Survival in the Killing Fields (66 page)

Before we left for Thailand all the Cambodians who had been chosen for the film got together for a party. Pat Golden was there. All the other Cambodians knew what part they were playing, but
when I asked Pat she just told me not to worry, I wasn’t going to have to learn anything by heart. It sounded to me as though my part was pretty small. The other Cambodians began teasing me
and saying that I had the co-starring role, but I just laughed and told them not to believe it.

When I got to Thailand I was given a script, but still nobody told me what part was mine. Then when Roland Joffé called a rehearsal I found that I was going to play Dith Pran.

‘Oh my god,’ I said to myself, slapping my hand to my forehead. ‘How big I am.’

‘This is a story of war and friendship, of the anguish of a ruined country and of one man’s will to live.’ So began a 1980 article in
The New York Times
Magazine.
The author was Sydney Schanberg, the
Times
’s correspondent in Cambodia during the Lon Nol years.

Schanberg wrote about the relationship between himself and his Cambodian assistant Dith Pran. They were not equals. Schanberg was the boss. By nature he was angry and unsatisfied, always
demanding more of people around him. However, he did not speak Khmer or know much about Cambodian culture. He needed Dith Pran to be his eyes and ears and nose. He depended on Pran when they ran
into obstacles to their reporting or when they got into situations that threatened their lives. Pran, in turn, depended on Schanberg for guidance. The two men were very different, but they liked
each other and they were close.

During the communist takeover Pran saved Schanberg and some other Western journalists from execution by the Khmer Rouge. With the communists in control of the city, all the Westerners and a few
Cambodians including Pran retreated to the French embassy. Pran was forced to leave the safety of the embassy and join the rest of the Cambodians out in the countryside, while the Westerners were
allowed to leave for Thailand and freedom. For almost four years, while the Khmer Rouge controlled the country, Schanberg heard nothing of Dith Pran. He felt terribly guilty: Pran had saved his
life, but he, Schanberg, hadn’t been able to save Pran. Finally the Vietnamese invaded, Pran escaped from Cambodia and the two men met again in a Thai refugee camp.

The article moved the hearts and the conscience of people who hadn’t known much about Cambodia or who hadn’t thought about the revolution there in human terms. Out of the magazine
article grew the movie
The Killing Fields.
The movie’s producer was an Englishman, David Puttnam, who had made
Chariots of Fire
and other films. The director was another
Englishman, Roland Joffé, whose background was in theatre and in film documentaries. The lead actors were two Americans, Sam Waterston as Sydney Schanberg, John Malkovich as the cynical
photographer Al Rockoff . . . and me, a Cambodian, as Dith Pran.

Studying the script I made a surprising discovery.
I was Dith Pran.
This is not to say that our stories were identical. Pran was a journalist; I was a doctor. He worked with Westerners; I
worked with Cambodians. His wife and children left Phnom Penh on a helicopter before the fall; Huoy and my family stayed. When he lived in the countryside, Pran was beaten by the Khmer Rouge; but
he never went to prison and never suffered as much as I did.

But the differences were much less important than the similarities. I was him and he was me because we were Cambodian men of about the same age and because we had been under the hammer of the
same terrible events: the civil war, then the revolution, then the foreign occupation and finally pouring into the refugee camps and going to America. Surviving the Khmer Rouge years was the most
important fact of our lives, the very centre of our identities. And we had both survived without quite knowing why.

Turning the pages of the screenplay I marvelled at our life paths, which ran parallel and sometimes crossed. Dith Pran had seen the senseless, barbaric civil war. As a journalist he’d gone
to some of the same briefings and battlefields as my friend Sam Kwil. He’d seen the
bonjour
and the deteriorating conditions in the hospitals, the wounded patients piled on the floors.
In the screenplay he and Sydney Schanberg visited Preah Keth Melea Hospital. In real life I had treated patients in Prea Keth Melea before the fall. Pen Tip was on the radiology staff there.

Both Dith Pran and I had an opportunity to leave Phnom Penh on the American helicopters. We didn’t go because we didn’t know what the Khmer Rouge were really like. Pran went into the
French embassy with the foreigners; I drove past the French embassy on my Vespa on my trip back into Phnom Penh and saw the foreigners on the lawn.

In the countryside Dith Pran and I were rice farmers, like all the other ‘new’ people. We both pulled ploughs by hand, planted and harvested rice, dug canals and built earthen dams.
We ate bowls of watery rice and gathered wild foods. We lived with the daily terror. When the Vietnamese invaded, we both escaped to Thailand through the minefields. Of the more than half a million
Cambodians on the border, Dith Pran and I were two of the very luckiest. I had Chana to give me my freedom and Uncle Lo to give me money and clothes. Dith Pran had Sydney Schanberg.

But I had never met Dith Pran. I asked Roland Joffé how Pran walked and spoke and what his facial expressions were like. I asked him to introduce us. It seemed to me that playing the Dith
Pran part meant imitating the real man as much as possible.

Roland was evasive. ‘Haing, don’t worry what he looks like or how he would have done things,’ he advised. ‘Just be yourself.’ Roland encouraged the idea that Dith
Pran and I were the same person on the inside. And I never did meet Dith Pran until the filming was over.

Roland knew that I had never acted before. He didn’t try to make acting seem difficult or mysterious. He made it as easy for me as possible.

He sent a tall, bearded American to the Bangkok airport to meet me. The American was very friendly and polite. He said his name was Sam Waterston. A few days later, with the help of John
Crowley, who was pleased and surprised to see me, Sam and I got our passes to visit the Thai-Cambodian border. Roland assigned Sam to write newspaper stories about the border, just like a real
journalist. Since I spoke Khmer and reasonably good Thai, I was Sam’s translator and guide. Roland was re-creating a relationship like the real Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran.

Sam and I drove along the road to Aranyaprathet. In three years little had changed. I showed him my favourite market stalls and restaurants and the ARC house where I had lived. We drove south of
Aran to a Khmer Rouge border camp that had been attacked by Vietnamese a few days before. Cadre followed us wherever we went, never letting us out of their sight. Nothing had changed about the
Khmer Rouge – the disdain on their faces, the atmosphere of menace, the thatched-roof houses with no walls.

I translated for Sam while he interviewed Khmer Rouge officers and wrote their answers in his notebook. Sam asked them if they had enough food, if their families were with them and so on. The
Khmer Rouge kept telling Sam that all they wanted was to go back into Cambodia to fight the Vietnamese.

Throughout the interview I kept a detached, neutral presence, at least on the outside. While Sam asked the questions and took notes, I stayed as calm as a monk. Inside, my emotions were
different. I thought of grabbing the cadre by their shirts and shouting, ‘Fools! You want to fight the Vietnamese? Look around you at the consequences of your fighting – at the orphans,
the handicapped, the civilians with no homes!’ I thought of grabbing a rifle and spraying them with bullets. But I didn’t do anything like that, and I kept my emotions hidden.

From the Khmer Rouge camp we went to Khao-I-Dang, where many of my old friends were still working in the hospital clinics, living in their huts and hoping to be resettled in the West. Again, I
was Sam’s eyes and ears and nose, helping him understand what was there. Sam was a cultivated, educated man, but he had never been to Southeast Asia before.

When we returned to Bangkok, Roland sent Sam and me to Chieng Mai, in northern Thailand, near the opium-producing region of the Golden Triangle. With us were John Malkovich and a British actor
named Julian Sands, who was going to play the journalist Jon Swain.

It was almost like a vacation. Our only assignment was to get to know each other. The four of us went sightseeing together. I negotiated with the taxi drivers, ordered the food at restaurants,
explained the culture. They asked me about Thailand and Cambodia. They wanted to know why Cambodians wear kramas and Thais don’t. They asked about food, Buddhism, corruption, history. Sam
asked the most questions. Most of the time he and I spoke in French, since that was easier for me, and he could speak it fluently.

One evening after we had gotten to know each other, Sam and I sat down in a bar. After a few drinks I began to tell him things about life under the Khmer Rouge that I had never told anybody
else. Things that had always bothered me. About leaving the patient to die on the operating table the day the communists took over. About watching Huoy die and being unable to save her. About my
Aunt Kim, who had risked my life by telling the chief of Tonle Batí my real identity. I told Sam that to the best of my knowledge, one of Aunt Kim’s sons had been a hard-core Khmer
Rouge officer. This same son had slipped past Immigration and was living in the United States. What was I supposed to do about that – a cousin who was probably a war criminal?
⁷

Sam was easy to talk to. He was wise and polite, a real gentleman. We became friends. In a totally different way I also became friends with John Malkovich, who was very naughty and funny. John
was always telling dirty jokes and making sly remarks about the young, beautiful Chieng Mai prostitutes. He got me to teach him to curse in Khmer. For me it was the best of both worlds: I could
behave like a gentleman with Sam Waterston or a rascal with John Malkovich.

When we returned to Bangkok, Roland started us doing improvisation scenes to prepare us for the cameras. Right from the start I felt comfortable acting with Sam and John and Julian. Being
friends in real life made acting with them seem easy and natural. Of course, that was what Roland had planned all along.

Roland was the centre of this multimillion-dollar movie project. His partner was David Puttnam, the producer. Just by watching them with other people, you could tell that the two of them cared a
great deal about telling the story truthfully. They went to great lengths to get details exactly right. They had negotiated for months with the Thai government to set up the filming locations in
several parts of the country. They always had good food – Asian food for the Asians, Western food for the Westerners. Throughout filming they were friendly and approachable. Roland knew the
names of most of the Cambodians in the cast, even the bit actors he hadn’t yet worked with. His light blue eyes seemed to penetrate into everything. The Cambodians on the set called him
‘Buddha’ because he was so calm and so smart.

The filming began with a scene of Sam and John sitting in an outdoor cafe in Phnom Penh in the Lon Nol years. A man held the clapper in front of the camera and announced, ‘Take One, Scene
One,’ and then clapped the hinge shut. The assistant director called out, ‘Ready,’ and the cameraman answered, ‘Ready.’ Then the assistant director said, into his
walkie-talkie, ‘Stop all truck movements.’ When the background movement had stopped he said to the rest of us, ‘Go!’ and then, ‘Roll it!’ and finally,
‘ACTION!’ in a loud voice. The camera made its quiet whir, and Sam and John began the scene, making small talk, deciding what to order and then rushing into the street when a grenade
exploded. Roland knelt on the ground off-camera. He had removed the little zoom lens he kept on his belt and was looking through it. Between takes he came in to advise the actors and change their
positions a bit. Then the scene began again.

‘Take Two, Scene One.’

‘Ready . . .’

Roland told me that when I went on-camera I didn’t have to speak every word exactly from the script as long as what I said included the key words and phrases. When I spoke in Khmer I could
say whatever I wanted as long as it was appropriate to the scene. He made the camera crew responsible for the blocking and the lighting, so the actors didn’t have to worry about it. When it
came time for me to go on-camera I was with my friends Sam and John, who knew just what to do. All I had to do was react to them and live out my part. There was no time to wonder what this meant,
living out the part. Around me, everyone else was already doing it.

Roland told me to remember situations from my own life that were similar to the movie, and then use those emotions in the scenes. This made sense to me. I prepared for the rice field scenes by
remembering how I had felt and walked and worked on the front lines. When I ate watery rice or caught lizards in the movie, I remembered what hunger was like in the countryside. The rural scenes
were the easiest, because I had been in identical situations. From there it was a small step to similar situations, and from there another step to situations that were externally different but had
some thread in common with my own experience. For example, when Dith Pran argues with his wife about leaving Cambodia, that was me, not listening to Huoy telling me to leave the country. During the
Khmer Rouge takeover scene, when Dith Pran pleads to the guerrillas to spare the lives of the Western journalists and he puts his palms together like a man praying and keeps asking them even when
it appears hopeless, that was me in prison, begging the Khmer Rouge to believe I was not a doctor. Or if that was not exactly what I did in prison, that was what I felt like doing in prison, which
still gave me an emotion to work with. When Dith Pran carries a young boy toward the minefield, that was me, carrying my young niece Ngim.