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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