He detonates a full-frontal attack: ‘WHERE ARE YOUR APPLICATIONS? WHY WAS THERE NO FOLLOW-UP? WHY WAS THERE NO CONTACT? WHERE WERE YOU, GRANT? WHY WERE YOU NOT HERE, GRANT? WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED, GRANT?’
He is unstoppable and implacable.
My feeble attempt to explain that the finances have collapsed and been resurrected, and the permits were the producer’s responsibility, goes for a Burton. His voice is now two decibels below full shout. ‘HIS MAJESTY IS ANGRY WITH YOU, THE CHIEF OF POLICE IS ANGRY WITH YOU, THE MINISTRY IS ANGRY WITH YOU. YOU CANNOT START FILMING IN FIVE DAYS’ TIME!’
I plead, beg, explain and grovel – all to no avail.
‘NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!’
In the poisonous silence that follows, all I can think about is what the response would be were a hundred foreigners to land at Heathrow or JFK airport without visas, permits or permissions of any description, intending to mosey down to Piccadilly Circus or Times Square for a two-month film shoot.
‘We are completely at fault, sir, and I understand your position entirely. Thank you for meeting us so early in the morning and I deeply regret that we won’t be able to make the film here or spend a large part of our budget in the kingdom.’
I know this is brinkmanship. There is no alternative. The likely reality is that it’s all over before it’s even properly begun. The minister says he will convene an emergency meeting and I should be on standby for his response.
Then I call Paris and, for once, manage to get straight through to MC, whose blood I am ready to boil.
‘So you believe this minister? You believe him and not me?’
‘That’s not the fucking point! It doesn’t matter who I believe. The point is we cannot start shooting because we do not have any work permits!’
‘Go ask the king.’
How many times in the twenty-first century are you going to be asked to do this in real life? Her edict rattles around my cranium like a superannuated boiled sweet in tandem with ‘You believe him and not me?’ I cannot credit this insanity and start laughing. The notion that you could cajole a government minister in London, Washington, let alone Paris, to make an exception to these procedures at such short notice is plainly ludicrous.
The minister calls at 4:45pm and I am summonsed for a rundown of the demands: permits to be submitted first thing next day (minimum of a week to process), letters for location permissions to be delivered immediately, a substantial fine to be paid for the inconvenience. On and on it goes and all I can register is, ‘This is a reprieve.’
He is at pains to point out that the film company has caused this delay, not the government, which is now expected to bend laws and make exceptions.
The production manager calls MC to report the results. Stunned silence.
Meanwhile in London, the actors are in a panic as they all have to report to a police station and get fingerprinted and pay for certificates to prove they’re not ex-cons, which are then faxed to the Swazi government.
All we can hope for is to be granted an audience with the king to beg permission to start shooting on schedule whilst the applications are being processed.
At 9pm I get the call to be at the palace the next day.
At least the minister has not vetoed our chances of filming outright. Or so we think until we receive the license contract from the committee at 11am demanding an extra $20,000 on top of the $200,000 fee to cover ‘administration, filming rights, policing, use of scenery etc,’ plus a proviso that the film be vetted by the government before it is commercially released. Oh fuckity, fuckity, fuckity, fuck-fuck.
Four-and-a-half sphincter-winking hours drag by and then a call to ‘Get to Lozitha Palace immediately.’ We pile into the rental car and drive hell for leather. On the radio, Bob Marley is chanting ‘Every little thing’s gonna be alright’ and we all hope that the man is right!
Royal protocol demands everyone is kept waiting for anything between one hour and eight to meet the king. The formerly incandescent minister has been waiting since noon. Does this mean the king has not yet heard his demands?
No sooner have we arrived at 3pm than we are ushered into the throne room, which ups our status instantly. The king, who I have met once a couple of years before, greets me with real warmth and insists that I sit beside him on a matching throne. As is Swazi custom, the minister sits shoeless before the monarch on the floor. Surreal.
‘Your Majesty, we are asking for your blessing to let filming go ahead. We simply do not have an extra $200,000 as stipulated by the minister this morning.’ The king’s wide-eyed reaction confirms that this is the first time he has heard about this.
We are granted a royal reprieve. The power of an absolute monarch never seemed so sweet.
Postscript: Wah-Wah was released in 2006, the minister has since been fired and MC’s company went into liquidation.
Behind the Scenes: Filming Tomb Raider at Angkor Wat
NICK RAY
As well as authoring more than thirty titles for Lonely Planet in destinations as diverse as Cambodia and Rwanda, Nick Ray has worked in television and film since the late 1990s. Following the success of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, he has scouted locations for feature films such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Two Brothers, and has worked with celebrities such as Charley Boorman, Jeremy Clarkson and Gordon Ramsay, introducing them to adventures, and some trouble, in remote parts of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Life doesn’t always follow the script. The original call came from Oliver Stone. He was working on a film called Beyond Borders, a sort of Dr Zhivago of the NGO world, set to star Meg Ryan in the female lead. We spent two weeks scouting around Cambodia for potential locations for a Khmer refugee camp set on the Thai border in the 1980s before a fateful call arrived from the Tomb Raider crew.
As a postscript to the Oliver Stone experience, Beyond Borders, starring Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen, was eventually directed by Martin Campbell, and the Cambodia scenes were shot on a vacant housing site outside Chiang Mai, Thailand. But in the meantime, the Tomb Raider crew were keen to scout around Angkor. The original film script had the Terracotta Army coming to life, but a Chinese film had already featured this very story. Luckily for Cambodia, the art department team had a coffee-table book on Angkor and director Simon West was hooked. Clearly, it was meant to be and two weeks later we were scouring the temples of Angkor with the crew.
Tomb Raider was the first major Hollywood film to hit Cambodia since Lord Jim, starring Peter O’Toole, back in 1964. It was a major gamble for Paramount Pictures, as 20th Century Fox had been roundly condemned for its heavy-handed treatment of the coastline around Ko Phi Phi during the filming of The Beach. Everyone involved was determined that such dramas would not unfold at Angkor and so the preparations began.
My role as a location manager was to select the locations and work with the production team to secure the necessary permissions. It was a bureaucratic minefield. Cambodia was still governed by a coalition of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the former communists installed in power by the Vietnamese in 1979 after the Khmer Rouge defeat, and Funcinpec, a loose alliance of royalists who had spent much of the 1980s fighting the CPP from their bases in the refugee camps along the Thai border. Deciding which faction to work with was one of the most important calls on the whole shoot. In the end we went with the CPP as the real powerbrokers in Cambodia, the royal family being largely symbolic and their political influence on the wane.
First stop was the Ministry of Culture to arrange a general filming permission. Her Royal Highness Princess Norodom Bopha Devi was the Minister of Culture at this time and Tomb Raider didn’t exactly sound like a culturally sensitive movie about Cambodia’s national treasure, the sacred temples of Angkor. The approval process headed to the Council of Ministers, where line producer Kulikar Sotho was granted a fifteen-minute meeting to convince Deputy Prime Minister Sok An of the project’s merits. It moved to the cabinet for debate and was passed fifteen to one in favor. We had the green light,
everything was in place – but this was when things really started to get complicated.
The locations chose themselves, as Angkor has such an embarrassment of riches to offer. We settled on the mountain temple of Phnom Bakheng as an establisher for the temples, with Angelina Jolie scanning the horizon to find a way into the lost complex, a nice piece of CGI wizardry that saw the East Gate of Angkor Thom superimposed upon the Cambodian jungle. A compressor provided the wind in her hair and for once the sunset over Angkor Wat was not the headline act: the tourists were far more interested in looking at Angelina in her hot pants. The bad guys were already trying to break in through the front door by pulling down a giant polystyrene apsara statue that had been moulded into the archway of the East Gate. Angelina needed wheels so she picked up her 650-horsepower custom Land Rover Defender, whizzed around Bayon temple a few times for glorious effect, and set off to find the back door.
Wandering amid the tentacle-like tree roots of Ta Prohm, she eventually found a secret entrance, plucking a sprig of jasmine before falling through the earth into Pinewood Studios near Windsor. Here she and the bad guys did battle with a giant multi-armed Hindu god before she escaped her adversaries by diving off the 35-meter-high waterfall at Phnom Kulen. Eventually she found her way to the royal pond of Angkor Wat, complete with a fully fledged floating village that happened to be there on that particular day. She borrowed a mobile phone from a friendly monk and received a blessing, which miraculously healed her wounded arm. Cambodia’s starring moment had come and gone – but what about the madness behind the scenes?
The East Gate of Angkor Thom is also known as the Gate of the Dead to Khmers, as this is where the bodies of kings were taken from the city for ceremonial cremation. Local heritage police were contracted to guard the site at night, as containers and props littered the area. On the second day, they wanted to quit, convinced they had heard the armies of Jayavarman VII marching through the gate at night. The only way to placate them was to hold a bon, a traditional ceremony to appease the spirits. Chickens duly slaughtered, they were happy to continue in their duties.
The Cambodian jungle is lush and green, but November marks the start of the dry season. Clearly the Cambodian jungle wasn’t quite lush enough for the Tomb Raider team, as they decided to decorate it with $2000 worth of tropical plants from the local garden centre. The problem was that without the guarantee of rain, the plants would need a daily dose of water. It was time to negotiate with the local fire brigade. The boys in red were only too glad for a piece of the action and a deal was struck for them to act as our gardeners.
They were so excited to be playing the part that they drove out to the set with sirens blaring and lights flashing. The road to East Gate is an ancient causeway and very narrow. The fire engine flew along with no apparent concern for the art department pick-up truck trundling along the other way. Just as a head-on collision looked inevitable, the fire engine swung sharply to the right, so sharply in fact that it tumbled off the causeway, rolled on to its side and buried itself in the jungle foliage. We were incensed by their recklessness, but the responsibility of rescuing the fire engine fell on the film crew as the contractors. It was the only working fire engine in town, so we were under real pressure to get it back on the road. A ten-ton crane and a grab truck managed the job between them, but it was 1am before the fire engine was back at the station. Amazingly enough, the firemen drove more cautiously in the subsequent weeks.
A major-feature film crew is like an army on the move, shifting from location to location and set to set, and needs a huge amount of logistical support. Tomb Raider came with a crew of 150 personnel, plus a supporting cast of up to 500 locals. Mobile production offices, artist’s caravans, generators, lighting, grips and the all-important honey wagon (that’s mobile toilets to you and me), all of these were needed and much more. Not forgetting the small task of feeding hungry mouths in the middle of the jungle.
This was back in 2000 and Cambodia was only an emerging destination. Hotels and vehicles were in short supply, but some adept juggling made things work. The lucky ones were housed in the Sofitel Royal Angkor, the unlucky ones had to make do with the City Angkor, soon renamed the Shitty Angkor by the construction boys. However, when it came to film servicing equipment, nothing was available, so we had to turn to Thailand.
Back in 2000, the road from Siem Reap to Poipet was notorious for potholes the size of golf bunkers and bridges that vanished into muddy brown waters. On a bad day it could take twenty-four hours to travel 150 kilometers, sometimes more. The film containers had already had a chastening experience upon arrival in Cambodia. The bridge at Stoeng, about a hundred kilometers southeast of Siem Reap, had collapsed, so the trucks had to travel the long way round via Battambang. It took them four days to arrive from Phnom Penh, a distance of 456 kilometers, and the photos were a trucker’s vision of hell. Now it was the turn of the sophisticated service vehicles from Thailand, a fleet of thirty-five trucks provided by the indomitable VS Service.
First we needed a plan to deal with all the broken bridges. Two army units were contracted, travelling in six-wheel-drive Russian trucks complete with enough lumber to build bridges as the convoy rumbled along. Clearing the border was a challenge in itself, as Cambodian customs had never seen anything quite like this before. Paperwork in order, eventually the convoy moved out, one army truck pushing ahead to build a bridge before the rest of the convoy cautiously traversed. The bridge duly dismantled, the second army truck would forge ahead to build the next bridge. It was a bridge relay and the clock was ticking. The convoy took about six hours to travel 300 kilometers from Bangkok to Poipet. It took another twenty hours to travel the 150 kilometers from Poipet to Siem Reap. When they finally arrived at about four o’clock in the morning, local motorbike taxi drivers were terrified that the Thais were invading.
Finding parking spaces for thirty-five trucks was the next problem, especially in the dark. One of the artist’s caravans was just that, an old tow-bar caravan that you might see in a European campsite. The big motor homes were bagged by the big stars, but even the support actors from the US often had clauses in their contracts that specified a caravan. This particular caravan had been loaded on a panel truck at Poipet and sealed for safety. When the panels were removed in Siem Reap, large sections of the caravan fell apart, like something from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
Angkor Wat presented a major challenge, as it is the national symbol of Cambodia and an affirmation of identity for the Cambodian people. The authorities were very concerned about filming at this national icon. To complicate matters further, President Jiang Zemin of China, on a state visit to Angkor, was due to arrive on November 14, just three days before the Tomb Raider shoot at the temple. He was being guided by King Sihanouk, head of state and last of the god-kings. So the authorities were adamant that the floating village could not be set up until the state visit was complete, despite King Sihanouk’s well-documented obsession with film. So the floating village was built and tested on a pond in Siem Reap before being moved into Angkor Wat and dressed.
The governor of Siem Reap took rather a liking to the village and asked to spend the night there before the shoot. Even more complicated was a busload of extras arriving at Angkor Wat the night before the shoot, planning to sleep in the stilted houses. Apsara Authority said a firm no, so we had to find beds for fifty people to spend the night. Eventually, however, the Angkor Wat shooting wrapped without incident, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the Cambodia sequences with the incredible color and life of the floating village and the hypnotic chanting of a hundred monks.
Back to the East Gate: breaking into the ‘tomb’ was one of the most difficult sequences to film on the whole shoot. The giant polystyrene apsara needed to come tumbling down at exactly the right moment to give the appearance that it was being pulled over by the Cambodian laborers. In fact, there was a truck positioned behind the gate complete with a hydraulic arm, which would actually push the apsara down on c
ue. Rehearsals began but we had to move cautiously with four cameras set up to capture the action.
We were working with village people – no, not the seminal disco band from the ’70s, but real Cambodians from around the temples with no previous exposure to film or television. The first rehearsal saw the ropes flapping around in the breeze, as the extras showed no emotion or effort. The second time they pulled harder, so hard that they almost pulled the apsara down. A few more practices and it was time to go live. The assistant directors barked instructions, the crowd began pulling and down came the giant apsara in a flurry of dust. The Cambodian extras cheered spontaneously, an unrehearsed scene that made the final cut.
Incidentally, that was the same day Angelina Jolie requested a snake. We had snake hunters on set to keep snakes away from the set. For Angelina, it was her Billy Bob Thornton period and snakes seemed to hold a peculiar fascination. Our snake hunters were duly dispatched to find a nonvenomous snake for Lara Croft and within minutes they were back. She was thrilled but the rest of the cast and crew looked decidedly worried that they had located the snake so quickly.
The tornado that was Tomb Raider eventually blew out of town, leaving Siem Reap with a short-term hangover. The police were sad to see it go, as they had been making money from the catering setup. This was budgeted to cater to 300 people, but on the first day, a bill arrived for 500 as the police had been selling cheap lunches to the locals. To overcome this problem of petty corruption, a raffle ticket system was introduced, but the police soon wised up to this and bought their own book of tickets.
Ultimately, these were only minor annoyances along the way. The impossible had been achieved. A major feature film had come to Cambodia and filmed the temples of Angkor. Cambodia was back on the map.
Lights, Camera...Travel! Page 14
