"[Soft instrumental music]" "[Groans]" "KAREN:" "He even took the gramophone on safari." "Three rifles, supplies for a month... and Mozart." "He began our friendship with a gift." "And later, not long before Tsavo... he gave me another." "An incredible gift." "A glimpse of the world through God's eye... and I thought." ""Yes, I see." ""This is the way it was intended."" "I've written about all the others, not because I loved them less... but because they were clearer, easier." "He was waiting for me there." "But I've gone ahead of my story." "He'd have hated that." "Denys loved to hear a story told well." "You see..." "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." "But it began before that." "It really began in Denmark." "[Gunshots firing]" "KAREN:" "And there I knew two brothers." "One was my lover, and one was my friend." " It's too cold for champagne." " It's too cold for anything but." " You said you'd be at Klampenborg." " I thought I'd come, but then I didn't." "Was it fun?" "Tanne." "Tanne, come on." "It's not as though you loved him." "You'd like to be a baroness, that's all." " He lied to me." " Of course." "Would you be in bed with him otherwise?" "My brother's only dull, but not stupid." "Pretend it's Hans." "[Gunshot fires]" "BROR:" "Where would you go?" "KAREN:" "Anywhere." "KAREN:" "America." "Ceylon." "I would even go to Australia." "Perhaps not Australia." "But I've got to be away from here." "I'll give you all I've got." "That should get you into town." "God, it was fun." "Money." "You could marry me." "I have to marry a virgin." "I can't stand criticism." "For the money, I mean." "Probably." "Listen to me." "I've got no life at all." "They wouldn't teach me anything useful, and now I've failed to marry." "You know the punishment for that." ""Miss Dinesen's at home."" "And you've gone through all your money." "You're off seducing the servant girls." "We're a pair, you and I." "I mean, at least we're friends." "We might be all right... and if we weren't, at least we'd have been somewhere." "You don't think you're being too romantic?" "BROR:" "Am I supposed to think you're serious?" "KAREN:" "I had a farm in Africa." "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "Good morning." "KAREN:" "Have you had trouble?" "DENYS:" "Now and then." "Have you?" " I'm travelling to Nairobi." " You caught the right train then." "Get away from there!" "Shoo!" "That's all my crystal, my Limoges." "[Exclaims knowingly]" "They didn't know it was Limoges." "[Denys speaks in African language]" "You plan to stay then?" "I've come out to marry Baron Blixen." "Do you know him?" "Bror?" "Yes." "We plan to start a dairy." "Are you quite famous?" "They stopped the train for you." "DENYS:" "It's rude not to here." "A dairy?" "Isn't it a bit soon for that?" "Milk at the door?" "[Train whistle blowing]" " Aren't you boarding?" " I'm going on." "On?" "To where?" "Mention the ivory to Berkeley Cole." "Bror knows him." " I'm Baroness Blixen!" " Not yet." "Finch Hatton, Denys!" "I am Farah Aden." "We can go now." " Where is Baron Blixen?" " He is at Muthaiga." "Please come." "[Farah speaking African language]" "KAREN:" "Where is Muthaiga?" "Muthaiga is a club where British go for drinking." "Please." "[Farah speaking African language]" "Listen, on the train are my crates with china and crystal." " Do you know china?" " Yes." "China, it can break." "[Tribal instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "Stay." "Excuse me, I'm looking for Baron Blixen." "Rajiv." " I wondered if you might tell me..." " Memsahibs must not be here." " I'm simply looking for someone..." " Memsahibs must not be here." "BROR:" "Tanne." "BROR:" "Where have you been?" "KAREN:" "Where have you been?" "Arranging things." "How was the trip?" "You can tell me later." "Would you like to change?" " My luggage is still on the train." " Room "D." Head of the stairs." "I haven't gotten a ring." "Do you care?" "KAREN:" "Did you think I wouldn't come?" "I thought you wouldn't want to spend the money." "BROR:" "You will love it here." "The servants are great." "BROR:" "Shall we get a drink?" "BROR:" "We've got almost one hour before the wedding." "One hour?" "[Traditional instrumental wedding music playing]" " Is this all right?" " I wondered what colour you'd choose." " It's ivory." "God, I've got this man's ivory." " Whose ivory?" "[People cheering excitedly]" "I'm Sarah, Lady Belfield." "Shall I stand up for you?" "Short or long, Blix?" "Long, please." "Give me time to adjust to it." "Settle down, all." "By the authority of His Majesty's Government vested in me..." "I declare that the Baron Bror Von Blixen, citizen of Sweden and..." " What's your name, my dear?" " Damn it, Henry, I told you her name." "Karen Christentze Dinesen." "Karen Christentze Dinesen, a female subject of the King of Denmark... are henceforth united man and wife." "[All cheering]" "God save this company, God save the King." "ALL:" "God save the King!" "Thank you for this." "DELAMERE: "Did you hear about Shuttleworth?""No," I said." ""He's living up country," he says, "in a tree with a baboon."" ""Male or female?" I said to him." ""Female, of course," he says." "There's nothing queer about old Shuttleworth." "[All laughing]" "Where's your muddleheaded husband?" "The Governor's at the punch bowl, thank you, hoping to avoid you." "Would you like to meet the bride?" "Or did you come just for the whiskey?" "Not for the company, God knows." "Lord Delamere, may I present Baroness Blixen." "Baroness Blixen, Lord Delamere, such as he is." " Baroness." "A Swede, are you?" " No, Danish, actually." "The little country next to Germany." "If it comes to war, where will Denmark stand?" "On its own, I hope." "We do have that history." "Is there something we can call you that gets round this Baroness?" " What do they call you?" " D, if I'm lucky." "[People cheering excitedly]" "My stupid name's Felicity, but I do like your dress." "Thank you." " It's not much of a hat." " It's meant to be stunning." " We die of sunstroke here." " At least I'm safe from the mosquitoes." "The big ones." " You nervous?" " Should I be?" "You know, wedding night and all that." "[People cheering excitedly]" "So they're both of them naked and not a shrub in sight." " Have you met Vicky Gresham?" " Hello, Baroness, I'd curtsy but I'm drunk." " May I see you, please?" " Excuse me." "If you want any friends, Tanne, I'd make them here." "There is no one else." "I want to see my house." "You may want to change." "It's a two-hour ride." "KAREN:" "Excuse me." "COLE:" "My God, these people drink." "I'm sorry, I was just..." " It's all right." " I'm afraid you've caught me snooping." "It's not my room, it's Denys', and Denys won't mind." "It's a thing about Denys, he doesn't mind." "Are you Cole?" "Berkeley Cole." " I brought the ivory with me on the train." " Well, thank you." " Are you taking your quinine?" " Oh, yes." "He has got lovely books." "Does he lend them?" "We had a friend, Hopworth." "He got a book and didn't return it." "Denys was furious." "I said, "Denys, you wouldn't lose a friend over a book, would you?"" "And he said, "No!" ""But he has, hasn't he?"" "[Laughing]" "COLE:" "Did you come out through London?" "KAREN:" "From Rome actually." "I thought you might have a newspaper." "KAREN:" "No, sorry." "Nothing in them anyway." "I had a friend who I used to take to the dances at Oxford." "They were in June by the river." "She always wore a new silk dress." "I think you're wearing her perfume." "No, it's very nice, but it's not the same." "We can go now." "[Natives singing tribal song]" "[Bror speaking African language]" "[All speak African language]" "This is Belknap." "He runs the farm." "Good evening, ma'am." "This is your cook." "Name is Esa." "Esa." "And this is Juma." "Houseboy." "Juma." "[Speaking African language]" "Come, see your house." "KAREN:" "When you leave me, I'm going to marry Berkeley Cole." "BROR:" "A man in trade." "Is that what he does?" "He is thick with the Somalis." "There's a crowd of them up on his land... who think he's some sort of prince." "He sells Finch Hatton's ivory." "Belknap is a cheery sort." "Had a place of his own." "Went belly up trying to grow flax." "KAREN:" "Does he know cattle?" "I didn't buy cattle." "We're going to grow coffee instead." "That's not what we planned." "BROR:" "You were in Denmark, I had to decide." "We made a decision." "KAREN:" "We don't know a thing about coffee." "BROR:" "You plant it, it grows." "My mother put her money up to do a dairy." "She doesn't care whether it's cows or coffee as long as it pays." "You must be with a herd or things go wrong." "I didn't come to Africa to sit with silly cows." "Just tell her we changed our minds." "Next time you change your mind, you do it with your money." "They bought you a title." "They didn't buy me." "Juma." "Fetch some wine for my lover's brother." "I think you're tired." "[Whispering] Be careful." "Did I tell you Hans came to say goodbye?" "[Farah instructing in African language]" "KAREN:" "Where is Baron Blixen?" "FARAH:" "He's gone to hunt." " Did he say when he would be back?" " He says he can come before the rain." "Is it going to rain today?" "It can be many days before the rains." "[Baboons screeching]" "BELKNAP:" "In Ohio we put up scarecrows to keep the birds away." "Here you hope there're enough leopards to keep down the baboons." "'Course they'll take your dog, too." "That's Africa." "KAREN:" "How much will we plant?" "BELKNAP: 1,000 acres, the Baron says." "How long will that take?" "That depends on Kinanjui." "He's the chief of the Kikuyu." "BELKNAP:" "Got a deal with him to get help." "KAREN:" "When will be our first harvest?" "These are seedlings." "It'll be three, maybe four years." "Four years!" "If they bear at all." "No one's ever tried coffee this high." "And what are we going to live on for four years?" "I'm working to get home." "Now, if you haven't got it... it'd be good if you could tell me right now." "We will plant 500." "Chief Kinanjui, I have heard that you are a wise chief..." "Not now, please." "And I look forward to our dealings." "Your Kikuyu are good workers." "I look forward to dealing with them honestly, and fairly." "This chief has no British." " Tell him that I am Baroness Blixen." " This chief knows that." "Tell him what I said." "[Farah translating in African language]" "[Speaking African language]" " What did he say?" " He says these Kikuyu can do this work." "KAREN:" "Farah, what else did he..." "Your leg is very sick." "You must come to the house for medicine." " Does he understand me?" " Yes." "If you don't come, the other boys will say you are afraid." "I myself will think only that you are foolish." "This boy must come to my house for treatment." "See that he does." "What else did Kinanjui say?" "He says coffee must not grow this high." "Never mind." "He's a chief, but he's a Kikuyu." "[Clock cuckooing]" "[Natives singing tribal song]" "If you put a dam here to stop the water then I can make a pond here." "Do you know how to make a pond?" " This water must go home to Mombasa." " It can go home after we make a pond." "This water lives at Mombasa." "[Bell ringing]" "KAREN:" "Come, then." "[Melancholic instrumental music]" "[Horse neighing softly]" "[Horse neighing loudly]" "[Exclaiming in annoyance]" "[Growling]" "DENYS:" "I wouldn't run." "DENYS:" "If you do, she'll think you're something good to eat." "[Growling menacingly]" " Do you have a gun?" " She won't like the smell of you." "KAREN:" "Shoot it." "DENYS:" "She's had breakfast." "[Exclaiming fearfully]" "Please shoot her." "Let's give her a moment." "Oh, my God, shoot her!" "Just how much closer did you expect to let her come?" "A bit." "She wanted to see if you'd run." "That's how they decide." "DENYS:" "A lot like people." "KAREN:" "She almost had me for lunch." " It wasn't her fault." "She's a lion." " It wasn't mine." "Doesn't that outfit come with a rifle?" "It's on my saddle." "Better keep it with you." "Your horse isn't much of a shot." "For Berkeley." "He's brought you presents." "DENYS:" "We stopped by your house, then came looking." "Good Lord, you are sweet." "You're on the road actually." "We're off to Magadi to shoot some ivory." "At least I have something good to offer you." "Did you intend to tell Berkeley what a fool I was?" "She had a lion a bit interested." "A bit?" "A bit, but not enough to bite." "It's all right to take a chance as long as you're the only one who'll pay." "Wouldn't you say so?" "I'd say that it sounds more like something you'd say." " Thank you." " Not at all." " Where's Blix?" " Hunting." " Has he been out long?" " Yes." "You'll need a good chat then." "Shall we stay for supper?" "Blix will have jackets we can use." " Do I have anything to say in this?" " Not really, but we'll hear you out." " Then I would like you to stay." " Good." "Denys." "I don't know." "Do you sing?" "Never." " Can you tell a story then?" " I happen to be very good at stories." "I believe that." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "DENYS:" "What's happened to the cows?" "For the dairy?" "KAREN:" "We changed our minds." "We'll grow coffee instead." "DENYS:" "A bit risky, this high." "KAREN:" "So I've been told." "DENYS:" "Didn't seem to bother you." "KAREN:" "I think they just haven't tried." "KAREN:" "Every time I turn my back, it wants to go wild again." "It will go wild." " Your man..." " Kanuthia." " He's not Kikuyu?" " No." "Shall I see that he's given supper?" "Don't do anything for him, thank you, Baroness." "COLE:" "It's true of Somalis." "The only tribe that knows horses." "And they don't drink, charge interest, or chase other men's wives." "Got to go to town for that." "Did you know that in all of literature there is no poem celebrating the foot?" "There's lips, there's eyes, hands, face, hair, breasts... legs, arms, even the knees, but not one verse for the poor old foot." "Why do you think that is?" "Priorities, I suppose." "Did you think you would make one?" "The problem is, there's nothing to rhyme it with." " Put." " It's not a noun." "Doesn't matter." ""Along he came and he did put upon my farm his clumsy foot"" "[Chuckling]" "We should have a story now." "When I tell a story to my nieces at home... one of them always provides the first sentence." " Anything?" " Absolutely anything." "There was a wandering Chinese named Cheng Huan... living in Limehouse... and a girl named Shirley." "Who spoke perfect Chinese... which she learned from her missionary parents." "Cheng Huan lived alone in a room on Formosa Street... above the Blue Lantern." "[Soft instrumental music]" "He sat at his window... and in his poor listening heart... strange echoes of his home and country..." "[Soft instrumental music continues]" "KAREN:" "They found them there the next morning... in their room above the Blue Lantern." "The dead child and the warlord... with Cheng Huan's love gift coiled about his neck." "Had you been to those places?" "I have been a mental traveller." "COLE:" "Till now." "KAREN:" "Yes." "Wasn't this England?" "Excuse me, Denmark?" "I like my things." "And when you travelled before, in your mind... did you carry so much luggage?" "A mental traveller hasn't the need to eat or sleep... or entertain." "You're right." "Anyway, aren't you pleased that I brought my crystal and my china?" "And your stories, yes." "COLE AND DENYS: [Singing] The conquering heroes come" "Sound the trumpets Beat the drums" "[Cole and Denys humming]" "KAREN:" "But I want you to come often." "COLE:" "I'd like that very much." " And you must promise me it will be soon." " I promise." "Bye." "KAREN:" "Did you save my life?" "No, the lioness did that." "She walked away." "So I am not indebted then?" "But I am." "We pay our storytellers here." "It's lovely." "But my stories are free and your present's much too dear." "Write them down sometime." "Take care, Finch Hatton." "You wouldn't rather call me Denys?" "Baroness." "[Thunder rumbling in the distance]" "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "What are you doing?" "I want you to come home." "[Thunder rumbling]" "Bror." "We never spoke about children." "Did you..." "Do you?" "Yes." "Is that all right?" "These Kikuyu want to be sick now." "Good Lord!" "Your leg has got worse." "You should go to hospital." "This leg may be foolish." "It may think not to go to hospital." "This leg will do as it pleases." "But if you will take it to hospital, I will think that you are wise." "And such a wise man as this, I would want to work in my house... for wages." "How much wages would come to such a wise man as that?" "More wages than come from tending goats." "I will speak to this leg." "[Majestic instrumental music]" "[Car horn honking]" "MAN 1:" "What about air raids?" "DELAMERE:" "Quiet!" "One question at a time." "MAN 2:" "The war's in Europe." "Will it ever reach here?" "German East is only 200 miles south." "General Von Lettow is there." "Let's not wait till he joins us at the bar." "BROR:" "Would we engage them?" "This is our war." "You don't have to be involved, but thanks." "I've got crops coming in." "How long is this thing gonna last?" "DELAMERE:" "We just have to stay and go as we must." "MAN 3:" "They won't fight if we won't fight." "We could always arm the Masai and point them south." "Do you want the job of collecting rifles from the Masai when this is over?" "And our women and children?" "Shall we bring them into town?" "We will deal with that problem as it arises." "Will they use native troops?" "I'd assume so, but not Masai!" "Berkeley, what about your Somalis?" "They'd make very good scouts." "We can cover the area here to the border." "We can gather information for when the regulars arrive." "DENYS:" "What's it about?" "Have you any idea?" "[Cole chuckling awkwardly]" "COLE:" "Not really." "DENYS:" "Then why do you want to get into it?" "It's got nothing to do with us." "They've made agreements we know nothing about." "Victoria and the Kaiser were relatives, for God's sake." "They divided Africa between them." "Do you know why there's a border?" "'Cause she had two mountains and he had none." "So she gave him Kilimanjaro." "It's a silly argument between two spoiled countries." "The sooner we do this, the sooner it ends, the sooner we pick up where we left off." "It may end." "But we're not gonna pick up where we left off." "You don't have to go!" "You want to go!" "We've got to live here." " They don't want you." " They don't know where we stand." "I'm not so fond of their empire I'd have you shot for it." "More likely chewed on than shot." "The farm will take care of itself, and you've got Belknap." "The farm will not take care of itself." "That's not the point." "I didn't expect to like you so much." "You're not going to go falling in love, are you?" "Not with someone who's always leaving." "If you need me, send a runner to find Delamere." "That's where I'll be." " That's a fine kiss goodbye." " I'm better at hello." "[Solemn instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "It's an odd feeling, farewell." "There is some envy in it." "Men go off to be tested for courage." "But if we're tested at all it's for patience... for doing without... perhaps for how well we can endure loneliness." "But I had always known that." "[Greeting in African language]" "KAREN:" "It didn't require a war." "I said goodbye to Bror." "Denys left without a word, which was quite proper." "FELICITY:" "Hello, the house!" "[Dog barking]" "KAREN:" "Felicity." "I thought you might want some meat." "KAREN:" "Is there any word?" "Nothing new." "There's not much fighting." "Awful fever, though." "I've got time for tea, I should think." "Are you for the Germans?" "Did they send you out to ask me this?" " We had a row about it in town." " Because of my bad English." "And whose side were you on?" "Yours." "They want to send me home to school." "Mother says I'm growing up wild." " I wanted to ask you about it." " Me?" "You've been around and about." "Some day, I'd like to run my own show the way you do." "KAREN:" "Is that what I do?" "FELICITY:" "You don't seem to need us much." "May I ask you something?" "I don't know much about men." "I want them to like me, but I..." "I want to be let alone, too." "I'm supposed to want to be taken, aren't I?" "I've got this book... but how do you know when to do what they want you to... and when not to?" "I suppose you ought to call me Karen." "[Clock ticking]" "[Soft instrumental music]" "[Clock cuckooing]" "They need paraffin and tinned food." "Enough for 300 men." "He wants you to send a white man with the wagon." "Is he all right?" "I assume." "Well enough to send a message." "And where would my husband like this wagon sent?" "He's with Delamere on the border near Lake Natron." " That's confidential, of course." " I would bear that in mind." "CAPTAIN:" "Sorry, I only meant... it wouldn't do for it to be talk around Nairobi." "CAPTAIN:" "We have to move you into town." "We can't protect you here." "What do you mean, into town?" "With the men gone, we're worried about the natives." "We have orders." "Women and children into town." " That is internment, Lieutenant." " Women and children." "Is that one category or two?" "You'll want time to gather your things." "CAPTAIN:" "I'll send an escort here for you Thursday." "And I am a captain." "I'm not paid to fight." "No." "Where is Lake Natron?" "That's south." "Bush country." "It's no place for a white man." "[Natives marshalling oxen]" "[Tense instrumental music]" "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "[Native singing tribal song]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "[Tense instrumental music]" "[Oxen mooing]" "[Natives singing tribal song]" "[Distant roaring]" "We should have crossed the Sand River today." "I may have got us lost." "God is great." "[Birds chirping]" "[Natives yelling]" " What the devil are you doing here?" " I'm on my way to Delamere." "COLE:" "Absurd." "We don't send women to war." "KAREN:" "Well, I'm going." "We haven't time for this." "You don't know where you are." "KAREN:" "I do now." "COLE:" "And you'll just get lost again." "I'm going on." " Talk to her, will you?" " No." "She could be hurt or worse." "I imagine she knows that." "Right, I tried." "DENYS:" "Here." "Find a spot on the horizon each morning and steer by it." "South-southwest." "About three days." "I see." "And don't worry about us, we'll be all right." "[Native marshalling oxen]" "[Tense instrumental music]" "[Sighing]" "Farah." " What is it?" " Masai." "[Tense instrumental music continues]" "[Lion growling]" "[Natives shouting]" "KAREN:" "Ismail, my rifle, where's my rifle?" "Ismail!" "[Lion roaring]" "[Natives shouting]" "[Karen exclaiming in pain]" "Get away!" "[Lion growling]" "Get away!" "[Oxen mooing in pain]" "[Lion growling]" "[Lions continue roaring]" "[Oxen mooing in pain]" "[Mournful instrumental music]" "[Karen exclaiming mournfully]" "FARAH:" "Msabu's bleeding." "She does not have this ox." "This lion is hungry." "He does not have this ox." "This wagon is heavy." "It doesn't have this ox." "God is happy." "He plays with us." "Tell Blix his wife's here." "[Native marshalling oxen]" "Hello, Karen." "Hello, D. Hello, Bror." "I've brought you some things." "You've changed your hair." "[Laughing]" "KAREN:" "You needed supplies..." "BROR:" "Send someone, I said." "You were lucky to get through." "It was really foolish." "KAREN:" "But I did get through." "And it was fun." "When are you coming home?" "Not just yet." "You're not going to help at all with the farm, are you?" "No." "KAREN:" "I could force you." "I could cut you off." "I'll just hunt professionally." "BROR:" "I might do it anyway." "It's not the way we thought it would be... is it?" "But I like it that you're honest with me." "I like you, too." "[Whispering] Tanne." "Very much." "[Soft instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "I had a compass from Denys." ""To steer by,"he said." "But later it came to me... that we navigated differently." "Perhaps he knew, as I did not... that the Earth was made round... so that we would not see too far down the road." "[Grunts]" "You've got syphilis." "KAREN:" "That's not possible." "Your husband is not ill?" "No." "Not the last time I saw him." "That was three months ago." "He's on the border with Delamere." "He would have come home." "These cases vary." "He may have just a touch." "But you are very ill." "Is he the only possibility?" "Yes." "DOCTOR:" "You'll have to go home to deal with it, you know?" "The treatment's difficult, but they have a thing called Salvarsan." "Arsenic." "And if I'm not cured then I will be insane, won't I?" "You ought to go soon." "I'll have to see your husband." "I will send for him." "These ought to help with the fever till you get home." " And what are my chances?" " About even, I'm afraid." "[Exclaims in disbelief]" "It's not what I thought would happen to me now." "FARAH:" "Muthaiga?" "KAREN:" "What?" "FARAH:" "Your letters." "Excuse me." "I heard you had made it." "I'd have paid anything to see their faces." "Hello." "Would you join us for a drink?" "I can't." "How is it that you are home?" "DENYS:" "I brought Berkeley back." " Has he been wounded?" " No, fever." "More than usual, but he'll be all right as long as the gin holds out." "And you?" "How is it with the fighting?" "We're taking a beating." "It's likely to last for a while." " I still have your compass." " Why don't you keep it?" "You've earned it." "Besides, I don't always want to know where I'm going anyway." "KAREN:" "Please don't let me keep you." " Are you all right?" " Yes." "Take good care." " We're behind a story or two." " Yes." " When I get back." " Back?" "From where?" "When you get back, I meant." "BROR:" "I thought it was malaria." "KAREN:" "It wasn't." "And you may be all right, but you have to be seen." "And the others, whoever they are, I hope they've got it." "It's my fault, no one else's." "[Clock ticking]" "I want to go with you." "Someone has to stay here and run things, and the factory must be finished." " Can you do that?" " That's little enough." "BROR:" "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry." "Where's memsahib?" "She can come soon enough." "KAREN:" "Later that day, I left for Mombasa... and the voyage home to Denmark." "It was a longer journey this time." "The war went on." "I fought my own war." "Arsenic was my ally against an enemy I never saw." "[African tribal song]" "KAREN:" "I stayed in the room where I was born... in Rungstedlund... and tried to remember the colours of Africa." "There was only the medicine... and walks with my mother along a deserted stretch of beach... and this room in my mother's house." "Denmark had become a stranger to me... and I to her." "But my mother's house, I came to know again." "And knew I would come back to it, sick or well... sane or mad, someday." "And so I did... after Tsavo." "[Exclaiming joyfully]" "BROR:" "Almost everyone's got them now." "[Car horn honking]" "[Car horn honking]" "[Natives talking excitedly]" "[Speaking African language]" "[Karen exclaiming contentedly]" " I am cooking now." " I have heard about this." "Are you well?" "I am well enough." "Then I am well enough also." "KAREN:" "What will you do?" "I have been thinking I'll hunt." "Safari sort of thing." "They say it'll be quite a business once the war is over." "KAREN:" "You wouldn't want to teach?" "I would like these Kikuyu to have a school." "There will be a fight about that." "Tanne." "Are you all well?" "They say I'm cured." "I won't have children." "Have you thought about us?" "Of course." "Belknap says the coffee will flower after the next rains." "If it does, you'll have to start thinking about hiring for the harvest... and how you'll get to market." "[Marching band playing lively tune]" "[Marching band continues playing]" " Where would Berkeley be?" " He must be here." "BROR:" "Who won the match?" "Have you got a story for me?" "Finch Hatton." "I've been demoted." "I was Denys last time." "Would you care for some champagne?" " They said you went home for a while." " Yes." " Where's Berkeley?" " It's good to see you." "He's still down with fever." "He'll be all right." "Who are all these people?" "KAREN:" "Bror says we'll be a colony soon." "They want it settled now." "They've got a lottery." ""Buy a ticket, win a farm in Africa."" "Did you really think it would stay the way it was?" "I thought it might." " Where is Kanuthia?" " He's dead." "Hello, Denys." "How are you?" "Would you join us for a drink?" " It's time to find a pillow." " Another night then?" "Have a good Christmas." "Christmas?" "So it is." "[Soft instrumental music]" "[Chief speaking African language]" "This Chief says children higher than this... must not learn to read." "Tell him that all the children must go to school." "No, this is a Chief." "You are not a Chief." "KAREN:" "That's absurd." "It is not good for tall people to know more than this Chief." "When these children are tall, then this Chief can be dead." "[Soft instrumental music continues]" "[Cheerful instrumental music playing]" "Bror, yes." "But Denys hired out to tourists, I can't imagine." "COLE:" "He's got no other trade and we've got no choice." "The government's put a stop to the ivory." "KAREN:" "What will you do then?" "COLE:" "I'll concentrate on the farm." "FELICITY:" "Hello, the house!" "KAREN:" "Felicity!" "How is it you're home?" "I'm out." "Look." "I didn't learn a thing, but I'm wonderfully clean." "I'll come and see you." "You save me a dance, Berkeley." "[Pleasant instrumental music playing]" "What's this nonsense I hear about a school?" "I've taken on a young missionary." "He's promised me to do the alphabet first, and save God for later." "Wogs can't even count their goats." "It's none of your bloody business anyway!" "Who the devil are you?" "[People shouting]" "I wonder if you'd dance with me?" "DELAMERE:" "I think you are about to apologise." "You do stir things up." "When they said they'd like to read, how did they put that exactly?" "Do they know they'd like Dickens?" " You don't think they should learn to read?" " I think you might have asked them." "KAREN:" "Did you ask to learn when you were a child?" "KAREN:" "How can stories possibly harm them?" "They have their own stories, just not in writing." "Why would you rather keep them ignorant?" "They're not ignorant." "I just don't think they should be turned into little Englishmen." "You do like to change things, don't you?" "KAREN:" "For the better, I hope." "I want my Kikuyu to learn to read." "My Kikuyu." "My Limoges." "My farm." " It's an awful lot to own, isn't it?" " I've paid a price for all I own." "What is it exactly that's yours?" "We're not owners here, we're just passing through." "Is life really so damn simple for you?" "Perhaps I ask less of it than you do." "I don't believe that at all." "ALL:" "Happy New Year!" "[Traditional New Year song playing]" "[All singing]" "[Shotgun fires]" "[All singing British anthem]" " Happy New Year." " And for you, too." "Someone has left her underclothes in the back." "I want you to take a place in town." "Are you sure?" "[Melancholic instrumental music]" "CHILDREN:" "Eats." "Eats." "CHILDREN:" "Eats." "MISSIONARY:" "He eats." "Elephant." "[Melancholic instrumental music continues]" "Give me work." "We've got peace, where is the prosperity?" "Why should the prices fall now just because they're not killing anybody?" "Tea's down just as bad." "[Bror shouting in African language]" "Do they always have to whip them so?" "[Soft classical music playing on gramophone]" "They finally made a machine that's really useful." "Listen." "It's for you." " I can't accept it." " Why not?" "Bror's moved to town." "That's a private matter, I imagine." "Did you think you would spend the night?" "Can't, thanks." "I have to go down to the Mara." "I've taken up safari work and I've gotta find a camp." "No." "There's country there you ought to see." "It won't last long now." "No." "I would be wasting your time." "Why don't you get your things?" "If you like me at all... don't ask me to do this." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "[Elephant trumpeting]" "[Car engine sputtering]" "[Car engine choking]" "What's your word?" "Shoo?" "Is that it?" "Shoo?" "DENYS:" "Shoo!" "That's a fine word you've got there." "[Car engine cranking]" "DENYS:" "Crank it again, please." "DENYS:" "Almost." "Crank it again." "Again." "Once more." "[Sighing]" "[Car engine starting]" "Well done." "We're off." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "DENYS:" "I don't know the scientific basis for it, but I know you can see further... in the African night than any other place." "And the stars are brighter." "It's about the tents." "When I'm out with Kanuthia..." "Used to be, we didn't use them." "I remember him." " There was something..." " Masai." "He was half Masai, that's what you remember about him." "They're like nobody else." "We think we'll tame them, but we won't." "If you put them in prison, they die." "Why?" "Because they live now." "They don't think about the future." "They can't grasp the idea that they'll be let out one day." "They think it's permanent, so they die." "They're the only ones here that don't care about us... and that is what will finish them." "What did the two of you ever find to talk about?" "Nothing." "So you knew I would come." "It's an early day tomorrow." "Why don't you get some sleep?" " What happens tomorrow?" " I have no idea." "Good night." "[Soft classical music playing]" "[Baboons screeching]" " You would think they would run off." " You didn't." "Hey!" "[Baboons screeching]" "Think of that." "Never a man-made sound, and then Mozart." "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "Have you clients already?" "In a week." "A man from Belgium and his daughters." "His letter said, "We'd like three of everything."" "DENYS:" "Lt'll be an interesting trip." "I'll be gone a month, or an hour and a half." "Why are you doing this?" "I don't know how to sow." "[Plane engine droning]" "Do you know what they're made of?" "Cloth." "KAREN:" "Where will he land?" "DENYS:" "Trick is not to." "It must feel amazing." "KAREN:" "It's how I imagined America to be." " Have you been to America?" " No, but my father was there... and he always told me stories about it when I was a little girl." "Are you still close?" "He died." "He killed himself when I was 10 years old." "I can fix that, I think." "DENYS: "Laugh'd loud and long, and all the while" ""His eyes went to and fro" ""'Ha!" "Ha!" "' quoth he, 'full plain I see" ""'T he Devil knows how to row'" ""Farewell, farewell!" "...i"" " You're skipping verses." " I leave out the dull parts." ""Farewell, farewell!" "But this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!"" "Lay your head back." ""He prayeth well, who loveth well" ""Both man and bird and beast"" "That's better." "KAREN:" "Will it be so different... hunting for hire?" "Not for the animals." "Well, maybe for the animals." "KAREN:" "Do you really prefer them to people?" "DENYS:" "Sometimes." "They don't do anything half-heartedly." "Everything's for the first time." "Hunting, working, mating." "It's only man that does it badly." "It's only man that tires of going through it." "Who says, "See here." "I know how you feel about me..." ""and you know how I feel about you." ""We understand each other, so let's lie down and get on with it."" "[Karen laughing]" "Why am I here?" "Because I wanted you to see all this." "I wanted to show it to you." "I thought you'd understand it." " Do you think much about death?" " I think about getting old." "It'd be like living with a cranky demanding old bastard." "You are a cranky demanding old bastard." "I had syphilis." "That's why I went home." "I know." "I never seem to get anything." "German measles once." "They say I'll have a normal life now." "But no children." "So the school." "So the school." "The farm, that's what I am now." "No." "We'll need meat for the camp tomorrow." "I'll wake you at dawn." "DENYS:" "Good night." "Good night." "DENYS:" "We might scare up a gazelle or two." "DENYS:" "But we'll go through buffalo country again." "They get cocky when you're on foot." "[Water buffalo grunting]" "Supper." "Good size, but..." "Lion." "Careful, the wind's behind us." "[Whispering] Back up." "Slowly." "If there's a charge, drop flat, and let me do it." "[Lion roaring]" "[Echoing] Drop!" "[Gunshot fires]" "Reload now!" "Dinner in a while?" "I'm glad you came." "[Soft classical music playing]" "To rose-lipt maidens." "There was a very young girl from Denmark... who took passage on a steamer bound for Suez." "There was a storm... off Morocco... and she was washed ashore onto a beach." "Onto a white beach." "Onto a beach so white..." "DENYS:" "I'd like to do that." "DENYS:" "Will that hurt?" "KAREN:" "If you say anything now..." "I'll believe it." "[Soft instrumental music]" "I need to know how to think about this." "Why?" "KAREN:" "Clear soup, the new lettuce... chicken, just the breast." "I trust this meets with your approval." " Who is coming?" " Bwana Cole is coming." "I will think on Bwana Cole." "I've got myself in real trouble now." " Now you think they should vote?" " No, worse." "Denys?" "[Soft classical music playing]" "Get Kamante." "He is out of hand entirely." "Does this look like a chicken?" "Here is not a chicken, here is a fish." "Go away." "What do you think?" "I think it's quite good, isn't it?" "Be careful." "When the old mapmakers got to the edge of the world... they used to write, "'Beyond this place, there be dragons."" "Is that where I am?" "He likes to give presents... but not at Christmas." "He hasn't even said when he's coming again." "If he's coming again." "Would you divorce?" "Then I would have no one." "[Soft instrumental music]" "DENYS:" "Men who missed moose in Alaska, grizzly in America... tigers in India, they're all at sea now bound for here." "[Karen chuckling]" "Berkeley is going to farm." "You could do that." "No, thank you." "You ought to look in on him though." "He didn't look all that well." "Can you stay?" "For a day or so." " Is that all right?" " No." "DENYS:" "You don't need two guns on safari." "Then do the town work." "Meet the clients, do outfitting." " There's the mail." "Lots of mail." " I don't know if I'd be right for that." "DENYS:" "You've gotta do something." "I don't actually." "My water's gone black." "We've gotta get you to a hospital, and get you some proper care." "I'm being cared for properly." "It's some years now." "She's fond of me, I think." "Why didn't you tell me?" "I suppose I thought..." "I didn't know you well enough." "There's money left in the trading account." "I'd like my share to go to Mariammo." "Berkeley, listen." "George Martin had blackwater fever and that was five years now." "You might take along that twelve-bore you're so fond of." "The trigger seems a bit..." "COLE:" "And the Rigby, get Karen to try the Rigby." "It's a nice size gun for her." "Would you like me to take you home?" "I am home, I suppose." "CHILDREN: "F."" "MISSIONARY: "F." CHILDREN: "F."" ""G."" "MISSIONARY: "G" for girl." "CHILDREN: "G" for girl." "KAREN:" "Are you packed?" "Yes." " How was town?" " Crowded." "I've been thinking." "With all the safari work I have little use for the room at the club." "I don't know that I'd be any good at this... but how would it be if I kept a few things with you?" "You would come and go from my house?" "If that's all right." "When the gods want to punish you they answer your prayers." "Berkeley's dying." "KAREN:" "What?" "DENYS:" "Blackwater fever." "KAREN:" "Oh, my God." "KAREN:" "I'll go to him." "DENYS:" "He wouldn't want you there." "Why?" "There's a woman there." "She's Somali." "DENYS:" "She's been with him for some time." "You never told me this." "I didn't know." "[African tribal song]" "[Priest reciting funeral rites]" ""...with each one of us now and forevermore." Amen." "Strange that Denys isn't here." "I think he is off with Berkeley." "[Soft classical instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "In the days and hours that Denys was at home... we spoke of nothing ordinary." "Not of my troubles with the farm... my notes due and my failing crop... or of his with his work and... what he knew was happening to Africa." "Or of anything at all that was small and real." "We lived disconnected... and apart from things." "I had been making up stories while he was away." "In the evenings, he made himself comfortable... spreading cushions like a couch in front of the fire... and with me sitting cross-legged like Scherazade herself... he would listen clear-eyed to a long tale... from when it began until it ended." "[Chief speaking African language]" " Where did you get it?" " Mombasa." "Get in." " When did you learn to fly?" " Yesterday." "[Adventurous instrumental music]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "Don't move." "I want to move." "[Whispering] Don't move." "Hello, Denys." "Hello, Blix." "May I see you?" "KAREN:" "I'm broke, too, you know?" "I wouldn't ask, but tips were a bit light." " Are you all right?" " Lf I get a decent crop." "I could shoot him." "I've got this terrible urge to kiss you." "He's smarter than I am." "It may go well." "Good luck." " You might have asked." " I did." "She said yes." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "If I get eaten up sometime bury me here, will you?" "Whatever's left." "KAREN:" "Just there at the crest of the hill." " When are you leaving?" " Tomorrow." "Doesn't it matter to you that I'm another man's wife?" "What matters to me is that you tried so hard." "What time tomorrow?" "KAREN:" "Goodbye again." " How many acres under cultivation?" " Five hundred." " The rest of it's wild?" " The Kikuyu live there." " Why don't you move them off?" " Because they live there." "We'll take it over should you default." "KAREN:" "We've got another year." "FARAH:" "God is great." "He's charging 3%." "[Speaking African language]" "This Chief says, "Tall children can come to school now."" "Tell Chief Kinanjui that reading is a valuable thing." "His children will remember him well." "This Chief says:" ""British can read and what good has it done them?"" "[Soft classical music playing]" "[Slow instrumental music]" "ANNOUNCER:" "Miss Felicity's Spurway." "Clear round." " She's quite something, that Felicity." " Yes, indeed." "ANNOUNCER:" "The next competitor:" "Mr. John Sutton on Castano." " How are you?" " Getting old, I think." "Not you." "KAREN:" "How is the hunting?" "I'll make a living." "Where's Denys?" "Uganda." "Some potentate." "I thought you might be wanting a divorce." "Has she got money?" "Of course she's got money." "Is this important, Bror?" "I suppose." "I'll have to accuse you of something... or did you think you would have it the other way around?" "Fire away, whatever." "I have surely done it." "Thank you." "How do you manage it?" "To keep us friends?" "We started that way." "I'll be happy for you, if I can." "I remember that quite well." "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "When you go away on safari... are you ever with someone else?" "I'd be with you if I wanted to be with anyone." " Do you ever get lonely?" " Sometimes." "Do you ever wonder if I am lonely?" "No, I don't." "Do you think about me at all?" "Often." "But not enough to come back." "I do come back, all the time." "What is it?" "Nothing." "Bror has asked me for a divorce." "He's found someone that he wants to marry." "I just thought we might do that some day." "Divorce?" "[Chuckling]" "How would a wedding change things?" "I would have someone of my own." "No." "You wouldn't." "What's wrong with marriage anyway?" " Have you ever seen one you admire?" " Yes, I have." "Many." "Belfields, for one." "He sent her home for the rains in 1910." "Didn't tell her they were over until 1913." "It's not a joke." "People marry." "It's not revolutionary." "Some animals mate for life." "Geese." "You use the animals for your own argument." "You won't let me use them for mine." "I'd mate for life." "One day at a time." "[Chuckling] I'd just like someone to ask me once that's all." "KAREN:" "Promise me you'll do that if I promise to say no?" "Just trust you?" "When you go away... you don't always go on safari, do you?" "No." "You just want to be away." "It's not meant to hurt you." "It does." "I'm with you because I choose to be with you." "I don't want to live someone else's idea of how to live." "Don't ask me to do that." "I don't want to find out one day that I'm at the end of someone else's life." "I'm willing to pay for mine." "To be lonely sometimes... to die alone if I have to." "I think that's fair." "Not quite." "You want me to pay for it as well." "You have a choice, and you're not willing to do the same for me." "I won't be closer to you... and I won't love you more because of a piece of paper." "[Thunder rumbling]" "[Natives talking in African language]" "See if you can shore it up." "Let it go." "This water lives in Mombasa anyway." "[Plane engine droning]" "[Solemn instrumental music]" "[Soft classical music playing]" "DENYS:" "I flew as far as Narok." "DENYS:" "You could see all the ruts where the lorries had been." "DENYS:" "The Serengeti was still good." "KAREN:" "It would take a week just getting there." "DENYS:" "And Samburu's still good." "DENYS:" "Where's Belknap?" "I haven't seen him." "He must be in America by now." "I let him go." "[Sighs]" "I had to." "But you don't want to hear about the farm, do you?" "KAREN:" "Have you got any buttons?" "DENYS:" "What are you doing?" "KAREN:" "Mending your shirts." "DENYS:" "Don't do that." "You don't have to do that." "Maybe I'll try Samburu day after tomorrow." "You just got back." "Felicity asked to come along... and I almost said no because I thought you wouldn't like it." " There's no reason for her not to come." " Yes, there is." "I wouldn't like it." "You want her along?" " I want things that don't matter not to." " Tell her no, do it for me." "Then what else would it be?" "Why is your freedom more important than mine?" "It isn't." "And I've never interfered with your freedom." "I'm not allowed to need you or rely on you... or expect anything from you!" "I'm free to leave!" "KAREN:" "But I need you." "DENYS:" "You don't need me." "If I die will you die?" "You don't need me." "You confuse need with want." "You always have." "In your world, there would be no love at all." "Or the best kind." "The one we wouldn't have to prove!" " You'd live on the moon then." " Because I won't do it your way?" "Are we assuming there is one proper way to do this?" "Do you think I care about Felicity?" "Do you think I'll be involved with her?" " No." " Then there's no reason for this, is there?" "KAREN:" "If she's not important why won't you give it up?" "I have learned a thing that you haven't." "There are some things worth having... but they come at a price, and I want to be one of them." "I won't allow it." "You have no idea the effect that language has on me." "I used to think there was nothing you really wanted... but that's not it, is it?" "You want to have it all." "I'm going to Samburu and she can come or not." "KAREN:" "Then you'll be living elsewhere." "All right." "[African tribal song]" "Is there a prince in there?" "[Soft instrumental music]" "JUMA:" "I think that you had better get up." "KAREN:" "What?" "JUMA:" "You had better get up." "I think that God is coming." "All gone." "All gone." "DELAMERE:" "How did it start?" "KAREN:" "I think God had a hand in it." "KAREN:" "He gave me my best crop ever and then he remembered." "DELAMERE:" "Insurance?" "KAREN:" "That's for pessimists." " Where's Denys?" " Who knows?" "[Karen chuckling cynically]" "It doesn't matter." "The Baroness is broke." "It's over." "I've got to find some land before I go for my Kikuyu." "You have trouble enough." "Just a chunk somewhere so they can stay all together." "We're just out of coffee, but I can give you tea." "There is no arable land that size outside the reserve." "And if there were, we'd not put natives on it." "Since it's theirs..." "It belongs to the Crown." "What you want is quite impossible." "It always is." "Who must I see next?" "You've run through us all, I'm afraid." "We have a new governor, haven't we?" "Sir Joseph." "He hasn't arrived yet." "But will soon, I'm told." "You do still ask me to things." "COMMISSIONER:" "Captain Jacques Llewllyn." "JACQUES:" "Your servant, sir." "COMMISSIONER:" "The Honourable Hugh Chomondeley, Lord Delamere." "DELAMERE:" "Your servant, sir." "COMMISSIONER:" "Lady Delamere." " Commissioner." " Baroness." "The Baroness Von Blixen." "I'm sorry to know that Kenya will be losing you." "KAREN:" "You have heard of my trouble then?" "JOSEPH:" "Yes, I regret it." "Do you know of my problem now?" " This land you want from us..." " Will you help me?" "That's quite difficult." "Get up, Baroness, please." "Kenya is a hard country for women." "So there is a chivalry here of a sort." "You are a powerful man and I've no one else to turn to." "JOSEPH:" "Let's discuss this the proper way." "You mustn't be embarrassed." "I've lost everything." "KAREN:" "It costs me very little to beg you." "DENYS:" "Wait." "Give her a moment, please?" "This land was theirs." "We took it and now they've nowhere else to go." "I'll look into it." "We'll do the best we can." "May I have your word?" "You have mine." "Thank you." "I hope you will be happy here." "I was." "I'm sorry I won't know you." "I didn't hear it until I got to the border." "It seems I'll do almost anything to get your attention." "[People murmuring]" "I've nearly got you packed." "KAREN:" "My poor family." "I've got them near bankrupt, now I have to ask them for more money." "Let me help you." "You would keep me then?" "I want to be worth something now." "What will you do?" "After my rummage sale, leave." "Friday for Mombasa, and then the boat to Denmark." "[Slow instrumental music]" "Thank you, Denys." "KAREN:" "You must have them ready to leave before the rains." "It is good land, enough for all, but they must not fight about it... or be any trouble to the authorities, do you understand?" "KAREN:" "Or they will lose it." "FARAH:" "Yes." "You must make them understand that I will not be here... to speak for them." " This land is far?" " By Dagoretti." "Not too far." "How can it be now?" "With me and yourself?" "You will have some money." "Enough, I think." "I do not speak of money." "Do you remember how it was on safari?" "In the afternoons I would send you ahead to look for a camp?" "And you would wait for me." "And you can see the fire and come to this place." "Yes." "It will be like that." "Only this time I will go ahead and wait for you." "It is far where you are going?" "Yes." "You must make this fire very big... so I can find you." "Take that out to the lawn." "[Soft classical music playing]" "Have you had dinner?" "Yes." "I've packed your things." "I thought I would send them on to the club." "Is that all right?" "Juma." "This wasn't a very good idea." "[Karen chuckling]" "I think we should have had it this way all the time." "I don't know." "I was beginning to like your things." "And I was beginning to like living without them." "You've ruined it for me, you know?" "Ruined what?" "Being alone." "Have I?" "I'd like to come with you to Mombasa." "Can I fly you there?" "Aren't you going away again?" "I have some things to do tomorrow at Tsavo, but I'll be back on Friday." "Will that be all right?" "Of course." "I've got this little thing that I've learned to do lately." "When it gets so bad and I think..." "I can't go on..." "I try to make it worse." "I make myself think about our camp on the river." "And Berkeley." "And the first time that you took me flying." "How good it all was." "And when I'm certain that I can't stand it..." "I go one moment more... and then I know I can bear anything." "Would you like to help me?" "Yes." "[Romantic classical music playing on gramophone]" "Come dance with me then." "KAREN:" "You were right, you know." "The farm never did belong to me." "DENYS:" "I may have been wrong." "KAREN:" "I had a farm in Africa." "[Plane engine droning]" "DENYS:" "Friday?" "KAREN:" "Yes." "[African tribal song]" "[African tribal song stops]" "[Birds chirping]" "Hello, Bror." "Hello." "Would you like a drink?" "Please." "Denys has been killed." "His plane crashed at Tsavo." "There was a fire." "Can I take you into town?" "Why did they send you?" "I thought I should." "My God, you're brave." "PRIEST: "The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon at night." ""The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil." ""He shall preserve thy soul." ""The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in." ""From this time forth and even forevermore. "" "ALL:" "Amen." ""The time you won your town the race" ""We chaired you through the market-place" ""Man and boy stood cheering by" ""And home we brought you shoulder-high" ""Smart lad, to slip betimes away" "KAREN: "From fields where glory does not stay" "KAREN: "And early though the laurel grows" "KAREN: "It withers quicker than a rose." ""Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out" ""Runners whom renown outran" ""And the name died before the man" ""And round that early-laurelled head" ""Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead" ""And find unwithered on its curls" ""A garland" ""briefer than a girl's "" "Now take back the soul of Denys George Finch Hatton... whom you have shared with us." "He brought us joy... and we loved him well." "He was not ours." "He was not mine." "[Soft instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "If I know a song of Africa... of the giraffe... and the African new moon lying on her back... of the ploughs in the fields... and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers... does Africa know a song of me?" "Will the air over the plain quiver... with a colour that I have had on?" "Or will the children invent a game in which my name is?" "Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive... that was like me?" "Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" "You cannot come where I'm going." "There is no cooking where you are going?" "You would not like it there." "You must trust me about this." "[Melancholic instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "Letters you can send on to this address in Denmark." "KAREN:" "When you sell the car, if you would send the cheque to Hunter  Company... and anything else you don't know what to do with." "Yes, ma'am." "Baroness." "I've been sent to ask if we may stand you a drink." "Who is "we"?" "The members actually." "All right." "Whiskey, please." "Two whiskeys, please." "Baroness." "Rose-lipt maidens, lightfoot lads." "ALL:" "Hear, hear!" "Thank you." "KAREN:" "This is very dear to me." "KAREN:" "It has helped me to find my way." "Thank you, msabu." "I want to hear you say my name." "You are Karen." "KAREN:" "The mail has come today... and a friend writes this to me." ""The Masai have reported to the district commissioner at Ngong..." ""that many times at sunrise and sunset..." ""they have seen lions on Finch Hatton's grave." ""A lion and a lioness have come there..." ""and stood, or lain on the grave for a long time." ""After you went away..." ""the ground around the grave was levelled out into a sort of terrace." ""I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions." ""From there they have a view over the plain..." ""and the cattle and game on it."" "Denys will like that." "I must remember to tell him." "[Slow instrumental music]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "We always struggled with how to begin." "That is, what the first images would be." "In the first draft, the film began... in a kind of white, snowy world of Denmark... and something always bothered me about that." "After a lot of work, we were finally able to figure out a way to open in Africa... and still have Denmark... by constructing a sort of mental mystery." "The woman remembering Africa and describing, or deciding... to mentally revisit her life there, in order to try once and for all... to figure out this enigmatic man, Finch Hatton... who really became the most important person in her life." "I always thought Denmark was necessary and we always wanted it there... in order to set up the strange circumstances of her ending up in Africa... and also the contrast from... that white, snowy, small place... into this vast continent that she was going to." "And later, not long before Tsavo..." "Setting up the mystery of trying to figure out Finch Hatton... gave us a key into it." "So, in a sense, we took little pieces... of what her memories were... and tried to set it up as though she was dreaming about them... and then decided consciously... sitting at her desk, to go back in time... and remember what happened." "And that gave us a way to get to Denmark." "He was waiting for me there." "But I've gone ahead of my story." "He'd have hated that." "Denys loved to hear a story told well." "The truth is that she had been very much in love... with one of a pair of twin brothers... who both had titles." "Hans and Bror." "Hans is the one she was in love with, but couldn't quite catch him." "At her age, in her late 20s... not being married was really a kind of a humiliation." "So she decided to settle for Bror... the kind of charming rascal of the family, if you will." "That's how she ended up... trying to grow coffee in Africa." "We shot the opening in northern England." "It's the only... exterior location that we filmed... away from Africa itself." "And I got very lucky." "We decided that we had to have snow to set it up as Denmark." "And it very rarely ever snows... in this spot in northern England, right off the North Sea." "But I got out there the morning that we were going to shoot... and the place was absolutely covered with this beautiful white snow." "So, for once, we got lucky." "Usually it's the opposite on films." "When you need snow, and it always snows... the one day it doesn't snow is the day you need it." "But in this case, I had really good luck." "I can't stand criticism." "For the money, I mean." "Probably." "Listen to me." "I've got no life at all." "They wouldn't teach me anything useful, and now I've failed to marry." "You know the punishment for that." ""Miss Dinesen's at home."" "And you've gone through all your money." "You're off seducing the servant girls." "We're a pair, you and I." "I mean, at least we're friends." "We might be all right... and if we weren't, at least we'd have been somewhere." "You don't think you're being too romantic?" "Am I supposed to think you're serious?" "I had known about this book Out of Africa for years... as almost everyone in Hollywood had... and I was not the first director to try to make it." "Several directors had attempted it and there were several screenplays." "When I first went and looked into the vaults... at the studio... there were at least five other screenplays... that had been attempted." "The difference, of course, we had, was that... we had Judith Thurman's really extraordinary biography..." "Isak Dinesen, The Life of a Storyteller to work with." "That gave us something that none of the other filmmakers had the use of." "Kurt Luedtke who wrote the screenplay... had written Absence of Malice, a film the two of us did earlier." "He'd always wanted to try this and I warned him that... it had been attempted before, but I think... part of what helped him to lick it was... the fact that he was new to the form... and was absolutely not intimidated by the fact... that it had been tried so many times before." "And the combination of his..." "The combination of his grasp of the material and perceptions... and then the insights into her life... that Judith Thurman gave us... allowed us to at least get a screenplay out of it." "The big problem in getting this book to the screen... is the fact that there's no conventional narrative in her book." "It's really a pastorale." "It's a beautifully formed memoir... that relies on her prose style and her sense of poetry... and, in effect, her ability to discover large truths... in very small, specific details." "So it's very difficult and elusive material to base a screenplay on." "You know, it's anecdotal... and it doesn't have a kind of narrative spine to it." "There is this sense of great loss... and you can infer from that that somehow a tragedy has occurred... and that a story for a film is to be found somewhere... among all these guarded memories." "She didn't really tell the truth in this book." "We depended on Judith for the truth." "What's beguiling about Out of Africa isn't what she wrote on the page... but in a way what isn't on the page." "It took a lot of drafts to get this right." "Kurt gave me the first draft in December of 1982." "And from there until the final shooting day, which was on June 6, 1985... we were continually revising it." "Kurt did the first draft alone." "Then he and I spent most of '83 doing two more drafts." "Then in 1984..." "David Rayfiel, our friend, joined us and we did a few more drafts." "Get away from there!" "That's all my crystal, my Limoges." "They didn't know it was Limoges." "You plan to stay then?" "We struggled a lot with the character of Finch Hatton... because he was an elusive man... and he lived at a kind of emotional distance from those around him." "The problem was how to dramatise... that seeming lack of involvement." " Aren't you boarding?" " I'm going on." "I had a superb production crew on this." "Terry Clegg who was... the executive in charge of production... for me, organised this crew, and I had to familiarise myself... with a lot of English technicians who I had not worked with before." "Very splendid cameraman named David Watkin... who did the camera work." "And a production designer named Stephen Grimes... who I had spent years and years working with... who I think is a kind of genius really." "He built the entire town of Nairobi... and took the bulk of the year to do it." "There wasn't any place that was in existence... that we could use." "So, the town, including the railroad station and the markets... doctors' offices, post office, town square... all had to be built from scratch... and mostly with untrained workers... because it would've been too expensive to try to bring... all of the craftsmen in from another part of Europe." "So this was quite an accomplishment that Stephen did." "The costumes were designed by Milena Canonero." "Her reputation sort of speaks for itself." "She's an extraordinarily gifted costumer." "I had Judith Thurman with me on location all the time... so she was a kind of walking encyclopaedia on this." "She had spent seven years writing her book... and researching the life... of these colonials who went there... and particularly of Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen." "So she was an authority." "Anytime I came to a scene and I wanted background activity..." "I wanted to say, "What would be going on at a table here?" ""Would they be playing cards?" "Would they be playing backgammon?" ""What would they be eating?" She could tell me anything." "So it was like having this marvellous walking encyclopaedia with you all the time." " Where have you been?" " Where have you been?" "Arranging things." "How was the trip?" "You can tell me later." "Would you like to change?" " My luggage is still on the train." " Room "D." Head of the stairs." "I haven't gotten a ring." "Do you care?" "Did you think I wouldn't come?" "I thought you wouldn't want to spend the money." "You will love it here." "The servants are wonderful." "Shall we get a drink?" "We've got almost one hour before the wedding." "One hour?" "When you start to work on a film, of course... you're always concentrating primarily on the screenplay." "And that takes precedence... and you begin then to visualise actors." "For a long time, I was struggling with... who could play this role of Karen Blixen." "Who could go through all of the maturation... who could go through all of the various emotional crises... that she went through... who would be the perfect one to represent her." "I didn't know Meryl personally." "I knew her work and loved her work... but did not know her personally." "I went through, obviously, a long list in my head of..." "That's not true." "I would say a short list in my head... because there aren't that many people... of actresses that I thought might be possible to play it." "Then I met Meryl." "She came to see me at a hotel." "The first time I really looked at her... and got this sense of who she really was... rather than the sense of her as the actress that I had seen in so many other roles..." "I knew that she was absolutely right for this." "You know, directors love to infer... that they're responsible for performances." "Sometimes they get credit for it." "And I certainly would love to get credit for Meryl's performance... but I can't." "I really can't take credit for it because... she arrived in Africa... and wham!" "She just delivered this performance." "It was like a great gift somehow." "She sort of gave birth to it... full-blown, accent and all." "I had a very impressive group of actors... both American and English... and, of course, with Klaus Maria Brandauer who is Austrian." "Oddly enough, Klaus had done all of these marvellous art films... but it was a James Bond film that made me cast him... because he was able to play this absolutely horrible villain... and yet you loved him." "You were charmed by him." "That's exactly what he plays here." "He plays... just a terrible guy who lies to her, spends her money... gives her syphilis, is a philanderer... does about everything that should be unforgivable... and yet, by the end of the film... you understand very clearly... why she's remained on good terms with him." "You know, wedding night and all that." "Redford, of course, was somebody that I had in mind from the beginning." "There was a lot of concern about the fact that..." "Finch Hatton was, in reality, an Englishman." "But finally... the test of Finch Hatton's, it seemed to me... was in his great romantic magnetism... and the fact that he was unpossessible in a way." "The fact that no one could own him." "Particularly not her." "And that was the kind of spine of this story, if you will." "I couldn't think of anybody better than Redford for that." "Sometimes, actors bring baggage to a film... when they've done a lot of work like Redford had... and sometimes that baggage is a problem that you have to overcome." "But sometimes, when one is lucky, the baggage is a big help." "I felt that..." "Redford's baggage, if you will, the history that he toted around... that he brought onto screen, his intelligence... his elusiveness, if you will... was a part of what made this work." "I brought the ivory with me on the train." "Michael Kitchen was the actor who played Berkeley Cole." "I remember running a lot of television shows in London... with Mary Selway, who was the casting director on the film... and trying very hard to find... actors who could work... in the same style together, if you will." "I remember watching Michael Kitchen's work in a television show." "I don't remember the show now... but feeling that there was a kind of simple reality to it... the way most American actors work." "And that, as elegant as he was, and as English as he was... his acting style would fit in with everybody else." "They were in June by the river." "She always wore a new silk dress." "I think you're wearing her perfume." "I'm not terribly comfortable working... when real people are being represented... because you feel often that a sense of freedom is being inhibited." "You're not really free... to go where you might want to go... or have them say what you might want to have them to say." "In this case... every one of these characters was a real character." "Lord Delamere, Farah, Kamante, Berkeley Cole..." "Denys Finch Hatton, Bror Blixen." "Karen Blixen." "But because she was so little known... really in wide circles, when we began working on the film..." "I think the film, in fact, made her... a much better known character." "It certainly changed the book sales... and helped a lot of people discover her." "But when we began... she was an obscure enough character... that we did have a certain kind of freedom." "But we did stick quite close to the facts." "At least the spirit of the facts." "This is Belknap." "He runs the farm." "Good evening, ma'am." "This is your cook." "Name is Esa." "And this is Juma." "Houseboy." "Come, see your house." "When you leave me, I'm going to marry Berkeley Cole." "A man in trade." "Is that what he does?" "He is thick with the Somalis." "There's a crowd of them up on his land... who think he's some sort of prince." "He sells Finch Hatton's ivory." "Belknap is a cheery sort." "Had a place of his own." "Went belly up trying to grow flax." "Does he know cattle?" "I didn't buy cattle." "We're going to grow coffee instead." "This house we found near the suburb... which is now called Karen, which is where she lived." "This was not the real house she lived in." "As a matter of fact... this was the house... of the woman called Mama Ngina who was the surviving widow... of the first Black President... of Kenya." "I didn't come to Africa to sit with silly cows." "We added on to it... and copied very closely the original house that she lived in." "It was necessary to dig wells and irrigate." "There had been a drought the previous years... and everything was dried up when we found the house." "But Stephen Grimes... in his typically talented way, sort of saw past all of... the crumbling stones of the house, the dried grass, and the abandoned place... and he turned it into a really lovely house... that was very close in spirit to the house she lived in... with the same view of the Ngong Hills in the back." "Where is Baron Blixen?" "There's an old Hollywood saying that says." ""If you can't tell it in two sentences, it's not worth telling. "" "It's the subject of a lot of jokes." "But, like in most cases of clichés... there's an awful lot of truth in it." "We spent about two years trying to find what I always call a spine... or an armature of this piece." "Sort of trying to distil the idea... down to one or two clear sentences that could be a guide post." "What is it really about?" "And we finally settled on possession." "Freedom versus obligation." "If I say, "I love you," what price am I expected to pay?" "To what extent am I obligated?" "How much of myself do I have to give up?" "It's always important for me to be able to describe the heart of a film... in some simple and evocative way... so that I can sort of test each scene and character... and development against that idea." "This is just a personal way of working... but it forces some sense of where the hell we're going... and it always acts as a kind of discipline for me." "It helps me make it cohesive." "I don't think it's something a writer ever has to have... but this finally became the armature." "The idea of possession seemed to be organic, both to the foreground story... and all of Karen's relationships, and this background story of colonialism." "I think it helped knit together her relationships with the Africans... as well as with her husband and her lover." "It was a track for us to follow... and then it helped us to dramatise her attempts at possession." "She was trying to imprint in some way... herself onto Africa." "Moving the water, bringing her china." "She kept attempting to make Europe out of Africa." "It also gave Finch Hatton a clear conflict with her." "It provided anchor points for a sort of shape to the story... because near the end of the film, she begins to let go of these possessions... one by one." "What did he say?" "We broke the film down into six sections." "You could call it six acts maybe." "They were enclosed and separated... by seven monologues or voice-overs... that is, Karen speaking as an older woman directly to the audience." "Almost as if she were writing." "Six of those monologues had to be invented." "The one that we used from the book really was the last one." "But the attempt was to find a way... of imitating, I guess that's the best word for it... approximating her sense of poetry in these monologues." "There is this marvellous sense of music in the book when you read it." "The way she wrote sentences was absolutely extraordinary." "It was beguiling... and it had so much grace in it." "So it was difficult to try to come up with... a style that you felt was consistent... with what the real voice... of Karen Blixen was, because we did have to mix the real voice in." "At least on the last one." "Always what we struggled with was... trying to make coherent... what really was very episodic." "This is a film that is really based on small incidents." "And trying to thread the sense of a story through it... made us rely very heavily on rhythm... and style, if you will." "It's a picture that doesn't have..." "Come, then." "... a strong narrative in the conventional sense of what happens next... where is the melodrama, where is the..." "What's driving the narrative suspense?" "It's watching these lives... and trying to pull an audience... into caring about these people... in the sort of day-to-day events of their lives." "I had enormous help with... a great wildlife photographer named Simon Trevor... who helped organise a lot of the animal sequences." "I had great help in aerial sequences... with a wonderful..." "English aerial photographic expert named Peter Allwork." "And I had great help with... all of the animal organisations, which was so important... which is a big key to this picture working in any way." "One of the odd things is having to... bring lions to Africa." "I was kind of stunned when I began to think about it... but, of course, if you think for a second you know that... you can't run around hurting animals in Africa." "Firstly, it's against the law, and secondly, it would be physically impossible to do." "So, we actually had to bring... four or five, maybe six, lion and lioness with us... to Africa... and depended on a lot of courage for Meryl... to accept the fact that we'd be able to handle them." "I'm not sure I believe that you can ever really train a lion." "In every shot where we work with the lion, there are a couple of good strong guys... with very big fire extinguishers, standing just out of the camera's range... ready to stop the lions without hurting them." "Obviously, we didn't want to use anything that would hurt the animals." "The best way, I am told, to stop a lion... were these huge, industrial strength fire extinguishers." "The contrast in the light here is kind of interesting." "You're first of all at the equator... which is closer to the sun than anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere... and secondly, you're up about a mile high." "So we had a tough problem in fighting this light... which is, to the eye, rather ugly." "It's straight down, as a rule." "And it's more contrasty than anywhere else." "The ratios between the bright spots and the dark spots..." "That ratio was wider than it would be at any other place on the globe." "After a lot of experimentation, what we came up with was... something which actually reverses... what normal logic would tell you." "And that is... we used a fast film... in the brightest light... because the fast film is softer, and it smoothes out the contrast." "Then we used a slower film... on the overcast days or the dark days... because the slower film has a bit more contrast." "It helps give you some snap on the soft scenes." "And it has such great blacks." "So, we used a film that's really invented for low-light conditions... in the maximum lighting conditions." "We used it when the sun was at its brightest." "And then inside, in all of these sequences indoors... we used a slower film to add contrast and add rich blacks." "Did you know that in all of literature there is no poem celebrating the foot?" "There's lips, there's eyes, hands..." "We spent a long time trying to figure out whether Redford ought to try... doing this with an English accent." "I was uncomfortable with it." "He was willing to try it... and he did quite a good version of it." "But I was always afraid that..." "Redford is such an American icon, in a way... that I think audiences would have had trouble believing it." "We pulled back from it at the last minute, and even spent a bit of time... post-synchronising some of the lines which still contained... a trace of the English." "...one of them always provides the first sentence." " Anything?" " Absolutely anything." "There was a wandering Chinese named Cheng Huan... living in Limehouse... and a girl named Shirley." "We were fortunate in the set of her house, in that we could have... a sort of home base, if you will." "The logistics of a film like this are always a kind of a nightmare... and what we basically had was a kind of... permanent set, if you will... where we could shoot the exterior and the interior in the house." "So, if we got to the house and it was raining... we could sometimes jump to the inside of it." "Watkin has a marvellous lighting style... in that he lights primarily from the outside in." "Not night sequences, but day sequences." "So, we didn't have big rigging problems in the house itself." "If we'd go to do a day sequence in the house... we would pump a lot of the light in, from the outside." "He would sometimes use just a tiny bit of bounce fill light." "But, all in all, he lit from the outside in." "His interiors at night, of course, we did have to do a good bit of rigging." "But he has a very simple way of working... and, I think, quite an unusual way." "He used to say." ""The less I do, the better it looks"... which is a kind of strange thing to hear... a cinematographer say." "I learned an awful lot working with him, and I thought he was... quite an exceptionally gifted man... to have come to this point of view." "And it's quite a special look that he gets." "You're right." "Anyway, aren't you pleased that I brought my crystal and my china?" "And your stories, yes." "The conquering heroes come" "Sound the trumpets" "Without any other form of entertainment... and with the houses miles apart... and very few automobiles... and no roads for them... a visit from someone was a very special occasion." "Oftentimes went on a day or two... and very often, people stayed up through the night... and one's ability to make conversation... was an extremely valued quality." "One could be very famous as just plain good company... because of their ability to converse." "So people would call upon neighbours... spend a day or two talking about anything that came to mind." "Then they'd drift apart again." "That was the popular entertainment of the day." "But my stories are free and your present's much too dear." "Write them down sometime." "Take care, Finch Hatton." "You wouldn't rather call me Denys?" "What are you doing?" "Difficult problem with weather in Africa is... as always, when one is on location, the predictability of it." "No matter what you're told the weather's gonna be like... it's always gonna be different and not good for you... when you're shooting." "At least, that's been my luck." "There's supposed to be two rainy seasons in Africa." "Period." "But, of course, when we went there, there were four rainy seasons." "Part of the problem with getting around the country... is that when it does rain, the roads, which are dirt turned to mud... and it's very difficult to move equipment around." "We basically... broke this unit down into many tiny units... because of the difficulty of getting stuck in the mud." "We didn't have big semi-trailers, the way you'd normally do on a picture." "We used a lot of small vehicles... it seemed like hundreds of them, loaded with small loads... and most of them four-wheel drive vehicles... to be able to get in and out of these areas." "It was always also difficult to find a lot of the native cast." "But we had wonderful help... and found some wonderful actors locally." "The young man who plays Kamante... had the face of an old soul even though he was a kid." "He did an extraordinary job for someone who'd never ever acted before." "We were visited on the set by the real Kamante... and it was a great treat for all of us because all of us had read so much about him." "He had become her cook and was really quite famous... and did very famous drawings... and there were letters back and forth between the two of them... that everyone who's read her books, her Africa papers, and her Africa writing... knows about." "So it was a big thrill for all of us to spend this time with Kamante... who has since died, unfortunately." "But, he spent the day with us on the set... and talked to us about what life was like then, in the days that we were representing." "When the war finally hit... it made everybody anxious... because East Africa, which was a colony of the British then... bordered German East Africa at that time." "What was called German East Africa." "Everyone was alarmed at whether or not the war would spread... from Europe into this local area." "Watkin was a very interesting cinematographer." "He lit from the outside in always." "The light in this scene is very interesting... because there are no lights in the room at all." "All the lights are coming in from the windows... which is, of course, the way it is in real life." "It's the way that he lit and got quite a look." "He did a strange thing with this picture." "We were the first major studio film ever to use... the German motion picture stock." "The AGFA stock." "It was very fast." "It was a 3200 ASA stock." "This is really backwards." "Normally, you would use this kind of fast stock... only if you had very low-light conditions." "We actually used it with more light than we would normally have... because we found it to be softer." "In order to make the film fast, the emulsion is built up quite thick." "That softens the film a bit." "So, this harsh contrasty light that was there... on the equator, we were able to combat by using... this very high-speed film." "And then when we had low light, or in our interiors... we went back to the old 5247 Kodak film, which is a slower film... but has wonderful rich blacks." "So we actually shot the film backwards, in a way... using very fast film, where you have a lot of light... and slow film, where you have even, overcast light... or low light." "He got a very beautiful look, I think, with this... although it was a very difficult job for Technicolor... to balance these two different stocks, different emulsions." "They were completely different chemically." "I can't remember doing any other film, except... maybe 25 years ago, I did a film, also with Redford, oddly enough... called Jeremiah Johnson... where all of the sets were practical... other than this film." "It's the only other one like that." "Every single set on this film was a practical set." "That is, it was built so that you could photograph... the outside of it." "You could photograph the area it was in... and you could photograph the interior of it." "It sounds easier than it is... because the sets then have to be built so that you can light them." "And they have to be built with entrances and exits... that can accommodate large pieces of equipment." "And they have to be practically able to be shot... so that you can move back and forth in weather problems." "But it turned out to be a lifesaver for us... because an awful lot of times... we would go out to shoot a sunny sequence outside... and it would be an overcast rainy day... and we could jump right inside, same group of people... and very quickly get set up and work inside." "Denys left without a word..." "Roy Helland, who was Meryl's make-up man... is a really gifted guy... who, with Meryl, came up with... about four different looks for her." "A combination of hair, make-up... eye style, lips, the way her lipstick was." "And we were able to label these in a simple way... so that we could go from one to three, or two to four... in a period of a couple of hours." "And it was that along with... our ability to try to change the look of the house... from its early unfurnished and unplanted look... to the greener, more lush look, when it was furnished... helped us to get the sense of time passing... because we had to try to pass the equivalent of 16 years..." "Sixteen or seventeen years in the course of the film." "Some day, I'd like to run my own show the way you do." "During the year of preparation, along with the building... and along with the irrigation and the greening up, we also planted... coffee in various stages... from seeds and seedlings... to one and two-year-old plants... because it was necessary again for the purpose of time passage..." "to see various stages of the planting, growing and harvesting... of the coffee." "...but how do you know when to do what they want you to... and when not to?" "Suzanna Hamilton is the actress who plays... a character we call Felicity, in the picture." "She is really meant to be Beryl Markham... who was the other wonderful author... who came from that group of colonials at that time, and wrote about it." "Her book, West With the Night, is a beautiful book... and also a memoir of her time in Africa." "She is said to have been... a lover of Finch Hatton's as well, and there were stories... about the fact that he was to have been headed... for a rendezvous with her in Mombasa... the day he was finally killed." "I was lucky enough to meet her... when I was there preparing." "She was quite old then... and loved to drink her gin and orange juice starting at about 10.00 in the morning." "And she would talk for hours... about what life was like at that time... and she would occasionally drift into another story." "It was odd." "She would start talking about Finch Hatton... and then she would end up talking about a murder... that had been committed 10 years later." "She was the first woman to have flown the Atlantic... going westerly." "She crashed off Long Island in LaGuardia." "The mayor of LaGuardia presented her with a medal." "She had the medals and the maps of the trip... in her suitcase." "I used to sit with her while she was drinking her gin and orange juice... and she'd tell me these wonderful stories about the flying." "Karen Blixen did, in fact, make a trip to the front... to bring supplies to Bror during the war." "We used that trip as an opportunity... to both see some of the wonders of Africa... and to try to find... a way of doing... what would be the equivalent almost of an action sequence." "This was a sequence which took a long time to put together... and we used the talents of an awful lot of people." "We were able to do the sequence with the help of a lot of specialists." "Jack Couffer, as a second unit director..." "Simon Trevor, with the animals..." "John Sutton, who was a local guide there... who knew the country like the back of his hand... and was able to take us to places that nobody otherwise could get to." "He found ways of making runways for us in the middle of the desert." "Trying to find a way to make the trip an adventure... and using real lions and real oxen... was the coming together of many different skills." "Jack Couffer shooting second unit night after night... with a young lion cub... whose claws had been cut so he couldn't do a lot of damage... and allowing that lion... to actually get on the back of some of the oxen... but not have to do any damage." "That was part one of it." "Part two of it was... finding the trained lion... who we could get to snap at Meryl... and behave as though he was going after her... but not ill-tempered enough to really go after her." "Trying to fake the shooting of it by using long lenses... and keeping them farther apart... but making the long lenses compress them... as though they were close together." "We actually took... the carcass of a fake ox... and buried some food in its neck." "Got the lion hungry for a couple of days... so the lion would be much more interested in the food... than in trying to go after poor Meryl." "And then by separating them... no more really than about, I would say, 6 or 7 feet... and trying to compress that distance with long lenses... and having Meryl whip at the ground... the lion would make a couple of false attacks at her." "But we did have those wonderful fire extinguishers standing by all the time." "We went to places in this wonderful land... that had views and textures that I've really never seen before." "It's such a big continent and a big country... and it has a kind of light and a kind of look... that I haven't ever encountered." "It actually feels like the sky is round and is a bowl over your head... because you can see it for 360 degrees as you look around it." "And you can find such varieties of colour... and texture between the rocks, or the white clay soil, or the red dirt." "The trees that flower and the trees that are brown." "The vivid green of these thorn trees... which are what you see everywhere." "The eucalyptus trees, the baking of the heat, and so on." "It was quite an extraordinary place visually." "We spent a lot of the time under canvas, camped out... and the logistics of that were pretty incredible." "That was all solved again by John Sutton, this marvellous man... who, for years, was one of the main... executives with Ker  Downey, the great safari company... and also was a guide himself." "A hunter himself." "And he actually built these enormous camps for us... where we had to be fed and showered... and transported from... to these various locations." "This area is made up of many tribes." "Each tribe, of course, having its own cultural characteristics... and its own language, and its own physical qualities." "The lingua franca was Swahili, but each of the tribes spoke their own language." "The Luo spoke Luo, the Kikuyu spoke Kikuyu." "The Somalis spoke Somali, the Masai spoke Masai." "And each tribe had its own kind of look." "It's very easy, once you're there, to tell a Masai from a Kikuyu." "Farah Arden, the real manservant... who was really her closest friend in Africa... was a Somali." "They're a very elegant people, extremely tall... with great bone structure, very high cheekbones... and quite a kind of, almost an arrogance, I would say." "I could not find a Somali actor to play this role... but was lucky enough to find Malick Bowens... who is from Mali, to do it." "He was an actor playing with Peter Brook in Paris." "He looked, in bone structure, close enough that I could make use of him." "Ismail, my rifle, where's my rifle?" "The oxen actually... got pretty angry with this lion." "Under normal circumstances, there'd be no contest." "The lion would overpower one of the oxen and get it." "But in this case, without any claws, there was very little he could do... and, as a matter of fact, he finally just walked over and sat down." "He got tired of getting bumped around by them." "Get away!" "They were actually able to chase off the lion because he was in no mood to really fight... even though he was hungry." "He made a couple of false charges, but he went back." "It's always strange watching these sequences." "You remember, you have a kind of sense memory of how many nights... and how many hours you spent getting a sequence that's over so quickly." "That's true of every action sequence, of course." "It's always particularly difficult doing it with animals." "Again, I have to say, Meryl was very brave... to do this." "And the lion could not have performed better." "He really was interested in the food, but he didn't like all the commotion being made." "So he made just enough of several false charges..." "Or just enough false charges, I should say." "He made just the right number of false charges so that we could edit the sequence." "And we got a good sequence out of it." "Tell Blix his wife's here." "One of the things we did... when we couldn't get ourselves out of the harsh light, is... use these stretched canvases... to get people under a kind of... shady overcast... to try to simulate overcast." "It was really tough when the hard sunlight would come down on everybody." "So we did an odd thing... and that is, we shot everything in the movie in backlight." "All of our main characters are shot with the light behind them... which, of course, in life, could never happen." "But it isn't something that... your eye tells you is a lie... when you watch it." "You can get away with it even though it wouldn't be possible in life." "And it was fun." "When are you coming home?" "Not just yet." "You're not going to help at all with the farm, are you?" "I could force you." "I could cut you off." "I'll just hunt professionally." "I might do it anyway." "It's not the way we thought it would be... is it?" "But I like it that you're honest with me." "I like you, too." "Very much." "The theory is that she contracted syphilis while visiting Bror... on that trip that she made to the front." "I had a compass from Denys." ""To steer by," he said." "But later it came to me... that we navigated differently." "Perhaps he knew, as I did not... that the Earth was made round... so that we would not see too far down the road." "We had the luck... of having a wonderful Irish actor named Donal McCann... who played the doctor." "It was always one of my favourite scenes... the scene in which Meryl finds out that she has syphilis." "She's so good... in such an understated way in the scene." "And he's so very good also." "It's always been a favourite scene of mine." "Your husband is not ill?" "No." "Not the last time I saw him." "That was three months ago." "He's on the border with Delamere." "He would have come home." "These cases vary." "He may have just a touch." "But you are very ill." "Is he the only possibility?" "Yes." "You'll have to go home to deal with it, you know?" "The treatment's difficult, but they have a thing called Salvarsan." "Arsenic." "Milena Canonero and Stephen Grimes worked..." "I think, beautifully together here... between the costumes and the decor... staying in sort of a monochrome tone... with the walls and the costumes... complementing and echoing each other in a certain way." "The doctor's office was another one of our live sets... so that we had the reality of filming it... both inside and out." "It was a practical set inside, and then going right outside... being able to see out the windows... and have some real background there... and being able to cut directly to the outside." "It's not what I thought would happen to me now." " Muthaiga?" " What?" "Your letters." "She went away." "She went back to Denmark... for one full year... to take a cure for her syphilis." "In those days, the cure was pretty rough, it was arsenic." "And the combination of the arsenic... and what the syphilis did to her... left her quite ill in later life." "There was some disintegration of her spine... and so there were nerves that went to her stomach... that were interfered with, and she had difficulty... eating certain foods and digesting them." "So she was always thought to be eccentric, in the sense that she was incredibly thin... and she ate oysters and drank champagne." "Not because she wanted to be eccentric... but because they were the only things that she digested well in later life." "We're behind a story or two." "When she went away and stayed for a year... one of the interesting problems for us... was how to indicate that, how to pass the time." "How to not make it take too long." "While I was there..." "I ran into a wonderful African named George Senoga-Zake... who was a professor of music." "He got together... some local school kids, really... and we recorded right there." "We didn't have a real, slick, professional set-up... but we recorded right there, locally... a lot of wonderful Kikuyu music." "And it helped us a lot... in putting together these bridges and montages... where we had to pass the time." "It gave us a sound that was distinctly different... than the written source music." "That was also so instrumental and helpful, I think... to the picture, John Barry's score..." "She can come soon enough." "... which has been a very popular recording." "He did a beautiful job with it." "But this specific source music was a big help, I think." "...and the voyage home to Denmark." "It was a longer journey this time." "The war went on." "I fought my own war." "One of the nice things about the spot that Grimes picked... where we were able to do this... is that you could really see those Ngong Hills... where Finch Hatton is buried." "Obviously, we went up and visited the grave of Finch Hatton." "She wrote so lovingly about the Ngong Hills... and how they changed in the light all the time." "Of course, this country is a magical country with light." "It's different every minute, it changes all the time." "And every time it does change... it seems to have a different emotional characteristic." "Denmark had become a stranger to me... and I to her." "Over the years, she became the local doctor... for a lot of these people who lived on her land." "It began, of course, with Kamante, and then it grew and grew... until there were masses of people... one day a week, lined up outside her house, for her to take care of." "She was a kind of lay doctor for them." "Almost everyone's got them now." "She wrote a lot about the owl... that one of the little girls on the farm gave her." "And she wrote a lot about Kamante... and how proud he was that his leg had healed quite a bit... 'cause she sent him to the hospital while she was gone." "One of the interesting things that we tried to do... in line with the spine and the armature, if you will... of the story, was slowly change the look of the Africans... so that they were culturally authentic in the beginning... and then, as the picture goes on... she begins to try to westernise them in a way." "Again, this idea of possession." "She tries... to put her stamp of ownership on it... which she is, of course, ultimately unable to do... as she is unable to do with Finch Hatton." "Are you all well?" "They say I'm cured." "I won't have children." "One of the things..." "I've always had a habit of doing... and it's not a very good habit because it drives composers crazy... is I usually put together some sort of a temp score to a picture." "I do that, really, because it helps me..." "It helps me get the rhythms organised... in a picture." "It helps me test whether certain sequences will or won't work." "And oftentimes, that temp score will drive the composer crazy... because the composer will feel compelled... to do it the way I've got the temp score." "In this particular film, I found myself using piece after piece... of John Barry's from other movies." "Almost every movie." "Robin and Marian." "Pieces from The Last Valley." "Pieces from..." "I kept gravitating to John Barry's music." "So, by the time I finished the picture..." "I had had a whole temp score... that was done by John Barry." "Obviously, that convinced me to hire John Barry." "But poor John Barry had to watch the film the first time... with all these cues that he'd written for other pictures." "Basically, what I was saying to him is." ""Can you do something that feels like this..." ""but is more correct for this picture?"" "And he did a magnificent job, I think." "The toughest thing about shooting our big... end-of-the-war celebration, oddly enough... was getting 1,000 torches lit... so that the last one could be lit before the first one that we lit went out." "Who won the match?" "I had a great first assistant... named David Tomblin, an Englishman... who's done a lot... of big productions, both American and English." "He is a real general and a real organiser." "Again, I couldn't have done this film without him." "He's had this organised well enough so that... with all the help, we had a whole scientific approach... to how to get the fireworks timed... and how to light the torches so that we could get shots... with 1,000 people marching... and all the torches were burning equally brightly." "He's as organised and sensitive to the script... as anybody I've ever worked with." "He was a remarkable help." " Where is Kanuthia?" " He's dead." "How are you?" "Would you join us for a drink?" " It's time to find a pillow." " Another night then?" "Have a good Christmas." "Christmas." "So it is." "We went from seedlings... to two-year-old plants... to the blossoming... to the beans and the pickings." "So we really had to have about four sets... of coffee plants." "One of the things that Karen Blixen was noted for... is bringing schools into this area." "She actually set up schools and brought English tutors over... to teach the kids English." "Finch Hatton had some words with her about that... feeling again that it was her attempt... to possess Africa, if you will." "To put her imprint on it." "One of the things I couldn't do... is see the feet of very many people... during the New Year's Eve dance celebration... because it was raining so hard... that there was so much mud... that we could not get the actors and particularly the extras... from the holding areas into the set... without them literally destroying their feet." "So I ended up shooting fairly tightly... while they were dressed in their tuxedos and finery... because they looked absurd if you saw down to their feet." "I've taken on a young missionary." "He's promised me to do the alphabet first, and save God for later." "Wogs can't even count their goats." "It's none of your bloody business anyway!" "Who the devil are you?" "I wonder if you'd dance with me?" "I think you are about to apologise." "You do stir things up." "When they said they'd like to read, how did they put that exactly?" "Do they know they'd like Dickens?" " You don't think they should learn to read?" " I think you might have asked them." "Did you ask to learn when you were a child?" "How can stories possibly harm them?" "They have their own stories, just not in writing." "Why would you rather keep them ignorant?" "They're not ignorant." "I just don't think they should be turned into little Englishmen." " You do like to change things, don't you?" " For the better, I hope." "I want my Kikuyu to learn to read." "My Kikuyu." "My Limoges." "Meryl has such a different look in each of these sections... and yet I think Roy was able to do it." "She and Roy were able to pull it off so that it isn't jarring." "It's not like a whole other actress... and yet there's a completely different personality... and a completely different feeling about each one of these looks." "Bror was quite a character." "He was a real philanderer." "He was extremely well-liked." "He was a charmer, he was a great hunter... written about in..." ""The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."" "He was written about by Hemingway, he was written about by Beryl Markham." "He was quite a popular man, and particularly popular with the ladies." "Got himself into a lot of trouble... and eventually she got tired of it and sent him away." " Happy New Year." " And for you, too." "Someone has left her underclothes in the back." "I want you to take a place in town." "As a matter of fact, the day he was killed... he was supposed to have been meeting Beryl Markham in Mombasa." "Are you sure?" "Eats." "He eats." "Elephant." "Give me work." "We've got peace, where is the prosperity?" "Why should the prices fall now just because they're not killing anybody?" "Tea's down just as bad." "Do they always have to whip them so?" "Finally... this coffee plantation that Bror had purchased... instead of the farm that he was supposed to have purchased... it finally destroyed her." "There was just no way to grow coffee so high." "And after years and years of trying, it never happened." "Finch Hatton was crazy about Mozart... and was said to have carried... this gramophone with him everywhere." "We used the Clarinet Concerto, which is..." "Well, everything Mozart wrote was beautiful." "But this is particularly beautiful, and one that worked for us." "And we used it over and over, and used it in a way, thematically." "Finch Hatton was famous for his love of Mozart... and for carrying this gramophone with him everywhere." "He played Mozart whenever he possibly could." "And he gave her a gramophone... which was a big treasure of hers." "This is in fact the Masai Mara... which is one of the greatest pieces of land I've ever laid eyes on." "It goes forever and ever... and it is the area that was inhabited almost exclusively one time... by the Masai... and every form and species of animal there is." "And this was extraordinarily difficult footage to get... because we had to drive the car in and among these... water buffalo, very dangerous animals, and the gorillas." "These animals are kind of deadly here." "Just getting the car into them was a bit difficult... to not spook them too much by the car." "They're kind of slow and a bit dim-witted, but they're aggressive." "And they do like to charge, and they're very strong and tough... and they can afflict a lot of damage." "So a sequence like this... which looks quite simple and is over quickly... can take days to get." "But just to get the car into position... with the herd that close..." "There are very strict game laws there." "We're not really allowed to herd these animals." "So we have to sneak in there with the camera equipment... protect the camera equipment, protect the cameramen... protect ourselves, protect the actors, and still get them close." "One of the interesting challenges in the picture... was to play out the country... so that you didn't see... and get used to or bored or tired of it... in the first half." "We had to save something really for this safari." "We had to try to make her trip to the front, for example... have a completely different feeling of nature and the outdoors than this... much more poetic look at the country... and what eventually is gonna be ruined, at least in Finch Hatton's mind... by the encroachment of civilisation." "When you're making a picture... that's in a country or a land as picturesque as Africa is... and where the country itself... is like a character in the piece... you're always torn between... photographing the beauty of it... and getting accused of making postcards... a travelogue, if you will." "One of the things that had to be given... some consideration here was... varying these expeditions... out into the countryside... so that each one had a different character." "When Finch Hatton takes her out... it's the size and the romanticism of it." "When she takes her trip to the front... it's the roughness and the shock of it, in a way." "So we were always worried about... this balance between how beautiful it was... and taking pictures that were simply pretty pictures... and weren't organic to the story." "What did the two of you ever find to talk about?" "Nothing." "So you knew I would come." "It's an early day tomorrow." "Why don't you get some sleep?" " What happens tomorrow?" " I have no idea." "Good night." "We had a wonderful soundman named Peter Handford, who worked overtime... getting us the marvellous, authentic sounds... of an African night." "And they really were marvellous sounds." "One of the greatest things about being out... under canvas in Africa... in the Masai Mara, or in Beringo, or in any of these marvellous places... is the life that starts to happen at night... because this place was really... one big killing ground." "The animals live... in an almost prehistoric way... as though civilisation hasn't affected them." "Of course it has." "But you begin to hear late at night... the prowling that starts... and the sort of dance that begins before all of the killing starts." "And you get up in the morning and drive to work... and you see the vultures... on the bones of last night's carcass, or whatever." "Kurt used to say." ""If there was a garden of Eden..." ""it probably was here."" "And that's certainly the feeling that you have." "It's a hard feeling to describe." "You really have to experience it, and there's no other place like it." "It'll be an interesting trip." "I'll be gone a month, or an hour and a half." "Why are you doing this?" "Finch Hatton actually went out one day and bought a Moth... which was the old biplane that he flew." "It was pretty simple in those days... to get a licence." "I'm not sure you even had to have a licence." "There wasn't much traffic in the sky, and there weren't any... navigation leads, except ground contact." "So once you knew the mechanics of it, you were a flier." "I suspect that Finch Hatton was probably not a great pilot." "He managed to get himself from place to place... but then he ended up killing himself in a plane crash." "But he was crazy about flying... and it was a wonderful way for him to see Africa." "Are you still close?" "He died." "He killed himself when I was 10 years old." "I can fix that, I think." ""Laugh'd loud and long, and all the while" ""His eyes went to and fro" ""'Ha!" "Ha!" "' quoth he, 'full plain I see" ""'T he Devil knows how to row'" ""Farewell, farewell!" "...i"" " You're skipping verses." " I leave out the dull parts." ""Farewell, farewell!" "But this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!"" "Lay your head back." ""He prayeth well, who loveth well" ""Both man and bird and beast"" "That's better." "Will it be so different... hunting for hire?" "Not for the animals." "Well, maybe for the animals." " Do you really prefer them to people?" " Sometimes." "They don't do anything half-heartedly." "Everything's for the first time." "Hunting, working, mating." "It's only man that does it badly." "It's only man that tires of going through it." "Who says, "See here." "I know how you feel about me..." ""and you know how I feel about you." ""We understand each other, so let's lie down and get on with it."" "Why am I here?" "Because I wanted you to see all this." "I wanted to show it to you." "I thought you'd understand it." " Do you think much about death?" " I think about getting old." "It'd be like living with a cranky demanding old bastard." "You are a cranky demanding old bastard." "I had syphilis." "That's why I went home." "I know." "I never seem to get anything." "German measles once." "They say I'll have a normal life now." "But no children." "So the school." "So the school." "The farm, that's what I am now." "No." "We'll need meat for the camp tomorrow." "I'll wake you at dawn." "There's a tracking sequence, and then a lion-shooting sequence... which was immensely difficult to control and stage." "Lions are extraordinary animals." "They're capable of great speeds for short distances... but they're rather lazy." "They won't go after something that they don't think they can catch." "One of their favourite sources of food are zebra and horse." "We had to use a horse as bait... obviously a horse that we felt, and the writer felt and everybody felt... could run faster than the lion." "The trick was... to run the horse past the cage... and then one of our wild animal experts to time it... and let the lion out of the cage... while the lion felt it could catch the horse." "But, in fact, the horse was far enough away to outrun it." "I would not have wanted to be the horse." "The horse didn't much care for it." "And neither did we." "The horse was perfectly safe because we had a lot of safety people... and, again, those fire extinguishes which would have stopped the lion." "The other trick was try to trip the lion without hurting it." "Basically, what we did is take a piece of plywood... two pieces of plywood, grease them... lay them down on the ground, cover one with dirt, put a rope on one... and when the lion hit it, yank it just enough to lose the footing." "They're cats, and they go down and get right back up pretty easy." "So we had a pair of lions that were, again, quite hungry." "We put a wildebeest carcass... down and let them eat." "Put Redford and Streep... behind a slanted piece of plate glass." "Actually, it was plastic, very thick plastic." "Slanted, so that we wouldn't see the reflections." "Cameras were behind them, and then we barricaded them with plywood." "We had a very brave wildlife cameraman... who dug a hole in the ground, got down in the ground... and let the lion go right over him... trusting that the lion wasn't gonna be interested in him if it was after the horse." "It was an interesting sequence to try to do because we had to do two charges... and lure the lions twice to charge." "Again, keep everybody safe... and also not hurt any of the animals." "These guys were really hungry, and they didn't want to be messed with." "And when they charge, they really charge." "They think they're gonna get a horse." "We didn't feed the lions for a couple of days... so they would behave as lions in the wild do." "One of the difficulties... is getting a lion that's been in captivity... to behave in as rough a way as a wild lion will." "And one of the ways you can do it is to not feed them for a few days... and they very quickly revert to, at least, an apparent savagery." "The lions there didn't much like the fact... that we had lions with us." "They're very turf-conscious... and when we would carry these lions... out to the safaris where we were... you'd hear the wild lions... just screaming at night." "We did two charges, one with the lioness... and then the big lion last." "We only had to trip the lioness... because the big lion veered off by himself." "He was actually beginning to give up on the chase." "But he made kind of a step to his left... and I was able to cut it quickly... so that you got the sense that he was gonna go down." "Dinner in a while?" "I'm glad you came." "I had a lot of fun... going through the lists of the songs... that were popular at that particular time." "And I ended up picking... a song called Let the Rest of the World Go By... because it seemed so oddly appropriate for Denys... the lyrics did." "With someone like you, with a heart good and true" "Something, something." "I'd like to leave it all and find A place that's known to God alone" "And let the rest of the world go by" "Denys' constant search for... a place away from structured society... away from the need to conform to someone else's rules... was an obvious character trait of his." "And that song seemed to... in some way, touch upon it." "To rose-lipt maidens." "There was a very young girl from Denmark... who took passage on a steamer bound for Suez." "There was a storm... off Morocco... and she was washed ashore onto a beach." "Onto a white beach." "Onto a beach so white..." "I'd like to do that." "Will that hurt?" "If you say anything now..." "I'll believe it." "I need to know how to think about this." "Why?" "There are such wonderful anecdotes in the book... about her life with Kamante, her cook... who had this extraordinary gift for cooking." "One doesn't know why." "She taught him to cook... but then he had his own marvellous imagination about it." "But he was very much his own man, or his own boy, I should say... and had a kind of odd logic... to what he would do." "One of the other things that David Watkin did, which I liked so much is... he would use the white tablecloths... in many of the eating scenes that we had... and we had several of them... to give, what I thought, was a very beautiful kind of glow... to the people bouncing up from off the table." "Does this look like a chicken?" "Here is not a chicken, here is a fish." "Go away." "Berkeley Cole, who we suspect... was himself in love with her... but never had a chance with Denys around... eventually died of blackwater fever... which was a rather horrible disease." "It's where your urine turns black." "It comes from bleeding inside your kidneys, and it comes from... the parasites that are there." "Actually there are the most exotic kinds of diseases... in that place you can get." "We had our script clerk, we had to send home." "There is a small hook-shaped fluke that's in the water that you shower with." "Sometimes it gets into your skin through your pores... and gets into your liver and kidneys." "It's called bilharzia, and she contracted it." "That's even in 1985, when we did this." "But in the days when they were there, the diseases were quite exotic... and they didn't have the penicillins and the antibiotics." "Men who missed moose in Alaska, grizzly in America... tigers in India, they're all at sea now bound for here." "Berkeley is going to farm." "You could do that." "No, thank you." "You ought to look in on him though." "He didn't look all that well." "Can you stay?" "For a day or so." " Is that all right?" " No." "You don't need two guns on safari." "One of the happy accidents that happened while I was there is..." "I ran into Iman, the very famous model... who is married to David Bowie now." "Of course she was not at that time." "I asked her if she would be interested... in just doing one or two days' work for me... and she agreed." "And she was lovely... in this role of Berkeley Cole's mistress." "She has an extraordinary bone structure... which is, of course, what's made her such a popular model... and she has extraordinary dignity." "She has that wonderful look I was talking about... that is characteristic of the Somali look." "Why didn't you tell me?" "I suppose I thought..." "She only played in two sequences." "The sequence where we meet her for the first time... and we, as is Denys... are sort of shocked that he's been living with her... and the second, when she attends Berkeley's funeral." "George Martin had blackwater fever and that was five years now." "She was evidently there on a modelling assignment." "I had spoken to her earlier, actually, and she was a great help to me... trying to put me in touch with people who might help me find... a possible Somali actor to play Farah." "But I couldn't find an actor who spoke English well enough... and who had any acting experience." "And so I was, as I said, very lucky to find Malick... who's just wonderful in the part." ""F."" ""G."" "As I watch this now..." "I'm very aware of the backlight... which, I think, audiences in general aren't." "But it's a terrible cheat." "You essentially have to shoot pretty much the same direction... when you're supposedly shooting 180 degrees in the opposite direction... as you would be when two people look at each other." "We literally shot every single shot... with the light behind the people." "It was the only way to get a soft flesh tone... in this, kind of, terribly harsh light." "You would come and go from my house?" "If that's all right." "Right behind him, crossover, right behind her." "Berkeley's dying." " What?" " Blackwater fever." "Oh, my God." " I'll go to him." " He wouldn't want you there." "Why?" "There's a woman there." "She's Somali." "She's been with him for some time." "You never told me this." "Iman has this extraordinary dignity... as do all the Somalis." "She had not a single line of dialogue to say... but she had this terrific dignity immediately." ""...with each one of us now and forevermore." Amen." "Simon Trevor... our wonderful animal life photographer... used to be able to lead us into areas where we could get so close... to animals that are potentially quite dangerous... the buffalo, the herds of elephant." "He was amazing." "In the days and hours that Denys was at home... we spoke of nothing ordinary." "Not of my troubles with the farm... my notes due and my failing crop... or of his with his work..." "Probably the happiest time of her life was the period... as Denys was moving in... and the early period where they stayed together... before the strong wills of both of them began to cause trouble." "I had been making up stories while he was away." "For a short time, she had high hopes about her coffee... and then, finally she had to just give it up." "It was too difficult to grow coffee so high." "The price of coffee went down." "And somewhere during this time..." "Denys showed up with his airplane." "And she got to see Africa from the air... which was really something she never forgot." "In those days, you could sort of..." "Like a car, you could buy a plane... and just say, "What do I do?" "Pull back on this, push forward on this. "" "It wasn't quite as restricted as it was." "You'd have to go to school a little bit... but I suspect Finch Hatton wasn't the world's greatest pilot." "But he got this plane... and figured out how to use it." "We had a wonderful helicopter pilot and a helicopter cameraman... from London who came down and did all of the chase sequences... following the plane... and got this extraordinarily beautiful footage." "When I got into the editing room and began to edit it... there were a lot of different ways I could have gone with the sequence." "I could've made it a joyous kind of sequence... because it seems like it could be." "But I heard a piece of music... from a picture called The Last Valley." "It was a piece of music that John Barry had written... and it was quite religious in the feeling of it." "We edited this whole sequence to that piece of music." "So then, John Barry was again obliged to find something... that had the similar feeling." "He did an extraordinary job... using the male voices, the low men's voices here." "Here again, you see a sense of size, this is Ngorongoro Crater." "Just a tiny little crater." "Look at the speck that the airplane is against the crater." "One of the things that Judith wrote in her biography... while she was talking about the book of Karen's, Out of Africa... she said, "Out of Africa does not describe Karen Blixen's life..." ""on her African farm..." ""as it was, in a documentary sense, lived." ""The serene perfection of the style..." ""the spareness of detail..." ""the attendance of the gods..." ""all signal that we've escaped from the gravity of practical questions..." ""and have gotten up into a purer element." ""One that offers less resistance to the ideal." ""The point of view in Out of Africa is the overview, which Karen Blixen called..." ""'the one thing of vital importance to achieve in life. '" ""What we see is a landscape from the air." ""Time and action have been tremendously compressed and telescoped. "" "And that's the end of her quote." "And, in a sense, we tried to find the metaphor... for that whole African experience in a way." "One of the things that Karen Blixen herself said... is what happened to her when she got up in the air... and could look down at her footprints in the snow... and find a pattern that she had never been aware of... when she was down in the footprints." "So, Denys and his plane, and Denys taking her flying... all had a very deep emotional meaning to her." "Don't move." "So, Denys taking her flying..." "Denys in the plane, her ability to get up in the air... were all part of something we wanted very much to keep... as a part of this anchor spine." "Hello, Denys." "May I see you?" "I'm broke, too, you know?" "I wouldn't ask, but tips were a bit light." " Are you all right?" " Lf I get a decent crop." "I could shoot him." "I've got this terrible urge to kiss you." "He's smarter than I am." "It may go well." "Good luck." "Between Stephen Grimes and John Sutton... they managed to find an extraordinary spot... down at the southern end of the Masai Mara... that overlooks Tanzania." "We made it a key location for Karen and Denys... and then later, made it the gravesite for Denys... because of the distance that you could see out... over Africa." "I think they still have a kind of... a little marker there now." "Sadly, it's for tourists." "Somebody who was in Africa recently said they were out... on a photographic safari... and they took them up the hill to the spot where we shot the grave." "What time tomorrow?" "There was only a short time when things went well... and then this downward spiral, kind of, came together." "Problems began with Denys." "She began to have real financial trouble." "The coffee didn't sell." "Finally... the coffee mill itself burnt down." "And then Denys was killed." "And she really had no choice... but to go back to Denmark." "And that's when her career as a writer began." "It's almost as though... she was able to distil... all of the experiences of that time in Africa... into the ink that she wrote with... because her career as a writer really started then... when she went home." "She might have written little bits and pieces and kept a diary... but she was never a published writer... until after her 17 years in Africa." "She's in a whole other look now." "Her hair is, as you can see, cut shorter." "She's in this whole other..." "There's a different kind of make-up on her." "Again, it's a subtle change... but you'd have to look at them all side by side to really see them." "Her hair has been cut literally... and so there's a completely different feeling to her look here." "Back to Clarinet Concerto again... which is the way he often announced that he was home." "He'd put the record on and she'd hear it from out in the fields." "He'd turn the music up very loud." "And that was "Honey, I'm home."" "We always called this, when we were shooting it..." ""the end of an era"scene." "Sometimes you give titles to scenes just for yourself... because it urges you... into a way of shooting it." "Life was changing here rapidly." "Things were getting more and more civilised." "A lot of the old ways were changing." "The country was opening up." " She's quite something, that Felicity." " Yes, indeed." "And this, sort of... age of individuality was changing a bit." " How are you?" " Getting old, I think." "This is the last scene I shot of the film..." "How is the hunting?" "... on the last day we were in Africa, which was a total of seven months... in, really." "You can see, I don't know if you can remember back... to the way she looked on the train when she first met Finch Hatton... but she looks completely different here." "But the change has been slow so that it doesn't hit you over the head." "Is this important, Bror?" "I suppose." "I'll have to accuse you of something... or did you think you would have it the other way around?" "Fire away, whatever." "I have surely done it." "Thank you." "How do you manage it?" "To keep us friends?" "We started that way." "I'll be happy for you, if I can." "The only sequences that we ever filmed on a soundstage... are the night firelight beach scenes... on the beach at Mombasa... and obviously the process shots, or the bluescreen shots... that we watched when Denys takes her flying." "They did a very nice job of putting the sand... on a kind of a backing with a little bit of sparkle... that you get a slight sense of water in the distance." "This was on a stage in a studio in London... and it was shot at the very, very end of the picture." "The last three days of shooting... took up those scenes in the airplane... and this sequence here... by the fire at night." "Bror has asked me for a divorce." "He's found someone that he wants to marry." "I just thought we might do that some day." "Divorce?" "How would a wedding change things?" "I would have someone of my own." "You wouldn't." "What's wrong with marriage anyway?" " Have you ever seen one you admire?" " Yes, I have." "Many." "Belfields, for one." "He sent her home for the rains in 1910." "Didn't tell her they were over until 1913." "It's not a joke." "People marry." "It's not revolutionary." "This scene gets a bit close to actually... verbalising the spine of the picture, and perhaps that's a mistake." "I don't know." "Sometimes you have a different perspective on a film... when you see it again after you make it." "But there's always a concern about clarity." "...if I promise to say no?" "Finally, here... these two ways of looking at life... and the idea of possession begin to spill over... or they at least begin to plant the seeds... of a conflict that really boils over... a couple of scenes deeper in the picture." "It's not meant to hurt you." "It does." "I'm with you because I choose to be with you." "I don't want to live someone else's idea of how to live." "Don't ask me to do that." "I don't want to find out one day that I'm at the end of someone else's life." "I'm willing to pay for mine." "To be lonely sometimes... to die alone if I have to." "I think that's fair." "Not quite." "You want me to pay for it as well." "You have a choice, and you're not willing to do the same for me." "I won't be closer to you..." "Our attempt, of course, was to... come, in a way, full circle... and begin to have her abandon... this strict sense of possession that she started out with." "She wants to dam the river." "Farah says this water belongs in Mombasa." "She dams the river anyway." "Nature eventually says, "I don't want this dam."" "She accepts that fact and says really what Farah told her in the first place... which is, "This water belongs in Mombasa."" "The civilisation that they all ran from, particularly Denys... begins to encroach on them... and it becomes particularly disturbing to him." "And all these things eventually spill over... in their personal irritation with each other... because of this clash of ideas... about what the nature of a relationship is." "He wants to have one without giving up anything of himself." "She doesn't believe that that's possible... and believes that what he wants is a kind of loveless world." "I flew as far as Narok." "You could see all the ruts where the lorries had been." " The Serengeti was still good." " It would take a week just getting there." "And Samburu's still good." "Where's Belknap?" "I haven't seen him." "He must be in America by now." "I let him go." "I had to." "But you don't want to hear about the farm, do you?" "Strange thing happened after the picture had played out theatrically... when it was bought for television." "The television people came back to me and asked if I would... put back about 15 minutes... so that we could make it two two-hour evenings." "Because it was financially quite significant to do it that way..." "I did try it, but I think it ruined the picture really." "Because I think the picture primarily stands or falls... on the basis of whether or not these rhythms are pleasing." "And although it's not a film for everybody... those who like the film and respond to it..." "I think are partially responding to the rhythms of the film... as well as the content of the film." "And when that gets changed, it turns into another animal." "A lot of the scenes that we took out were very interesting scenes on their own... beautiful scenes that Kurt had written... but they got in the way of the rhythm of it when you put it together." "The one we wouldn't have to prove!" " You'd live on the moon then." " Because I won't do it your way?" "Are we assuming there is one proper way to do this?" "Do you think I care about Felicity?" "Do you think I'll be involved with her?" " No." " Then there's no reason for this, is there?" "If she's not important why won't you give it up?" "I have learned a thing that you haven't." "There are some things worth having... but they come at a price, and I want to be one of them." "I won't allow it." "You have no idea the effect that language has on me." "I used to think there was nothing you really wanted... but that's not it, is it?" "You want to have it all." "I'm going to Samburu and she can come or not." "Then you'll be living elsewhere." "All right." "Redford is particularly good in these final scenes... where the conflict comes to a head... and where later he begins... to empathise with her and see her point of view... less as something that he's hostile to... after he first becomes angry with it, and can't deal with it... and then changes." "I think he's really very good." "Is there a prince in there?" "I think that you had better get up." "You had better get up." "I think that God is coming." "Fire scenes are always strange." "The cinematographer is guessing at the exposure." "You don't quite know how bright the fire's gonna be." "You don't have a second chance with the fire." "You just get a lot of cameras on it, and hope the exposure's gonna be right... and then you're always..." "I was shocked at how hot that thing was." "We couldn't get nearly as close as we wanted to." "We were wandering around with hand-held cameras... trying to get as close as possible, but the heat was so enormous... that we were improvising the shooting angles." "Obviously, the ones where we shot toward the people and toward Meryl... we had a better chance with... but the ones toward the fire... were sort of on the spur of the moment, depending on how close you could get... and somebody really adjusting the exposure all the time... depending on how intense the flames were." "You have trouble enough." "Just a chunk somewhere so they can stay all together." "We're just out of coffee, but I can give you tea." "Actually..." "There is no arable land that size outside the reserve." "... I'm very grateful that I had Grimes do this part... 'cause it's a nice way to remember him, to see him talking." "This is Stephen Grimes, playing this tiny part here... dressed in the white outfit." "We have a new governor, haven't we?" "Sir Joseph." "He hasn't arrived yet." "But will soon, I'm told." "We tried always, as I said, to use canvas." "And the fact that it took the sun off, but let light in... it let a soft light in from the top... we tried to take advantage whenever we could, of using that... when we had large groups of people." "Because there was not any way... that I could shoot those sequences, where every angle was in backlight." "I could do it when I had two people on, sometimes when I had three or four... but not with crowds like this." "So we used the canvas quite often." "Will you help me?" "That's quite difficult." "Get up, Baroness, please." "Kenya is a hard country for women." "So there is a chivalry here of a sort." "You are a powerful man and I've no one else to turn to." "Let's discuss this in the proper way." "You mustn't be embarrassed." "I've lost everything." " It costs me very little to beg you." " Wait." "Give her a moment, please?" "This land was theirs." "We took it and now they've nowhere else to go." "I'll look into it." "We'll do the best we can." "May I have your word?" "You have mine." "Thank you." "I hope you will be happy here." "I was." "I'm sorry I won't know you." "I didn't hear it until I got to the border." "It seems I'll do almost anything to get your attention." "I've nearly got you packed." "My poor family." "I've got them near bankrupt, now I have to ask them for more money." "Let me help you." "You would keep me then?" "I want to be worth something now." "What will you do?" "After my rummage sale, leave." "Friday for Mombasa, and then the boat to Denmark." "Thank you, Denys." "You must have them ready to leave before the rains." "It is good land, enough for all, but they must not fight about it... or be any trouble to the authorities, do you understand?" " Or they will lose it." " Yes." "You must make them understand that I will not be here... to speak for them." " This land is far?" " By Dagoretti." "Not too far." "How can it be now?" "With me and yourself?" "You will have some money." "Enough, I think." "I do not speak of money." "Do you remember how it was on safari?" "This was the best take possible... but the string wouldn't go around that cuckoo clock." "So there's Meryl trying desperately to figure out... what to do with the price tag... but it was still the best possible take." "So I used it." "Only this time I will go ahead and wait for you." "It is far where you are going?" "I always loved the way Kurt wrote this scene... and, of course, I loved the way... both Meryl and Malick played it." "The sort of understated emotion in it I thought was very good." "Take that out to the lawn." "We tried this idea of them... slowly changing places just a little bit... of Denys beginning to appreciate her original point of view... and she finally beginning to understand his point of view... obviously when it's too late." "Have you had dinner?" "Yes." "I've packed your things." "I thought I would send them on to the club." "Is that all right?" "This wasn't a very good idea." "I think we should have had it this way all the time." "I don't know." "I was beginning to like your things." "And I was beginning to like living without them." "You've ruined it for me, you know?" "Ruined what?" "Being alone." "Have I?" "I'd like to come with you to Mombasa." "Can I fly you there?" "Aren't you going away again?" "I have some things to do tomorrow at Tsavo, but I'll be back on Friday." "Will that be all right?" "Of course." "I've got this little thing that I've learned to do lately." "The critics who have written... such beautiful things about her book..." "I can't go on  often have commented on the deceptive simplicity of the writing... and particularly of the opening line." ""I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. "" "It says so little..." "It says so much, so simply, when you think back on it... after the life and the amount of living... that was put in that time." "And we got hung up..." "I got hung up, anyway, on that line itself... like a parenthesis... which sort of encloses the film." "In the beginning, hearing her voice as the old woman repeat it several times." ""I had a farm in Africa." ""I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." ""I had a farm in Africa."" "And then, wanting again to find this... slightly A-B-A form... which is a form... that I'm always drawn to, for whatever reasons." "And then, trying to find a way for the line... to bring us back to a reminder of the older..." "Karen Blixen that we began the film with... and putting it here when Denys is dancing with her." "You were right, you know." "The farm never did belong to me." "I may have been wrong." "I had a farm in Africa." " Friday?" " Yes." "I wanted you to know that she knew... that Denys was killed... in some kind of mystical African way." "And so we tried to do it really with the way we ended the music... with this odd echoed overhang." "We are told that Farah knew it... or sensed it anyway." "And whatever one thinks about this particular kind of... mysticism, ESP, whatever you want to call it... it was written about at the time." "I don't know that one can believe it... but the historical references are that Farah knew." "It's also been written in the biographies that... the reason Beryl Markham did not fly with him to Tsavo... is that her African servant told her... not to go, that she would die if she went." "When I was doing research on all of this..." "I came across this phenomenon a lot." "This sense that the Africans have of premonition, if you will." "Would you like a drink?" "One can accept it or not accept it as the case may be... but it seemed a valid thing... to use for purposes of the theatricality of the story." "We depart from the truth here a bit." "She did not learn of Denys' death from Bror." "Denys has been killed." "What she did is walk through the town, and she began to notice... that people were staring at her in a very odd way." "It was an unpleasant reminder... of how they treated her during the war." "Because Denmark was so close to Germany... they assumed that her sympathies lie with Germany." "So they treated her rather badly in the very beginning." "And when Denys died... they were embarrassed when they saw her in town and nobody would talk to her... and she finally stopped someone and they told her." "But this seemed a more theatrical and interesting way to do it." "Actually, this came from an earlier screenplay... that was written for Nicolas Roeg... when Nick Roeg was going to direct the film in the early '70s." "It never got made, but this sequence... the idea for this sequence and some of the content of it... was written by Judith Rascoe... and that script was owned by Columbia." "So it became part of what I could, sort of, pilfer from." "And I loved that part of it, so I took it." "We had some long discussions prior to the shooting of the end sequence." "It's a very difficult one for Meryl." "And we worked very closely... on how it would be covered, so that she would have to do it... the least possible number of times." "You always have to do something over and over every time, obviously... that there is an angle change, that means redoing the whole sequence, in a way." "But because of the emotional nature of this scene... we wanted to decide in advance... how many times she'd have to do it, and obviously..." "I tried very hard, for her sake, to keep it to a minimum." "One of the interesting things about this scene, to me anyway, is... how important the silent reactions... are to the emotion of it." "That there comes a point in the scene... where, as much as you are being affected... by what Karen is going through..." "I think you're sort of pushed over the top... by the silent reactions... of the people that are watching her, in a way." ""Runners whom renown outran" ""And the name died before the man" ""And round that early-laurelled head"" "The poem that she reads... was said to have been a favourite of Kennedy's." "It's a poem by A. E. Housman." "A beautiful poem, obviously." ""briefer than a girl's "" "There was this deep affinity that Denys had for the Masai... and the Masai did, in fact, attend his funeral." "He had some kind of understanding... an intuitive understanding of them, and obviously, a great empathy... for their aloneness, aloofness, in a way." "...and we loved him well." "He was not ours." "He was not mine." "The next-to-last voice-over which begins here... is the only one that came from the book." "It's a very, very beautiful piece of writing... and it's definitive..." "Dinesen, if you will." "It has a kind of lyricism... that sort of distils the whole book." ""If I know a song of Africa,"she says, and she goes on to wonder... as she says goodbye to the farm and to Africa." ""Does it know a song of me?"" "If I know a song of Africa... of the giraffe... and the African new moon lying on her back... of the ploughs in the fields... and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers... does Africa know a song of me?" "Will the air over the plain quiver... with a colour that I have had on?" "Or will the children invent a game in which my name is?" "Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive... that was like me?" "Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" "You cannot come where I'm going." "There is no cooking where you are going?" "You would not like it there." "You must trust me about this." "Letters you can send on to this address in Denmark." "When you sell the car, if you would send the cheque to Hunter  Company... and anything else you don't know what to do with." "Yes, ma'am." "I've been sent to ask if we may stand you a drink." "Who is "we"?" "The members actually." "All right." "Whiskey, please." "Two whiskeys, please." "Rose-lipt maidens, lightfoot lads." "Hear, hear!" "Thank you." "This is very dear to me." "It has helped me to find my way." "Thank you, msabu." "I want to hear you say my name." "You are Karen." "The mail has come today..." "He has such an extraordinary face, Malick." "So full of character and dignity that... it was, I thought, wonderfully moving at the end." "And then the animal unit again, waited and waited to get these lions... to lounge on the grave, which is what... the people in the city wrote to her... that they used to spot lions on Finch Hatton's grave in the Ngong Hills... all the time after Karen left." "She went back and became a writer." "At this point, she wasn't really a writer beforehand." "Obviously, it was what happened to her in Africa... that gave her..." "That it's almost as though the soil of Africa... became the ink that she wrote with, because it really..." "Almost everything she wrote came from what happened to her." "[Soft instrumental music]" "[Groans]" "KAREN:" "He even took the gramophone on safari." "Three rifles, supplies for a month... and Mozart." "He began our friendship with a gift." "And later, not long before Tsavo... he gave me another." "An incredible gift." "A glimpse of the world through God's eye... and I thought." ""Yes, I see." ""This is the way it was intended."" "I've written about all the others, not because I loved them less... but because they were clearer, easier." "He was waiting for me there." "But I've gone ahead of my story." "He'd have hated that." "Denys loved to hear a story told well." "You see..." "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." "But it began before that." "It really began in Denmark." "[Gunshots firing]" "KAREN:" "And there I knew two brothers." "One was my lover, and one was my friend." " It's too cold for champagne." " It's too cold for anything but." " You said you'd be at Klampenborg." " I thought I'd come, but then I didn't." "Was it fun?" "Tanne." "Tanne, come on." "It's not as though you loved him." "You'd like to be a baroness, that's all." " He lied to me." " Of course." "Would you be in bed with him otherwise?" "My brother's only dull, but not stupid." "Pretend it's Hans." "[Gunshot fires]" "BROR:" "Where would you go?" "KAREN:" "Anywhere." "KAREN:" "America." "Ceylon." "I would even go to Australia." "Perhaps not Australia." "But I've got to be away from here." "I'll give you all I've got." "That should get you into town." "God, it was fun." "Money." "You could marry me." "I have to marry a virgin." "I can't stand criticism." "For the money, I mean." "Probably." "Listen to me." "I've got no life at all." "They wouldn't teach me anything useful, and now I've failed to marry." "You know the punishment for that." ""Miss Dinesen's at home."" "And you've gone through all your money." "You're off seducing the servant girls." "We're a pair, you and I." "I mean, at least we're friends." "We might be all right... and if we weren't, at least we'd have been somewhere." "You don't think you're being too romantic?" "BROR:" "Am I supposed to think you're serious?" "KAREN:" "I had a farm in Africa." "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "Good morning." "KAREN:" "Have you had trouble?" "DENYS:" "Now and then." "Have you?" " I'm travelling to Nairobi." " You caught the right train then." "Get away from there!" "Shoo!" "That's all my crystal, my Limoges." "[Exclaims knowingly]" "They didn't know it was Limoges." "[Denys speaks in African language]" "You plan to stay then?" "I've come out to marry Baron Blixen." "Do you know him?" "Bror?" "Yes." "We plan to start a dairy." "Are you quite famous?" "They stopped the train for you." "DENYS:" "It's rude not to here." "A dairy?" "Isn't it a bit soon for that?" "Milk at the door?" "[Train whistle blowing]" " Aren't you boarding?" " I'm going on." "On?" "To where?" "Mention the ivory to Berkeley Cole." "Bror knows him." " I'm Baroness Blixen!" " Not yet." "Finch Hatton, Denys!" "I am Farah Aden." "We can go now." " Where is Baron Blixen?" " He is at Muthaiga." "Please come." "[Farah speaking African language]" "KAREN:" "Where is Muthaiga?" "Muthaiga is a club where British go for drinking." "Please." "[Farah speaking African language]" "Listen, on the train are my crates with china and crystal." " Do you know china?" " Yes." "China, it can break." "[Tribal instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "Stay." "Excuse me, I'm looking for Baron Blixen." "Rajiv." " I wondered if you might tell me..." " Memsahibs must not be here." " I'm simply looking for someone..." " Memsahibs must not be here." "BROR:" "Tanne." "BROR:" "Where have you been?" "KAREN:" "Where have you been?" "Arranging things." "How was the trip?" "You can tell me later." "Would you like to change?" " My luggage is still on the train." " Room "D." Head of the stairs." "I haven't gotten a ring." "Do you care?" "KAREN:" "Did you think I wouldn't come?" "I thought you wouldn't want to spend the money." "BROR:" "You will love it here." "The servants are great." "BROR:" "Shall we get a drink?" "BROR:" "We've got almost one hour before the wedding." "One hour?" "[Traditional instrumental wedding music playing]" " Is this all right?" " I wondered what colour you'd choose." " It's ivory." "God, I've got this man's ivory." " Whose ivory?" "[People cheering excitedly]" "I'm Sarah, Lady Belfield." "Shall I stand up for you?" "Short or long, Blix?" "Long, please." "Give me time to adjust to it." "Settle down, all." "By the authority of His Majesty's Government vested in me..." "I declare that the Baron Bror Von Blixen, citizen of Sweden and..." " What's your name, my dear?" " Damn it, Henry, I told you her name." "Karen Christentze Dinesen." "Karen Christentze Dinesen, a female subject of the King of Denmark... are henceforth united man and wife." "[All cheering]" "God save this company, God save the King." "ALL:" "God save the King!" "Thank you for this." "DELAMERE: "Did you hear about Shuttleworth?""No," I said." ""He's living up country," he says, "in a tree with a baboon."" ""Male or female?" I said to him." ""Female, of course," he says." "There's nothing queer about old Shuttleworth." "[All laughing]" "Where's your muddleheaded husband?" "The Governor's at the punch bowl, thank you, hoping to avoid you." "Would you like to meet the bride?" "Or did you come just for the whiskey?" "Not for the company, God knows." "Lord Delamere, may I present Baroness Blixen." "Baroness Blixen, Lord Delamere, such as he is." " Baroness." "A Swede, are you?" " No, Danish, actually." "The little country next to Germany." "If it comes to war, where will Denmark stand?" "On its own, I hope." "We do have that history." "Is there something we can call you that gets round this Baroness?" " What do they call you?" " D, if I'm lucky." "[People cheering excitedly]" "My stupid name's Felicity, but I do like your dress." "Thank you." " It's not much of a hat." " It's meant to be stunning." " We die of sunstroke here." " At least I'm safe from the mosquitoes." "The big ones." " You nervous?" " Should I be?" "You know, wedding night and all that." "[People cheering excitedly]" "So they're both of them naked and not a shrub in sight." " Have you met Vicky Gresham?" " Hello, Baroness, I'd curtsy but I'm drunk." " May I see you, please?" " Excuse me." "If you want any friends, Tanne, I'd make them here." "There is no one else." "I want to see my house." "You may want to change." "It's a two-hour ride." "KAREN:" "Excuse me." "COLE:" "My God, these people drink." "I'm sorry, I was just..." " It's all right." " I'm afraid you've caught me snooping." "It's not my room, it's Denys', and Denys won't mind." "It's a thing about Denys, he doesn't mind." "Are you Cole?" "Berkeley Cole." " I brought the ivory with me on the train." " Well, thank you." " Are you taking your quinine?" " Oh, yes." "He has got lovely books." "Does he lend them?" "We had a friend, Hopworth." "He got a book and didn't return it." "Denys was furious." "I said, "Denys, you wouldn't lose a friend over a book, would you?"" "And he said, "No!" ""But he has, hasn't he?"" "[Laughing]" "COLE:" "Did you come out through London?" "KAREN:" "From Rome actually." "I thought you might have a newspaper." "KAREN:" "No, sorry." "Nothing in them anyway." "I had a friend who I used to take to the dances at Oxford." "They were in June by the river." "She always wore a new silk dress." "I think you're wearing her perfume." "No, it's very nice, but it's not the same." "We can go now." "[Natives singing tribal song]" "[Bror speaking African language]" "[All speak African language]" "This is Belknap." "He runs the farm." "Good evening, ma'am." "This is your cook." "Name is Esa." "Esa." "And this is Juma." "Houseboy." "Juma." "[Speaking African language]" "Come, see your house." "KAREN:" "When you leave me, I'm going to marry Berkeley Cole." "BROR:" "A man in trade." "Is that what he does?" "He is thick with the Somalis." "There's a crowd of them up on his land... who think he's some sort of prince." "He sells Finch Hatton's ivory." "Belknap is a cheery sort." "Had a place of his own." "Went belly up trying to grow flax." "KAREN:" "Does he know cattle?" "I didn't buy cattle." "We're going to grow coffee instead." "That's not what we planned." "BROR:" "You were in Denmark, I had to decide." "We made a decision." "KAREN:" "We don't know a thing about coffee." "BROR:" "You plant it, it grows." "My mother put her money up to do a dairy." "She doesn't care whether it's cows or coffee as long as it pays." "You must be with a herd or things go wrong." "I didn't come to Africa to sit with silly cows." "Just tell her we changed our minds." "Next time you change your mind, you do it with your money." "They bought you a title." "They didn't buy me." "Juma." "Fetch some wine for my lover's brother." "I think you're tired." "[Whispering] Be careful." "Did I tell you Hans came to say goodbye?" "[Farah instructing in African language]" "KAREN:" "Where is Baron Blixen?" "FARAH:" "He's gone to hunt." " Did he say when he would be back?" " He says he can come before the rain." "Is it going to rain today?" "It can be many days before the rains." "[Baboons screeching]" "BELKNAP:" "In Ohio we put up scarecrows to keep the birds away." "Here you hope there're enough leopards to keep down the baboons." "'Course they'll take your dog, too." "That's Africa." "KAREN:" "How much will we plant?" "BELKNAP: 1,000 acres, the Baron says." "How long will that take?" "That depends on Kinanjui." "He's the chief of the Kikuyu." "BELKNAP:" "Got a deal with him to get help." "KAREN:" "When will be our first harvest?" "These are seedlings." "It'll be three, maybe four years." "Four years!" "If they bear at all." "No one's ever tried coffee this high." "And what are we going to live on for four years?" "I'm working to get home." "Now, if you haven't got it... it'd be good if you could tell me right now." "We will plant 500." "Chief Kinanjui, I have heard that you are a wise chief..." "Not now, please." "And I look forward to our dealings." "Your Kikuyu are good workers." "I look forward to dealing with them honestly, and fairly." "This chief has no British." " Tell him that I am Baroness Blixen." " This chief knows that." "Tell him what I said." "[Farah translating in African language]" "[Speaking African language]" " What did he say?" " He says these Kikuyu can do this work." "KAREN:" "Farah, what else did he..." "Your leg is very sick." "You must come to the house for medicine." " Does he understand me?" " Yes." "If you don't come, the other boys will say you are afraid." "I myself will think only that you are foolish." "This boy must come to my house for treatment." "See that he does." "What else did Kinanjui say?" "He says coffee must not grow this high." "Never mind." "He's a chief, but he's a Kikuyu." "[Clock cuckooing]" "[Natives singing tribal song]" "If you put a dam here to stop the water then I can make a pond here." "Do you know how to make a pond?" " This water must go home to Mombasa." " It can go home after we make a pond." "This water lives at Mombasa." "[Bell ringing]" "KAREN:" "Come, then." "[Melancholic instrumental music]" "[Horse neighing softly]" "[Horse neighing loudly]" "[Exclaiming in annoyance]" "[Growling]" "DENYS:" "I wouldn't run." "DENYS:" "If you do, she'll think you're something good to eat." "[Growling menacingly]" " Do you have a gun?" " She won't like the smell of you." "KAREN:" "Shoot it." "DENYS:" "She's had breakfast." "[Exclaiming fearfully]" "Please shoot her." "Let's give her a moment." "Oh, my God, shoot her!" "Just how much closer did you expect to let her come?" "A bit." "She wanted to see if you'd run." "That's how they decide." "DENYS:" "A lot like people." "KAREN:" "She almost had me for lunch." " It wasn't her fault." "She's a lion." " It wasn't mine." "Doesn't that outfit come with a rifle?" "It's on my saddle." "Better keep it with you." "Your horse isn't much of a shot." "For Berkeley." "He's brought you presents." "DENYS:" "We stopped by your house, then came looking." "Good Lord, you are sweet." "You're on the road actually." "We're off to Magadi to shoot some ivory." "At least I have something good to offer you." "Did you intend to tell Berkeley what a fool I was?" "She had a lion a bit interested." "A bit?" "A bit, but not enough to bite." "It's all right to take a chance as long as you're the only one who'll pay." "Wouldn't you say so?" "I'd say that it sounds more like something you'd say." " Thank you." " Not at all." " Where's Blix?" " Hunting." " Has he been out long?" " Yes." "You'll need a good chat then." "Shall we stay for supper?" "Blix will have jackets we can use." " Do I have anything to say in this?" " Not really, but we'll hear you out." " Then I would like you to stay." " Good." "Denys." "I don't know." "Do you sing?" "Never." " Can you tell a story then?" " I happen to be very good at stories." "I believe that." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "DENYS:" "What's happened to the cows?" "For the dairy?" "KAREN:" "We changed our minds." "We'll grow coffee instead." "DENYS:" "A bit risky, this high." "KAREN:" "So I've been told." "DENYS:" "Didn't seem to bother you." "KAREN:" "I think they just haven't tried." "KAREN:" "Every time I turn my back, it wants to go wild again." "It will go wild." " Your man..." " Kanuthia." " He's not Kikuyu?" " No." "Shall I see that he's given supper?" "Don't do anything for him, thank you, Baroness." "COLE:" "It's true of Somalis." "The only tribe that knows horses." "And they don't drink, charge interest, or chase other men's wives." "Got to go to town for that." "Did you know that in all of literature there is no poem celebrating the foot?" "There's lips, there's eyes, hands, face, hair, breasts... legs, arms, even the knees, but not one verse for the poor old foot." "Why do you think that is?" "Priorities, I suppose." "Did you think you would make one?" "The problem is, there's nothing to rhyme it with." " Put." " It's not a noun." "Doesn't matter." ""Along he came and he did put upon my farm his clumsy foot"" "[Chuckling]" "We should have a story now." "When I tell a story to my nieces at home... one of them always provides the first sentence." " Anything?" " Absolutely anything." "There was a wandering Chinese named Cheng Huan... living in Limehouse... and a girl named Shirley." "Who spoke perfect Chinese... which she learned from her missionary parents." "Cheng Huan lived alone in a room on Formosa Street... above the Blue Lantern." "[Soft instrumental music]" "He sat at his window... and in his poor listening heart... strange echoes of his home and country..." "[Soft instrumental music continues]" "KAREN:" "They found them there the next morning... in their room above the Blue Lantern." "The dead child and the warlord... with Cheng Huan's love gift coiled about his neck." "Had you been to those places?" "I have been a mental traveller." "COLE:" "Till now." "KAREN:" "Yes." "Wasn't this England?" "Excuse me, Denmark?" "I like my things." "And when you travelled before, in your mind... did you carry so much luggage?" "A mental traveller hasn't the need to eat or sleep... or entertain." "You're right." "Anyway, aren't you pleased that I brought my crystal and my china?" "And your stories, yes." "COLE AND DENYS: [Singing] The conquering heroes come" "Sound the trumpets Beat the drums" "[Cole and Denys humming]" "KAREN:" "But I want you to come often." "COLE:" "I'd like that very much." " And you must promise me it will be soon." " I promise." "Bye." "KAREN:" "Did you save my life?" "No, the lioness did that." "She walked away." "So I am not indebted then?" "But I am." "We pay our storytellers here." "It's lovely." "But my stories are free and your present's much too dear." "Write them down sometime." "Take care, Finch Hatton." "You wouldn't rather call me Denys?" "Baroness." "[Thunder rumbling in the distance]" "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "What are you doing?" "I want you to come home." "[Thunder rumbling]" "Bror." "We never spoke about children." "Did you..." "Do you?" "Yes." "Is that all right?" "These Kikuyu want to be sick now." "Good Lord!" "Your leg has got worse." "You should go to hospital." "This leg may be foolish." "It may think not to go to hospital." "This leg will do as it pleases." "But if you will take it to hospital, I will think that you are wise." "And such a wise man as this, I would want to work in my house... for wages." "How much wages would come to such a wise man as that?" "More wages than come from tending goats." "I will speak to this leg." "[Majestic instrumental music]" "[Car horn honking]" "MAN 1:" "What about air raids?" "DELAMERE:" "Quiet!" "One question at a time." "MAN 2:" "The war's in Europe." "Will it ever reach here?" "German East is only 200 miles south." "General Von Lettow is there." "Let's not wait till he joins us at the bar." "BROR:" "Would we engage them?" "This is our war." "You don't have to be involved, but thanks." "I've got crops coming in." "How long is this thing gonna last?" "DELAMERE:" "We just have to stay and go as we must." "MAN 3:" "They won't fight if we won't fight." "We could always arm the Masai and point them south." "Do you want the job of collecting rifles from the Masai when this is over?" "And our women and children?" "Shall we bring them into town?" "We will deal with that problem as it arises." "Will they use native troops?" "I'd assume so, but not Masai!" "Berkeley, what about your Somalis?" "They'd make very good scouts." "We can cover the area here to the border." "We can gather information for when the regulars arrive." "DENYS:" "What's it about?" "Have you any idea?" "[Cole chuckling awkwardly]" "COLE:" "Not really." "DENYS:" "Then why do you want to get into it?" "It's got nothing to do with us." "They've made agreements we know nothing about." "Victoria and the Kaiser were relatives, for God's sake." "They divided Africa between them." "Do you know why there's a border?" "'Cause she had two mountains and he had none." "So she gave him Kilimanjaro." "It's a silly argument between two spoiled countries." "The sooner we do this, the sooner it ends, the sooner we pick up where we left off." "It may end." "But we're not gonna pick up where we left off." "You don't have to go!" "You want to go!" "We've got to live here." " They don't want you." " They don't know where we stand." "I'm not so fond of their empire I'd have you shot for it." "More likely chewed on than shot." "The farm will take care of itself, and you've got Belknap." "The farm will not take care of itself." "That's not the point." "I didn't expect to like you so much." "You're not going to go falling in love, are you?" "Not with someone who's always leaving." "If you need me, send a runner to find Delamere." "That's where I'll be." " That's a fine kiss goodbye." " I'm better at hello." "[Solemn instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "It's an odd feeling, farewell." "There is some envy in it." "Men go off to be tested for courage." "But if we're tested at all it's for patience... for doing without... perhaps for how well we can endure loneliness." "But I had always known that." "[Greeting in African language]" "KAREN:" "It didn't require a war." "I said goodbye to Bror." "Denys left without a word, which was quite proper." "FELICITY:" "Hello, the house!" "[Dog barking]" "KAREN:" "Felicity." "I thought you might want some meat." "KAREN:" "Is there any word?" "Nothing new." "There's not much fighting." "Awful fever, though." "I've got time for tea, I should think." "Are you for the Germans?" "Did they send you out to ask me this?" " We had a row about it in town." " Because of my bad English." "And whose side were you on?" "Yours." "They want to send me home to school." "Mother says I'm growing up wild." " I wanted to ask you about it." " Me?" "You've been around and about." "Some day, I'd like to run my own show the way you do." "KAREN:" "Is that what I do?" "FELICITY:" "You don't seem to need us much." "May I ask you something?" "I don't know much about men." "I want them to like me, but I..." "I want to be let alone, too." "I'm supposed to want to be taken, aren't I?" "I've got this book... but how do you know when to do what they want you to... and when not to?" "I suppose you ought to call me Karen." "[Clock ticking]" "[Soft instrumental music]" "[Clock cuckooing]" "They need paraffin and tinned food." "Enough for 300 men." "He wants you to send a white man with the wagon." "Is he all right?" "I assume." "Well enough to send a message." "And where would my husband like this wagon sent?" "He's with Delamere on the border near Lake Natron." " That's confidential, of course." " I would bear that in mind." "CAPTAIN:" "Sorry, I only meant... it wouldn't do for it to be talk around Nairobi." "CAPTAIN:" "We have to move you into town." "We can't protect you here." "What do you mean, into town?" "With the men gone, we're worried about the natives." "We have orders." "Women and children into town." " That is internment, Lieutenant." " Women and children." "Is that one category or two?" "You'll want time to gather your things." "CAPTAIN:" "I'll send an escort here for you Thursday." "And I am a captain." "I'm not paid to fight." "No." "Where is Lake Natron?" "That's south." "Bush country." "It's no place for a white man." "[Natives marshalling oxen]" "[Tense instrumental music]" "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "[Native singing tribal song]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "[Tense instrumental music]" "[Oxen mooing]" "[Natives singing tribal song]" "[Distant roaring]" "We should have crossed the Sand River today." "I may have got us lost." "God is great." "[Birds chirping]" "[Natives yelling]" " What the devil are you doing here?" " I'm on my way to Delamere." "COLE:" "Absurd." "We don't send women to war." "KAREN:" "Well, I'm going." "We haven't time for this." "You don't know where you are." "KAREN:" "I do now." "COLE:" "And you'll just get lost again." "I'm going on." " Talk to her, will you?" " No." "She could be hurt or worse." "I imagine she knows that." "Right, I tried." "DENYS:" "Here." "Find a spot on the horizon each morning and steer by it." "South-southwest." "About three days." "I see." "And don't worry about us, we'll be all right." "[Native marshalling oxen]" "[Tense instrumental music]" "[Sighing]" "Farah." " What is it?" " Masai." "[Tense instrumental music continues]" "[Lion growling]" "[Natives shouting]" "KAREN:" "Ismail, my rifle, where's my rifle?" "Ismail!" "[Lion roaring]" "[Natives shouting]" "[Karen exclaiming in pain]" "Get away!" "[Lion growling]" "Get away!" "[Oxen mooing in pain]" "[Lion growling]" "[Lions continue roaring]" "[Oxen mooing in pain]" "[Mournful instrumental music]" "[Karen exclaiming mournfully]" "FARAH:" "Msabu's bleeding." "She does not have this ox." "This lion is hungry." "He does not have this ox." "This wagon is heavy." "It doesn't have this ox." "God is happy." "He plays with us." "Tell Blix his wife's here." "[Native marshalling oxen]" "Hello, Karen." "Hello, D. Hello, Bror." "I've brought you some things." "You've changed your hair." "[Laughing]" "KAREN:" "You needed supplies..." "BROR:" "Send someone, I said." "You were lucky to get through." "It was really foolish." "KAREN:" "But I did get through." "And it was fun." "When are you coming home?" "Not just yet." "You're not going to help at all with the farm, are you?" "No." "KAREN:" "I could force you." "I could cut you off." "I'll just hunt professionally." "BROR:" "I might do it anyway." "It's not the way we thought it would be... is it?" "But I like it that you're honest with me." "I like you, too." "[Whispering] Tanne." "Very much." "[Soft instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "I had a compass from Denys." ""To steer by,"he said." "But later it came to me... that we navigated differently." "Perhaps he knew, as I did not... that the Earth was made round... so that we would not see too far down the road." "[Grunts]" "You've got syphilis." "KAREN:" "That's not possible." "Your husband is not ill?" "No." "Not the last time I saw him." "That was three months ago." "He's on the border with Delamere." "He would have come home." "These cases vary." "He may have just a touch." "But you are very ill." "Is he the only possibility?" "Yes." "DOCTOR:" "You'll have to go home to deal with it, you know?" "The treatment's difficult, but they have a thing called Salvarsan." "Arsenic." "And if I'm not cured then I will be insane, won't I?" "You ought to go soon." "I'll have to see your husband." "I will send for him." "These ought to help with the fever till you get home." " And what are my chances?" " About even, I'm afraid." "[Exclaims in disbelief]" "It's not what I thought would happen to me now." "FARAH:" "Muthaiga?" "KAREN:" "What?" "FARAH:" "Your letters." "Excuse me." "I heard you had made it." "I'd have paid anything to see their faces." "Hello." "Would you join us for a drink?" "I can't." "How is it that you are home?" "DENYS:" "I brought Berkeley back." " Has he been wounded?" " No, fever." "More than usual, but he'll be all right as long as the gin holds out." "And you?" "How is it with the fighting?" "We're taking a beating." "It's likely to last for a while." " I still have your compass." " Why don't you keep it?" "You've earned it." "Besides, I don't always want to know where I'm going anyway." "KAREN:" "Please don't let me keep you." " Are you all right?" " Yes." "Take good care." " We're behind a story or two." " Yes." " When I get back." " Back?" "From where?" "When you get back, I meant." "BROR:" "I thought it was malaria." "KAREN:" "It wasn't." "And you may be all right, but you have to be seen." "And the others, whoever they are, I hope they've got it." "It's my fault, no one else's." "[Clock ticking]" "I want to go with you." "Someone has to stay here and run things, and the factory must be finished." " Can you do that?" " That's little enough." "BROR:" "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry." "Where's memsahib?" "She can come soon enough." "KAREN:" "Later that day, I left for Mombasa... and the voyage home to Denmark." "It was a longer journey this time." "The war went on." "I fought my own war." "Arsenic was my ally against an enemy I never saw." "[African tribal song]" "KAREN:" "I stayed in the room where I was born... in Rungstedlund... and tried to remember the colours of Africa." "There was only the medicine... and walks with my mother along a deserted stretch of beach... and this room in my mother's house." "Denmark had become a stranger to me... and I to her." "But my mother's house, I came to know again." "And knew I would come back to it, sick or well... sane or mad, someday." "And so I did... after Tsavo." "[Exclaiming joyfully]" "BROR:" "Almost everyone's got them now." "[Car horn honking]" "[Car horn honking]" "[Natives talking excitedly]" "[Speaking African language]" "[Karen exclaiming contentedly]" " I am cooking now." " I have heard about this." "Are you well?" "I am well enough." "Then I am well enough also." "KAREN:" "What will you do?" "I have been thinking I'll hunt." "Safari sort of thing." "They say it'll be quite a business once the war is over." "KAREN:" "You wouldn't want to teach?" "I would like these Kikuyu to have a school." "There will be a fight about that." "Tanne." "Are you all well?" "They say I'm cured." "I won't have children." "Have you thought about us?" "Of course." "Belknap says the coffee will flower after the next rains." "If it does, you'll have to start thinking about hiring for the harvest... and how you'll get to market." "[Marching band playing lively tune]" "[Marching band continues playing]" " Where would Berkeley be?" " He must be here." "BROR:" "Who won the match?" "Have you got a story for me?" "Finch Hatton." "I've been demoted." "I was Denys last time." "Would you care for some champagne?" " They said you went home for a while." " Yes." " Where's Berkeley?" " It's good to see you." "He's still down with fever." "He'll be all right." "Who are all these people?" "KAREN:" "Bror says we'll be a colony soon." "They want it settled now." "They've got a lottery." ""Buy a ticket, win a farm in Africa."" "Did you really think it would stay the way it was?" "I thought it might." " Where is Kanuthia?" " He's dead." "Hello, Denys." "How are you?" "Would you join us for a drink?" " It's time to find a pillow." " Another night then?" "Have a good Christmas." "Christmas?" "So it is." "[Soft instrumental music]" "[Chief speaking African language]" "This Chief says children higher than this... must not learn to read." "Tell him that all the children must go to school." "No, this is a Chief." "You are not a Chief." "KAREN:" "That's absurd." "It is not good for tall people to know more than this Chief." "When these children are tall, then this Chief can be dead." "[Soft instrumental music continues]" "[Cheerful instrumental music playing]" "Bror, yes." "But Denys hired out to tourists, I can't imagine." "COLE:" "He's got no other trade and we've got no choice." "The government's put a stop to the ivory." "KAREN:" "What will you do then?" "COLE:" "I'll concentrate on the farm." "FELICITY:" "Hello, the house!" "KAREN:" "Felicity!" "How is it you're home?" "I'm out." "Look." "I didn't learn a thing, but I'm wonderfully clean." "I'll come and see you." "You save me a dance, Berkeley." "[Pleasant instrumental music playing]" "What's this nonsense I hear about a school?" "I've taken on a young missionary." "He's promised me to do the alphabet first, and save God for later." "Wogs can't even count their goats." "It's none of your bloody business anyway!" "Who the devil are you?" "[People shouting]" "I wonder if you'd dance with me?" "DELAMERE:" "I think you are about to apologise." "You do stir things up." "When they said they'd like to read, how did they put that exactly?" "Do they know they'd like Dickens?" " You don't think they should learn to read?" " I think you might have asked them." "KAREN:" "Did you ask to learn when you were a child?" "KAREN:" "How can stories possibly harm them?" "They have their own stories, just not in writing." "Why would you rather keep them ignorant?" "They're not ignorant." "I just don't think they should be turned into little Englishmen." "You do like to change things, don't you?" "KAREN:" "For the better, I hope." "I want my Kikuyu to learn to read." "My Kikuyu." "My Limoges." "My farm." " It's an awful lot to own, isn't it?" " I've paid a price for all I own." "What is it exactly that's yours?" "We're not owners here, we're just passing through." "Is life really so damn simple for you?" "Perhaps I ask less of it than you do." "I don't believe that at all." "ALL:" "Happy New Year!" "[Traditional New Year song playing]" "[All singing]" "[Shotgun fires]" "[All singing British anthem]" " Happy New Year." " And for you, too." "Someone has left her underclothes in the back." "I want you to take a place in town." "Are you sure?" "[Melancholic instrumental music]" "CHILDREN:" "Eats." "Eats." "CHILDREN:" "Eats." "MISSIONARY:" "He eats." "Elephant." "[Melancholic instrumental music continues]" "Give me work." "We've got peace, where is the prosperity?" "Why should the prices fall now just because they're not killing anybody?" "Tea's down just as bad." "[Bror shouting in African language]" "Do they always have to whip them so?" "[Soft classical music playing on gramophone]" "They finally made a machine that's really useful." "Listen." "It's for you." " I can't accept it." " Why not?" "Bror's moved to town." "That's a private matter, I imagine." "Did you think you would spend the night?" "Can't, thanks." "I have to go down to the Mara." "I've taken up safari work and I've gotta find a camp." "No." "There's country there you ought to see." "It won't last long now." "No." "I would be wasting your time." "Why don't you get your things?" "If you like me at all... don't ask me to do this." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "[Elephant trumpeting]" "[Car engine sputtering]" "[Car engine choking]" "What's your word?" "Shoo?" "Is that it?" "Shoo?" "DENYS:" "Shoo!" "That's a fine word you've got there." "[Car engine cranking]" "DENYS:" "Crank it again, please." "DENYS:" "Almost." "Crank it again." "Again." "Once more." "[Sighing]" "[Car engine starting]" "Well done." "We're off." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "DENYS:" "I don't know the scientific basis for it, but I know you can see further... in the African night than any other place." "And the stars are brighter." "It's about the tents." "When I'm out with Kanuthia..." "Used to be, we didn't use them." "I remember him." " There was something..." " Masai." "He was half Masai, that's what you remember about him." "They're like nobody else." "We think we'll tame them, but we won't." "If you put them in prison, they die." "Why?" "Because they live now." "They don't think about the future." "They can't grasp the idea that they'll be let out one day." "They think it's permanent, so they die." "They're the only ones here that don't care about us... and that is what will finish them." "What did the two of you ever find to talk about?" "Nothing." "So you knew I would come." "It's an early day tomorrow." "Why don't you get some sleep?" " What happens tomorrow?" " I have no idea." "Good night." "[Soft classical music playing]" "[Baboons screeching]" " You would think they would run off." " You didn't." "Hey!" "[Baboons screeching]" "Think of that." "Never a man-made sound, and then Mozart." "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "Have you clients already?" "In a week." "A man from Belgium and his daughters." "His letter said, "We'd like three of everything."" "DENYS:" "Lt'll be an interesting trip." "I'll be gone a month, or an hour and a half." "Why are you doing this?" "I don't know how to sow." "[Plane engine droning]" "Do you know what they're made of?" "Cloth." "KAREN:" "Where will he land?" "DENYS:" "Trick is not to." "It must feel amazing." "KAREN:" "It's how I imagined America to be." " Have you been to America?" " No, but my father was there... and he always told me stories about it when I was a little girl." "Are you still close?" "He died." "He killed himself when I was 10 years old." "I can fix that, I think." "DENYS: "Laugh'd loud and long, and all the while" ""His eyes went to and fro" ""'Ha!" "Ha!" "' quoth he, 'full plain I see" ""'T he Devil knows how to row'" ""Farewell, farewell!" "...i"" " You're skipping verses." " I leave out the dull parts." ""Farewell, farewell!" "But this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!"" "Lay your head back." ""He prayeth well, who loveth well" ""Both man and bird and beast"" "That's better." "KAREN:" "Will it be so different... hunting for hire?" "Not for the animals." "Well, maybe for the animals." "KAREN:" "Do you really prefer them to people?" "DENYS:" "Sometimes." "They don't do anything half-heartedly." "Everything's for the first time." "Hunting, working, mating." "It's only man that does it badly." "It's only man that tires of going through it." "Who says, "See here." "I know how you feel about me..." ""and you know how I feel about you." ""We understand each other, so let's lie down and get on with it."" "[Karen laughing]" "Why am I here?" "Because I wanted you to see all this." "I wanted to show it to you." "I thought you'd understand it." " Do you think much about death?" " I think about getting old." "It'd be like living with a cranky demanding old bastard." "You are a cranky demanding old bastard." "I had syphilis." "That's why I went home." "I know." "I never seem to get anything." "German measles once." "They say I'll have a normal life now." "But no children." "So the school." "So the school." "The farm, that's what I am now." "No." "We'll need meat for the camp tomorrow." "I'll wake you at dawn." "DENYS:" "Good night." "Good night." "DENYS:" "We might scare up a gazelle or two." "DENYS:" "But we'll go through buffalo country again." "They get cocky when you're on foot." "[Water buffalo grunting]" "Supper." "Good size, but..." "Lion." "Careful, the wind's behind us." "[Whispering] Back up." "Slowly." "If there's a charge, drop flat, and let me do it." "[Lion roaring]" "[Echoing] Drop!" "[Gunshot fires]" "Reload now!" "Dinner in a while?" "I'm glad you came." "[Soft classical music playing]" "To rose-lipt maidens." "There was a very young girl from Denmark... who took passage on a steamer bound for Suez." "There was a storm... off Morocco... and she was washed ashore onto a beach." "Onto a white beach." "Onto a beach so white..." "DENYS:" "I'd like to do that." "DENYS:" "Will that hurt?" "KAREN:" "If you say anything now..." "I'll believe it." "[Soft instrumental music]" "I need to know how to think about this." "Why?" "KAREN:" "Clear soup, the new lettuce... chicken, just the breast." "I trust this meets with your approval." " Who is coming?" " Bwana Cole is coming." "I will think on Bwana Cole." "I've got myself in real trouble now." " Now you think they should vote?" " No, worse." "Denys?" "[Soft classical music playing]" "Get Kamante." "He is out of hand entirely." "Does this look like a chicken?" "Here is not a chicken, here is a fish." "Go away." "What do you think?" "I think it's quite good, isn't it?" "Be careful." "When the old mapmakers got to the edge of the world... they used to write, "'Beyond this place, there be dragons."" "Is that where I am?" "He likes to give presents... but not at Christmas." "He hasn't even said when he's coming again." "If he's coming again." "Would you divorce?" "Then I would have no one." "[Soft instrumental music]" "DENYS:" "Men who missed moose in Alaska, grizzly in America... tigers in India, they're all at sea now bound for here." "[Karen chuckling]" "Berkeley is going to farm." "You could do that." "No, thank you." "You ought to look in on him though." "He didn't look all that well." "Can you stay?" "For a day or so." " Is that all right?" " No." "DENYS:" "You don't need two guns on safari." "Then do the town work." "Meet the clients, do outfitting." " There's the mail." "Lots of mail." " I don't know if I'd be right for that." "DENYS:" "You've gotta do something." "I don't actually." "My water's gone black." "We've gotta get you to a hospital, and get you some proper care." "I'm being cared for properly." "It's some years now." "She's fond of me, I think." "Why didn't you tell me?" "I suppose I thought..." "I didn't know you well enough." "There's money left in the trading account." "I'd like my share to go to Mariammo." "Berkeley, listen." "George Martin had blackwater fever and that was five years now." "You might take along that twelve-bore you're so fond of." "The trigger seems a bit..." "COLE:" "And the Rigby, get Karen to try the Rigby." "It's a nice size gun for her." "Would you like me to take you home?" "I am home, I suppose." "CHILDREN: "F."" "MISSIONARY: "F." CHILDREN: "F."" ""G."" "MISSIONARY: "G" for girl." "CHILDREN: "G" for girl." "KAREN:" "Are you packed?" "Yes." " How was town?" " Crowded." "I've been thinking." "With all the safari work I have little use for the room at the club." "I don't know that I'd be any good at this... but how would it be if I kept a few things with you?" "You would come and go from my house?" "If that's all right." "When the gods want to punish you they answer your prayers." "Berkeley's dying." "KAREN:" "What?" "DENYS:" "Blackwater fever." "KAREN:" "Oh, my God." "KAREN:" "I'll go to him." "DENYS:" "He wouldn't want you there." "Why?" "There's a woman there." "She's Somali." "DENYS:" "She's been with him for some time." "You never told me this." "I didn't know." "[African tribal song]" "[Priest reciting funeral rites]" ""...with each one of us now and forevermore." Amen." "Strange that Denys isn't here." "I think he is off with Berkeley." "[Soft classical instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "In the days and hours that Denys was at home... we spoke of nothing ordinary." "Not of my troubles with the farm... my notes due and my failing crop... or of his with his work and... what he knew was happening to Africa." "Or of anything at all that was small and real." "We lived disconnected... and apart from things." "I had been making up stories while he was away." "In the evenings, he made himself comfortable... spreading cushions like a couch in front of the fire... and with me sitting cross-legged like Scherazade herself... he would listen clear-eyed to a long tale... from when it began until it ended." "[Chief speaking African language]" " Where did you get it?" " Mombasa." "Get in." " When did you learn to fly?" " Yesterday." "[Adventurous instrumental music]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "Don't move." "I want to move." "[Whispering] Don't move." "Hello, Denys." "Hello, Blix." "May I see you?" "KAREN:" "I'm broke, too, you know?" "I wouldn't ask, but tips were a bit light." " Are you all right?" " Lf I get a decent crop." "I could shoot him." "I've got this terrible urge to kiss you." "He's smarter than I am." "It may go well." "Good luck." " You might have asked." " I did." "She said yes." "[Pleasant instrumental music]" "If I get eaten up sometime bury me here, will you?" "Whatever's left." "KAREN:" "Just there at the crest of the hill." " When are you leaving?" " Tomorrow." "Doesn't it matter to you that I'm another man's wife?" "What matters to me is that you tried so hard." "What time tomorrow?" "KAREN:" "Goodbye again." " How many acres under cultivation?" " Five hundred." " The rest of it's wild?" " The Kikuyu live there." " Why don't you move them off?" " Because they live there." "We'll take it over should you default." "KAREN:" "We've got another year." "FARAH:" "God is great." "He's charging 3%." "[Speaking African language]" "This Chief says, "Tall children can come to school now."" "Tell Chief Kinanjui that reading is a valuable thing." "His children will remember him well." "This Chief says:" ""British can read and what good has it done them?"" "[Soft classical music playing]" "[Slow instrumental music]" "ANNOUNCER:" "Miss Felicity's Spurway." "Clear round." " She's quite something, that Felicity." " Yes, indeed." "ANNOUNCER:" "The next competitor:" "Mr. John Sutton on Castano." " How are you?" " Getting old, I think." "Not you." "KAREN:" "How is the hunting?" "I'll make a living." "Where's Denys?" "Uganda." "Some potentate." "I thought you might be wanting a divorce." "Has she got money?" "Of course she's got money." "Is this important, Bror?" "I suppose." "I'll have to accuse you of something... or did you think you would have it the other way around?" "Fire away, whatever." "I have surely done it." "Thank you." "How do you manage it?" "To keep us friends?" "We started that way." "I'll be happy for you, if I can." "I remember that quite well." "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "When you go away on safari... are you ever with someone else?" "I'd be with you if I wanted to be with anyone." " Do you ever get lonely?" " Sometimes." "Do you ever wonder if I am lonely?" "No, I don't." "Do you think about me at all?" "Often." "But not enough to come back." "I do come back, all the time." "What is it?" "Nothing." "Bror has asked me for a divorce." "He's found someone that he wants to marry." "I just thought we might do that some day." "Divorce?" "[Chuckling]" "How would a wedding change things?" "I would have someone of my own." "No." "You wouldn't." "What's wrong with marriage anyway?" " Have you ever seen one you admire?" " Yes, I have." "Many." "Belfields, for one." "He sent her home for the rains in 1910." "Didn't tell her they were over until 1913." "It's not a joke." "People marry." "It's not revolutionary." "Some animals mate for life." "Geese." "You use the animals for your own argument." "You won't let me use them for mine." "I'd mate for life." "One day at a time." "[Chuckling] I'd just like someone to ask me once that's all." "KAREN:" "Promise me you'll do that if I promise to say no?" "Just trust you?" "When you go away... you don't always go on safari, do you?" "No." "You just want to be away." "It's not meant to hurt you." "It does." "I'm with you because I choose to be with you." "I don't want to live someone else's idea of how to live." "Don't ask me to do that." "I don't want to find out one day that I'm at the end of someone else's life." "I'm willing to pay for mine." "To be lonely sometimes... to die alone if I have to." "I think that's fair." "Not quite." "You want me to pay for it as well." "You have a choice, and you're not willing to do the same for me." "I won't be closer to you... and I won't love you more because of a piece of paper." "[Thunder rumbling]" "[Natives talking in African language]" "See if you can shore it up." "Let it go." "This water lives in Mombasa anyway." "[Plane engine droning]" "[Solemn instrumental music]" "[Soft classical music playing]" "DENYS:" "I flew as far as Narok." "DENYS:" "You could see all the ruts where the lorries had been." "DENYS:" "The Serengeti was still good." "KAREN:" "It would take a week just getting there." "DENYS:" "And Samburu's still good." "DENYS:" "Where's Belknap?" "I haven't seen him." "He must be in America by now." "I let him go." "[Sighs]" "I had to." "But you don't want to hear about the farm, do you?" "KAREN:" "Have you got any buttons?" "DENYS:" "What are you doing?" "KAREN:" "Mending your shirts." "DENYS:" "Don't do that." "You don't have to do that." "Maybe I'll try Samburu day after tomorrow." "You just got back." "Felicity asked to come along... and I almost said no because I thought you wouldn't like it." " There's no reason for her not to come." " Yes, there is." "I wouldn't like it." "You want her along?" " I want things that don't matter not to." " Tell her no, do it for me." "Then what else would it be?" "Why is your freedom more important than mine?" "It isn't." "And I've never interfered with your freedom." "I'm not allowed to need you or rely on you... or expect anything from you!" "I'm free to leave!" "KAREN:" "But I need you." "DENYS:" "You don't need me." "If I die will you die?" "You don't need me." "You confuse need with want." "You always have." "In your world, there would be no love at all." "Or the best kind." "The one we wouldn't have to prove!" " You'd live on the moon then." " Because I won't do it your way?" "Are we assuming there is one proper way to do this?" "Do you think I care about Felicity?" "Do you think I'll be involved with her?" " No." " Then there's no reason for this, is there?" "KAREN:" "If she's not important why won't you give it up?" "I have learned a thing that you haven't." "There are some things worth having... but they come at a price, and I want to be one of them." "I won't allow it." "You have no idea the effect that language has on me." "I used to think there was nothing you really wanted... but that's not it, is it?" "You want to have it all." "I'm going to Samburu and she can come or not." "KAREN:" "Then you'll be living elsewhere." "All right." "[African tribal song]" "Is there a prince in there?" "[Soft instrumental music]" "JUMA:" "I think that you had better get up." "KAREN:" "What?" "JUMA:" "You had better get up." "I think that God is coming." "All gone." "All gone." "DELAMERE:" "How did it start?" "KAREN:" "I think God had a hand in it." "KAREN:" "He gave me my best crop ever and then he remembered." "DELAMERE:" "Insurance?" "KAREN:" "That's for pessimists." " Where's Denys?" " Who knows?" "[Karen chuckling cynically]" "It doesn't matter." "The Baroness is broke." "It's over." "I've got to find some land before I go for my Kikuyu." "You have trouble enough." "Just a chunk somewhere so they can stay all together." "We're just out of coffee, but I can give you tea." "There is no arable land that size outside the reserve." "And if there were, we'd not put natives on it." "Since it's theirs..." "It belongs to the Crown." "What you want is quite impossible." "It always is." "Who must I see next?" "You've run through us all, I'm afraid." "We have a new governor, haven't we?" "Sir Joseph." "He hasn't arrived yet." "But will soon, I'm told." "You do still ask me to things." "COMMISSIONER:" "Captain Jacques Llewllyn." "JACQUES:" "Your servant, sir." "COMMISSIONER:" "The Honourable Hugh Chomondeley, Lord Delamere." "DELAMERE:" "Your servant, sir." "COMMISSIONER:" "Lady Delamere." " Commissioner." " Baroness." "The Baroness Von Blixen." "I'm sorry to know that Kenya will be losing you." "KAREN:" "You have heard of my trouble then?" "JOSEPH:" "Yes, I regret it." "Do you know of my problem now?" " This land you want from us..." " Will you help me?" "That's quite difficult." "Get up, Baroness, please." "Kenya is a hard country for women." "So there is a chivalry here of a sort." "You are a powerful man and I've no one else to turn to." "JOSEPH:" "Let's discuss this the proper way." "You mustn't be embarrassed." "I've lost everything." "KAREN:" "It costs me very little to beg you." "DENYS:" "Wait." "Give her a moment, please?" "This land was theirs." "We took it and now they've nowhere else to go." "I'll look into it." "We'll do the best we can." "May I have your word?" "You have mine." "Thank you." "I hope you will be happy here." "I was." "I'm sorry I won't know you." "I didn't hear it until I got to the border." "It seems I'll do almost anything to get your attention." "[People murmuring]" "I've nearly got you packed." "KAREN:" "My poor family." "I've got them near bankrupt, now I have to ask them for more money." "Let me help you." "You would keep me then?" "I want to be worth something now." "What will you do?" "After my rummage sale, leave." "Friday for Mombasa, and then the boat to Denmark." "[Slow instrumental music]" "Thank you, Denys." "KAREN:" "You must have them ready to leave before the rains." "It is good land, enough for all, but they must not fight about it... or be any trouble to the authorities, do you understand?" "KAREN:" "Or they will lose it." "FARAH:" "Yes." "You must make them understand that I will not be here... to speak for them." " This land is far?" " By Dagoretti." "Not too far." "How can it be now?" "With me and yourself?" "You will have some money." "Enough, I think." "I do not speak of money." "Do you remember how it was on safari?" "In the afternoons I would send you ahead to look for a camp?" "And you would wait for me." "And you can see the fire and come to this place." "Yes." "It will be like that." "Only this time I will go ahead and wait for you." "It is far where you are going?" "Yes." "You must make this fire very big... so I can find you." "Take that out to the lawn." "[Soft classical music playing]" "Have you had dinner?" "Yes." "I've packed your things." "I thought I would send them on to the club." "Is that all right?" "Juma." "This wasn't a very good idea." "[Karen chuckling]" "I think we should have had it this way all the time." "I don't know." "I was beginning to like your things." "And I was beginning to like living without them." "You've ruined it for me, you know?" "Ruined what?" "Being alone." "Have I?" "I'd like to come with you to Mombasa." "Can I fly you there?" "Aren't you going away again?" "I have some things to do tomorrow at Tsavo, but I'll be back on Friday." "Will that be all right?" "Of course." "I've got this little thing that I've learned to do lately." "When it gets so bad and I think..." "I can't go on..." "I try to make it worse." "I make myself think about our camp on the river." "And Berkeley." "And the first time that you took me flying." "How good it all was." "And when I'm certain that I can't stand it..." "I go one moment more... and then I know I can bear anything." "Would you like to help me?" "Yes." "[Romantic classical music playing on gramophone]" "Come dance with me then." "KAREN:" "You were right, you know." "The farm never did belong to me." "DENYS:" "I may have been wrong." "KAREN:" "I had a farm in Africa." "[Plane engine droning]" "DENYS:" "Friday?" "KAREN:" "Yes." "[African tribal song]" "[African tribal song stops]" "[Birds chirping]" "Hello, Bror." "Hello." "Would you like a drink?" "Please." "Denys has been killed." "His plane crashed at Tsavo." "There was a fire." "Can I take you into town?" "Why did they send you?" "I thought I should." "My God, you're brave." "PRIEST: "The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon at night." ""The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil." ""He shall preserve thy soul." ""The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in." ""From this time forth and even forevermore. "" "ALL:" "Amen." ""The time you won your town the race" ""We chaired you through the market-place" ""Man and boy stood cheering by" ""And home we brought you shoulder-high" ""Smart lad, to slip betimes away" "KAREN: "From fields where glory does not stay" "KAREN: "And early though the laurel grows" "KAREN: "It withers quicker than a rose." ""Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out" ""Runners whom renown outran" ""And the name died before the man" ""And round that early-laurelled head" ""Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead" ""And find unwithered on its curls" ""A garland" ""briefer than a girl's "" "Now take back the soul of Denys George Finch Hatton... whom you have shared with us." "He brought us joy... and we loved him well." "He was not ours." "He was not mine." "[Soft instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "If I know a song of Africa... of the giraffe... and the African new moon lying on her back... of the ploughs in the fields... and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers... does Africa know a song of me?" "Will the air over the plain quiver... with a colour that I have had on?" "Or will the children invent a game in which my name is?" "Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive... that was like me?" "Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" "You cannot come where I'm going." "There is no cooking where you are going?" "You would not like it there." "You must trust me about this." "[Melancholic instrumental music]" "KAREN:" "Letters you can send on to this address in Denmark." "KAREN:" "When you sell the car, if you would send the cheque to Hunter  Company... and anything else you don't know what to do with." "Yes, ma'am." "Baroness." "I've been sent to ask if we may stand you a drink." "Who is "we"?" "The members actually." "All right." "Whiskey, please." "Two whiskeys, please." "Baroness." "Rose-lipt maidens, lightfoot lads." "ALL:" "Hear, hear!" "Thank you." "KAREN:" "This is very dear to me." "KAREN:" "It has helped me to find my way." "Thank you, msabu." "I want to hear you say my name." "You are Karen." "KAREN:" "The mail has come today... and a friend writes this to me." ""The Masai have reported to the district commissioner at Ngong..." ""that many times at sunrise and sunset..." ""they have seen lions on Finch Hatton's grave." ""A lion and a lioness have come there..." ""and stood, or lain on the grave for a long time." ""After you went away..." ""the ground around the grave was levelled out into a sort of terrace." ""I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions." ""From there they have a view over the plain..." ""and the cattle and game on it."" "Denys will like that." "I must remember to tell him." "[Slow instrumental music]" "[Sweeping instrumental music]" "We always struggled with how to begin." "That is, what the first images would be." "In the first draft, the film began... in a kind of white, snowy world of Denmark... and something always bothered me about that." "After a lot of work, we were finally able to figure out a way to open in Africa... and still have Denmark... by constructing a sort of mental mystery." "The woman remembering Africa and describing, or deciding... to mentally revisit her life there, in order to try once and for all... to figure out this enigmatic man, Finch Hatton... who really became the most important person in her life." "I always thought Denmark was necessary and we always wanted it there... in order to set up the strange circumstances of her ending up in Africa... and also the contrast from... that white, snowy, small place... into this vast continent that she was going to." "And later, not long before Tsavo..." "Setting up the mystery of trying to figure out Finch Hatton... gave us a key into it." "So, in a sense, we took little pieces... of what her memories were... and tried to set it up as though she was dreaming about them... and then decided consciously... sitting at her desk, to go back in time... and remember what happened." "And that gave us a way to get to Denmark." "He was waiting for me there." "But I've gone ahead of my story." "He'd have hated that." "Denys loved to hear a story told well." "The truth is that she had been very much in love... with one of a pair of twin brothers... who both had titles." "Hans and Bror." "Hans is the one she was in love with, but couldn't quite catch him." "At her age, in her late 20s... not being married was really a kind of a humiliation." "So she decided to settle for Bror... the kind of charming rascal of the family, if you will." "That's how she ended up... trying to grow coffee in Africa." "We shot the opening in northern England." "It's the only... exterior location that we filmed... away from Africa itself." "And I got very lucky." "We decided that we had to have snow to set it up as Denmark." "And it very rarely ever snows... in this spot in northern England, right off the North Sea." "But I got out there the morning that we were going to shoot... and the place was absolutely covered with this beautiful white snow." "So, for once, we got lucky." "Usually it's the opposite on films." "When you need snow, and it always snows... the one day it doesn't snow is the day you need it." "But in this case, I had really good luck." "I can't stand criticism." "For the money, I mean." "Probably." "Listen to me." "I've got no life at all." "They wouldn't teach me anything useful, and now I've failed to marry." "You know the punishment for that." ""Miss Dinesen's at home."" "And you've gone through all your money." "You're off seducing the servant girls." "We're a pair, you and I." "I mean, at least we're friends." "We might be all right... and if we weren't, at least we'd have been somewhere." "You don't think you're being too romantic?" "Am I supposed to think you're serious?" "I had known about this book Out of Africa for years... as almost everyone in Hollywood had... and I was not the first director to try to make it." "Several directors had attempted it and there were several screenplays." "When I first went and looked into the vaults... at the studio... there were at least five other screenplays... that had been attempted." "The difference, of course, we had, was that... we had Judith Thurman's really extraordinary biography..." "Isak Dinesen, The Life of a Storyteller to work with." "That gave us something that none of the other filmmakers had the use of." "Kurt Luedtke who wrote the screenplay... had written Absence of Malice, a film the two of us did earlier." "He'd always wanted to try this and I warned him that... it had been attempted before, but I think... part of what helped him to lick it was... the fact that he was new to the form... and was absolutely not intimidated by the fact... that it had been tried so many times before." "And the combination of his..." "The combination of his grasp of the material and perceptions... and then the insights into her life... that Judith Thurman gave us... allowed us to at least get a screenplay out of it." "The big problem in getting this book to the screen... is the fact that there's no conventional narrative in her book." "It's really a pastorale." "It's a beautifully formed memoir... that relies on her prose style and her sense of poetry... and, in effect, her ability to discover large truths... in very small, specific details." "So it's very difficult and elusive material to base a screenplay on." "You know, it's anecdotal... and it doesn't have a kind of narrative spine to it." "There is this sense of great loss... and you can infer from that that somehow a tragedy has occurred... and that a story for a film is to be found somewhere... among all these guarded memories." "She didn't really tell the truth in this book." "We depended on Judith for the truth." "What's beguiling about Out of Africa isn't what she wrote on the page... but in a way what isn't on the page." "It took a lot of drafts to get this right." "Kurt gave me the first draft in December of 1982." "And from there until the final shooting day, which was on June 6, 1985... we were continually revising it." "Kurt did the first draft alone." "Then he and I spent most of '83 doing two more drafts." "Then in 1984..." "David Rayfiel, our friend, joined us and we did a few more drafts." "Get away from there!" "That's all my crystal, my Limoges." "They didn't know it was Limoges." "You plan to stay then?" "We struggled a lot with the character of Finch Hatton... because he was an elusive man... and he lived at a kind of emotional distance from those around him." "The problem was how to dramatise... that seeming lack of involvement." " Aren't you boarding?" " I'm going on." "I had a superb production crew on this." "Terry Clegg who was... the executive in charge of production... for me, organised this crew, and I had to familiarise myself... with a lot of English technicians who I had not worked with before." "Very splendid cameraman named David Watkin... who did the camera work." "And a production designer named Stephen Grimes... who I had spent years and years working with... who I think is a kind of genius really." "He built the entire town of Nairobi... and took the bulk of the year to do it." "There wasn't any place that was in existence... that we could use." "So, the town, including the railroad station and the markets... doctors' offices, post office, town square... all had to be built from scratch... and mostly with untrained workers... because it would've been too expensive to try to bring... all of the craftsmen in from another part of Europe." "So this was quite an accomplishment that Stephen did." "The costumes were designed by Milena Canonero." "Her reputation sort of speaks for itself." "She's an extraordinarily gifted costumer." "I had Judith Thurman with me on location all the time... so she was a kind of walking encyclopaedia on this." "She had spent seven years writing her book... and researching the life... of these colonials who went there... and particularly of Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen." "So she was an authority." "Anytime I came to a scene and I wanted background activity..." "I wanted to say, "What would be going on at a table here?" ""Would they be playing cards?" "Would they be playing backgammon?" ""What would they be eating?" She could tell me anything." "So it was like having this marvellous walking encyclopaedia with you all the time." " Where have you been?" " Where have you been?" "Arranging things." "How was the trip?" "You can tell me later." "Would you like to change?" " My luggage is still on the train." " Room "D." Head of the stairs." "I haven't gotten a ring." "Do you care?" "Did you think I wouldn't come?" "I thought you wouldn't want to spend the money." "You will love it here." "The servants are wonderful." "Shall we get a drink?" "We've got almost one hour before the wedding." "One hour?" "When you start to work on a film, of course... you're always concentrating primarily on the screenplay." "And that takes precedence... and you begin then to visualise actors." "For a long time, I was struggling with... who could play this role of Karen Blixen." "Who could go through all of the maturation... who could go through all of the various emotional crises... that she went through... who would be the perfect one to represent her." "I didn't know Meryl personally." "I knew her work and loved her work... but did not know her personally." "I went through, obviously, a long list in my head of..." "That's not true." "I would say a short list in my head... because there aren't that many people... of actresses that I thought might be possible to play it." "Then I met Meryl." "She came to see me at a hotel." "The first time I really looked at her... and got this sense of who she really was... rather than the sense of her as the actress that I had seen in so many other roles..." "I knew that she was absolutely right for this." "You know, directors love to infer... that they're responsible for performances." "Sometimes they get credit for it." "And I certainly would love to get credit for Meryl's performance... but I can't." "I really can't take credit for it because... she arrived in Africa... and wham!" "She just delivered this performance." "It was like a great gift somehow." "She sort of gave birth to it... full-blown, accent and all." "I had a very impressive group of actors... both American and English... and, of course, with Klaus Maria Brandauer who is Austrian." "Oddly enough, Klaus had done all of these marvellous art films... but it was a James Bond film that made me cast him... because he was able to play this absolutely horrible villain... and yet you loved him." "You were charmed by him." "That's exactly what he plays here." "He plays... just a terrible guy who lies to her, spends her money... gives her syphilis, is a philanderer... does about everything that should be unforgivable... and yet, by the end of the film... you understand very clearly... why she's remained on good terms with him." "You know, wedding night and all that." "Redford, of course, was somebody that I had in mind from the beginning." "There was a lot of concern about the fact that..." "Finch Hatton was, in reality, an Englishman." "But finally... the test of Finch Hatton's, it seemed to me... was in his great romantic magnetism... and the fact that he was unpossessible in a way." "The fact that no one could own him." "Particularly not her." "And that was the kind of spine of this story, if you will." "I couldn't think of anybody better than Redford for that." "Sometimes, actors bring baggage to a film... when they've done a lot of work like Redford had... and sometimes that baggage is a problem that you have to overcome." "But sometimes, when one is lucky, the baggage is a big help." "I felt that..." "Redford's baggage, if you will, the history that he toted around... that he brought onto screen, his intelligence... his elusiveness, if you will... was a part of what made this work." "I brought the ivory with me on the train." "Michael Kitchen was the actor who played Berkeley Cole." "I remember running a lot of television shows in London... with Mary Selway, who was the casting director on the film... and trying very hard to find... actors who could work... in the same style together, if you will." "I remember watching Michael Kitchen's work in a television show." "I don't remember the show now... but feeling that there was a kind of simple reality to it... the way most American actors work." "And that, as elegant as he was, and as English as he was... his acting style would fit in with everybody else." "They were in June by the river." "She always wore a new silk dress." "I think you're wearing her perfume." "I'm not terribly comfortable working... when real people are being represented... because you feel often that a sense of freedom is being inhibited." "You're not really free... to go where you might want to go... or have them say what you might want to have them to say." "In this case... every one of these characters was a real character." "Lord Delamere, Farah, Kamante, Berkeley Cole..." "Denys Finch Hatton, Bror Blixen." "Karen Blixen." "But because she was so little known... really in wide circles, when we began working on the film..." "I think the film, in fact, made her... a much better known character." "It certainly changed the book sales... and helped a lot of people discover her." "But when we began... she was an obscure enough character... that we did have a certain kind of freedom." "But we did stick quite close to the facts." "At least the spirit of the facts." "This is Belknap." "He runs the farm." "Good evening, ma'am." "This is your cook." "Name is Esa." "And this is Juma." "Houseboy." "Come, see your house." "When you leave me, I'm going to marry Berkeley Cole." "A man in trade." "Is that what he does?" "He is thick with the Somalis." "There's a crowd of them up on his land... who think he's some sort of prince." "He sells Finch Hatton's ivory." "Belknap is a cheery sort." "Had a place of his own." "Went belly up trying to grow flax." "Does he know cattle?" "I didn't buy cattle." "We're going to grow coffee instead." "This house we found near the suburb... which is now called Karen, which is where she lived." "This was not the real house she lived in." "As a matter of fact... this was the house... of the woman called Mama Ngina who was the surviving widow... of the first Black President... of Kenya." "I didn't come to Africa to sit with silly cows." "We added on to it... and copied very closely the original house that she lived in." "It was necessary to dig wells and irrigate." "There had been a drought the previous years... and everything was dried up when we found the house." "But Stephen Grimes... in his typically talented way, sort of saw past all of... the crumbling stones of the house, the dried grass, and the abandoned place... and he turned it into a really lovely house... that was very close in spirit to the house she lived in... with the same view of the Ngong Hills in the back." "Where is Baron Blixen?" "There's an old Hollywood saying that says." ""If you can't tell it in two sentences, it's not worth telling. "" "It's the subject of a lot of jokes." "But, like in most cases of clichés... there's an awful lot of truth in it." "We spent about two years trying to find what I always call a spine... or an armature of this piece." "Sort of trying to distil the idea... down to one or two clear sentences that could be a guide post." "What is it really about?" "And we finally settled on possession." "Freedom versus obligation." "If I say, "I love you," what price am I expected to pay?" "To what extent am I obligated?" "How much of myself do I have to give up?" "It's always important for me to be able to describe the heart of a film... in some simple and evocative way... so that I can sort of test each scene and character... and development against that idea." "This is just a personal way of working... but it forces some sense of where the hell we're going... and it always acts as a kind of discipline for me." "It helps me make it cohesive." "I don't think it's something a writer ever has to have... but this finally became the armature." "The idea of possession seemed to be organic, both to the foreground story... and all of Karen's relationships, and this background story of colonialism." "I think it helped knit together her relationships with the Africans... as well as with her husband and her lover." "It was a track for us to follow... and then it helped us to dramatise her attempts at possession." "She was trying to imprint in some way... herself onto Africa." "Moving the water, bringing her china." "She kept attempting to make Europe out of Africa." "It also gave Finch Hatton a clear conflict with her." "It provided anchor points for a sort of shape to the story... because near the end of the film, she begins to let go of these possessions... one by one." "What did he say?" "We broke the film down into six sections." "You could call it six acts maybe." "They were enclosed and separated... by seven monologues or voice-overs... that is, Karen speaking as an older woman directly to the audience." "Almost as if she were writing." "Six of those monologues had to be invented." "The one that we used from the book really was the last one." "But the attempt was to find a way... of imitating, I guess that's the best word for it... approximating her sense of poetry in these monologues." "There is this marvellous sense of music in the book when you read it." "The way she wrote sentences was absolutely extraordinary." "It was beguiling... and it had so much grace in it." "So it was difficult to try to come up with... a style that you felt was consistent... with what the real voice... of Karen Blixen was, because we did have to mix the real voice in." "At least on the last one." "Always what we struggled with was... trying to make coherent... what really was very episodic." "This is a film that is really based on small incidents." "And trying to thread the sense of a story through it... made us rely very heavily on rhythm... and style, if you will." "It's a picture that doesn't have..." "Come, then." "... a strong narrative in the conventional sense of what happens next... where is the melodrama, where is the..." "What's driving the narrative suspense?" "It's watching these lives... and trying to pull an audience... into caring about these people... in the sort of day-to-day events of their lives." "I had enormous help with... a great wildlife photographer named Simon Trevor... who helped organise a lot of the animal sequences." "I had great help in aerial sequences... with a wonderful..." "English aerial photographic expert named Peter Allwork." "And I had great help with... all of the animal organisations, which was so important... which is a big key to this picture working in any way." "One of the odd things is having to... bring lions to Africa." "I was kind of stunned when I began to think about it... but, of course, if you think for a second you know that... you can't run around hurting animals in Africa." "Firstly, it's against the law, and secondly, it would be physically impossible to do." "So, we actually had to bring... four or five, maybe six, lion and lioness with us... to Africa... and depended on a lot of courage for Meryl... to accept the fact that we'd be able to handle them." "I'm not sure I believe that you can ever really train a lion." "In every shot where we work with the lion, there are a couple of good strong guys... with very big fire extinguishers, standing just out of the camera's range... ready to stop the lions without hurting them." "Obviously, we didn't want to use anything that would hurt the animals." "The best way, I am told, to stop a lion... were these huge, industrial strength fire extinguishers." "The contrast in the light here is kind of interesting." "You're first of all at the equator... which is closer to the sun than anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere... and secondly, you're up about a mile high." "So we had a tough problem in fighting this light... which is, to the eye, rather ugly." "It's straight down, as a rule." "And it's more contrasty than anywhere else." "The ratios between the bright spots and the dark spots..." "That ratio was wider than it would be at any other place on the globe." "After a lot of experimentation, what we came up with was... something which actually reverses... what normal logic would tell you." "And that is... we used a fast film... in the brightest light... because the fast film is softer, and it smoothes out the contrast." "Then we used a slower film... on the overcast days or the dark days... because the slower film has a bit more contrast." "It helps give you some snap on the soft scenes." "And it has such great blacks." "So, we used a film that's really invented for low-light conditions... in the maximum lighting conditions." "We used it when the sun was at its brightest." "And then inside, in all of these sequences indoors... we used a slower film to add contrast and add rich blacks." "Did you know that in all of literature there is no poem celebrating the foot?" "There's lips, there's eyes, hands..." "We spent a long time trying to figure out whether Redford ought to try... doing this with an English accent." "I was uncomfortable with it." "He was willing to try it... and he did quite a good version of it." "But I was always afraid that..." "Redford is such an American icon, in a way... that I think audiences would have had trouble believing it." "We pulled back from it at the last minute, and even spent a bit of time... post-synchronising some of the lines which still contained... a trace of the English." "...one of them always provides the first sentence." " Anything?" " Absolutely anything." "There was a wandering Chinese named Cheng Huan... living in Limehouse... and a girl named Shirley." "We were fortunate in the set of her house, in that we could have... a sort of home base, if you will." "The logistics of a film like this are always a kind of a nightmare... and what we basically had was a kind of... permanent set, if you will... where we could shoot the exterior and the interior in the house." "So, if we got to the house and it was raining... we could sometimes jump to the inside of it." "Watkin has a marvellous lighting style... in that he lights primarily from the outside in." "Not night sequences, but day sequences." "So, we didn't have big rigging problems in the house itself." "If we'd go to do a day sequence in the house... we would pump a lot of the light in, from the outside." "He would sometimes use just a tiny bit of bounce fill light." "But, all in all, he lit from the outside in." "His interiors at night, of course, we did have to do a good bit of rigging." "But he has a very simple way of working... and, I think, quite an unusual way." "He used to say." ""The less I do, the better it looks"... which is a kind of strange thing to hear... a cinematographer say." "I learned an awful lot working with him, and I thought he was... quite an exceptionally gifted man... to have come to this point of view." "And it's quite a special look that he gets." "You're right." "Anyway, aren't you pleased that I brought my crystal and my china?" "And your stories, yes." "The conquering heroes come" "Sound the trumpets" "Without any other form of entertainment... and with the houses miles apart... and very few automobiles... and no roads for them... a visit from someone was a very special occasion." "Oftentimes went on a day or two... and very often, people stayed up through the night... and one's ability to make conversation... was an extremely valued quality." "One could be very famous as just plain good company... because of their ability to converse." "So people would call upon neighbours... spend a day or two talking about anything that came to mind." "Then they'd drift apart again." "That was the popular entertainment of the day." "But my stories are free and your present's much too dear." "Write them down sometime." "Take care, Finch Hatton." "You wouldn't rather call me Denys?" "What are you doing?" "Difficult problem with weather in Africa is... as always, when one is on location, the predictability of it." "No matter what you're told the weather's gonna be like... it's always gonna be different and not good for you... when you're shooting." "At least, that's been my luck." "There's supposed to be two rainy seasons in Africa." "Period." "But, of course, when we went there, there were four rainy seasons." "Part of the problem with getting around the country... is that when it does rain, the roads, which are dirt turned to mud... and it's very difficult to move equipment around." "We basically... broke this unit down into many tiny units... because of the difficulty of getting stuck in the mud." "We didn't have big semi-trailers, the way you'd normally do on a picture." "We used a lot of small vehicles... it seemed like hundreds of them, loaded with small loads... and most of them four-wheel drive vehicles... to be able to get in and out of these areas." "It was always also difficult to find a lot of the native cast." "But we had wonderful help... and found some wonderful actors locally." "The young man who plays Kamante... had the face of an old soul even though he was a kid." "He did an extraordinary job for someone who'd never ever acted before." "We were visited on the set by the real Kamante... and it was a great treat for all of us because all of us had read so much about him." "He had become her cook and was really quite famous... and did very famous drawings... and there were letters back and forth between the two of them... that everyone who's read her books, her Africa papers, and her Africa writing... knows about." "So it was a big thrill for all of us to spend this time with Kamante... who has since died, unfortunately." "But, he spent the day with us on the set... and talked to us about what life was like then, in the days that we were representing." "When the war finally hit... it made everybody anxious... because East Africa, which was a colony of the British then... bordered German East Africa at that time." "What was called German East Africa." "Everyone was alarmed at whether or not the war would spread... from Europe into this local area." "Watkin was a very interesting cinematographer." "He lit from the outside in always." "The light in this scene is very interesting... because there are no lights in the room at all." "All the lights are coming in from the windows... which is, of course, the way it is in real life." "It's the way that he lit and got quite a look." "He did a strange thing with this picture." "We were the first major studio film ever to use... the German motion picture stock." "The AGFA stock." "It was very fast." "It was a 3200 ASA stock." "This is really backwards." "Normally, you would use this kind of fast stock... only if you had very low-light conditions." "We actually used it with more light than we would normally have... because we found it to be softer." "In order to make the film fast, the emulsion is built up quite thick." "That softens the film a bit." "So, this harsh contrasty light that was there... on the equator, we were able to combat by using... this very high-speed film." "And then when we had low light, or in our interiors... we went back to the old 5247 Kodak film, which is a slower film... but has wonderful rich blacks." "So we actually shot the film backwards, in a way... using very fast film, where you have a lot of light... and slow film, where you have even, overcast light... or low light." "He got a very beautiful look, I think, with this... although it was a very difficult job for Technicolor... to balance these two different stocks, different emulsions." "They were completely different chemically." "I can't remember doing any other film, except... maybe 25 years ago, I did a film, also with Redford, oddly enough... called Jeremiah Johnson... where all of the sets were practical... other than this film." "It's the only other one like that." "Every single set on this film was a practical set." "That is, it was built so that you could photograph... the outside of it." "You could photograph the area it was in... and you could photograph the interior of it." "It sounds easier than it is... because the sets then have to be built so that you can light them." "And they have to be built with entrances and exits... that can accommodate large pieces of equipment." "And they have to be practically able to be shot... so that you can move back and forth in weather problems." "But it turned out to be a lifesaver for us... because an awful lot of times... we would go out to shoot a sunny sequence outside... and it would be an overcast rainy day... and we could jump right inside, same group of people... and very quickly get set up and work inside." "Denys left without a word..." "Roy Helland, who was Meryl's make-up man... is a really gifted guy... who, with Meryl, came up with... about four different looks for her." "A combination of hair, make-up... eye style, lips, the way her lipstick was." "And we were able to label these in a simple way... so that we could go from one to three, or two to four... in a period of a couple of hours." "And it was that along with... our ability to try to change the look of the house... from its early unfurnished and unplanted look... to the greener, more lush look, when it was furnished... helped us to get the sense of time passing... because we had to try to pass the equivalent of 16 years..." "Sixteen or seventeen years in the course of the film." "Some day, I'd like to run my own show the way you do." "During the year of preparation, along with the building... and along with the irrigation and the greening up, we also planted... coffee in various stages... from seeds and seedlings... to one and two-year-old plants... because it was necessary again for the purpose of time passage..." "to see various stages of the planting, growing and harvesting... of the coffee." "...but how do you know when to do what they want you to... and when not to?" "Suzanna Hamilton is the actress who plays... a character we call Felicity, in the picture." "She is really meant to be Beryl Markham... who was the other wonderful author... who came from that group of colonials at that time, and wrote about it." "Her book, West With the Night, is a beautiful book... and also a memoir of her time in Africa." "She is said to have been... a lover of Finch Hatton's as well, and there were stories... about the fact that he was to have been headed... for a rendezvous with her in Mombasa... the day he was finally killed." "I was lucky enough to meet her... when I was there preparing." "She was quite old then... and loved to drink her gin and orange juice starting at about 10.00 in the morning." "And she would talk for hours... about what life was like at that time... and she would occasionally drift into another story." "It was odd." "She would start talking about Finch Hatton... and then she would end up talking about a murder... that had been committed 10 years later." "She was the first woman to have flown the Atlantic... going westerly." "She crashed off Long Island in LaGuardia." "The mayor of LaGuardia presented her with a medal." "She had the medals and the maps of the trip... in her suitcase." "I used to sit with her while she was drinking her gin and orange juice... and she'd tell me these wonderful stories about the flying." "Karen Blixen did, in fact, make a trip to the front... to bring supplies to Bror during the war." "We used that trip as an opportunity... to both see some of the wonders of Africa... and to try to find... a way of doing... what would be the equivalent almost of an action sequence." "This was a sequence which took a long time to put together... and we used the talents of an awful lot of people." "We were able to do the sequence with the help of a lot of specialists." "Jack Couffer, as a second unit director..." "Simon Trevor, with the animals..." "John Sutton, who was a local guide there... who knew the country like the back of his hand... and was able to take us to places that nobody otherwise could get to." "He found ways of making runways for us in the middle of the desert." "Trying to find a way to make the trip an adventure... and using real lions and real oxen... was the coming together of many different skills." "Jack Couffer shooting second unit night after night... with a young lion cub... whose claws had been cut so he couldn't do a lot of damage... and allowing that lion... to actually get on the back of some of the oxen... but not have to do any damage." "That was part one of it." "Part two of it was... finding the trained lion... who we could get to snap at Meryl... and behave as though he was going after her... but not ill-tempered enough to really go after her." "Trying to fake the shooting of it by using long lenses... and keeping them farther apart... but making the long lenses compress them... as though they were close together." "We actually took... the carcass of a fake ox... and buried some food in its neck." "Got the lion hungry for a couple of days... so the lion would be much more interested in the food... than in trying to go after poor Meryl." "And then by separating them... no more really than about, I would say, 6 or 7 feet... and trying to compress that distance with long lenses... and having Meryl whip at the ground... the lion would make a couple of false attacks at her." "But we did have those wonderful fire extinguishers standing by all the time." "We went to places in this wonderful land... that had views and textures that I've really never seen before." "It's such a big continent and a big country... and it has a kind of light and a kind of look... that I haven't ever encountered." "It actually feels like the sky is round and is a bowl over your head... because you can see it for 360 degrees as you look around it." "And you can find such varieties of colour... and texture between the rocks, or the white clay soil, or the red dirt." "The trees that flower and the trees that are brown." "The vivid green of these thorn trees... which are what you see everywhere." "The eucalyptus trees, the baking of the heat, and so on." "It was quite an extraordinary place visually." "We spent a lot of the time under canvas, camped out... and the logistics of that were pretty incredible." "That was all solved again by John Sutton, this marvellous man... who, for years, was one of the main... executives with Ker  Downey, the great safari company... and also was a guide himself." "A hunter himself." "And he actually built these enormous camps for us... where we had to be fed and showered... and transported from... to these various locations." "This area is made up of many tribes." "Each tribe, of course, having its own cultural characteristics... and its own language, and its own physical qualities." "The lingua franca was Swahili, but each of the tribes spoke their own language." "The Luo spoke Luo, the Kikuyu spoke Kikuyu." "The Somalis spoke Somali, the Masai spoke Masai." "And each tribe had its own kind of look." "It's very easy, once you're there, to tell a Masai from a Kikuyu." "Farah Arden, the real manservant... who was really her closest friend in Africa... was a Somali." "They're a very elegant people, extremely tall... with great bone structure, very high cheekbones... and quite a kind of, almost an arrogance, I would say." "I could not find a Somali actor to play this role... but was lucky enough to find Malick Bowens... who is from Mali, to do it." "He was an actor playing with Peter Brook in Paris." "He looked, in bone structure, close enough that I could make use of him." "Ismail, my rifle, where's my rifle?" "The oxen actually... got pretty angry with this lion." "Under normal circumstances, there'd be no contest." "The lion would overpower one of the oxen and get it." "But in this case, without any claws, there was very little he could do... and, as a matter of fact, he finally just walked over and sat down." "He got tired of getting bumped around by them." "Get away!" "They were actually able to chase off the lion because he was in no mood to really fight... even though he was hungry." "He made a couple of false charges, but he went back." "It's always strange watching these sequences." "You remember, you have a kind of sense memory of how many nights... and how many hours you spent getting a sequence that's over so quickly." "That's true of every action sequence, of course." "It's always particularly difficult doing it with animals." "Again, I have to say, Meryl was very brave... to do this." "And the lion could not have performed better." "He really was interested in the food, but he didn't like all the commotion being made." "So he made just enough of several false charges..." "Or just enough false charges, I should say." "He made just the right number of false charges so that we could edit the sequence." "And we got a good sequence out of it." "Tell Blix his wife's here." "One of the things we did... when we couldn't get ourselves out of the harsh light, is... use these stretched canvases... to get people under a kind of... shady overcast... to try to simulate overcast." "It was really tough when the hard sunlight would come down on everybody." "So we did an odd thing... and that is, we shot everything in the movie in backlight." "All of our main characters are shot with the light behind them... which, of course, in life, could never happen." "But it isn't something that... your eye tells you is a lie... when you watch it." "You can get away with it even though it wouldn't be possible in life." "And it was fun." "When are you coming home?" "Not just yet." "You're not going to help at all with the farm, are you?" "I could force you." "I could cut you off." "I'll just hunt professionally." "I might do it anyway." "It's not the way we thought it would be... is it?" "But I like it that you're honest with me." "I like you, too." "Very much." "The theory is that she contracted syphilis while visiting Bror... on that trip that she made to the front." "I had a compass from Denys." ""To steer by," he said." "But later it came to me... that we navigated differently." "Perhaps he knew, as I did not... that the Earth was made round... so that we would not see too far down the road." "We had the luck... of having a wonderful Irish actor named Donal McCann... who played the doctor." "It was always one of my favourite scenes... the scene in which Meryl finds out that she has syphilis." "She's so good... in such an understated way in the scene." "And he's so very good also." "It's always been a favourite scene of mine." "Your husband is not ill?" "No." "Not the last time I saw him." "That was three months ago." "He's on the border with Delamere." "He would have come home." "These cases vary." "He may have just a touch." "But you are very ill." "Is he the only possibility?" "Yes." "You'll have to go home to deal with it, you know?" "The treatment's difficult, but they have a thing called Salvarsan." "Arsenic." "Milena Canonero and Stephen Grimes worked..." "I think, beautifully together here... between the costumes and the decor... staying in sort of a monochrome tone... with the walls and the costumes... complementing and echoing each other in a certain way." "The doctor's office was another one of our live sets... so that we had the reality of filming it... both inside and out." "It was a practical set inside, and then going right outside... being able to see out the windows... and have some real background there... and being able to cut directly to the outside." "It's not what I thought would happen to me now." " Muthaiga?" " What?" "Your letters." "She went away." "She went back to Denmark... for one full year... to take a cure for her syphilis." "In those days, the cure was pretty rough, it was arsenic." "And the combination of the arsenic... and what the syphilis did to her... left her quite ill in later life." "There was some disintegration of her spine... and so there were nerves that went to her stomach... that were interfered with, and she had difficulty... eating certain foods and digesting them." "So she was always thought to be eccentric, in the sense that she was incredibly thin... and she ate oysters and drank champagne." "Not because she wanted to be eccentric... but because they were the only things that she digested well in later life." "We're behind a story or two." "When she went away and stayed for a year... one of the interesting problems for us... was how to indicate that, how to pass the time." "How to not make it take too long." "While I was there..." "I ran into a wonderful African named George Senoga-Zake... who was a professor of music." "He got together... some local school kids, really... and we recorded right there." "We didn't have a real, slick, professional set-up... but we recorded right there, locally... a lot of wonderful Kikuyu music." "And it helped us a lot... in putting together these bridges and montages... where we had to pass the time." "It gave us a sound that was distinctly different... than the written source music." "That was also so instrumental and helpful, I think... to the picture, John Barry's score..." "She can come soon enough." "... which has been a very popular recording." "He did a beautiful job with it." "But this specific source music was a big help, I think." "...and the voyage home to Denmark." "It was a longer journey this time." "The war went on." "I fought my own war." "One of the nice things about the spot that Grimes picked... where we were able to do this... is that you could really see those Ngong Hills... where Finch Hatton is buried." "Obviously, we went up and visited the grave of Finch Hatton." "She wrote so lovingly about the Ngong Hills... and how they changed in the light all the time." "Of course, this country is a magical country with light." "It's different every minute, it changes all the time." "And every time it does change... it seems to have a different emotional characteristic." "Denmark had become a stranger to me... and I to her." "Over the years, she became the local doctor... for a lot of these people who lived on her land." "It began, of course, with Kamante, and then it grew and grew... until there were masses of people... one day a week, lined up outside her house, for her to take care of." "She was a kind of lay doctor for them." "Almost everyone's got them now." "She wrote a lot about the owl... that one of the little girls on the farm gave her." "And she wrote a lot about Kamante... and how proud he was that his leg had healed quite a bit... 'cause she sent him to the hospital while she was gone." "One of the interesting things that we tried to do... in line with the spine and the armature, if you will... of the story, was slowly change the look of the Africans... so that they were culturally authentic in the beginning... and then, as the picture goes on... she begins to try to westernise them in a way." "Again, this idea of possession." "She tries... to put her stamp of ownership on it... which she is, of course, ultimately unable to do... as she is unable to do with Finch Hatton." "Are you all well?" "They say I'm cured." "I won't have children." "One of the things..." "I've always had a habit of doing... and it's not a very good habit because it drives composers crazy... is I usually put together some sort of a temp score to a picture." "I do that, really, because it helps me..." "It helps me get the rhythms organised... in a picture." "It helps me test whether certain sequences will or won't work." "And oftentimes, that temp score will drive the composer crazy... because the composer will feel compelled... to do it the way I've got the temp score." "In this particular film, I found myself using piece after piece... of John Barry's from other movies." "Almost every movie." "Robin and Marian." "Pieces from The Last Valley." "Pieces from..." "I kept gravitating to John Barry's music." "So, by the time I finished the picture..." "I had had a whole temp score... that was done by John Barry." "Obviously, that convinced me to hire John Barry." "But poor John Barry had to watch the film the first time... with all these cues that he'd written for other pictures." "Basically, what I was saying to him is." ""Can you do something that feels like this..." ""but is more correct for this picture?"" "And he did a magnificent job, I think." "The toughest thing about shooting our big... end-of-the-war celebration, oddly enough... was getting 1,000 torches lit... so that the last one could be lit before the first one that we lit went out." "Who won the match?" "I had a great first assistant... named David Tomblin, an Englishman... who's done a lot... of big productions, both American and English." "He is a real general and a real organiser." "Again, I couldn't have done this film without him." "He's had this organised well enough so that... with all the help, we had a whole scientific approach... to how to get the fireworks timed... and how to light the torches so that we could get shots... with 1,000 people marching... and all the torches were burning equally brightly." "He's as organised and sensitive to the script... as anybody I've ever worked with." "He was a remarkable help." " Where is Kanuthia?" " He's dead." "How are you?" "Would you join us for a drink?" " It's time to find a pillow." " Another night then?" "Have a good Christmas." "Christmas." "So it is." "We went from seedlings... to two-year-old plants... to the blossoming... to the beans and the pickings." "So we really had to have about four sets... of coffee plants." "One of the things that Karen Blixen was noted for... is bringing schools into this area." "She actually set up schools and brought English tutors over... to teach the kids English." "Finch Hatton had some words with her about that... feeling again that it was her attempt... to possess Africa, if you will." "To put her imprint on it." "One of the things I couldn't do... is see the feet of very many people... during the New Year's Eve dance celebration... because it was raining so hard... that there was so much mud... that we could not get the actors and particularly the extras... from the holding areas into the set... without them literally destroying their feet." "So I ended up shooting fairly tightly... while they were dressed in their tuxedos and finery... because they looked absurd if you saw down to their feet." "I've taken on a young missionary." "He's promised me to do the alphabet first, and save God for later." "Wogs can't even count their goats." "It's none of your bloody business anyway!" "Who the devil are you?" "I wonder if you'd dance with me?" "I think you are about to apologise." "You do stir things up." "When they said they'd like to read, how did they put that exactly?" "Do they know they'd like Dickens?" " You don't think they should learn to read?" " I think you might have asked them." "Did you ask to learn when you were a child?" "How can stories possibly harm them?" "They have their own stories, just not in writing." "Why would you rather keep them ignorant?" "They're not ignorant." "I just don't think they should be turned into little Englishmen." " You do like to change things, don't you?" " For the better, I hope." "I want my Kikuyu to learn to read." "My Kikuyu." "My Limoges." "Meryl has such a different look in each of these sections... and yet I think Roy was able to do it." "She and Roy were able to pull it off so that it isn't jarring." "It's not like a whole other actress... and yet there's a completely different personality... and a completely different feeling about each one of these looks." "Bror was quite a character." "He was a real philanderer." "He was extremely well-liked." "He was a charmer, he was a great hunter... written about in..." ""The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."" "He was written about by Hemingway, he was written about by Beryl Markham." "He was quite a popular man, and particularly popular with the ladies." "Got himself into a lot of trouble... and eventually she got tired of it and sent him away." " Happy New Year." " And for you, too." "Someone has left her underclothes in the back." "I want you to take a place in town." "As a matter of fact, the day he was killed... he was supposed to have been meeting Beryl Markham in Mombasa." "Are you sure?" "Eats." "He eats." "Elephant." "Give me work." "We've got peace, where is the prosperity?" "Why should the prices fall now just because they're not killing anybody?" "Tea's down just as bad." "Do they always have to whip them so?" "Finally... this coffee plantation that Bror had purchased... instead of the farm that he was supposed to have purchased... it finally destroyed her." "There was just no way to grow coffee so high." "And after years and years of trying, it never happened." "Finch Hatton was crazy about Mozart... and was said to have carried... this gramophone with him everywhere." "We used the Clarinet Concerto, which is..." "Well, everything Mozart wrote was beautiful." "But this is particularly beautiful, and one that worked for us." "And we used it over and over, and used it in a way, thematically." "Finch Hatton was famous for his love of Mozart... and for carrying this gramophone with him everywhere." "He played Mozart whenever he possibly could." "And he gave her a gramophone... which was a big treasure of hers." "This is in fact the Masai Mara... which is one of the greatest pieces of land I've ever laid eyes on." "It goes forever and ever... and it is the area that was inhabited almost exclusively one time... by the Masai... and every form and species of animal there is." "And this was extraordinarily difficult footage to get... because we had to drive the car in and among these... water buffalo, very dangerous animals, and the gorillas." "These animals are kind of deadly here." "Just getting the car into them was a bit difficult... to not spook them too much by the car." "They're kind of slow and a bit dim-witted, but they're aggressive." "And they do like to charge, and they're very strong and tough... and they can afflict a lot of damage." "So a sequence like this... which looks quite simple and is over quickly... can take days to get." "But just to get the car into position... with the herd that close..." "There are very strict game laws there." "We're not really allowed to herd these animals." "So we have to sneak in there with the camera equipment... protect the camera equipment, protect the cameramen... protect ourselves, protect the actors, and still get them close." "One of the interesting challenges in the picture... was to play out the country... so that you didn't see... and get used to or bored or tired of it... in the first half." "We had to save something really for this safari." "We had to try to make her trip to the front, for example... have a completely different feeling of nature and the outdoors than this... much more poetic look at the country... and what eventually is gonna be ruined, at least in Finch Hatton's mind... by the encroachment of civilisation." "When you're making a picture... that's in a country or a land as picturesque as Africa is... and where the country itself... is like a character in the piece... you're always torn between... photographing the beauty of it... and getting accused of making postcards... a travelogue, if you will." "One of the things that had to be given... some consideration here was... varying these expeditions... out into the countryside... so that each one had a different character." "When Finch Hatton takes her out... it's the size and the romanticism of it." "When she takes her trip to the front... it's the roughness and the shock of it, in a way." "So we were always worried about... this balance between how beautiful it was... and taking pictures that were simply pretty pictures... and weren't organic to the story." "What did the two of you ever find to talk about?" "Nothing." "So you knew I would come." "It's an early day tomorrow." "Why don't you get some sleep?" " What happens tomorrow?" " I have no idea." "Good night." "We had a wonderful soundman named Peter Handford, who worked overtime... getting us the marvellous, authentic sounds... of an African night." "And they really were marvellous sounds." "One of the greatest things about being out... under canvas in Africa... in the Masai Mara, or in Beringo, or in any of these marvellous places... is the life that starts to happen at night... because this place was really... one big killing ground." "The animals live... in an almost prehistoric way... as though civilisation hasn't affected them." "Of course it has." "But you begin to hear late at night... the prowling that starts... and the sort of dance that begins before all of the killing starts." "And you get up in the morning and drive to work... and you see the vultures... on the bones of last night's carcass, or whatever." "Kurt used to say." ""If there was a garden of Eden..." ""it probably was here."" "And that's certainly the feeling that you have." "It's a hard feeling to describe." "You really have to experience it, and there's no other place like it." "It'll be an interesting trip." "I'll be gone a month, or an hour and a half." "Why are you doing this?" "Finch Hatton actually went out one day and bought a Moth... which was the old biplane that he flew." "It was pretty simple in those days... to get a licence." "I'm not sure you even had to have a licence." "There wasn't much traffic in the sky, and there weren't any... navigation leads, except ground contact." "So once you knew the mechanics of it, you were a flier." "I suspect that Finch Hatton was probably not a great pilot." "He managed to get himself from place to place... but then he ended up killing himself in a plane crash." "But he was crazy about flying... and it was a wonderful way for him to see Africa." "Are you still close?" "He died." "He killed himself when I was 10 years old." "I can fix that, I think." ""Laugh'd loud and long, and all the while" ""His eyes went to and fro" ""'Ha!" "Ha!" "' quoth he, 'full plain I see" ""'T he Devil knows how to row'" ""Farewell, farewell!" "...i"" " You're skipping verses." " I leave out the dull parts." ""Farewell, farewell!" "But this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!"" "Lay your head back." ""He prayeth well, who loveth well" ""Both man and bird and beast"" "That's better." "Will it be so different... hunting for hire?" "Not for the animals." "Well, maybe for the animals." " Do you really prefer them to people?" " Sometimes." "They don't do anything half-heartedly." "Everything's for the first time." "Hunting, working, mating." "It's only man that does it badly." "It's only man that tires of going through it." "Who says, "See here." "I know how you feel about me..." ""and you know how I feel about you." ""We understand each other, so let's lie down and get on with it."" "Why am I here?" "Because I wanted you to see all this." "I wanted to show it to you." "I thought you'd understand it." " Do you think much about death?" " I think about getting old." "It'd be like living with a cranky demanding old bastard." "You are a cranky demanding old bastard." "I had syphilis." "That's why I went home." "I know." "I never seem to get anything." "German measles once." "They say I'll have a normal life now." "But no children." "So the school." "So the school." "The farm, that's what I am now." "No." "We'll need meat for the camp tomorrow." "I'll wake you at dawn." "There's a tracking sequence, and then a lion-shooting sequence... which was immensely difficult to control and stage." "Lions are extraordinary animals." "They're capable of great speeds for short distances... but they're rather lazy." "They won't go after something that they don't think they can catch." "One of their favourite sources of food are zebra and horse." "We had to use a horse as bait... obviously a horse that we felt, and the writer felt and everybody felt... could run faster than the lion." "The trick was... to run the horse past the cage... and then one of our wild animal experts to time it... and let the lion out of the cage... while the lion felt it could catch the horse." "But, in fact, the horse was far enough away to outrun it." "I would not have wanted to be the horse." "The horse didn't much care for it." "And neither did we." "The horse was perfectly safe because we had a lot of safety people... and, again, those fire extinguishes which would have stopped the lion." "The other trick was try to trip the lion without hurting it." "Basically, what we did is take a piece of plywood... two pieces of plywood, grease them... lay them down on the ground, cover one with dirt, put a rope on one... and when the lion hit it, yank it just enough to lose the footing." "They're cats, and they go down and get right back up pretty easy." "So we had a pair of lions that were, again, quite hungry." "We put a wildebeest carcass... down and let them eat." "Put Redford and Streep... behind a slanted piece of plate glass." "Actually, it was plastic, very thick plastic." "Slanted, so that we wouldn't see the reflections." "Cameras were behind them, and then we barricaded them with plywood." "We had a very brave wildlife cameraman... who dug a hole in the ground, got down in the ground... and let the lion go right over him... trusting that the lion wasn't gonna be interested in him if it was after the horse." "It was an interesting sequence to try to do because we had to do two charges... and lure the lions twice to charge." "Again, keep everybody safe... and also not hurt any of the animals." "These guys were really hungry, and they didn't want to be messed with." "And when they charge, they really charge." "They think they're gonna get a horse." "We didn't feed the lions for a couple of days... so they would behave as lions in the wild do." "One of the difficulties... is getting a lion that's been in captivity... to behave in as rough a way as a wild lion will." "And one of the ways you can do it is to not feed them for a few days... and they very quickly revert to, at least, an apparent savagery." "The lions there didn't much like the fact... that we had lions with us." "They're very turf-conscious... and when we would carry these lions... out to the safaris where we were... you'd hear the wild lions... just screaming at night." "We did two charges, one with the lioness... and then the big lion last." "We only had to trip the lioness... because the big lion veered off by himself." "He was actually beginning to give up on the chase." "But he made kind of a step to his left... and I was able to cut it quickly... so that you got the sense that he was gonna go down." "Dinner in a while?" "I'm glad you came." "I had a lot of fun... going through the lists of the songs... that were popular at that particular time." "And I ended up picking... a song called Let the Rest of the World Go By... because it seemed so oddly appropriate for Denys... the lyrics did." "With someone like you, with a heart good and true" "Something, something." "I'd like to leave it all and find A place that's known to God alone" "And let the rest of the world go by" "Denys' constant search for... a place away from structured society... away from the need to conform to someone else's rules... was an obvious character trait of his." "And that song seemed to... in some way, touch upon it." "To rose-lipt maidens." "There was a very young girl from Denmark... who took passage on a steamer bound for Suez." "There was a storm... off Morocco... and she was washed ashore onto a beach." "Onto a white beach." "Onto a beach so white..." "I'd like to do that." "Will that hurt?" "If you say anything now..." "I'll believe it." "I need to know how to think about this." "Why?" "There are such wonderful anecdotes in the book... about her life with Kamante, her cook... who had this extraordinary gift for cooking." "One doesn't know why." "She taught him to cook... but then he had his own marvellous imagination about it." "But he was very much his own man, or his own boy, I should say... and had a kind of odd logic... to what he would do." "One of the other things that David Watkin did, which I liked so much is... he would use the white tablecloths... in many of the eating scenes that we had... and we had several of them... to give, what I thought, was a very beautiful kind of glow... to the people bouncing up from off the table." "Does this look like a chicken?" "Here is not a chicken, here is a fish." "Go away." "Berkeley Cole, who we suspect... was himself in love with her... but never had a chance with Denys around... eventually died of blackwater fever... which was a rather horrible disease." "It's where your urine turns black." "It comes from bleeding inside your kidneys, and it comes from... the parasites that are there." "Actually there are the most exotic kinds of diseases... in that place you can get." "We had our script clerk, we had to send home." "There is a small hook-shaped fluke that's in the water that you shower with." "Sometimes it gets into your skin through your pores... and gets into your liver and kidneys." "It's called bilharzia, and she contracted it." "That's even in 1985, when we did this." "But in the days when they were there, the diseases were quite exotic... and they didn't have the penicillins and the antibiotics." "Men who missed moose in Alaska, grizzly in America... tigers in India, they're all at sea now bound for here." "Berkeley is going to farm." "You could do that." "No, thank you." "You ought to look in on him though." "He didn't look all that well." "Can you stay?" "For a day or so." " Is that all right?" " No." "You don't need two guns on safari." "One of the happy accidents that happened while I was there is..." "I ran into Iman, the very famous model... who is married to David Bowie now." "Of course she was not at that time." "I asked her if she would be interested... in just doing one or two days' work for me... and she agreed." "And she was lovely... in this role of Berkeley Cole's mistress." "She has an extraordinary bone structure... which is, of course, what's made her such a popular model... and she has extraordinary dignity." "She has that wonderful look I was talking about... that is characteristic of the Somali look." "Why didn't you tell me?" "I suppose I thought..." "She only played in two sequences." "The sequence where we meet her for the first time... and we, as is Denys... are sort of shocked that he's been living with her... and the second, when she attends Berkeley's funeral." "George Martin had blackwater fever and that was five years now." "She was evidently there on a modelling assignment." "I had spoken to her earlier, actually, and she was a great help to me... trying to put me in touch with people who might help me find... a possible Somali actor to play Farah." "But I couldn't find an actor who spoke English well enough... and who had any acting experience." "And so I was, as I said, very lucky to find Malick... who's just wonderful in the part." ""F."" ""G."" "As I watch this now..." "I'm very aware of the backlight... which, I think, audiences in general aren't." "But it's a terrible cheat." "You essentially have to shoot pretty much the same direction... when you're supposedly shooting 180 degrees in the opposite direction... as you would be when two people look at each other." "We literally shot every single shot... with the light behind the people." "It was the only way to get a soft flesh tone... in this, kind of, terribly harsh light." "You would come and go from my house?" "If that's all right." "Right behind him, crossover, right behind her." "Berkeley's dying." " What?" " Blackwater fever." "Oh, my God." " I'll go to him." " He wouldn't want you there." "Why?" "There's a woman there." "She's Somali." "She's been with him for some time." "You never told me this." "Iman has this extraordinary dignity... as do all the Somalis." "She had not a single line of dialogue to say... but she had this terrific dignity immediately." ""...with each one of us now and forevermore." Amen." "Simon Trevor... our wonderful animal life photographer... used to be able to lead us into areas where we could get so close... to animals that are potentially quite dangerous... the buffalo, the herds of elephant." "He was amazing." "In the days and hours that Denys was at home... we spoke of nothing ordinary." "Not of my troubles with the farm... my notes due and my failing crop... or of his with his work..." "Probably the happiest time of her life was the period... as Denys was moving in... and the early period where they stayed together... before the strong wills of both of them began to cause trouble." "I had been making up stories while he was away." "For a short time, she had high hopes about her coffee... and then, finally she had to just give it up." "It was too difficult to grow coffee so high." "The price of coffee went down." "And somewhere during this time..." "Denys showed up with his airplane." "And she got to see Africa from the air... which was really something she never forgot." "In those days, you could sort of..." "Like a car, you could buy a plane... and just say, "What do I do?" "Pull back on this, push forward on this. "" "It wasn't quite as restricted as it was." "You'd have to go to school a little bit... but I suspect Finch Hatton wasn't the world's greatest pilot." "But he got this plane... and figured out how to use it." "We had a wonderful helicopter pilot and a helicopter cameraman... from London who came down and did all of the chase sequences... following the plane... and got this extraordinarily beautiful footage." "When I got into the editing room and began to edit it... there were a lot of different ways I could have gone with the sequence." "I could've made it a joyous kind of sequence... because it seems like it could be." "But I heard a piece of music... from a picture called The Last Valley." "It was a piece of music that John Barry had written... and it was quite religious in the feeling of it." "We edited this whole sequence to that piece of music." "So then, John Barry was again obliged to find something... that had the similar feeling." "He did an extraordinary job... using the male voices, the low men's voices here." "Here again, you see a sense of size, this is Ngorongoro Crater." "Just a tiny little crater." "Look at the speck that the airplane is against the crater." "One of the things that Judith wrote in her biography... while she was talking about the book of Karen's, Out of Africa... she said, "Out of Africa does not describe Karen Blixen's life..." ""on her African farm..." ""as it was, in a documentary sense, lived." ""The serene perfection of the style..." ""the spareness of detail..." ""the attendance of the gods..." ""all signal that we've escaped from the gravity of practical questions..." ""and have gotten up into a purer element." ""One that offers less resistance to the ideal." ""The point of view in Out of Africa is the overview, which Karen Blixen called..." ""'the one thing of vital importance to achieve in life. '" ""What we see is a landscape from the air." ""Time and action have been tremendously compressed and telescoped. "" "And that's the end of her quote." "And, in a sense, we tried to find the metaphor... for that whole African experience in a way." "One of the things that Karen Blixen herself said... is what happened to her when she got up in the air... and could look down at her footprints in the snow... and find a pattern that she had never been aware of... when she was down in the footprints." "So, Denys and his plane, and Denys taking her flying... all had a very deep emotional meaning to her." "Don't move." "So, Denys taking her flying..." "Denys in the plane, her ability to get up in the air... were all part of something we wanted very much to keep... as a part of this anchor spine." "Hello, Denys." "May I see you?" "I'm broke, too, you know?" "I wouldn't ask, but tips were a bit light." " Are you all right?" " Lf I get a decent crop." "I could shoot him." "I've got this terrible urge to kiss you." "He's smarter than I am." "It may go well." "Good luck." "Between Stephen Grimes and John Sutton... they managed to find an extraordinary spot... down at the southern end of the Masai Mara... that overlooks Tanzania." "We made it a key location for Karen and Denys... and then later, made it the gravesite for Denys... because of the distance that you could see out... over Africa." "I think they still have a kind of... a little marker there now." "Sadly, it's for tourists." "Somebody who was in Africa recently said they were out... on a photographic safari... and they took them up the hill to the spot where we shot the grave." "What time tomorrow?" "There was only a short time when things went well... and then this downward spiral, kind of, came together." "Problems began with Denys." "She began to have real financial trouble." "The coffee didn't sell." "Finally... the coffee mill itself burnt down." "And then Denys was killed." "And she really had no choice... but to go back to Denmark." "And that's when her career as a writer began." "It's almost as though... she was able to distil... all of the experiences of that time in Africa... into the ink that she wrote with... because her career as a writer really started then... when she went home." "She might have written little bits and pieces and kept a diary... but she was never a published writer... until after her 17 years in Africa." "She's in a whole other look now." "Her hair is, as you can see, cut shorter." "She's in this whole other..." "There's a different kind of make-up on her." "Again, it's a subtle change... but you'd have to look at them all side by side to really see them." "Her hair has been cut literally... and so there's a completely different feeling to her look here." "Back to Clarinet Concerto again... which is the way he often announced that he was home." "He'd put the record on and she'd hear it from out in the fields." "He'd turn the music up very loud." "And that was "Honey, I'm home."" "We always called this, when we were shooting it..." ""the end of an era"scene." "Sometimes you give titles to scenes just for yourself... because it urges you... into a way of shooting it." "Life was changing here rapidly." "Things were getting more and more civilised." "A lot of the old ways were changing." "The country was opening up." " She's quite something, that Felicity." " Yes, indeed." "And this, sort of... age of individuality was changing a bit." " How are you?" " Getting old, I think." "This is the last scene I shot of the film..." "How is the hunting?" "... on the last day we were in Africa, which was a total of seven months... in, really." "You can see, I don't know if you can remember back... to the way she looked on the train when she first met Finch Hatton... but she looks completely different here." "But the change has been slow so that it doesn't hit you over the head." "Is this important, Bror?" "I suppose." "I'll have to accuse you of something... or did you think you would have it the other way around?" "Fire away, whatever." "I have surely done it." "Thank you." "How do you manage it?" "To keep us friends?" "We started that way." "I'll be happy for you, if I can." "The only sequences that we ever filmed on a soundstage... are the night firelight beach scenes... on the beach at Mombasa... and obviously the process shots, or the bluescreen shots... that we watched when Denys takes her flying." "They did a very nice job of putting the sand... on a kind of a backing with a little bit of sparkle... that you get a slight sense of water in the distance." "This was on a stage in a studio in London... and it was shot at the very, very end of the picture." "The last three days of shooting... took up those scenes in the airplane... and this sequence here... by the fire at night." "Bror has asked me for a divorce." "He's found someone that he wants to marry." "I just thought we might do that some day." "Divorce?" "How would a wedding change things?" "I would have someone of my own." "You wouldn't." "What's wrong with marriage anyway?" " Have you ever seen one you admire?" " Yes, I have." "Many." "Belfields, for one." "He sent her home for the rains in 1910." "Didn't tell her they were over until 1913." "It's not a joke." "People marry." "It's not revolutionary." "This scene gets a bit close to actually... verbalising the spine of the picture, and perhaps that's a mistake." "I don't know." "Sometimes you have a different perspective on a film... when you see it again after you make it." "But there's always a concern about clarity." "...if I promise to say no?" "Finally, here... these two ways of looking at life... and the idea of possession begin to spill over... or they at least begin to plant the seeds... of a conflict that really boils over... a couple of scenes deeper in the picture." "It's not meant to hurt you." "It does." "I'm with you because I choose to be with you." "I don't want to live someone else's idea of how to live." "Don't ask me to do that." "I don't want to find out one day that I'm at the end of someone else's life." "I'm willing to pay for mine." "To be lonely sometimes... to die alone if I have to." "I think that's fair." "Not quite." "You want me to pay for it as well." "You have a choice, and you're not willing to do the same for me." "I won't be closer to you..." "Our attempt, of course, was to... come, in a way, full circle... and begin to have her abandon... this strict sense of possession that she started out with." "She wants to dam the river." "Farah says this water belongs in Mombasa." "She dams the river anyway." "Nature eventually says, "I don't want this dam."" "She accepts that fact and says really what Farah told her in the first place... which is, "This water belongs in Mombasa."" "The civilisation that they all ran from, particularly Denys... begins to encroach on them... and it becomes particularly disturbing to him." "And all these things eventually spill over... in their personal irritation with each other... because of this clash of ideas... about what the nature of a relationship is." "He wants to have one without giving up anything of himself." "She doesn't believe that that's possible... and believes that what he wants is a kind of loveless world." "I flew as far as Narok." "You could see all the ruts where the lorries had been." " The Serengeti was still good." " It would take a week just getting there." "And Samburu's still good." "Where's Belknap?" "I haven't seen him." "He must be in America by now." "I let him go." "I had to." "But you don't want to hear about the farm, do you?" "Strange thing happened after the picture had played out theatrically... when it was bought for television." "The television people came back to me and asked if I would... put back about 15 minutes... so that we could make it two two-hour evenings." "Because it was financially quite significant to do it that way..." "I did try it, but I think it ruined the picture really." "Because I think the picture primarily stands or falls... on the basis of whether or not these rhythms are pleasing." "And although it's not a film for everybody... those who like the film and respond to it..." "I think are partially responding to the rhythms of the film... as well as the content of the film." "And when that gets changed, it turns into another animal." "A lot of the scenes that we took out were very interesting scenes on their own... beautiful scenes that Kurt had written... but they got in the way of the rhythm of it when you put it together." "The one we wouldn't have to prove!" " You'd live on the moon then." " Because I won't do it your way?" "Are we assuming there is one proper way to do this?" "Do you think I care about Felicity?" "Do you think I'll be involved with her?" " No." " Then there's no reason for this, is there?" "If she's not important why won't you give it up?" "I have learned a thing that you haven't." "There are some things worth having... but they come at a price, and I want to be one of them." "I won't allow it." "You have no idea the effect that language has on me." "I used to think there was nothing you really wanted... but that's not it, is it?" "You want to have it all." "I'm going to Samburu and she can come or not." "Then you'll be living elsewhere." "All right." "Redford is particularly good in these final scenes... where the conflict comes to a head... and where later he begins... to empathise with her and see her point of view... less as something that he's hostile to... after he first becomes angry with it, and can't deal with it... and then changes." "I think he's really very good." "Is there a prince in there?" "I think that you had better get up." "You had better get up." "I think that God is coming." "Fire scenes are always strange." "The cinematographer is guessing at the exposure." "You don't quite know how bright the fire's gonna be." "You don't have a second chance with the fire." "You just get a lot of cameras on it, and hope the exposure's gonna be right... and then you're always..." "I was shocked at how hot that thing was." "We couldn't get nearly as close as we wanted to." "We were wandering around with hand-held cameras... trying to get as close as possible, but the heat was so enormous... that we were improvising the shooting angles." "Obviously, the ones where we shot toward the people and toward Meryl... we had a better chance with... but the ones toward the fire... were sort of on the spur of the moment, depending on how close you could get... and somebody really adjusting the exposure all the time... depending on how intense the flames were." "You have trouble enough." "Just a chunk somewhere so they can stay all together." "We're just out of coffee, but I can give you tea." "Actually..." "There is no arable land that size outside the reserve." "... I'm very grateful that I had Grimes do this part... 'cause it's a nice way to remember him, to see him talking." "This is Stephen Grimes, playing this tiny part here... dressed in the white outfit." "We have a new governor, haven't we?" "Sir Joseph." "He hasn't arrived yet." "But will soon, I'm told." "We tried always, as I said, to use canvas." "And the fact that it took the sun off, but let light in... it let a soft light in from the top... we tried to take advantage whenever we could, of using that... when we had large groups of people." "Because there was not any way... that I could shoot those sequences, where every angle was in backlight." "I could do it when I had two people on, sometimes when I had three or four... but not with crowds like this." "So we used the canvas quite often." "Will you help me?" "That's quite difficult." "Get up, Baroness, please." "Kenya is a hard country for women." "So there is a chivalry here of a sort." "You are a powerful man and I've no one else to turn to." "Let's discuss this in the proper way." "You mustn't be embarrassed." "I've lost everything." " It costs me very little to beg you." " Wait." "Give her a moment, please?" "This land was theirs." "We took it and now they've nowhere else to go." "I'll look into it." "We'll do the best we can." "May I have your word?" "You have mine." "Thank you." "I hope you will be happy here." "I was." "I'm sorry I won't know you." "I didn't hear it until I got to the border." "It seems I'll do almost anything to get your attention." "I've nearly got you packed." "My poor family." "I've got them near bankrupt, now I have to ask them for more money." "Let me help you." "You would keep me then?" "I want to be worth something now." "What will you do?" "After my rummage sale, leave." "Friday for Mombasa, and then the boat to Denmark." "Thank you, Denys." "You must have them ready to leave before the rains." "It is good land, enough for all, but they must not fight about it... or be any trouble to the authorities, do you understand?" " Or they will lose it." " Yes." "You must make them understand that I will not be here... to speak for them." " This land is far?" " By Dagoretti." "Not too far." "How can it be now?" "With me and yourself?" "You will have some money." "Enough, I think." "I do not speak of money." "Do you remember how it was on safari?" "This was the best take possible... but the string wouldn't go around that cuckoo clock." "So there's Meryl trying desperately to figure out... what to do with the price tag... but it was still the best possible take." "So I used it." "Only this time I will go ahead and wait for you." "It is far where you are going?" "I always loved the way Kurt wrote this scene... and, of course, I loved the way... both Meryl and Malick played it." "The sort of understated emotion in it I thought was very good." "Take that out to the lawn." "We tried this idea of them... slowly changing places just a little bit... of Denys beginning to appreciate her original point of view... and she finally beginning to understand his point of view... obviously when it's too late." "Have you had dinner?" "Yes." "I've packed your things." "I thought I would send them on to the club." "Is that all right?" "This wasn't a very good idea." "I think we should have had it this way all the time." "I don't know." "I was beginning to like your things." "And I was beginning to like living without them." "You've ruined it for me, you know?" "Ruined what?" "Being alone." "Have I?" "I'd like to come with you to Mombasa." "Can I fly you there?" "Aren't you going away again?" "I have some things to do tomorrow at Tsavo, but I'll be back on Friday." "Will that be all right?" "Of course." "I've got this little thing that I've learned to do lately." "The critics who have written... such beautiful things about her book..." "I can't go on  often have commented on the deceptive simplicity of the writing... and particularly of the opening line." ""I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. "" "It says so little..." "It says so much, so simply, when you think back on it... after the life and the amount of living... that was put in that time." "And we got hung up..." "I got hung up, anyway, on that line itself... like a parenthesis... which sort of encloses the film." "In the beginning, hearing her voice as the old woman repeat it several times." ""I had a farm in Africa." ""I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." ""I had a farm in Africa."" "And then, wanting again to find this... slightly A-B-A form... which is a form... that I'm always drawn to, for whatever reasons." "And then, trying to find a way for the line... to bring us back to a reminder of the older..." "Karen Blixen that we began the film with... and putting it here when Denys is dancing with her." "You were right, you know." "The farm never did belong to me." "I may have been wrong." "I had a farm in Africa." " Friday?" " Yes." "I wanted you to know that she knew... that Denys was killed... in some kind of mystical African way." "And so we tried to do it really with the way we ended the music... with this odd echoed overhang." "We are told that Farah knew it... or sensed it anyway." "And whatever one thinks about this particular kind of... mysticism, ESP, whatever you want to call it... it was written about at the time." "I don't know that one can believe it... but the historical references are that Farah knew." "It's also been written in the biographies that... the reason Beryl Markham did not fly with him to Tsavo... is that her African servant told her... not to go, that she would die if she went." "When I was doing research on all of this..." "I came across this phenomenon a lot." "This sense that the Africans have of premonition, if you will." "Would you like a drink?" "One can accept it or not accept it as the case may be... but it seemed a valid thing... to use for purposes of the theatricality of the story." "We depart from the truth here a bit." "She did not learn of Denys' death from Bror." "Denys has been killed." "What she did is walk through the town, and she began to notice... that people were staring at her in a very odd way." "It was an unpleasant reminder... of how they treated her during the war." "Because Denmark was so close to Germany... they assumed that her sympathies lie with Germany." "So they treated her rather badly in the very beginning." "And when Denys died... they were embarrassed when they saw her in town and nobody would talk to her... and she finally stopped someone and they told her." "But this seemed a more theatrical and interesting way to do it." "Actually, this came from an earlier screenplay... that was written for Nicolas Roeg... when Nick Roeg was going to direct the film in the early '70s." "It never got made, but this sequence... the idea for this sequence and some of the content of it... was written by Judith Rascoe... and that script was owned by Columbia." "So it became part of what I could, sort of, pilfer from." "And I loved that part of it, so I took it." "We had some long discussions prior to the shooting of the end sequence." "It's a very difficult one for Meryl." "And we worked very closely... on how it would be covered, so that she would have to do it... the least possible number of times." "You always have to do something over and over every time, obviously... that there is an angle change, that means redoing the whole sequence, in a way." "But because of the emotional nature of this scene... we wanted to decide in advance... how many times she'd have to do it, and obviously..." "I tried very hard, for her sake, to keep it to a minimum." "One of the interesting things about this scene, to me anyway, is... how important the silent reactions... are to the emotion of it." "That there comes a point in the scene... where, as much as you are being affected... by what Karen is going through..." "I think you're sort of pushed over the top... by the silent reactions... of the people that are watching her, in a way." ""Runners whom renown outran" ""And the name died before the man" ""And round that early-laurelled head"" "The poem that she reads... was said to have been a favourite of Kennedy's." "It's a poem by A. E. Housman." "A beautiful poem, obviously." ""briefer than a girl's "" "There was this deep affinity that Denys had for the Masai... and the Masai did, in fact, attend his funeral." "He had some kind of understanding... an intuitive understanding of them, and obviously, a great empathy... for their aloneness, aloofness, in a way." "...and we loved him well." "He was not ours." "He was not mine." "The next-to-last voice-over which begins here... is the only one that came from the book." "It's a very, very beautiful piece of writing... and it's definitive..." "Dinesen, if you will." "It has a kind of lyricism... that sort of distils the whole book." ""If I know a song of Africa,"she says, and she goes on to wonder... as she says goodbye to the farm and to Africa." ""Does it know a song of me?"" "If I know a song of Africa... of the giraffe... and the African new moon lying on her back... of the ploughs in the fields... and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers... does Africa know a song of me?" "Will the air over the plain quiver... with a colour that I have had on?" "Or will the children invent a game in which my name is?" "Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive... that was like me?" "Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" "You cannot come where I'm going." "There is no cooking where you are going?" "You would not like it there." "You must trust me about this." "Letters you can send on to this address in Denmark." "When you sell the car, if you would send the cheque to Hunter  Company... and anything else you don't know what to do with." "Yes, ma'am." "I've been sent to ask if we may stand you a drink." "Who is "we"?" "The members actually." "All right." "Whiskey, please." "Two whiskeys, please." "Rose-lipt maidens, lightfoot lads." "Hear, hear!" "Thank you." "This is very dear to me." "It has helped me to find my way." "Thank you, msabu." "I want to hear you say my name." "You are Karen." "The mail has come today..." "He has such an extraordinary face, Malick." "So full of character and dignity that... it was, I thought, wonderfully moving at the end." "And then the animal unit again, waited and waited to get these lions... to lounge on the grave, which is what... the people in the city wrote to her... that they used to spot lions on Finch Hatton's grave in the Ngong Hills... all the time after Karen left." "She went back and became a writer." "At this point, she wasn't really a writer beforehand." "Obviously, it was what happened to her in Africa... that gave her..." "That it's almost as though the soil of Africa... became the ink that she wrote with, because it really..." "Almost everything she wrote came from what happened to her."