ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR THE RELIEF-WORKER ROMANCE 'BEYOND BORDERS' TOOK AN ARDUOUS JOURNEY TO THE SILVER SCREEN.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

It is difficult enough to make a sweeping Hollywood movie about an entirely unpleasant, real-world subject in this entertainment-rattled age.

Consider how much higher the level of difficulty was when these chilling words were uttered: Oliver Stone wants to make a love story.

Believe it or not, that was the origin of ``Beyond Borders,'' which finally comes down to us today - after five years of frustrating, on-and-off development - with romance and refugee horror stories eminently intact but sans the controversy-stirring macho man director of ``Platoon,'' ``JFK'' and ``Natural Born Killers.''

Instead, the film - which stars Angelina Jolie and Britain's Clive Owen as relief workers who fall in love over a 15-year course of humanitarian disasters in war-torn Ethiopia, Cambodia and Chechnya - has been directed by reliable New Zealander Martin Campbell (``GoldenEye,'' ``The Mask of Zorro,'' ``Vertical Limit'') from a script credited to Stone's original screenwriter, Caspian Tredwell-Owen.

It features several disturbing incidents of appalling suffering and much impassioned rhetoric from Owen's Nick Callahan, who works for a Doctors Without Borders-like, nongovernmental charity organization. But Campbell says that his primary concern regarding the piece was identical to, at least, Stone's original intent.

``I emphasized the love story,'' the director says. ``That's what I was intrigued by because my last three films could hardly be called love stories. But that was the key, because I thought that the backdrop to the movie being refugee camps and Doctors Without Borders, etc., would look after itself. I think, perhaps, that Oliver might have made a more political movie out of it than I would have. But I think you can get the same message across with a less-is-more approach; I didn't want it to get preachy, if you see what I mean.''

Without Oliver

As she told U earlier this year, Jolie - who became so interested in the issue while doing research for the film over its long gestation period, she became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and adopted a Cambodian orphan - agrees that the change in directors has probably resulted in a more accessible film.

``Oliver's (version) might have been more controversial and maybe more appealing to a certain group,'' Jolie said. ``But I think it's good that everybody is going to be able to understand this movie and watch it.''

But let's not get too carried away with that one. Dan Halsted, who produced Stone's ``Any Given Sunday,'' ``Nixon'' and ``U Turn'' and was in on ``Beyond Borders'' from its conception, notes that it's impossible to guess how much the final product differed from the previously planned one.

``As somebody who produced three of Oliver's films, I feel like I should know,'' Halsted acknowledges. ``But I don't really know the difference. I can't imagine this movie ever getting made by anybody other than Martin, because of what he brought to it. But it's too hard to speculate what Oliver's would be in a vacuum. The script never changed, really. It's easy to say it would have been more political or this or that. But at the end of the day, we shot the script that Oliver was always going to shoot.''

After years in development hell - in which lead casting passed among Kevin Costner, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ralph Fiennes and Meg Ryan before Jolie committed to the long wait - Stone dropped out of directing the project in the summer of 2001 on the grounds that he couldn't make it under the strict budget limitations financiers demanded.

Jolie gave some indication of what the five-year wait and money-wrangling was about.

``It's a hard movie to make because it's not a popular subject matter,'' says Jolie, who plays a socialite, Sarah Jordan, whose consciousness is raised as the film progresses. ``And it's not an easy movie to make, because it travels through so many countries and it deals with different politics. And people honestly don't want to see things that can be that sad or that upsetting.

``So to get people together to put funds into a very epic film and to really say, Let's go and shoot this - knowing that people may not see it at all, but you have to make it because you love it ... You don't often find people who are willing to make that kind of a film these days.''

Campbell came on in August 2001 but had to prepare the film for production by December or lose crucial German tax shelter money.

The proper path

The other problem was, even the can-do Kiwi and his frugal producing partner, fellow New Zealander Lloyd Phillips, could not film the long script they'd been handed and remain on budget. Nevertheless, Tredwell- Owen, who did a first edit for the new team but then had to work on another project he'd committed to, feels that Campbell and the writers who came after him remained extremely faithful to his and Stone's vision.

``It's really just a difference in directing, I don't think there's any value judgment involved,'' the British writer explains. ``Oliver tells stories at a kind of fever pitch and Martin has more of a leisurely approach. I think Martin deflated things which might have seemed overblown, and thereby made the film a little bit more direct. I'm very pleased with how the film turned out; some things were lost, but I think the most powerful moments come across.''

It's those powerful moments, however, that may drive away general audiences out for a sweeping romantic saga. These include scenes of starving African children, grotesque medical operations, real land-mine victims and a scene in which a sadistic Khmer Rouge soldier forces people to watch a baby play with a live hand grenade (the boy's parents included).

``There were certain moments when we needed to focus, full-frontal, on issues, because they related to the story,'' notes Campbell's partner, Phillips. ``Like when Sarah picks up the starving baby. We had to show that because it related to how her character was going to become an activist. But once we did that, and soon after showed how these NGO doctors had to perform operations in these camps, we didn't feel we had to concentrate any more on that. We felt that was strong enough.''

Um, did he say starving baby? Don't worry; it was actually a healthy child Jolie worked with in the Namibian desert. The skeletal appearance was achieved via computer graphics in postproduction.

``The key was not to show too many gross images,'' Campbell says. ``I watched a lot of documentaries and talked to a lot of people before we started shooting, and the truth is it's horrific out there in those camps. I always thought that if I overdid it, audiences would just turn away. I felt that the malnourished child she found in the African desert represented everything that needed to be said about the starving people. It didn't need endless shots of emaciated people, simply because I felt it would completely overbalance the movie.''

Escapism vs. activism

From the very start, though, determining how to strike a balance was a painstaking, if mostly intuitive, task.

``They want to eat their popcorn and enjoy the film,'' writer Tredwell- Owen says of audiences. ``You balance that and the message you're trying to get across with great difficulty. In a lot of cases, I relied on the relief workers I came to know to kind of guide me. But it's an inexact process. There are going to be those who disagree with the balance of the piece and those who agree with it. It's so subjective, ultimately. But in each case where I had a kind of distance between dramatic requisite and reality, I always called someone in a cool group of people that I referred to and asked, 'Is this plausible? Can I get away with this? Will this offend anyone?' So it was a fairly deliberative process in that respect.''

``Finding the balance is just something that you have to be aware of going in,'' adds Campbell, ``and hope that you get it somewhere near right.''

However that works out at the box office, Jolie and company are convinced that the success of their movie will be much more appropriately judged by its impact on individual viewers.

``When I read the script five years ago, it just inspired me to start traveling and to educate myself,'' the actress says. ``Then, when the film finally did go, I was amazed at how much the making of it meant to me. I'm just hoping that that will translate to some of the people who see the film, and I won't be alone out there on my next trip.''

``Not everybody's going to like the movie,'' original producer Halsted reckons. ``Some might find it too intense or too grim or whatever. But I think people will respect us for a noble try, for trying to do something a little different in this marketplace.

``While we always set out to make a love story from the beginning, I think the movie does have its own message. And that's good, at least for me as a moviegoer. I want to go see stuff that has some bite to it. Even if it's not a huge financial hit, I think people will respect it for raising issues.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) An unsettling view

`Beyond Borders,' with Angelina Jolie, filters the suffering of refugees through a film romance

(2) Clive Owen and Angelina Jolie in ``Beyond Borders''

(3) Angelina Jolie on the set of ``Beyond Borders'' with director Martin Campbell