American Cinematographer - April 1985 - 74

we were

shooting during the

soon season.

So it

was

mon¬

almost im¬

to get any light at any of
the exterior locations during the
monsoon. I'd often be opening up
to fi or f2.5 during the middle of
the day in Phuket. Our biggest

possible

lighting problem, always, was in
maintaining a workable aperture.
"But then again, I had a
superb crew. The camera opera¬
tion by Mike was excellent, the
focus pulling - which was done

on

those concerned with
and floor effects. For exam¬

were

stunts

ple,

Killing Fields.

of

atmospheric claus¬
trophobia anyhow. So I lit the film
into

to

a

sort

follow this emotion.

"Interestingly enough, in
the last half of the film, while the
tension is mounting, we are almost
always out of doors against a
backdrop of hills, forests and
fields. The

contrast

between this

expansive landscape and claus¬
trophobic interior drama is quite
remarkable.
"I

that I was
continually faced with lighting
problems," Menges continued.
"In Thailand many of the build¬
ings are more modern, to keep out
the sunshine. They have big con¬
crete edges jutting out. So it was
quite a chore setting up indoors in
these dark buildings and trying to
maintain
and not

a

must

say

realistic appearance

to assemble a convincing
"army" of Lon Nol and Khmer
Rouge soldiers stunt supervisor
Terry Forrestal culled through
250 hopeful extras before finally
selecting 17 young men and 30
young women between the ages of
eleven and twenty-two for the
parts. All of Forrestal's "troops"
had extensive backgrounds in Thai
boxing or gymnastics. To train
them for their roles, Forrestal

drilled the

in basic weapo¬
to
handle the Russian AK-47, the
American M-16, the RPG rocket
launcher and the M-60 machine

American

Cinematographer

extras

nry,

including learning how

gun.

These "soldiers" also under¬
intensive basic military tacti¬

went

cal drills, with the end result of all
this being that not a single member
of Forrestal's army was injured

during filming.
Special effects director
Fred Cramer also found himself

actively involved with the produc¬
tion. Among his other respon¬
sibilities were the burning down of
an old Thai brewery on the banks
of the Chao

Bangkok
tion of

-

really having enough
lamps to do it. Plus, as I've said,

72

a

large

of Buddha made of foam

plastic within the ruin. "One
morning we came out to this site,"
Menges remembered, "and we

titiously slips into

gaffer Peter

this film."
Two of the

on
location for The

statue

film

my

fighting for something special

Manges

constructed, complete with

departments
making major contributions to the

markable, and

worked miracles. Then again, the
entire crew of The Killing Fields,
no matter what department, was

Chris

a bombsite at
Neak Luong, where four large
holes were dug for bomb craters
and real buildings put up around
the hole, which were then burned
down to simulate the destruction.
At this site a i/3oth scale model
of a ruined Thai temple was also

found that someone had put a gar¬
land of flowers around that
statue's neck, a local custom."
One of Cramer's more
difficult assignments concerned
the rigging of an uncomfortably
realistic effect used for that mo¬
ment when Pran, facing starvation
under the brutal conditions of a
Khmer Rouge work camp, surrep¬

under the most arduous condi¬
tions you can imagine - was re¬

Roland Joffe and

Cramer also created

April 1985

a

Praya River in

to simulate the
Phnom Penh oil

destruc¬
refinery.

a

corral and

drinks the fresh blood from a cow
that he has cut open with a razor
blade. "No animals were harmed
while we were making The Killing

Fields, although

we did buy a dead
dog from a veterinarian to use as a
prop. As for that cow sequence,"
Joffe said, "we draped the skin of a

dead

cow over a live one, which
then held in place by a rope
that was tied around the cow's
neck. Fred laid a blood bag in un¬
der that small area where Haing
made his razor cut. So when he cut

was

through the dead skin and into the
bag, Flaing just sucked out the
fluid. The cow never felt a thing."
Cramer's most chilling ef¬
fect, however, occurs during
Pran's lonely march to freedom.
Having escaped the work camp,
the Cambodian stumbles into

a

littered with the bones
of thousands of people - the kill¬
ing fields of the film's title. "I have
a theory that an audience's
eye is
always focused on the faces on a
mass

grave

screen,

almost

to

the exclusion of

everything else," explained Joffe.
"People, I feel, are the center of a
scene.

Now the

moment

where

Haing falls into the pit of bones is
example of this theory. The
bones and bodies are already in

an
American Cinematographer - April 1985

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