Proof Of Life: In Print Page Three

'Life' imitates life?
By Bob Strauss
Copyright 2000, Los Angeles Daily News

You’ve gotta love this one.

Cast and crew braved incredible obstacles -- a South American coup, altitude sickness, unstable weather conditions that obscured and even washed away remote mountain locations, a director who admittedly turned into something of a monster, even an accidental death in the company -- to film the movie “Proof of Life.”

But now that the $70 million movie is being released, and for a good many months leading up to this hard-won conclusion, all anybody associates with the picture is the Meg and Russell show.

Perhaps you’ve been at the summit of Machu Picchu since spring and have not heard, but there has been rather some hubbub about the fact that the romantic thriller’s two leads, recently minted international superstar Russell Crowe and Hollywood’s bubbly comic sweetheart Meg Ryan, had their own romantic liaison while filming some 11,000 feet up in the Ecuadorean Andes. The relationship would not have been obsessed upon beyond the gossip columns but for the fact that Ryan was generally believed to be happily and stably married to her husband of many years, actor Dennis Quaid.

So now, as you might imagine, Crowe and Ryan are being extremely selective about speaking to the media at a time when their movie -- a look at the current phenomenon of terrorist ransom kidnapping in the Third World -- is coming out ... and needs all the promotional support it can get in the crowded, competitive and high-expectation-packed holiday movie rush.

Indeed, Crowe sounds like the only person from the company who’s actually nostalgic for the thin air, rough terrain and constant dampness of the high Andes.

“When we were in Ecuador for four months, we didn’t have to worry about paparazzi,” Crowe says. “I don’t know why, but they didn’t choose to fly to Ecuador.”

He can jest. But director-producer Taylor Hackford -- yes, the very one who had those “Fitzcarraldo” moments of loudly shared stress during his madly ambitious Andean adventure -- is none too pleased about the whole situation.

“It concerns me,” says Hackford, a respected craftsman of grown-up studio fare such as “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Against All Odds,” “Dolores Claiborne” and “The Devil’s Advocate.” “You know, you can’t help what happens in life. These people didn’t know each other when I cast them, and, well, things evolve.

“The problem is that you go out to make a film and people, including Meg and Russell, put a huge amount of time and effort and talent into something, and then you’re usurped by the tabloids and hit the cover of People magazine twice in one month. They say that there’s no publicity that’s bad publicity, but I’m not so sure. I think that a lot of people read this stuff, which was published as ’Life imitates art,’ so they think that’s exactly what happens in the movie. Well, it’s not. And I’m afraid, in this instance, that some people are going to figure that they’ve already read the tabloid story, so they don’t need to see it.”

In “Proof of Life,” Ryan plays Alice Bowman, whose engineer husband Peter (David Morse) is kidnapped and held for ransom by drug-running rebels in the fictional but very Colombia-like South American nation of Tecala. Terry Thorne, Crowe’s expert in the growth industry of international kidnap-and-ransom negotiation, dedicates himself to securing Peter’s release. Early scenes establish serious troubles in the Bowmans’ marriage, and as the extended and emotion-charged chess game with the captors drags on, an attraction grows between Alice and Terry.

Or so we’re told. Perhaps a more serious casualty of the off-screen romance than the promotional spin may be a lack of discernible on-screen heat between Alice and Terry -- in a movie made by a guy known for the memorably erotic “Officer and a Gentleman,” “Against All Odds” and “Everybody’s All-American” (which, interestingly, starred Quaid). But the only overt indications of intimacy come late in “Proof,” when a third party suggests it and Terry steals a desperate kiss as he is about to depart on a life-or-death mission.

Hackford has admitted that a love scene between Ryan and Crowe was filmed, but he fervently denied to this reporter that anything was cut from the movie to avoid ... well, a lot of things.

“The general audience may say, ’Wait a minute! That’s all?’ ” Hackford acknowledges. “But I think that the tabloids are preparing you for an incredibly torrid thing in this film, and it isn’t that.

“This film, and the ending of the film, was always as it is,” Hackford insists. “What happens in this instance, however, is that you have expectations. You have Meg and Russell, but the fact is that this is a film about adults in a complicated situation. These two people are really working and struggling very hard to get this woman’s husband back. As such, they are very intensely involved in very serious business.” According to Crowe, that’s the main business that was going on at the Ecuador locations, too ... as well as later, in London, when the production arrived to film a few scenes amid a nova of paparazzi flashbulbs.

“All we were doing, mate, was simply getting on with the job of making the film, regardless of how other people phrase things or couch things,” says the Australian actor. “We were just focusing on completing the characters and doing the best we could, and all this other stuff started up around it which didn’t actually have anything to do with us. It had to do with someone else’s need for a story, I suppose.”

While his Oscar nomination for “The Insider” and the worldwide commercial success of “Gladiator” made Crowe an A-list actor this year, the garrulous bloke has clearly also learned the handy star tactic of talking around uncomfortable subjects. But getting Crowe cast as the lead before either of his breakthrough films opened was one of Hackford’s first battles in the “Proof of Life” campaign. It took some impassioned convincing for Castle Rock Entertainment and the film’s distributor, Warner Bros., to hang their expensive production on what was, at the time, a relative unknown’s shoulders. But they came around on that without too much of a fight. When a coup erupted in Ecuador shortly before filming there was scheduled to commence, however, the suits understandably hit the roof.

“I chose Ecuador for a specific reason: because it’s peaceful, and I had a lot of input from the best experts about this,” Hackford explains. “So what happens? Three weeks before we go, there’s a coup. I’m now facing a studio that’s saying, ’Forget it, you’re not going! Go to Mexico.’ I’m like, ’You know, Mexico’s a lot more dangerous than Ecuador.’ They’re like, ’Bull----! You’re not going.’

“At this point, I had to start playing poker with them. I didn’t know this to be the case but, basically, I stood by my research. In other places, a coup happens, it’s going to be bloody. But Ecuador has no history of that, so I bet them that it would be an orderly transition of power on a Friday. Not believing it would happen, they kind of went, ’OK.’ On Monday, an orderly transition of power; I won and I went.”

Was it an ancient Incan sage who said be careful what you wish for? Hackford not only wanted to film in Ecuador for its relative verisimilitude -- violence-wracked Colombia is just across the northern border -- but for breathtaking mountain locations that had never before been seen on film. Unfortunately, by the time he got cast and crew back to the volcanic, jungle-covered and difficult-to-access slopes he’d scouted months earlier, the wettest rainy season in 40 years had set in.

“Basically, you get yourself up in the altitude, everyone is asking you why they’re here and having to go through this, and, at that point, you have to drive everybody forward,” Hackford explains. “And are you the nicest human being in the world during that process? Probably not.”

The filmmaker recalls a particular stretch marked by long drives over rutted roads and evacuations of personnel who could not function in the oxygen-thin atmosphere.

“A fog descended for one week on this mountaintop that has the most spectacular vistas you’ve ever seen, and only cleared for half a day,” Hackford recalls. “At that point, the studio’s saying you could’ve shot this on a sound stage, you have some local actors who’ve never acted before, you get involved in these horrible moments ... and, yeah, it drives you nuts.”

Morse recalls the worst outburst.

“A lot of directors lose it, and understandably so; it’s one of the hardest jobs in the world,” says the gentle, unfailingly thoughtful actor. “And Taylor lost it at me really badly one day, and at some girls who had never acted before and were up there suffering like everybody else. He was so out of control of the environment, we were in clouds so thick you couldn’t see the length of a room.

“But then he apologized. And to me, that was the real leader, somebody who could say, ’I made a mistake.’ There are a lot of directors who wouldn’t have done that, and it says something about his character.”

The indisputably worst day was when, 3 1/2 weeks into production, a truck carrying Will Gaffney, Morse’s stand-in, fell 350 feet down a ravine, killing him and injuring five local actors.

Morse, understandably, does not wish to discuss the tragedy (“What’s most important is his family and their loss,” he says, not the discomfort it naturally caused him).

“It was a crushing blow of reality,” says actor David Caruso, who plays Crowe’s soldier of fortune buddy in the film. “It was so rough; my wife and I would get on the elevator at our hotel and just see grown men crying. It was scary.”

Apprehensive better describes the mood as “Proof of Life’s” box-office fate is about to be decided. Whatever the verdict, at least someone seems prepared to take responsibility for it.

“You know, this is of my own making and my own choice,” Hackford concludes. “I’m not complaining to anybody, I feel I was incredibly privileged. There is this love-hate relationship that goes on when a studio gives you all this money. But I wanted a level of reality to this film.”

Jungle Fever
By William Prochnau
Premiere magazine - December 2000

For 16 weeks in the spring of 2000, a crew of about 250 people filmed the kidnap drama Proof of Life high up in the Andes in Ecuador. No major film had ever been shot there before.

"When people go see this movie, they won't understand that we were in a war, and this could have been a disaster. We could have been ambushed and defeated. We weren't." -Taylor Hackford, director

"I consider the location to be a character in the film. It adds depth, like an actor." -Dow Griffith, locations manager

"We could have made this in a city park." --Russell Crowe, actor, during rain, mud, and delays in the jungle

"No movie is worth this."--Alonso Alegria, Latin American casting director, as people collapsed and nerves cracked in the cold, thin air on location at 14,000-plus feet

"I've really come to like it here. I could live here. I even liked the week on the mountain. It became a personal challenge." --David Morse, actor

"Challenge! Hell, this is a career-ender. --Charles Mulvehill, producer

THE FIRST VOLCANO WAS ACTING UP IN MID-October 1999, causing Ecuador to evacuate 20,000 people and 162 zoo animals from the Andean tourist town of Banos. A second blew a month later, 78 miles away, enveloping the capital city of Quito in a searing cloud of volcanic ash that halted traffic, closed schools, and shut down the international airport for six days.

Though Ecuador has about 30 volcanoes, scientists computed the odds at 50,000 to 1 against nearly simultaneous eruptions from volcanoes so close to each other. No one bothered to calculate the odds of two eruptions happening only seven and four miles, respectively, from the prime shooting locations of a major Hollywood movie about to begin filming.

Meanwhile, Colombian guerrillas had made their most brazen crossing into Ecuador to date, kidnapping 12 people, including eight Canadians and an American, at a jungle road-block. These were the same variety of leftist guerrilla cast as the villains in Proof of Life, Warner Bros.' $70 million Christmas entry, starring Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe.

In Los Angeles, the director, Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Bound by Honor), began to scramble. One volcano added some unscripted drama. But two, with one spitting lava four miles above the now-empty town in which he planned to house a crew of about 250? No way could he risk lives and millions on that.

Hackford headed south to find new locations, carve new roads in the mountainous jungle, build a replica of a rebel camp, and arrange for the location to be secured against attack. Funding a revolution with multimillion-dollar ransoms, the guerrillas have not been shy about their targets, kidnapping one of Colombia's most famous female television anchors, foreign journalists, American corporate executives, a nine-year old schoolboy who painted a poster criticizing them, mayors, congressmen, the brother of a former president. Why would they draw the line at Meg Ryan? Ryan would be the perfect symbol of Norte Americano capitalism. Castle Rock Entertainment was paying her $15 million, which was more than it planned to spend on all local salaries, meals, housing-everything-during its four month stay. The studio also paid a London kidnap-and-ransom company (the Control Risks Group) a small fortune to protect the cast and crew. Ironically, the firm was one of the prototypes for the "K&R" company in the screenplay. Proof of Life was getting uneasily close to real life. It would get closer. It was 90 days before the beginning of principal photography.

The studio was nervous as hell about Ecuador. But Hackford was bullheaded, determined to the point of obsession to film in the same mountains and jungle where the reality takes place. He would push his people to the far limits of their talents and endurance, in equatorial sleet blizzards at over 14,000 feet and in cloud-forest hillsides, where the rain began like clockwork shortly after noon, turning the set into a downhill slalom of putrid mud.

"By June, they all will hate me," he said of cast, crew, and studio. "June!" Mulvehill said when I repeated the line to him. "Try April." He said this in April.

In Proof of Life, Hackford and screenwriter Tony Gilroy created a drama loosely based on the actual kidnapping of an American (played by David Morse) who was held in the Andes by Colombian guerrillas for 11 months. Kidnap negotiator Russell Crowe comes in to help the victim's wife, Meg Ryan, and falls in love with her.

Hackford invited me, as the author of the Vanity Fair story that inspired Proof of Life, to watch the making of his movie. We spoke at length about the risks of filming in South America. In reporting my story, I visited chaotic Colombia (where kidnapping is an epidemic), talked to kidnappers, and cultivated sources among an elite corps of kidnap-and-ransom negotiators.

To shoot his movie, Hackford had three location requirements: mountains, jungle, and relative peace, a combination that ruled out virtually every country in Latin or South America. He settled on Ecuador: Third World poor, politically troubled, unpredictable, and corrupt, but spectacularly beautiful and home to one of the most peace-loving peoples in the world--so peaceful, the line went, that they gave half of their country to Peru rather than go to war over it.

In January, with filming less than two months away, Hackford called his actors to London for rehearsals. On the Friday night before the first read-through, the following Monday, the news clattered in abruptly: a coup d'etat in Quito. The actors fretted, whispered, and looked at their escape clauses.

Volcanoes, kidnappers, and now a South American revolt! The studio said, "Move it to Mexico." The insurance people, the ones who insure against "force majeure" - acts of God, civil strife, strikes, revolutions-wobbled.

Hackford bluffed. "It will be over by Monday," he said boldly. "Or I'll go to Mexico. He doesn't bluff without a hole card. "But you'll miss Christmas," he added. Ouch. Castle Rock and parent Warner Bros. were backed into a corner.

Ecuador is a marvelous country of more than 12 million people. But the coup was a Peter Sellers set piece. About 4,000 unarmed South American Indians marched down out of the mountains and occupied the house of congress, which was closed and empty for the weekend. They demanded the president's resignation. He resigned. The army told the Indians to go home. They went. The vice-president took over within 24 hours and told his countrymen to stop the "buffoonery."

Morse, whose performance as the victim is inspired, had brief doubts. Then someone told him a story, probably apocryphal, about the last time the Indians marched on the congress. They made one demand. "They forced the congressmen to strip--and put on native clothing. End of revolt," Morse says. "It sounded like my kind of country.

Hackford's bluff won, Ecuador quickly became his blessing and his curse. Its soaring volcanoes and dank jungles created that Oscar-caliber costar. But with the scenery came the country's worst rainy season in decades. Mudslides blocked routes to locations. Roads washed out. Clouds shrouded vistas. The political climate worsened, and tear gas used against civil protests wafted onto sets.

The big, visible threats--kidnapping attempts, volcanoes, violence--never went away. The rate of kidnappings, usually a relatively rare crime in Quito, doubled while Proof of Life was in town. One sensational incident occurred just a block from the headquarters hotel, when a heavily armed gang ambushed a limousine in broad daylight, shot the driver, and kidnapped the daughter of a prominent Ecuadorean businessman. "The threat was there every day of shooting, and you felt that something could happen at any minute," Hackford says.

A movie on location creates its own dramas. Proof of Life had sideshows: Crowe becoming an overnight superstar with the release of Gladiator, and the Meg-and-Russell frolic providing endless fodder for the press. (Unlikely as it seems, Hackford says he was unaware of the Ryan-Crowe romance until it entered the tabloids when the crew reached London for the shoot's final stages, in June and July. "Nothing really surprises me," he says. "I'm so focused. I want to be oblivious to the irrelevant. If these things don't affect the performance, so what! I've made films with people who were shooting heroin or freebasing cocaine. Some have given good performances and some haven't. These things are real dangers to the film. I've had people who hate each other and have to love each other in the film. Anything can happen in a movie. But I didn't know about them; and I didn't care.")

Proof was also beset by more serious troubles: a tragic death, muggings, a stabbing attack on one of the South American stars, an on-set heart attack, two cases of debilitating and unknown tropical diseases, and hardened pros falling like flies from altitude sickness. The primary players also had pressurized professional agendas. Crowe needed to prove that he wasn't a fluke; Ryan that she could shift from meringue to drama; Morse that he could break out of journeyman supporting roles.

Ecuador added not just spectacular scenery but a rawer edge to a raw-edged drama. But not without a price. At times, the movie bogged down dangerously. Tempers flared and cracked - especially Hackford's, occasionally in spectacular ways. Old friendships bent and crumbled. It was one rough go.

Indeed, it became Hackford's war. Momentum, as crucial to moviemaking as it is to politics or football, faltered, cranked back up, and faltered again. Toward the end, in a morass of mud, the shot crept along like trench warfare. Some days they shot as little as one-fourth of a page of script. "Jesus, I haven't even killed anyone yet," Crowe muttered (he sounded like he was only half-kidding), as a day spent waiting in rain, mud, and camouflaged combat gear ended two hours before sunset with dark clouds stealing the last light.

NOTHING JOLTED THE PRODUCTION AND established its lingering pall like the freak accident that killed Morse's stand-in, Will Gaffney, after three and a half weeks of filming. Gaffney died when a truck in which he was riding veered inexplicably off a mountain road and plunged 350 feet into a ravine. Remarkably, five South American actors survived. Mulvehill said he had never seen a single event so stagger a movie crew. Hackford called the tragedy "nightmarish," all the more because Gaffney was such a happy innocent, a 29-year-old English teacher on a busman's holiday in Quite, who was joyously off on a grand lark because he coincidentally looked like Morse. For Morse, the accident was deeply traumatic. He had gone home to attend to a family matter. Gaffney had taken his place in the truck.

This was a tough international crew. I counted people from 25 countries, ranging from Chechnya to Colombia, veterans of movies made all over the world. They worked hard and played hard. Now, in the aftermath of Gaffney's death, they were headed into the meanest outdoor locations of the movie: a windswept rebel camp more than 14,000 feet up in the mountains above Quito, and a soggy guerrilla base camp in the cloud forest below the city. For Hackford, these locations were the jewels in his Ecuadorian crown. They were, by design, very harsh places.

Of all the egos that careened testily off each other in Ecuador, Hackford's was the most complex. Tall, bearded, and more handsome than most movie stars, he is sophisticated, charming, generous, and married to a great actress, Helen Mirren. He also is so driven, so focused, and given to such sudden and shockingly brutal outbursts that the weak tremble and the strong swear they will never work for him again. Mulvehill calls these eruptions "Taylor's nut-outs."

Hackford calls them his "dark side" and "irresponsible." But he seems incapable of holding a grudge. And his targets almost always return, certain that Hackford draws some crucial extra bit out of them.

"I absolutely hated the man," Mulvehill said of his feelings at the end of Dolores Claiborne, their last movie together. Now he shrugs. "Then time passed, it was a good movie, he called me, and..."

In the script, the mountain hideaway is known as Camp Insanity. In reality, it is a treeless bluff at the side of a small lake a few hundred meters above a place called Papallacta, a 13,000-feet-high pass through the Andes to the headwaters of the Amazon. From it stretches one of the most spectacular views in the world--a panorama of distant peaks known as "the Avenue of the Volcanoes," two of them smoking. Sparkling alpine lakes nestle thousands of feet below; jagged crags reach thousands of feet above.

That is, if you can see. For all but two hours of one week on the mountain, you couldn't. Day after day, crew and actors toiled through fog and through sleet and rain driven sideways in cold pellets at an elevation roughly equivalent to the summits of the highest peaks in the continental United States--mountains like Whitney or Rainier.

Working unacclimated at that altitude makes most people queasy. Some vomit, panic, gasp for oxygen. Every morning when I arrived, the ambulance was pulling out with the first evacuation. The crew's' health-and-safety officer, Jake Edmonds, a burly six-foot-six Brit with high blood pressure, passed out cold in the lunch tent and woke up 45 minutes later as he was being taken down to Quito. In all, 19 people were taken down.

The week was becoming a disaster. The crew grumbled that they would get better results with smoke machines on a soundstage. Hackford had picked one of the rainiest weeks in history to come to his mountain. In Quito, mudslides killed 15 people. Roads became rivers. The mountain disappeared. Near the end of the third day, the light was going fast. Twilight does not ebb at the equator. The sun sinks like a stone at 6 P.M. sharp, taking day with it. (The sudden loss of light affected everyone so profoundly that two months later in London, where light lingers till 10:30 P.M. in June, Crowe barked the greatest unscripted line of the movie: "Hurry! We'll lose the light!" It was 4:30 in the afternoon.)

Hackford could be at his worst in late afternoon, darkness being such a fast thief of another $125,000 day. A young Peruvian actress blew a slapping scene. The director angrily showed her how to do it. His slap ricocheted off her face like an icefall in the cold, thin air. The young woman ran off. Gaffers, grips, and Steadicam operators stared silently at their feet. Hackford then spent a half hour apologizing to her privately. "I really fucked up," he told me later, with awful pain in his eyes. "I don't understand it. It's the darker side of me. I really lost it and took it out on a young actor and humiliated her in front of everybody." The next morning, amid fog swirls, he called the crew together and apologized publicly. "Not for nothing is this set called Camp Insanity," he said. That afternoon, the sun finally broke through. Mountains popped out and lakes twinkled. It held for two hours, half a scene, glorious but virtually worthless without more of the same. The next morning, the weather was fouler by twice. Hackford looked at it for an hour, packed up, and left.

The next week, the caravan moved 8,000 feet lower into the cloud forests of Las Palmas, 75 minutes of hairpin curves from Quite. This was a last-minute find, bought from a farmer's widow for $8,000 after the volcano forced Proof Of life away from Banos. Castle Rock then spent $100,000 carving a road into the site. You couldn't miss Las Palmas. Coming down the main road, the place glinted in the distance like an alien landing field. As you went closer, the glint became a reflection off hundreds of thousands of square feet of plastic sheeting put there in an attempt to hold the soggy mountainside back from the road.

On the other side, in a verdant hollow surrounded by hills, lay a replica of a guerrilla rest camp: huts, pig pen, vegetable gardens, a soccer pitch. Formations of parrots flew overhead. It was warm. The sun was shining. T-shirt time. The relief could be seen in every face. "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go," chirruped Chris Carreras, a first assistant director. Someone leapt into a heel-click, then skidded in the mud when landing. Adam Bohling, a former British Royal Marine, grinned devilishly. He had been at Las Palmas for the past two weeks, training the South American actors in guerrilla tactics. He was wearing rain pants. "It starts every day at 1 o'clock," he laughed. "Pre-cise-ly." It did. The cloud forest was not quite a rain forest. It got only 100 inches of rain per year.

Hackford could not take another location backfire. Las Palmas would be far from that, and Papallacta eventually would be triumphantly salvaged-partly by the luck of one good day in June, partly by the remarkable photography of the great Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, whose filters cut through fog to backgrounds the eye couldn't see. But the cloud forest became a day-after-day slog that turned earlier second-guessing into a torrent of doubt about making the Christmas release date.

Hackford's late-afternoon outbursts became awesome. During one, standing high up on a steep hill, directing a scene setting up below him, he suddenly "went nuclear," as Mulvehill was given to calling it. He marched down, headlong, 150 feet, without missing a sloshing, muddy stride. Parrots broke formation at what one onlooker called the "longest, loudest, uninterrupted string of English-language epithets ever uttered." By the time he reached the bottom, Hackford seemed to have burned himself out. He placed an arm on the offender's shoulder, smiled, and quietly said, "Can we do it this way!" I turned to Miles Hargrove, the son of the real-life kidnapping victim I had interviewed. Hackford had hired Hargrove to do the in house video of the making of the movie. "Did you get that, Miles! It was the best scene of the day," I said. Hargrove nodded. On the mountain earlier, mindful of who was paying his check, young Hargrove had turned off his camera during outbursts. Hackford saw him. "Make up your mind, Miles," the director said. "You're either going to be a documentary maker or a hack. If you're going to be a documentary maker, leave your camera on."

At Las Palmas, Russell Crowe returned to the shoot a new superstar, just off a triumphant 25,000-mile, nine-day world tour to hype Gladiator. He had come to the picture with a reputation as a troublemaker, a brawler, and one difficult dude, seemingly destined to conflict with his volatile director. There were moments. But the two men were more like bear cubs batting at each other than full-growns charging. Once, he made a sharply cutting comment about Hackford's leadership and then stared at me: "Print a word of that, Billy, and I'll haunt your family to the grave." If you were a politician, Russell, whom I normally cover, you'd be dead meat. In this case, I think I'll save my family the grief.

During the shoot at Las Palmas, which started to slip quickly into the last of the great downers, Crowe infused new energy and propped up morale. The crew loved him. He rented a theater and invited them to a private Quito premiere of Gladiator. Afterward, he kept the Quito Sports Bar open until 4 A.M., picking up the tab for the food, the booze--and the damage. On the set, he was all business when he needed to be; all jokes and one-liners when he didn't.

Las Palmas was crucial to the movie for a series of action sequences just before the end. Crowe was decked out each day with jungle khakis and M-4. He did his own stunts, which meant a lot of sloshing in the mud and combat rolls down hillsides. In one of the first stunts, he did a 30-foot roll. At the bottom of the hill, there was a terrible clatter and then a roar: "Mutha-fucka!!!!" Rarely have so many people rushed to the attention of one man. He had rolled over three unseen logs. Was he hurt! An old injury, he said, shaking it off. But it wasn't so old--a shoulder, injured making Gladiator and, unbeknownst to anyone, an injury that would force him into surgery. He went back and did the scene six more times.

I spent, all told, 52 days on campaign in General Hackford's war in Ecuador. A few weeks after leaving, I received a two-line e-mail from him. Las Palmas was over and Hackford had just returned from a day of sunny triumph at Papallacta Pass. It should have been a cable, so MacArthuresque did it read: "The scene is complete," he wrote. The general had won his war: Filming ended $10 million over budget and three weeks over schedule, a boardroom yawn by today's standards. "There is one thing you have to understand about making movies," Hackford says. "They don't call it 'the Industry' for nothing. Make them money, and they will forgive any idiosyncrasy. Stop making them money, and you are on the worst shit list in the world."

William Prochnau is a Washington-based journalist and Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair. More of his writing on the making of Proof of Life can be seen on the website MightyWords.com.

Illustration: Steve Brodner
(Transciption and photos, thanks to Marjean!)

Photo: ¡Hola! magazine (Spain, November 16, 2000)
Cordon Press agency / Warner Bros Pictures
(Thanks to Esther!)

Hollywood Journal
by Tom King
The Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2000

[King rates the 13 big movies coming out during the holiday season, starting from November 1 to end of December. Here's what he says about Proof of Life:]

How it will do:
$65 million (Total Gross)

What the critics will say:
They won't buy the plot.

Our take:
Meg and Russell's tryst will turn off moviegoers. Studio gets jilted.

Concept:
No Christmas would be complete without a man or two chasing Meg Ryan. This time, it's terrorists from Latin America who have kidnapped her husband. So, who comes to the rescue? Oh, thank goodness, Russell Crowe.

Expectations:
Strong, but a challenge. The early weeks of December are usually tough for new movies, with adults out shopping and hitting holiday parties.

The Buzz:
Not much. What people are talking about is Meg and Russell. As anybody who's been at the supermarket checkout lately knows, Mr. Crowe and Ms. Ryan, who is in the midst of a divorce from Dennis Quaid, are romantically involved. Some in Hollywood are betting that the gossip will make it hard for Warners to get anyone (like us, for instance) to focus on the film itself. Not everyone agrees. "I think the controversy is a giant bonus," a competitor suggests. "It will buy tons of free publicity."

© Copyright The Wall Street Journal, 2000

(Article: thanks to Syd!)

Far from home, at work amid danger and beauty
By Bonnie Churchill
Special to The Christian Science Monitor (Dec. 15, 2000)
Copyright 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society

HOLLYWOOD -- The mist was slowly lifting in the Andes, and Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan, stars of the new film "Proof of Life," were waiting for director Taylor Hackford to say, "Action." It had rained and hailed most of the night.

"Hail stones as big as fried eggs," Crowe says, as he recalls filming on location in Ecuador.

Once the sun pierced the clouds, Hackford filmed a spectacular scene with the lush green foliage of the rain forest, which formed an ideal backdrop.

"Good thing he did," Crowe says. "Twenty minutes later, the road slipped down the mountain. It's all volcanic ground in this section of Ecuador. You know that saying, 'Now you see it, now you don't.' [It] was written to describe this terrain."

Hackford, who'd lived in Bolivia during his days with the Peace Corps, had traveled the world seeking the perfect locations for "Proof of Life." He selected Ecuador, England, and Poland. Ecuador didn't have the moviemaking infrastructure for a big US film, but "what it did have," Hackford says, "was the most beautiful natural scenery in the world."

"Proof of Life" is inspired by a 1998 Vanity Fair article by William Prochnau. The story opens with Peter Bowman (David Morse), the husband of Alice Bowman (Ryan), being kidnapped in a Latin American country.

Terry Thorne (Crowe), an expert in winning the release of hostages, is called in to negotiate. Thorne has to demand a "proof of life" so he knows that Bowman is still alive. As proof, the kidnappers send a photo of the prisoner holding a newspaper showing the date.

To prepare for the role, Crowe spent three weeks talking with real-life K&R (kidnap and rescue) men, many of them former intelligence officers and military men. He learned that when you meet with the victim's family, "you have to be calm, sensitive, and relieve any hysteria."

"The guys I talked with said the rules are the victim's wife is to be kept out of the loop because she'll be too emotional. [But] as I got to know them, they said sometimes they found the wife is the most reasonable 'tiger' in the group. She cooperates because she wants her husband back."

When filming began, Crowe found it heartwarming that his "Gladiator" British film crew agreed to work on "Proof."

"Movie crews don't fancy being that far from home and working under those conditions," says Crowe, who was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia. "If the road washed away, they had to rebuild it. I have to admit those English blokes are good to be with when the going gets rough. We Aussies kid them a lot, but they're the ones to be with in the trenches."

Interlaced with the crew were former Royal marines and US marines, who provided security.

"Every role is an education," Crowe says. "The action in this film was new territory.

"For all its beauty, the locations had dangers, too. Landslides were a regular occurrence. Then, we're working at an altitude of 11,000 feet. Twenty members of the crew had to be sent home [because they weren't accustomed to working at such high altitudes]."

Hackford was more than a little concerned when Crowe decided he'd bed down in his trailer in the jungle rather than make the daily two-hour drive from the hotel to the location.

Crowe explains, "Mate, those roads had potholes as big as a cow! They'd drive in the center of the dirt road. It seemed deserted until you'd make a curve, and there was a truck also in the center. I'd yell out, 'Holy moly! Move over!' The trucks would just squeeze by. There were more prayers going than at church."

After four months of being away from civilization, the cast and crew had bonded. "There wasn't any paparazzi in the rain forest. When we came back to England to finish the movie ... there were photographers at every turn."

Crowe is known as an action-movie star now, but he's also got a lighter side. "I'm the type who likes to be a comic," he says. "When I was a kid going to military school, I thought everyone wearing those same uniforms and marching down the parade ground wasn't much fun. So when all the cadets turned right, I turned left, and got a big laugh from the crowd -- also a big reprimand!"

Crowe channels much of that energy into music. His band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, have their own Web site, www.gruntland.com.

"After 20,000 hits, it crashed -- too much traffic," he says. "I love the guys in the band.... When we get together, it's really fertile. Songs just seem to pop out of our heads. I think it's because we don't live in each other's pockets all the time."

Crowe gets up from the couch, smoothes the wrinkles from his checkered lumberjack shirt, and does a healthy stretch. "It's been a busy year. In the last 12 months, I've only slept 22 nights on my farm in Australia. I've got to get back to the cows."

Photo: ¡Hola! magazine (Spain, November 16, 2000)
Cordon Press agency / Warner Bros Pictures
(Thanks to Esther!)