Behind the Scenes: Out of Africa (Pollack, 1985) with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford

I wanted the opening image to be Africa, just sunrise and the silhouette of a man hunting. It's a dream of an old woman who's now going back in her mind to try to see who this man was. You have the sense of a woman that you admire who gets under your skin. There's something about her courage and eloquence and wisdom and she made Africa sound so marvelous and poetic. At the age of 27, Karen Dennison was unattached and untested and Africa was simply the dark continent. Her courage and eloquence choked inside her, eager to be set free. She wanted to be so full of stories that if you pricked her, they would pour out. But the great chapter of her life remained blank. The destiny which she was determined to fulfill was vague and seemed to be eluding her. She was a very unhappy, aimless woman who was out of sync with her family and out of sync with their expectations for her. She writes very often about orphans, whether they're actual orphans or spiritual orphans, orphans in their milieu, and she felt that she was born to have a different life, a wider scope, a more passionate existence than the one that she had in Denmark. She saw her experience as a dialectic, the aesthetic and the moral that was Kierkegaard's either or, and the poles of that dialectic organized her experience in an extraordinarily coherent way. She came from, on her mother's side, a very bourgeois family with middle-class values, a very strong sense of morality, very Christian, repressed, responsible. They saw life as a long and costly mortgage. You were paying off your debt to God by living responsibly. The erotic repressiveness of her mother's family was one of the most oppressive aspects of their morality, so she was already deeply affected by it, and in a way she never really transcended it. I think she wanted to be sensual and wasn't considered sensual by other people. Her father, whom she adored and who committed suicide when she was 10, had been a great adventurer and an aesthete and a hedonist and a sensualist and a warrior, and all of those virtues that she admired in him she longed to have in her own life and didn't see any way to have them. She received several marriage proposals, one from an art critic who would have made a decorous and understanding husband, but she didn't want a decorous understanding husband. She worshipped virility. She fell in love with Brewer's older brother, Hans, who was killed also, ironically, in a plane crash. Karen got what Karen wanted, which was married. Brewer got what he wanted, which was to get to Africa, and no small part on Karen's money. It wasn't just a mercenary or even a sort of exploitive or marriage of convenience. They really were friends, and they had a great complicity. They both wanted to escape. I think there was quite a strong attraction on her part to him. He was not an obvious choice for her, for a sort of intellectual, high-strung, cultivated woman, but in other ways he was not such a bad husband. Her family then staked them to this farm, which was an extraordinary gift. The air was sweeter than anything I've ever smelled in my life, and there were bird calls that I never recognized, because it is sort of paradise. She was euphoric when she first arrived in the highlands. Part of that is just the air of the highlands. It's very high and very pure. There is a euphoria that everybody gets. It's overwhelming. It's truly overwhelming, to the point where you say, if there was a Garden of Eden, this is where it would be. British East Africa in 1913 was a place where nature sanctioned the complete abandonment of civilized inhibitions. Serial monogamy was athletically practiced, and in the bars of steamers, women were accosted with the famous question, are you married or do you live in Kenya? Farah introduced himself, this extraordinarily handsome and dignified figure from the Thousand and One Nights, and he was to be her majordomo and her butler and her confidant. She was thrilled. Malick played with an intensity that bore through me. He was so connected to my character. He carried his dignity ferociously through the shoot. The sense of this man's being much more important than anyone ever dreamed. Nairobi was a rough and ramshackle little town built around the wooden sidewalks were shaded with rows of eucalyptus trees and lined with offices and bungalows roofed in corrugated tin. The thoroughfares were paved with red dust that turned to mud the color of oxblood when it rained. Reproducing the city accurately, we did have to build it, and it's a pretty spectacular set I wouldn't have attempted in any other country. Stephen Grimes, a great production designer, went there and for a year built that city and built the railroad and found a house and built onto it that was like Karen Blixen's house. Klaus was the only actor I ever saw in the role. He was the first actor I wanted, and at a certain point it looked like I wasn't going to be able to get him, and I just could not think of another actor who could do it. He does every despicable thing possible to that woman, and they still end up friends, and you have to believe it. Klaus was a difficult man. He's a very complicated man. He has a sense of unease that he carries around a lot. He isn't necessarily looking to have a good time on the movie like I am. The first years of marriage to Broar were a voyage of discovery. They worked the farm together. Determined to yield great harvests, they went on safari together, where Karen proved to be the equal of any hunter, but the love of adventure and the life force that it unleashed captured Broar completely. His boundless charm and stamina were soon legendary. He could drink through the night at the club and then safari all day. Karen was equally true to herself, and she preferred to be isolated on the farm. It was not easy to get to know the natives. They were quick of hearing and evanescent. If you frightened them, they could withdraw into a world of their own in a second. Until you knew a native well, it was almost impossible to get a straight answer from him. To a direct question as to how many cows he had, he had an eluding reply. As many as I told you yesterday. I was a doctor to the people on the farm most mornings from nine to ten, and like all great quacks, I had a large circle of patients. I knew very little of doctoring, just what you learn at a first aid course. But my renown as a doctor had been spread by a few chance lucky cures, and had not been decreased by the catastrophic mistakes that I had made. At night we would hear the lions. I thought it was the neighbors at first because they were going, sounded like heartburn next door, you know, but it was lions. I thought lions went, but they don't, they go. There's a war going on out there between the animals. You hear them start up, and the next morning you get in your jeep and you drive and you see carcasses all over the place, and you see the food chain working perfectly. The lion kills the zebra, and the vultures stand and wait. This lion was tethered, and as long as it was tethered it would sit there like this, and I would whip it, you know, with fury, and it would go. So Sidney was tearing his hair out just the day before we're supposed to leave. We're all supposed to, he's had it, he's had it. It's like endless shoot I guess for him, and he goes, untie the lion, don't tell her. So he untethers the lion, and I go, and then I go. I would have to ask any sane person whether they believe I would actually untie a lion and let it loose on my actress. I think that's a little creative memory going on. She was very brave. She did get close to these lions, but the lions were brought from the United States, and the lions always had their trainers around them. We did everything we could to protect Meryl. Dennis was the son of an earl. He'd been educated at Eaton. He was a classical scholar and a lover of modern music and art. He was very handsome, very elusive. Today we would say he was afraid of commitment. I think everybody in Africa was afraid of commitment. It was the place where you went, when you were afraid of commitment, you went and became a hunter in the highlands or ran a coffee farm. He was not going to settle down and raise a family and be a husband. Dennis was able to play with her verbally. He had a terrific sense of humor and a great sense of irony, and he wasn't intimidated by her. She liked to say Roy didn't know whether the Renaissance came before or after the Crusades. Dennis was her match. He was a hunter. A lot of women were in love with him, and he was the pinnacle of the unattainable guy. Now, at first, I didn't think of Redford at all. Finch Hatton, as we tried to imagine him, really wanted Africa to stay exactly as it was the moment that he first set foot in Africa. Dennis deeply admired the unique qualities of the Maasai, and he tried to help them when the not only of their ability to fight and thus stop lions from raiding their herds, but also of their identity. The British plutocrats condemned, because they could not comprehend, a race that did not define itself by its economic utility. Karen venerated the Maasai, for they were completely true to their own nature and to an unspoken ideal. Their daring and fantastical style had grown from the inside and was an expression of the race and its history. I have really thick, thick books just to deal with the various tribes that were here, and be authentic with their dress and their dialects that they speak. I have to recreate the look. Native costumes, like the Somali and the African costume, were very accurately researched, and we, as accurately as possible, we tried to recreate them perfectly as they used to be. In the very beginning of the shoot, and we didn't know each other very well at all, Sidney wanted to go over and over and over on his coverage, and he said, tell me a story. So I told, I think, 30 stories. I think that's when I solidified her for myself. Bit by bit, she formalizes her own figure as the timeless, the ageless storyteller, not the woman who suffers. And the woman who suffers and struggles and weeps and loves and loses is the character in the film, and that is actually the historical Isaac Denison rather than literary Isaac Denison. We were out in the tents sleeping at night, and I heard what sounded like a washing machine backing up, if you've heard this sound. You know, it sounded like a terrible, terrible plumbing problem. So I got up, and I looked through the little screen outside, and right as far as you're sitting from me, what looked like two Volkswagens were going. It was two hippos. They were so close to my tent that the wind from their clash was, you know, making the sides go. And I thought this was hilarious. Hippos, you know, they're so funny and cute. The next day, they told me that more people are killed by hippos than any other animal in Africa. These were native hippos who didn't know, you know, that this was Robert Redford and me. They were going to, if you get between them and the water, apparently, or between them and their offspring, they'll just eat you. So I was more scared of doing the hair washing scene than the beating up the lion scene. The intellectual attention, this sort of love of books, the ability to quote poetry back and forth, was not only interesting to her and stimulating, but erotic. So in addition to Dennis's prowess as a man, there was his prowess as a mind, as a person who thought. And she loved that, because again, those were qualities that her father had had. Sidney wanted a sensual quality to her that would go with the landscape as he saw it of Africa. He didn't think that I was sexy enough to play Isaac Denison, that sex pot. But, you know, it's a movie, and I understood that. But I went for the meeting. I finally wrangled a meeting, and I went pathetically in a very low-cut blouse with a push-up bra. I'm very ashamed to say it, but I did. And it worked. That's the really sad part. Once when Dennis and I had been up and were landing on the plain of the farm, a very old Kikuyu came up and talked to us. Did you see God, he asked. No, Andweti, I said. We did not see God. And you, Bedar, he said, turning to Dennis. What do you think? Will you get up high enough in your aeroplane to see God? Really, I do not know, said Dennis. Then, said Andweti, I do not know at all why you two go flying. There's always some sort of a conflict of ways of looking at life. Sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's political, sometimes it's just emotional. And that's usually at the center of the love story. Sidney said, I need to see the film in the line. And Meryl was the one who came up with it. And she said, Out of Africa is the story of a woman whose lover was more beautiful than she was. She would go to bed for three weeks in a depression. I imagined it as when her idea of herself collapsed, when her invention collapsed, her powers of invention. You just can't believe in the illusion that you've been manufacturing. There's an adrenaline rush involved in that kind of attachment, which I think she thrived on. He did what he could to help her, but he was really very absent in the last months, weeks and months before she was to leave and before his plane crashed. There was some sort of row, that was the word her friends used to describe it. And whether it was about another woman or whether it was about his unwillingness to help her, I think maybe she even expected that he might offer to marry her at that point so she could stay in Africa. There was talk about the fact that he was having an affair with Beryl Markham. Beryl Markham had been fixated on Dennis for years. He represented an ideal conquest, especially since he was the only male in East Africa who had rejected her charms. She remained deferential to her much older rival as she waited for Dennis to stray. She was striking to behold, and 15 years younger than Dennis. She flouted all convention, her daring culminating in the first solo flight from Europe to America. She wore her prowess like a wild animal, and to a resolutely independent man past 40, she was irresistible. So when Karen clutched Dennis too fiercely, he turned to Beryl. I began to see the movie as a dramatization of the idea of possession, in some way, between two people and between countries. Rationally, she knew she couldn't possess him and probably didn't want to, but that was his essence. But the woman wanted him, and wanted to marry him, and wanted to be the honorable Mrs. Dennis Finchatten. His selfishness was his weakness, and that her possessiveness was her weakness. His selfishness about protecting his individuality was his Achilles' heel, and her need to be assured of closeness was her Achilles' heel. He's just not going to bend. Is that good? Depends on your point of view. I don't think it's good, but it's attractive. If you don't get to the flaw, you can't finish the relationship. He had to say, you have no idea the effect that language has on me. She says, in the world in which you want, there would be no love at all. And he says, well, you didn't have to prove it every five minutes. They both have valid arguments. The reason for my giving up my life to loving the independent-seeking Dennis in the black race so boundlessly must be because this is a necessity for me. I cannot be possessed and have no desire to possess. It can be cold and empty, God knows, but it is not cramped or stifling. I know that I must accept this aspect of my life unconditionally too, for however much I may long for something more secure and intimate in my life, when the crunch comes, I back out of it. And this recurs continually. The Pandora, who presumably shrieked and clutched at Dennis, was released from a cauldron of despair. Karen would never write about this painful history, not only because she preferred to forget, but also because it hardly seemed to belong to her. You know, if you live with a great deal of happiness or the thing that you love the most or you care about the most, you always secretly, in the back of your mind, think it will be taken away.