The Kite Runner

"Good novels are almost always better than the movies they inspire,” says screenwriter David Benioff. And perhaps it’s true that his adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel The Kite Runner—directed by Marc Forster and released this month—is another film with perpetual baggage: “Yeah,” Benioff says, “you gotta read the book.”

But we can’t blame him and Forster for wanting to try. Hosseini’s Afghani émigré tale, published in 2003 (and becoming the third best-selling book of 2005), covers a lot of ground: family, coming of age, race, class, explosions, invasions, romance, betrayal, redemption, a musical number or two, religion, brutality, terrorism and, of course, sports. Set to screen, it’s an unqualified epic, plopping its protagonist square in modernity’s maw. But it’s also a fable, stocked with classical tropes straight from the Persian folktales referenced throughout. Someone had to make a movie out of it, right?

As a filmmaker, Forster is something of a chameleon. With a shaved head and gentle demeanor, the German-born/Swiss-raised director speaks English with a soft, vaguely Germanic lilt and confesses an attraction to “emotionally repressed” characters: Will Ferrell befuddled by a narrator intoning the specifics of his OCD in last year’s Stranger Than Fiction, Johnny Depp’s tender evocation of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in 2004’s Finding Neverland, and—next up—a troubled assassin named James Bond. Equally capable of stark realism (2001’s Monster’s Ball) or cloud-headed dreaminess (Neverland), Forster’s new film combines these moods, as he sets its titular kites aflight above Kabul’s tiered cityscape.

“I used a kite master [Kabul native Basir Beria] out of southern California,” Forster says of how he recreated these mock dogfights, where kite strings dipped in ground glass and glue are used to cut your opponents from the sky. “He’s Afghani. He was captured by Russians, tortured—all sorts of things. He competes with kites a lot. With him, I started choreographing the tournaments, how you attack, how you defend. We walked through it and we tried to figure out what we could shoot [for] real. We had a little heli-cam for some shots. There’s some stuff you shoot with real kites, some kites are CG.”

It’s easier to accept allegory if it's draped in foreign tradition—and, make no mistake, The Kite Runner (written in English) is aimed at Western audiences. For them, Forster has spared no detail. “Memoirs of a Geisha is a beloved book,” he notes. “It’s a beautiful movie, if you look at the images. But they speak English. The language detaches you from being part of the story. I didn’t see these kids running around Kabul in the ’70s speaking English.”

Recreating Kabul
Shot in Kashgar, in western China near the Afghan border, the film’s backdrop is the territory of Marco Polo, and remarkably similar to Kabul. “The mountains are the same, because it’s [just] the back side,” Forster says. “It’s the closest, architecturally, that you can get. You have similar tribes—the Pashtuns, the Hazaras—so you have similar-looking extras.”

Logistic nightmares included (but were not limited to) Forster casting new actors from schools in Kabul (including his two child leads, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada and Zekeria Ebrahimi), making sure Afghani dialects were spoken with the proper accents, and the fact that no film had ever been shot in Kashgar before. “You constantly have to have two or three translators with you,” Forster says, laughing over the comfort of a vegetarian lunch in the posh drawing room of a SoHo residential club. “It’s insane.”

The result, which Forster shaped by studying vintage Super 8 footage of Kabul, practically smells of kebab—it’s a memorable evocation of Afghani street culture in the ‘70s and the desolation it has experienced since. “A group of Afghan diplomats who watched the movie were surprised to learn that it hadn’t been filmed in Kabul,” says Benioff, pleased.

In large part, though, the trickery is unnecessary. The Kite Runner would be memorable in any medium, presented by any culture, to any audience. Though the plot that unfolds from privileged Amir and servant-class Hassan’s childhood friendship seems an inevitable result of Afghanistan’s political pressure cooker, the specifics could be replaced and rearranged: Pashtun/Hazara racial tension swapped for some other senseless prejudice, the Soviet invasion supplanted by a different unwanted government, the Taliban’s beard patrol traded for other thugs.

“I think the movie is just a nice companion piece to the book,” Forster says, but it’s clearly something more than that. Forster’s adaptation—while not as satisfying as the book—is perhaps its truest translation, if only because it will surely find its way to Kabul (where no movie theaters remain), but also to Taiwan and the Caribbean and hundreds of other places where bootleg DVDs go and books rarely travel. Despite Hosseini’s evocative prose and Forster and Benioff’s epic efforts, The Kite Runner—in the end—needs no language. It probably doesn’t even need subtitles.