Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/957795
DGA QUARTERLY 27 "What's going on in the secret of the shade is Pran's magic. He's taking over as the savior, so I wanted a kind of beauty to this moment. The Caravaggio feel is rather lovely, and the slight chiaroscuro. This is all reflected light. It's all to make the audience feel hope without being certain exactly what Pran is doing, like the characters. I could speak to Haing in French, so the other actors didn't know what we were saying. That was important because we needed to create the trust that they were physically safe as actors, but at the same time, there was a freedom in the chore- ography." "This sequence had to be a giant bal- let, though there was very fast cutting. The real conundrum for me was, how do I do the arrival of the Khmer Rouge and the evacuation of the city at the same time? So, I wanted to take some ordinary circumstances and make them strange, so I had people throw- ing down suitcases while standing on the roofs. Into that chaos, I wanted our little group push- ing their car, which for me was a perfect illus- tration of how they were both free, but not free and how everything had switched around. Then we spent a long, long time thinking about how we were going to do the evacuation scene." "This is a level crossing I found on train tracks. The shot and reset took 15 minutes, which gave us seven minutes to be ready for the trains to come. If you see 3,000 people carrying bags down a railway track, it doesn't bode well. Sydney and the tuk tuk they're pushing have guided us into the evacuation. There was a road that crossed the track and went into the city. I could get one flowing shot of evacuation and invasion in the same moment, and the Khmer Rouge could run into the camera and almost wipe it out." "It's a continuing shot, and I love the idea that our perspectives are shift- ing with a real kind of dynamism. And then with the odd sounds [composer] Mike Oldfield, who has a particular ear for ca- cophonous noises, added to the score, like the strange way that helicopters batter the air, I think we created something visceral, I think re- ally truthful. It was the only way I could express the moment in a way both real but choreo- graphed. Otherwise, it was just going to be lots of little bits. If you were there, it would have felt like this, although in reality it took longer. But that's how film compression works." ® 11 12 13 14 11 12 13 14