Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/957795
24 DGA QUARTERLY "They are about to flee but the tunnel is blocked by an APC (armored vehicle), which isn't going to stop," explains Joffé. "This image was just to do with raw power, and it set up the very mobile camera that makes the sequence work. It was on a dolly and track, and it had to traverse the car and look like it almost got run over by the APC, which it nearly was. Luckily, our operator had nerves of steel. For me, this was about creating the panicked feeling of what it's like when you suddenly don't have any control, when once you called all the shots." "We used a longer lens than one might because we wanted some compression, but the movement had to have a smooth- ness to it. I didn't want things to look handheld because I didn't want to lose a sense of contained energy. The discipline would have disappeared and it wouldn't have felt as real, like it's going to pop out of the screen. To give it reality, we spent a lot of time with those costumes, with hordes of people dragging them through the sand, driving trucks over them, washing them hundreds of times so they felt like they had been in a conflict." T H E K H M E R R O U G E U P R I S I N G and takeover of Cambodia was a little spoken about or under- stood footnote of the Vietnam War when producer David Puttnam gave Roland Joffé a 300-plus-page screenplay for The Killing Fields, adapted from Sydney Schanberg 's reporting in The New York Times. To Joffé it was revelatory but he also felt it could be unlike any war movie he had ever seen. "It's about love and male friendship," Joffé wrote to Puttnam. "If the story is made from that point of view, I think it will turn into an unforgettable movie." More than a year later, Joffé found himself in Thailand, chroni- cling the story of journalists Schanberg (Sam Waterston), Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S. Ngor), Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) and Jon Swain (Julian Sands) at the moment the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh. When he could have been evacuated, Pran opts to stay behind and report with his colleagues. The invasion sequence formed the heart of the movie for Joffé because it sets up the ultimate separation of Pran and Schanberg, and shows how Pran risked his life to save Schanberg and his fel- low journalists. The sequence is chaotic, dangerous, bloody and imbued with the men's confusion at the new state of affairs. "It wasn't a question of depicting what exactly happened," says Joffé. "We wanted it to feel as real as it possibly could but more importantly, to convey exactly what it felt like to be in it. "I wanted that whole sequence to be in constant movement," the director adds. "The universe was upending. The camera move- ment created the feeling of discombobulation. It created in the audience the kind of tension and fear that I wanted." PHOTOS: (TOP) PHOTOFEST; SCREENPULLS: WARNER ARCHIVE COLLECTION S H O T T O R E M E M B E R The Feeling of Discombobulation AS THE KHMER ROUGE RUMBLES INTO PHNOM PENH IN THE KILLING FIELDS, DIRECTOR ROLAND JOFFÉ CAPTURES THE FEAR AND DREAD WITH CONSTANT MOVEMENT | BY ROB FELD 1 2 1 2