ENDURANCE

About The Production

Founded in the eighth century B.C. by Herakles, the greatest of all Greek heroes, the Olympic Games were held continuously, at four-year intervals, for over a thousand years. The highest prize for a winner in each event was the right to commission a victory song - a poem in praise of his achievement, to be both sung and danced by a chorus of his young relatives and countrymen at the celebrations in his hometown.

This coveted honor underscored the central Olympic reality: that for the incandescent duration of his performance, some mortal would go further than any other on earth toward exceeding the physical limits of our common humanity.

Inspired by such ancient customs as well as the compelling triumphs of modern-day competitors, the picture was intended to create a tribute to both Olympian aspiration and East African distance running. It would take the form of a film glorifying one contemporary athlete and his heroic feat by portraying the way of life that produced him. It would transform the customary local rejoicing into a global celebration and, in the process, reawaken the ancient victory song.

The result is "Endurance," a paean to human excellence that defies categorization.

Producer Pressman recalls that "initially, Terry and I were interested in two things: the tradition of distance running in East Africa and the notion of what makes an Olympic hero. We originally targeted Kenya, because that country produces an unusually great number of record-breaking distance runners. What, we wondered, inspired these men and women to run so hard and compete so well? Could this drive and 'endurance' be something specific to their culture?

"Then the notion of a hero, an Olympic hero - one who finds the courage to win not just for himself but for his country shaped our search, and ultimately we found our hero in Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie, whose humility and spirit made him a natural choice."

Renowned British drama-documentary director Leslie Woodhead accepted the challenge to realize their concept. To that end, the director has woven together elements of cinema verite, traditional documentary filmmaking, sports coverage, docudrama and feature film devices with a stirring score drawn from East African musical traditions.

"What we did was not a documentary, although we used real people, not actors," explains Woodhead. "But it wasn't a dramatized reconstruction of events either. In essence, 'Endurance' is a nonfiction feature that incorporates devices usually associated with fiction."

The approach was inspired by the work of filmmaker Robert Flaherty. His classic films on the lives of indigenous people around the world, including the silent film "Nanook of the North," attempted to discover "the bigger themes in a single life," says Woodhead. "Nanook, for instance, became an archetype of survival and matters that reached far beyond himself. In the same way, 'Endurance' explores Haile Gebrselassie as both a person and a mythic figure."

"'Endurance' is Haile's personal story," adds Pressman, "but in making the film it became much more. Inadvertently, it became a universal tale of courage, strength and the power of the human will."

The offer to direct a feature film originally caught documentarian Woodhead off guard. At the same time, the challenge of an innovative project about am uncannily talented East African athlete was, he says, "utterly fascinating. All I could do was say, 'I'll try."'

The project pulled together strands of work he had been doing for a half a century. Since the '70s, Woodhead has filmed numerous documentaries with remote peoples, many of them in East Africa, including five films in Ethiopia. He is also known for his docudramas. "I have the incredibly good fortune to be paid to do this work," he says. "We aren't only making a film, but we are forced to collide with other peoples lives."

Because it is such an unusual work, "Endurance" called for the special skills of a select group of filmmakers. In addition to Woodhead, they include: America's top Olympics documentarian, Bud Greenspan, who filmed the Atlanta Games' distance runs using seven cameras; co-producer Sally Roy, who worked with Woodhead on five other films and has extensive experience in both feature filmmaking and documentaries; director of photography Ivan Strasburg; and the music team of John Powell and Hans Zimmer.

To complement the impressionistic saga unfolding on the screen, the soundtrack would be crucial. The score would be performed by singers from the runners native land and played on original instruments. In the case of Ethiopia, indigenous instruments - the flute called the washint, the one-stringed violin-like massinko and the krar, which is actually a small King David's harp - were shipped back to composer John Powell in Los Angeles, who also recorded in-studio the voices of respected Ethiopian soloists Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shihabaw and Theodros Tadesse.

Under the supervision of Hans Zimmer, Powell's task was to create a score that intentionally does not adhere to cinematic cliches. A rich tapestry of Ethiopian devotional songs, chants and instrumental tunes, it also features symphonic strains and elements reminiscent of the blues, gospel and spiritual tunes, even reggae. One track Powell composed combined krar, massinko and Western orchestra in such a fashion that "it could have been an Aaron Copland Texas waltz," he says. "In fact, the more I listened to Ethiopian music, the more I could hear little fragments familiar to the Western ear. But even in completely orchestral segments, I tried to reflect the compositional concepts of Ethiopian music.

The idea was to narrow the cultural gap between Ethiopians and Westerners while at the same time striking universal chords of feeling.

"Ethiopian music in its rawest form is very different from ours," Powell explains. "It has an alien sound to Western ears, more Arabic than African. It uses different scales, and an Ethiopian melody can last four minutes without repeating itself."

"But what I didn't want was a fusion," he continues. "Instead, it was important to create a bridge for audiences to grasp the underlying emotions."

To accomplish the goal, Powell relied mostly on Malick's conceptual descriptions. Powell then worked over the course of 18 months without the film in front of him, an approach he describes as "freeing. And Terry Malick is someone who believes in letting your artistry out as fully as possible.

Of course, until the Atlanta Olympics it was not certain that Haile would be the subject of the film. Kenyans had dominated distance running in the past five Olympics, but Pressman and Malick planned to profile the East African - Kenyan, Ethiopian or otherwise - who won in Atlanta, exploring him as both a human being and the personification of the almost superhuman qualities the sport can engender.

But when Woodhead met Haile before the race, he saw "a fire, a quickness, a wonderfully alive spark about him. I have never before cheered for someone during a race as loudly and passionately as I did that day in Atlanta."

With Haile confirmed as the film's subject, Woodhead chose his crew carefully. Those who come to Ethiopia would have to be professionals familiar with rugged location shoots who were "able to improvise and not be prima donnas," Woodhead says. To the small core group of only seven Westerners were added several Ethiopian film technicians who had trained in Moscow when a Marxist regime governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1993, plus several drivers.

In the aftermath of the country's devastating civil war in Eritrea's (which began in 1962, subsided with Eritrea's independence in 1993 and re-ignited earlier this summer) and because the country had been relatively isolated from the outside world since the early '70s, the land had a frontier feel to it.

The crew had to negotiate a labyrinth of Ethiopian paperwork and permits, Roy recalls. Once settled in the relatively fertile southern region (in contrast to famine-struck northern Ethiopia), however, the film team was welcomed in Haile's native village, Asela.

Because "Endurance" incorporates elements of both dramatic feature films and documentaries, the villagers played a key role in the film: Woodhead's strategy was to use "real people playing their own lives" as much as possible.

Casting, where required, turned out to be equally naturalistic. For young Haile's father, Ato Bekele, Woodhead chose Ato Bekele's actual first cousin. Ato Bekele himself also appears late in the film when Haile is a grown man. Haile's mother is plaved by his eldest sister, Shawanness. Haile himself is portrayed by the runner's nephew, who displayed the same quick intelligence, drive and determination as his uncle.

For large scenes, the filmmakers explained the event they wished to film for instance, an ancient "tree anointing" ceremony based on Oromo tribal rituals, or the scene at the healing waters of the Shrine of St. George - and then would, essentially, stand back and let it happen.

"The villagers were totally natural," says Roy. "Their ability to recreate events fascinated us. We were amazed that during the recreation of Haile's mother's funeral, the mourners were shedding real tears, grieving over people they'd lost in the past. One man told me quietly, 'I'm thinking of my mother today."

"These were some of the most open, helpful people I've encountered," she continues. "A huge trust developed between the crew and the subjects, but it was also our job to disappear, to be invisible, so we could film people at their most natural. For a project like this, where people are being gracious enough to invite you into their homes and lives, we as filmmakers had an especially fine balance to strike. They gave us so much and we, in turn, had an obligation to try and help them."

Statistics indicate that the average life expectancy for an Ethiopian man is 39 years, while the per capita national income of most Ethiopians is around $100 per year. Western ways are, therefore, truly foreign. On the first trip to the village, for instance, the crew brought gifts of chocolate. By the second trip, the most popular gifts for children were far more practical, including notebooks and pencils picturing Mickey Mouse. In the end, the Westerners had given away most of their own clothes, along with shoes, cards, Walkmans - virtually everything they had packed.

The crew's greatest contributions were the exact replica they built of the mud hut, or tukul, where Haile grew up, which they gave to the owner of the compound where they shot scenes taking place in the runner's childhood.

Second, in the process of trucking equipment up to the village church in four-wheel-drive vehicles, it was discovered that Coptic Christian services were inaccessible to older villagers who couldn't make the climb on foot. The crew rebuilt the road during shooting. Now everyone can reach the church.

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