Where the Mosquito Bites

PAUL THEROUX

PAUL THEROUX on the filming of his novel

Letter from Belize

When I began my novel The Mosquito Coast, I thought it was about the son, Charlie Fox, who is the narrator and sufferer of his father's adventure. But after a while— and like Charlie—I became

possessed by the father, Allie, who was always yapping and bursting with ideas, the greatest of which was to create a brilliant ice-making society in the Honduran jungle. He was a good inspiration. I often heard him thinking out loud. I knew his opinions, his reactions to most things. He was the sort of Yankee I had known my whole life, someone who says, "If you can't find it on the beach and it's not in the Sears catalogue, you probably don't need it." I wrote the book in an Allie Fox mood. After he died, the story was over. I had planned more—a long voyage of the remaining members of the family in Part Five. But it was not possible with the man gone. Part Five is only two pages long.

Readers still write to me to say that Allie was like their father or uncle—or especially husband. I have received hundreds of husband letters—always from ex-wives who last saw the crazy bastard swinging an ax in a wilderness. He was wacko, he had this thing about fresh air, he wouldn't stop talking; there were times when / wanted to kill him, but you had to admire the guy.

When I picked this novel up afterward, I felt somewhat detached from it. It was an affectionate detachment: a book goes its own way, and if it is a good book it is indestructible. A movie is a simple version of it, provoking different expectations. No movie can be

very faithful to the meandering complexities of a long novel, and so it must be good in its own terms—a movie has to be true to itself.

were involved with it in other ways. What one might call "the Allie Factor" is strong among those who are supporters of the book. Just the other day a local man asked me about my new novel, O-Zone, and said, "Is it as good as The Mosquito CoastV' I thought, What a question to ask me! And then he started talking admiringly about Allie Fox and sort of bullying me in an Allie-like way. It was another reminder that as soon as the book appeared it ceased to belong to me.

The film rights were sold shortly after the book was published in the Unit-

The effect that The Mosquito Coast had on me when I was writing it seemed to be repeated with most people who

ed States in 1982, and this Allie Factor became evident again. It was not an option or a development deal but rather an outright sale, Jerome Heilman putting all his money down the way Allie bought Jeronimo. Heilman (producer of Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home) began to exhibit Allie characteristics: he raved a little, he became stubborn and embattled. When it was suggested by a studio that the movie might be made in Mexico or Jamaica, Heilman insisted that it had to be shot, no matter what the cost, on the Mosquito Coast—which actually exists, running more or less from Belize to Nicaragua. Off his own bat, Heilman hired Paul Schrader to write the script. When I made a few suggestions to Schrader, but insisted I did not want to influence him, he said in an Allie-like way, "I'm not influenceable."

Peter Weir, the director, rewrote the script, indefatigably tinkering. That was one of his Allie qualities. He assumed others. He was inventive, he was very certain, and in the quietest sort of way had a hot-eyed concentration that indicated he had fire in his belly. His copy of the novel was so heavily annotated you would have thought he was preparing the Norton Lectures at Harvard.

Meanwhile, the Allie Factor was animating Jerry Heilman. He flew from country to country, raising money. He kept saying, "We're going to do it right. We're going to make this picture without cutting any comers!" He went to Belize and found the right spot in the jungle, and observers saw I him bushwhacking and | gesturing hopefully. Sev5 eral deals collapsed at the | eleventh hour, forcing him "■ to look elsewhere for money and allowing Peter Weir to make Witness. But they kept The Mosquito Coast alive, and there was never any question of their abandoning it. When backers promised millions for them to turn Allie into a kind of Doctor Dolittle, they laughed and walked away. To change Allie into someone, shall we say, less Promethean was not merely bad judgment, it was to them a personal insult. Two and a half years had passed. I often spoke to Heilman and Weir, sometimes to clarify lines, sometimes to listen to their interpretations. I had moved on to other things, another novel, a script for Nicolas Roeg. For me, Allie was gone. But they had a very firm grasp of The Mosquito Coast; they had Allie's single-mindedness. They often reminded me of things I had forgotten. "But Allie says here. . . " Heilman had hired a researcher to anthologize the observations and opinions of Allie, and this resulted in a fifty-two-page pamphlet of the Selected Thoughts: what Allie thought of God, America, inventions, sleep, junk food, war, ice, jungles, and so forth.

"How much money are you looking for?" I asked Heilman one day.

"Not that much. Listen, the average car-chase picture costs 20 million! Isn't that disgusting? Doesn't that turn your stomach?"

I kept myself from saying, Yes, Allie.

When the Oscars were awarded in March 1985, and Amadeus won eight of them, the producer Saul Zaentz began exhibiting Allie Fox symptoms. He too became a man with a mission. He said he would bankroll the movie and make it soon. Many actors had been mentioned for the part of Allie, notably Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. It was Zaentz's idea to cast Harrison Ford. It was not merely that Ford had proved himself in Witness to be a fine and subtle actor; it was also the fact that to play Allie in the jungles of Belize would take physical and emotional strength. Harrison Ford had it all—even the quietly smoldering gaze and the serious grin. Best of all, he had started life as a carpenter and builder (known as "carpenter to the stars," he remodeled houses in Hollywood). He could chamfer an edge or hoist a flying buttress if the occasion called for it. If things slackened on the set, he could while away his time countersinking screws. He was Allie to his fingertips.

Belize was hot, buggy, povertystricken, and down on its luck: perfect, as Allie would say.

Peter Weir and Harrison Ford had gone down to look at it, and Ford had ended up clearing a piece of land with a huge machete, leading a work gang of Belizeans. It was a good start, and everyone connected with the film was enthusiastic about Belize. But when I saw it, I found it hard to believe that anyone unused to jungle conditions would willingly live there for the six or seven months it would take to make the movie. Everything that made it perfect for the setting also made it impractical.

And then it seemed to me that you had to become the man Allie himself in order to make the movie.

Heilman had been first; then Schrader and Weir; and then Saul Zaentz. Harrison Ford was the latest incarnation. But the crew also had a spirited and visionary look. From the point of view of handiwork, it was more like imperialism, Allie Fox-style, than moviemaking. The construction crew built roads

Harrison Ford hired a venerable 126-foot air-conditioned yacht and commuted to the set by speedboat.

and bridges, they built houses and then a pair of villages, they had boats, they had their own water supply. It seemed that the movie had swallowed the country and become its sole industry. What the burnoose is to a Bedouin, the T-shirt is to a Belizean, and every T-shirt in Belize was lettered MOSQUITO COAST.

"What you doing in Belize?" the customs man said at the airport outside of Belize City.

"Mosquito Coast," I began.

"The magic words," the man said, and waved me through.

The fictional Jeronimo had become a real place, an entire settlement in which there were crops and houses and waterwheels. People lived there; it had been built to last. After the picture was finished, some of these buildings became community centers, and others were taken over by homeless people.

For the traveler who thinks he's seen everything, I would suggest a season in Belize, where the bumper stickers say, YOU BETTER BELIZE IT! Most of Belize City is seven feet off the ground, on stilts, because of tidal waves and regular swamping; over the years hurricanes have come close to wiping it out (which is why the capital, Belmopan, is inland). It is a small wooden town of tall tottering houses and lame-looking shacks and a few solid villas. There are vultures in the sky and slavering dogs in the streets and hawksbill turtles in the river that runs through town. The population is multicolored. There is no Belize face. There are Indians and mestizos, and undiluted Chinese and frecklyfaced brown people; there are purplish blacks who wear woolen bags on their heads, and yellow women and Rastas and barefoot kids with hair like Velcro. You get the impression that everyone sings a great deal, though times have been hard, not to say desperate. The sugar price collapsed four years ago. People started growing marijuana, and planes began arriving with such regularity on the long straight roads that the government put up iron pylons on the roadside every few hundred yards to frustrate landings. Belize, they boast, is the second-largest grower of marijuana in the Western Hemisphere, after the Guajira in Colombia, which is legendary, but in fact it's the fourth: Mexico and Jamaica are two and three.

"I came down here and looked around," Harrison said. ''Looked at the houses and looked at the hotels. Jesus, those hotels. They said, 'Where do you want to stay?' And I said, 'Get a cargo plane...' "

Without any apparent effort, he had turned into Allie Fox: the beaky cap, the flapping shirt, the pushed-back hair, the I-know-best eyes, and the gently maniacal voice explaining his brilliant plan.

" 'One of these C-130s,' I told them. 'A big mother. Fill it up with a prefab house in lots of sections, all the plumbing, all the wires, maybe a helicopter too. Drop the whole thing into Belize in one package and bolt it together. That's where I'll live.' "

I asked him why he didn't do it.

''Because I had a better idea. I didn't have to live in Belize City—I didn't have to live in Belize at all!"

This again was pure Allie. He decided to hire a venerable 126-foot air-conditioned yacht called Mariner II— mahogany and brass and awnings and etched glass, a gourmet cook and a crew of five. He anchored this magnificent boat offshore and commuted to the set by speedboat, returning to his yacht every evening. His wife, Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter (E.T., The Black Stallion), remained onboard, working on a teleplay about General Custer.

Harrison is a brilliant mimic; he is funny and physical and full of ideas, a kind of embodiment of Allie.

One night we were talking about anxiety attacks while he chinned himself over the taffrail. He surprised Melissa by saying that he had had a number of them. Had I? he wondered.

Oh, sure, I said. Late one night in the African bush an African had pushed a gun muzzle into my face and begun screaming at me. I described how I had started gibbering.

''That's not an anxiety attack," Harrison said—not looking at me, still chinning himself slowly, his deltoids swelling, his lats spreading. ''That's scared shitless."

He then volunteered the information that he often worried about his performance as Allie.

"You shouldn't worry,'' I said. "You're doing everything right. You're Allie Fox. Listen, that's from the horse's mouth.''

He frowned at me. He said, "Don't tell me not to worry. I worry all the time. Does Allie Fox worry? Right. That's why I worry."

He had another homegrown Allie Fox characteristic. He wouldn't say much—he would chin himself, or wrap himself around a chair and do isometrics, and then he would pipe up only to correct you.

I had been saying something about Peter Weir being a good listener.

"He doesn't listen," Harrison said. "He hears. But that's all."

Weir was so highly respected on the set that he could give an order without raising his voice and it was instantly acted upon. I never saw him lose his temper or even get flustered. You might say: Why should he? But it was humid, and the temperature in the high eighties. The sand flies were torturous, the roads terrible, the machines on the set temperamental. Because children were involved in the filming,

working hours had to be somewhat limited. Some of the actors hardly spoke English.

Paul Schrader once told me, "The hardest films to make are those with scenes on ships, or ones set in the tropics, or ones with a lot of kids. This one has all three obstacles."

Peter Weir was imperturbable. He said there was a good analogy for directing The Mosquito Coast. "It's like being captain of a ship. Not a small vessel, but a ship of the line, with an enormous crew. I don't do it alone. John [Seale, the cameraman] is my first mate. Jerry and Saul are the owners. My second mate is... "

This is another way of describing Allie, too: as a sea captain. In fact, I had given Allie a number of nautical expressions to suggest this very aspect of his character.

Any writer must be humbled when something he has dimly imagined and put down in a few sentences is brought to life: it is like magic—a conjuring trick—the words creating something solid. The thrill of moviemaking has something to do with these apparitions.

I could write Father built a tall icehouse and filled it with a wilderness of iron pipes, and then I saw the crew doing that very thing. It seemed rash, and expensive, and such an effort; but it worked! He cleared about thirty acres and put up a settlement: and they went at it, cleared virgin jungle and did the same thing. One day Fat Boy blew up, I wrote. The special-effects crew said, "We're going to blow off the sides first, and then get those structures 180 feet off the ground. We can do a lot of things here with explosives that we could never do in the States. This explosion's going to be a national event!" I loved their eagerness. I wrote the book alone in a room; but to make the movie they had to do exactly what Father did—go into the jungle and colonize it and make ice. I am not understating my role. I had dreamed it all. But they had to tangibalize it, as Father Divine used to say. You have to agree with God: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made Flesh. It is not always an easy transition, but that is the essence of making movies out of novels. □