It took 10 years and £10m, the help of the Colombian navy and 15,000 Indians for the BBC to film Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. NICHOLAS HELLEN on an ordeal with a silver lining 

Four months into the making of the BBC epic, Nostromo, the crew assembled for yet another gruelling night shoot in the damp heat of Colombia. The rebuilt house of a silver-mine owner in the old town of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast was sharply delineated by the film lights, a small part of the vast fictional world of Joseph Conrad's novel, set amid the decay of colonialism at the turn of the century.  

The cameras were ready, the cast standing by, but the director was missing. A few miles away, in the modern city of Cartagena, Alastair Reid was waking up in hospital after losing consciousness. For months he had spurred himself on with heavy doses of energy-giving glucose. His body had finally refused to co-operate.  

The ward telephone rang in the early hours. On the line was Serena Scott Thomas, his female star, pleading for directions on that night's shoot. The tension was palpable. Michael Wearing, the BBC producer responsible for guaranteeing the completion of the drama, admits now that at that point he began to fear the £10m production might have to be abandoned.  

An insurance cheque might placate the BBC accountants back in London, who had argued all along against attempting to film the story of the fateful silver mine and its corrupting influence on all involved with it. Filming was only eight days from completion, but a stoppage could wreck a venture that had already taken 10 years to reach this stage. Reid took the call, and for two days resumed command from his sick bed.  

Nothing about Nostromo has ever been easy. Polish-born, with English only his third language, Conrad is perhaps the least read of our great novelists, certainly when compared to such contemporaries as Henry James, H G Wells and Rudyard Kipling. And the 1904 novel is both his greatest and most difficult achievement. Told in a series of looping flashbacks through the eyes of various characters, it is the story of an Englishman, Charles Gould, who inherits a silver mine in Sulaco, a region of the fictional South American republic of Costaguana. As civil war divides the country, Gould tries to smuggle his silver out with the help of a journalist, Decoud, and an Italian sailor, Nostromo. Their ship is damaged by rebels and the silver presumed lost to the sea. Decoud descends into madness and drowns himself. Only Nostromo knows the secret of its location.  

Though Nostromo has been likened to War and Peace, Conrad's novel is ironic and stark where Tolstoy's is triumphal and heroic. Conrad wrote on completing it, "I've finished. There's no elation. No relief even," and the public was equally cool. The Times Literary Supplement declared it "an artistic mistake". Conrad himself noted that the readers of the magazine serialisation in T P's Weekly complained "of so much space being taken by utterly unreadable stuff".  

The transition to the screen has been equally arduous. The BBC first considered an adaptation in the mid 1980s, but costume drama was at a low ebb. It concluded that the subject was simply too big. Christopher Hampton, the scriptwriter whose subsequent hits include Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Carrington, was involved with the project at that stage: "I distinctly remember the moment, during a discussion with a South American TV executive about the availability or otherwise of the Venezuelan army, when it dawned on me that we hadn't a hope in hell."  

Sir David Lean then became interested in making a version for the big screen. Working first with Hampton, then with Sir Robert Bolt, he trimmed it radically and envisaged a $45m movie. Six weeks before shooting was due to start in 1991 he died of cancer, and the film expired with him. Hampton remarked at the time: "There seems little likelihood that anyone will be tempted to invest $30m in a story whose essential point is that money is the root of all evil."  

In the 1990s, the BBC has once again been putting money into literary drama. Yet the range of approved texts has been narrow, with the emphasis on "frock flicks", adaptations of novels with romantic story lines that can be given a contemporary edge by accentuating their insights into the battle between the sexes. Jane Austen and the Brontës are apparently required reading in the BBC drama department.  

By comparison, Nostromo would seem to have little to recommend it. The story is complicated and what love interest there is is fraught with compromise and disillusionment. The relationship between the English characters, Gould and his wife, Emilia, offers little emotional depth. A further burden for ratings success in Britain is that the title role has to be played by an Italian.  

The ingredients would seem to add up to ratings poison in Britain and, as if to confirm this, last autumn the BBC broadcast Rhodes, another turn-of-the-century tale of a man's pursuit of riches and power in a far-off country. The viewing public switched off in their millions.  

Yet Nostromo never quite went away. In 1992, Wearing was approached at the BBC by Fernando Ghia, the Italian film producer who had collaborated with Bolt on The Mission, the 1986 film starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons as missionaries in 18th-century South America. His scriptwriter, John Hale, unravelled the flashbacks of Conrad's novel into a straightforward chronological narrative. They wanted Reid to direct, having been impressed by his work on the television dramas Traffik and Tales of the City.  

Wearing, whose credits include Boys from the Blackstuff and Edge of Darkness, swung his reputation behind the project. "If you ask whether it is great box office to do these great books, you end up just doing Pride and Prejudice or the obvious Dickens," he says. Wearing was attracted by the epic sweep of the book and saw it as fundamentally different to Rhodes. "Rhodes was a drama documentary; this is an allegorical novel. Stylistically it does not break new ground, but it is one of those stories showing elements of the human condition on a grand scale."  

The budget was conceived on a similarly epic scale. When Ghia attempted to sell the then uncompleted drama to international networks last May, he boasted of a $25m (£15m) budget and claimed that Hollywood would have spent three times that sum to achieve the same effect. Now Wearing insists that the entire project has come in under budget, at about £10m. Whatever the final sum, it was always clear that Nostromo was too big for the BBC to tackle on its own: even Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice cost only £6m each. As the American PBS network could stump up little more than £800,000 to add to the corporation's £5m, the project became a Europudding ­ a joint venture with producers divided by language and culture. Greco, an obscure fund administered by the EU, provided £1m. A further £3m came from RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, and TVE, the Spanish network, and £200,000 was pledged by a music publisher.  

The diversity of funding is reflected in the casting: the role of Nostromo is taken by the Italian actor, Claudio Amendola, and Decoud by a French-Canadian, Lothaire Bluteau. The Goulds are played by Colin Firth and Serena Scott Thomas, with Albert Finney appearing as the disillusioned, alcoholic Dr Monygham. As Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Firth made millions swoon. But the role of Gould calls for an unattractive beard and the silver mine as his only true passion, if also the setting for a loveless coupling with his wife. The only romance involving Firth took place off-screen. During filming he split with Jennifer Ehle, his co-star in Pride and Prejudice, and fell in love with Livia Giuggioli, an Italian production assistant.  

British viewers will notice the compromises. Italian actor speaks to Italian actress in heavily accented English. Yet there were other, far greater, pressures on the makers of the drama when shooting got under way in February 1995.  

As they laboured in Colombia's greenhouse-like humidity, the production seemed to be cursed by bad luck from the start. Ghia thought he had come forearmed against disasters by securing the personal blessing of the president of Colombia and being able to enlist 15,000 Arhauco Indians as extras.  

The president's backing defused a potentially ruinous dispute about pay towards the end of the shoot, but other mishaps proved harder to handle. A vast set, including a jetty, a steam engine and a 2,000ft railway track, was planned for construction on an island near Cartagena. It nearly had to be aborted when a landing craft, loaned by the Colombian navy and piled high with equipment, ran aground on a sandbank. Then a subcontractor destroyed a swathe of rainforest on the edge of Cartagena's botanical gardens. The local television news bulletins branded the producers "tree-killers" and Ghia was asked to pay large damages until the local firm accepted the blame.  

More worrying was the suspicion that a disaffected crew member had resorted to sabotage. A roll of film suffered fire damage before it was dispatched. Another can was opened en route to the laboratory, possibly by customs officials.  

Daily distractions threatened to derail the filming schedule. One day, a noisy political demonstration halted all recording. Unwelcome breaks caused by the frequent downpours became routine. The crane for overhead shots was one day bogged down on a jungle track and the next malfunctioned, trapping Reid 120ft aloft.  

The heat and humidity were overpowering. A video diary kept by Reid shows Firth struggling into his period costume, saying: "You have to have a masochistic delight in sweating and suffering. The Brits love this stuff more than anybody. It is the Italians and the Spanish who complain about it."  

Like Conrad's expatriate creations, the producers never quite came to grips with the mentality of the indigenous people. Wearing decided to leave the set, with its wooden steam engine and pier, as a gift to the local people. "They could have built a bistro and run the attraction as a business," he says. The locals thought otherwise and, within a day of the wrap, dismantled it for building materials.  

Unsurprisingly, a dark humour gripped the film-makers. In the claustrophobic jungle, the father of Charles Gould is murdered with an axe by the Indian slaves. The victim is played by Wearing. In a later scene, a group of men were required to be executed by a firing squad. Reid gleefully lined up almost the entire production team.  

He need not have worried. Nostromo avoids most of the weaknesses that made Rhodes so unsatisfactory. Although, like Nostromo, Rhodes was that rare thing, a period drama that spent more on locations than costumes, the actors seemed overwhelmed by sets and scenery. Nostromo not only looks good, the story is well paced and the performances much stronger. Finney is particularly fine, and, while Firth seems muted as a man in the grip of an obsession, Scott Thomas makes much of what could have been a slight role.  

The six-hour series has already been shown in Italy, where it was watched by 43% of the potential television audience, and in America, where it was screened on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre last week. New York magazine described it as "shrewd and sumptuous" and praised it for its ambition: "Something is being thought about, out loud, on primetime television: ideas, all dressed up, actually have a place to go."  

Reputations at the BBC will emerge untarnished by the burden of Conrad's morality tale. If audiences can survive the second and weakest of the four 90-minute episodes, it should prove a hit when it is screened on BBC2 starting early next month.  

Indeed, the successful outcome of this Nostromo has persuaded Lean's collaborator to revive plans for the feature film version. Serge Silberman, the Paris-based producer, says: "We will start shooting within a year." Hugh Hudson, the maker of Chariots of Fire, will direct.  

Yet Nostromo's reputation for destruction lingers on. Wearing believes we will not see its like again. "We've been working on this since 1992. Now, I wouldn't rush into another one of these things because I wouldn't trust the BBC to be there when I finished it."  

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