Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/957795
26 DGA QUARTERLY "They are moved to these warehouses by the river, which gave [us] images you cannot get anywhere in the west: banana plants, rusted corrugated iron, and the sweat and the heat of the whole thing. Also, this sense that you're in a small space where everything is sharp. It's not a good place to die. It had a beauty and brutality to it. That mixture to me was very, very important. There's also the two energies going on of Sydney and the others—who have to control their confusion and fear, as they realize Pran is keeping them going—and Haing, who suffered from the Khmer Rouge." Close-ups are like little beats when you're drumming, and sometimes you want emphatic beats. If they're done well, they destabilize you because they interrupt the rhythm. But at the same time, they punctuate what's going on, which is particularly important in this kind of sequence. Haing told me about his experiences with the Khmer Rouge. I would crawl around on the floor underneath the camera while Haing was working and give him a little running commentary in French. It would all add to the general mayhem but help Haing feel connected to what was going on." "After all that kinetic rush, I wanted people to suddenly feel the weird stasis of, have they been there five minutes or five hours? And there's something physical and anguished about crouching. We stayed on long lenses to pull up the backgrounds and keep a claustrophobia, even in these wide shots. The light in Thailand has an odd quality because of the humidity; it's a strange diffusion. When we started assembling things, we realized that we didn't want the reds to be too sharp, and that we wanted to get the slight- est underwater 'greeny' qualities, to add an element of heat. In Southeast Asia, you are underwater with the humidity being what it is." "A man puts an apple on his bayonet and makes people take bites, but then sudden- ly shoots one person in the face. It's the arbitrariness of this moment. It leaves you with the idea, 'I can't prepare myself for anything because I'm not going to know what happens next.' You're torn between hope and despair; each time you try to master your fear, you're given a moment of relief, which means you let the mastering the fear go and you're vulnerable. I wanted the shooting to happen in the wide shot so people wouldn't feel the setup. It had to feel as random as possible." 7 8 9 10 7 8 9 10