In Pursuit of a Dream : Director Bob Rafelson’s ‘Mountains of the Moon’ fulfills a screen obsession

Having traveled from the bazaars of India to the forbidden Muslim city of Harer, Capt. Richard Burton’s reputation as an adventurer would be secure even if he hadn’t led an extraordinary 1854 expedition in search of the source of the Nile.

Still, it’s this perilous odyssey--and the unsettling bond between Burton and fellow explorer Lt. John Speke--that forms the core of Bob Rafelson’s new film, “Mountains of the Moon,” which opens Friday. It’s an $18 million fevered cinematic dream that the adventurous director has been trying to bring to the screen for nearly a decade.

“To call this an obsession would be an understatement,” said Rafelson, a Hollywood maverick blessed with steely self-confidence and a prickly intelligence. “When I was still in college, I had run across Burton’s translations of Indian and Arabic erotic literature. Then I discovered his anthropology books about all sorts of obscure tribes and cultures. And only later still did I realize he was an explorer too.”

Rafelson laughed. “So I guess you could say I became obsessed with him in stages.”

It’s easy to see why Rafelson, whose films explore moody eroticism (“Black Widow”) and social anthropology (“Stay Hungry”), views Burton as a kindred spirit.

What the two men share most is a lust for adventure. Despite all his incredible feats, Burton could never boast that he broke his arms on a sheet of ice in Nepal or brought back poison hunting darts from a remote jungle in South America.

Those achievements belong to Rafelson, a restless character who prefers Africa’s desert savannah to any Bel-Air back yard. He is certainly the only Hollywood director who once went so far up the Amazon that when he arrived in a tiny village, all the locals stopped to gawk, having never seen a white man before.

Rafelson’s travels, which include a trek to Kashmir and a 1,500-mile walk through West Africa, prepared him for the rigors of making “Mountains of the Moon,” which was largely shot on location in Kenya’s arid wilderness. But they also came in handy when he shot a series of scenes with the Turkana tribe that inhabited a remote patch of African grasslands.

“None of the tribesmen really understood English, so I’d work through a translator,” Rafelson said, lighting up the first of many cigarettes. “But I’d been there several years before and actually taken in by someone in the tribe.

“When I was giving them instructions, I told them how much hospitality I’d received when I’d been there before--and suddenly a man in the back of the crowd stood up and said, ‘That was me. I remember taking you in!’ So I immediately cast him as the king of the tribe.”

Rafelson wagged his head. “To be honest, it probably wasn’t really him. But how could I refuse--he looked perfect for the part.”

An engaging guy with blunt features and the lean, sinewy build of an aging tennis pro, Rafelson drives a gray 1970 GTO and has a Hollywood Hills home crowded with artifacts from his travels (“Almost all bargained for, not bought” he says proudly). At 56, he’s one of the sturdiest survivors of the Hollywood outlaw generation that spawned Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton.

After youthful stints as a rodeo rider and jazz drummer, he ended up in Los Angeles in the late ‘60s, where he teamed up with producer Bert Schneider to present the original “Monkees” TV show (they also co-produced “Easy Rider” and “The Last Picture Show”).

Given a chance to direct, he made “Head,” a surreal cult film starring the Monkees (and co-written by Nicholson) that led to “Five Easy Pieces,” which won an Oscar nomination in 1970. In 1976, he directed “Stay Hungry,” which introduced American audiences to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But Rafelson’s career has been plagued by long dry spells. He only made two films in the ‘80s, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Black Widow.” At the beginning of the decade he was slated to direct “Brubaker,” but conflicts with Robert Redford forced him off the project. More recently, Rafelson spent several years unsuccessfully putting together a film version of Peter Matthiessen’s “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” (He also developed a film called “Air America” that was interrupted by the 1988 writers strike.)

“Bob is full of complexities,” an old studio-executive pal explained. “He’s bright--but not in an effete way. He’s incredibly tough. When you give Bob a free rein he can really make magic--look at the movies he’s made. His only problem is he hasn’t made enough of them. He’ll get completely fixated on one thing and then when the project falls through, he’s at a loss of where to go next. He’s not the type of guy who’ll just take an assignment.”

It’s possible Rafelson lost out on some projects because of his reputation as a stubborn perfectionist. But he may have missed opportunities simply because no one could find him.

“I’ve been told I don’t make more movies because I’m not around, being talked about,” he said quietly. “No one knows where I am. I do have certain misgivings about traveling so much. Let’s face it--I’m not prolific. But I’m not sure there’s such a great virtue in being busy all the time. I

like being idle, idle in the sense that I can be curious and go off in different directions.”

For Christmas, Rafelson took his girlfriend to Egypt, following the Nile from the Sudan to Cairo. A voracious reader, he brought Flaubert’s Egypt journals with him, comparing his reactions to the old master’s.

“Flaubert was bored,” Rafelson chuckled. “I wasn’t.”

In Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel, “The Storyteller,” his narrator visits the Machiguengas, an Indian tribe of the upper Amazon that survives by constantly migrating to new settlements. The tribe’s culture is in the hands of a wandering storyteller who serves as the group’s oral historian, preserving “the memory of the community.”

It’s a job made-to-order for Rafelson, who says that when he feels tied down, he takes off.

“After I’ve directed a movie, where you have to answer a hundred questions every day, I want to go some place where I get to ask all the questions. It’s not just a matter of going off somewhere to satisfy my curiosities or become enlightened.

“I don’t have that extraordinary kind of imagination where I can dwell in a room and create my work for myself. I need the outside stimuli. Travel allows you to be naive and utterly ingenuous--I’m completely entranced by it.”

Having wandered around an Amazon jungle with a medicine man who picked out herbs “like he was walking through the local A&P;,” this Hollywood nomad was the perfect candidate to pay homage to Burton, whose books on West Africa shocked Victorians with their explicit descriptions of tribal fetishism, ritual murder, cannibalism and bizarre sexual practices.

“He was an extraordinary passionate man of courage and searing curiosity,” said Rafelson, whose home is adorned with wooden aboriginal snakes, African tribal masks and poison-tipped Indian arrows. “He flew in the face of all opposition. He spoke 24 languages. He wanted to learn other peoples’ cultures while his superiors wanted to instruct those people in the grand ways of the English civilization.”

This appreciation of alien cultures had its price. “Burton was tried for writing pornography. He was almost court-martialed for his intelligence reports gathered in the Karachi brothels. But it didn’t matter-he was relentless.”

Rafelson shares Burton’s fondness for exotic cultural artifacts--one wall of his living room displays a Tanzanian fertility device that tribal women wear when they make love to help induce pregnancy. He also shares Burton’s indomitability, which came in handy trying to bring “Mountains of the Moon” to the screen. Rafelson and William Harrison (who had written a historical novel about Burton and Speke) began writing the “Mountains” script in 1982. Warner Bros. was initially eager to make the movie, but got cold feet after several films set in Africa, most notably “Greystoke,” sagged at the box office.

“So Africa was out,” Rafelson said with a wry grin. “When Warners’ passed, I took it to EMI, who said they’d love to do it. But as I was literally packing my bags, EMI folded. Cannon inherited the project, but they had so many silly casting ideas that I couldn’t do it with them. By then, I went around telling everyone about it--literally advertising the project--but no one was interested.”

When “Air America” fell through at Carolco, they asked Rafelson if he had any other projects ready to go. He quickly got a green light to make “Mountains,” which co-stars a pair of obscure British actors, Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen, as Burton and Speke.

The film avoids many of the cliches Hollywood uses to portray unfamiliar cultures. “In most movies everything looks choreographed,” Rafelson said. “I thought it would be a real challenge to show how the native culture experienced the white man. But it’s difficult to do it right. You have to ask--what did the 19th-Century Africans look like? And then how do you film it?”

Rafelson holed up at the Royal Geographic Society for weeks on end, studying accounts by Stanley and Livingstone as well as Burton and Speke. Having seen many of Burton and Speke’s stops on previous visits, Rafelson and Harrison wrote the script to fit those locales.

“I’d already been to Lamu, a coastal island with a perfectly preserved Arabic city, where we filmed the initial meetings between Burton and Speke,” said Rafelson. “And I’d been to the areas in Kenya that we used for many of the later scenes. So I’d bring the crew to look at those places and say, ‘OK, beat this.’ ”

Insistent on giving his explorers a well-worn look, Rafelson rejected most of his costumers’ initial ideas--taken from photos of the period--about appropriate 19th-Century wardrobes.

“I’d tell them, ‘Look, I know you’ve won a bunch of Academy Awards, but these pictures aren’t right.’ In the beginning they were shocked. So I ran them Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ and showed them how things didn’t have to look so starched. In his movie, everything was dusty and lived-in, with ill-fitting clothes and buttons missing, which was just what I wanted.”

One of the film’s most fascinating scenes is set in a village run by the brutal monarch Ngola, played by Bheki Tonto Ngema, who prowls the village with tiny, syncopated steps, prancing like a panther.

“That’s exactly the way his walk is characterized in Burton and Speke’s journals--moving on the balls of his feet like a panther,” said Rafelson, who hired a fugitive South African theatre student to play the part.

If the film has provoked a debate, it’s over its portrayal of the intimate relationship between Burton and Speke, who some historians say may have been lovers during their journeys. This sense of erotic attraction is a familiar Rafelson theme, surfacing in several scenes in “Black Widow” between the female characters played by Debra Winger and Theresa Russell.

“I’m sure Speke was a closet homosexual,” Rafelson said. “Who knows what must’ve gone on between the two men. After all, they spent 1000 days together, walking through Africa. Did they (have sex)? It probably happened. But I prefer to let the audience imagine the whole of the relationship. I think it makes them more complex. It thickens the relationship.”

What gives “Mountains” much of its emotional wallop is its vivid portrayal of the thrill--and the agony--of its rugged explorers’ outlandish adventures. Today, we live in a global village with few dramatic discoveries to celebrate and share.

“What’s really terrible is that we take the challenges of explorations--and the artifacts of our own lives--for granted,” Rafelson said, arranging a batch of South American tribal bracelets spread across his living room table. “People have gotten entirely away from self-reliance. We have secretaries and staffs to do things for us. We’ve become a car-phone culture. Even our discoveries, like the exploration of outer space, have become entirely pragmatic. Everything is researched before you go. You can’t compare it to the unpredictable quality of discovering the North Pole or walking across Africa.”

In “Mountains,” Rafelson takes pains to show Burton’s inquisitiveness--and respect--for tribal cultures.

“In a strange way, the 20th Century has gone about destroying not only the curiosity of the 19th Century, but the very civilizations they were curious about. When you go to the Amazon you see truly ancient, untouched civilizations. But their body of wisdom is disappearing--and once it disappears it will be gone forever.”

Rafelson shrugged. “It’s funny. When we were making ‘Mountains,’ I found it a lot easier to shoot in Africa than in England. In Africa, you knew things wouldn’t happen on schedule. If you couldn’t move a truck 400 miles across the desert or if you ran into bandits on the road, you expected it. It was the two-hour traffic jams around London that I couldn’t handle.”

He eyed a huge ceremonial mask on his living room wall. “Africa was the easiest part for me. I like sleeping in a tent--I’ve done it all my life. When I’m in difficult conditions, that’s when I come alive.”