Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/957795
DGA QUARTERLY 25 "The camera lands on this boy as an introduction to the role of children in this story, which is both innocent and brutal. When innocence is perverted, it can be- come terrifying because it has no boundaries. Terry Forrestal, who did our stunts, had been working with a group of kids to be our young Khmer Rouge. One day, he came in white-faced and said, 'Roland, the thing is, if I asked them to kill you, they would.' Terry removed the taboo against breaking certain rules of a very con- strained culture. The unleashed anger from over- control just popped out." "Now it's a different world, the power is reversed, and they're getting pulled out of their nice Peugeot. Haing Ngor, who was a doctor, not an actor, was seized with genuine panic—the panic of recall. When I'm setting up shots, I imagine myself to be a scuba diver, capable of moving around something and looking at it from different angles. Here I set the car as the central point and built action around it. Then I could design the camera move to spin around it. It looks like chaos, but you create a still center around which things can move." "We wanted the constant cuts to be slight jolts, and each one should contain an image of violence and mis- understanding. The editing is tied up with the cacophony of voices and sound—people shout- ing but nobody knows who or for what. Pran is talking but we don't know what he's saying. At this juncture, nobody knows what's happening next. Are they even Khmer Rouge? It all had to have movement and a jagged quality to it, so we messed around with the sound during the mix to give it a higher frequency, to make it jarring without you quite knowing what it was." "If you look at their faces, they are men- tally there in the reality of the moment because we improvised a lot about what would happen when they got caught. We did improvisations in the dark, and they're won- derful actors, so they internalized it all. In fact, they didn't know what was being said here. It's as though there wasn't a script. At that point, the script was kind of irrelevant in its detail. It was only relevant in its thrust. I told Haing he couldn't turn down the role, that Cambodia would never forgive him. I had no right to say that, but direc- tors do things they have no right to do." 3 4 5 6 3 4 5 6