artificial snow machine that blows out a respectably thick simulacrum. The
lights go on and, long into the night, the cameras roll. There are many
challenges involved in turning a runaway best-selling novel into a Hollywood
film. But when the novel is largely set in Afghanistan, and ranges widely
over that country, which after Iraq is perhaps the second most dangerous
place in the world for Americans, making snow is the least of the
filmmakers' problems.
Khaled Hosseini's novel, "The Kite Runner," has the added complication of
being an epic, once a staple of big-budget Hollywood productions but
nowadays an increasingly lost art. The story, about the doomed friendship
between two boys, sprawls over generations and roams well beyond Kabul,
notably to parts of Pakistan and to San Francisco, where Afghan exiles live
bound and haunted by a common sense of loss. "For me from the very beginning
this was a story that needed to be told on an epic scale, and you tell a
story on an epic scale with a little bit of fear," said Forster, whose film
is scheduled for release by DreamWorks and Paramount Vantage in November
2007. Specifically, he said, he tried to recreate a feeling of Kabul in the
1970s, of streets filled with color and of life in a country whose middle
class brimmed with hope, and then revisit the city a few years later, after
the Soviet invasion, to explore the sense of lost identity among exiles and
returnees "whose country has been raped and destroyed."

Hollywood does not have a happy history of managing what has been two of the
film's most daunting problems: finding the ideal remote location and casting
a large-canvas story about brown-skinned people from a faraway and
little-understood country. Traditionally big films have required Western
actors in lead roles, and preferably stars at that. The needs of marketing
typically dictate that the dialogue be in English, very often resulting in
inconsistent or even ridiculously stereotypical accents. Extras could be
relied upon to help moviegoers suspend their disbelief, uttering a few
incomprehensible lines and stumbling colorfully about. And once these
details have been nailed, location has never loomed terribly large.

For "The Kite Runner," though, filmmakers have placed a huge wager on
authenticity. They are betting, among other things, that audiences can be
persuaded to sit still through two-plus hours of subtitled plot
development - something moviegoers have become more accustomed to lately,
thanks to studio films like "Apocalypto," "Letters From Iwo Jima" and
"Babel," all of which unfold completely or largely in languages other than
English.

The crux of this gamble is here in Kashgar in China's Xinjiang region, where
a large slice of the film was shot, and the story of how this came to pass
is something of a tale itself.

The production team spent three months researching locations, giving little
thought to Afghanistan itself, for obvious reasons, as they drew up an
initial list of 20 countries and deliberated on which one would get them
closest to Afghanistan's look. The possibilities ranged from India to
Morocco to South Africa, but E. Bennett Walsh, who oversaw the search, said
the conversations kept returning to Kashgar, a place that few people in
Hollywood had ever heard of and where no Western film had ever been made.

Kashgar was always the best fit in terms of appearance, beginning with a
diverse but overwhelmingly Muslim population and a countryside that
plausibly resembles Afghanistan. "In some locations you are limited to
working small, little corners, whereas here you can shoot 100 yards down the
road," Walsh said. "The streets of this city are just dripping with
production value. All you have to do is change the signs."

The search for a cast proved even more challenging. The streets of Kashgar,
teaming with bearded men and women in burkas might fool the eye into
thinking one is seeing Kabul. But dialect cannot be finessed so easily, and
the producers needed to find a Dari-speaking cast once the decision was made
to film in the original language. Homayoun Ershadi, a 59-year-old Iranian
actor who played the lead in "Taste of Cherry," which was one of the winners
of the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, was recruited from
Tehran to play the role of Baba, the father of the principal character,
Amir.