Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  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.

  Gradually I began to build on the skills I had learned. With advice from Sam, and with pushes from Roland, who refused to accept my limitations, I did things I did not know I could do.

  In the central scene of the movie, Dith Pran has to say goodbye to the Western journalists, leave the safety of the French embassy and go off into the countryside. It is a sad scene because the journalists have failed to protect him and he knows he has to go even though he will probably die. I prepared for it by remembering what it had been like to say good-bye to Huoy on the front lines. Every time we said good-bye it hurt, because we knew we might never see each other again. I dwelt on that sadness until it grew and the feeling took over, and then just before the cameras started rolling I reached into my memory and remembered how I felt when she died. On the set I tried to hold in my emotions as I shook hands with one Western journalist, embraced Sydney Schanberg and slowly walked downstairs, but the sadness and grief were beyond control. Between takes the wardrobe man handed me tissues without looking at me. ‘Roland,’ I said after the sixth take, ‘I don’t think I can do this again.’ Roland paid no attention. He shot the scene a seventh time and this time everything was right. When I came off the set the cast and crew looked at me in absolute silence. The kind of silence that is louder than applause. I kept on walking, because in my mind I was still on my way out of the French embassy, heading toward death in the countryside.

  What was strangest was going out to shoot these scenes during the day, believing in the part I was playing, and then going back to a luxurious hotel. The cast and crew ate well, lived well and were very sociable in the evenings. It was like a huge party. Then the next morning I would wake up and wonder all over again whether the Khmer Rouge were going to tie me up and take me away.

  Usually I could cross from the hotel to the film role and back again. But sometimes on location my defences fell apart and I slipped back into the hunger and terror of the Khmer Rouge years. There was a scene where Dith Pran made an incision in the neck of a live ox for the blood, for nutrition. (I had never done that in real life, but
I had cut the tail off a live ox – pretty much the same thing.) He is caught by the Khmer Rouge, beaten and kicked. In the shooting of the scene I wore padding under my clothes to protect parts of my back and my legs. Unfortunately the bamboo stick that was supposed to be used in the scene broke and was replaced by a heavy wooden stick. And unfortunately the actors playing the Khmer Rouge guards didn’t hit me where the padding was. For a moment it was too real – the shock, the pounding of my blood in my ears, knowing that I was going to die.

  Then there was the chhlop. She was a young girl who lived in a small refugee camp just outside Aranyaprathet. The casting people found her and the wardrobe people gave her just the right appearance, the baggy black clothes, the short hair parted in the middle with the ends tucked behind the ears, but she needed coaching. She was a shy young girl, and whenever she could she clung to her older sister like a baby to its mother. I told her in Khmer how to look at me like a real chhlop, full of anger and power. She should tilt her head back to stare ‘down’ on me and her lower lip and jaw should protrude to signal her disdain. But most of all, she had to get the eyes right. ‘Look hard at me,’ I said. ‘Don’t blink. Just stare at me. Like you want to eat me. Like I’m Enemy Number One.’

  When filming started the young girl was transformed. Only she didn’t just resemble Khmer Rouge. There was something deep inside her character that she hadn’t learned from me.

  ‘Just like Khmer Rouge!’ I shouted to Roland Joffé. ‘She is Khmer Rouge – 100 per cent!’

  Roland looked at me and came over to try to get me to calm down, but I was still pointing at the girl and shouting. Maybe he misunderstood me. Maybe he thought I meant that she was Khmer Rouge in the technical sense, a girl who had worked for the Khmer Rouge administration. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I meant too. All I know was that a lot of people had come over to restrain me. ‘You can tell by the eyes! Look at her eyes!’ I was shouting.

  Roland was fascinated. He did take after take, to watch her. Off-camera she went to her big sister and shyly hid behind her. On-camera she became a different person, resentful, surly, arrogant. It was like turning an electric light switch on and off. For Roland, who understood more about Cambodians than the other Westerners on the set, the girl was the solution to the mystery. The mystery was how the Cambodians, the most shy and gentle people in the world, had turned into mass killers. This is Roland’s explanation: Cambodian children bury their anger deep. They are not allowed to be aggressive toward elders. They have to keep their heads lower than the adults’ when walking past them. When sitting, they have to be careful not to point their feet. The anger stays suppressed when they become adults, because the society is so rigidly concerned with keeping face. When anger has a chance to come out, it is uncontrollable.

  I saw it more simply. To me, when the little girl was ‘acting’ she became her real self. Whether she had been in the Khmer Rouge or not, hers was a soul I had seen many times before. She had little schooling or religion. Little to train her away from the worst trait of Cambodians. The little girl was kum-monuss.

  Besides acting the part of Dith Pran, I felt it was my duty to help Roland make the film as accurate as possible. Roland agreed to many of my suggestions. For example, the film shows Khmer Rouge putting plastic bags over people’s heads, which is something not in the script. We did scenes of life on the front lines of transplanting rice, of pulling a plough by hand, and Roland was as interested as I was in making them authentic. He refused, though, when I asked him to show the Khmer Rouge whipping the men pulling the plough. I felt the film should be more violent, to show what the Khmer Rouge were really like, but Roland did not agree. In terms of historical authenticity, I was right; in terms of knowing what the movie audiences would tolerate, he was. If the film had shown how bad things really were under the Khmer Rouge, Westerners would have refused to see it.

  We were in Thailand for four and a half months. It was a stressful time for me. I lost weight. My nightmares were even more frequent than before. I didn’t have much chance to see old friends, like General Chana, Uncle Lo, John Crowley, Susan Walker and the Cambodians I knew in the refugee camps. I missed my niece Sophia. But the cast and crew of The Killing Fields were excellent companions.

  Before we left Thailand we had a big cast party in Bangkok. Everyone came prepared to have a good time. I did too. But I showed up in black trousers, black tunic and black rubber-tyre sandals. In Khmer Rouge costume. To remind them that we were doing more than just making a movie.

  41

  Celebrity

  In the final version of The Killing Fields there is a scene, filmed in Thailand, where Sam Waterston and I, playing Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran, visit Lon Nol troops and their US military advisers. The Khmer Rouge launch an attack. Sam and I jump into a foxhole. The camera shifts to a close-up, filmed in England, of the two of us in the foxhole and me shouting, ‘Sydney, look! Khmer Rouge!’ Without pause the movie shifts back to footage shot in Thailand. It is all so perfectly matched that the viewer would never know the difference.

  Similarly, the evacuation of the US embassy in Phnom Penh, filmed with actors in Thailand, is spliced with shots of huge US Marine helicopters, filmed in San Diego.

  It surprised me, but that’s how movies are – put together from footage shot in different times and places, with reshootings, audio dubs, titles and music added in. The actors are only part of the illusion.

  The first and longest session of shooting had taken place in Thailand from March to August 1983. In November 1983 we had another two weeks of shooting in San Diego and in Canada. In April 1984 I went off to Thailand for a few weeks to film the escape to the border. In August and September I was in England to shoot a few scenes, like the close-up in the foxhole, and do some audio dubbing.

  I didn’t mind the travelling. It was an opportunity to see new places and to be reunited with the cast and crew.

  Each time I returned from filming to my four-hundred-dollar-a-week job in Los Angeles. Each time I came back I felt guilty. My colleagues at the Chinatown Service Centre were wonderful people – some of them Vietnamese, some Cambodian, some Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The work we did was important and practical. We had goals to reach. Each month we tried to place a certain number of refugees in jobs. Each time I left made it harder on the others.

  Each time I went off, my supervisor granted me a leave of absence. She was very kind. And only she and the overall boss of the centre knew the real reason for my travels. I didn’t tell anybody else in LA, except Sophia. To my friends and colleagues I explained vaguely that I was going off to work with refugees. Part of my reason for not telling them was to protect myself in case the movie wasn’t any good. There was no sense in getting them excited and then disappointing them later. But the underlying reason for not telling them was that I had developed a habit of secrecy under the Khmer Rouge. It was still hard to trust people. I didn’t even tell Balam, who lived a few doors away, or my brother Hok, who lived outside LA, or my cousin Phillip Thong.

  It was like leading a double life.

  Around November 1984, while sitting in my cubicle at the office, a call came in from the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. David Puttnam and Roland Joffé were there, and they wanted me to go to a prerelease screening of the film in San Diego. I sat with my Cambodian clients for the rest of the afternoon, explaining to them about registering for welfare and food stamps. I drove home at the usual time, and then a limousine pulled up outside my apartment. The limousine took me through the freeway traffic to the Burbank airport and onto the runway next to a small private jet. David and Roland and a few others were already aboard. The jet took off over the lights of LA, the hostess served champagne, and I sat back to marvel over the direction my life was taking.

  During the shooting of the film I had never allowed myself to believe that I was different from anyone else. David and Roland had always been down-to-earth and unpretentious. Sam was always pleasant and courteous to everyone. Those
men set the tone. Working with them, I didn’t daydream about becoming a ‘star.’

  I had never even wanted to be an actor. I knew who I was. In my mind I was still a doctor from Cambodia. But now, as the plane flew down the southern California coastline, I began to reconsider who I was and what I was doing. It was impossible not to compare my miserable life as a war slave with this. Surely this was as luxurious as life got, travelling around in limousines and private jets.

  I thought: The gods saved my life. They have given me opportunities beyond anything I dreamed of. Maybe they have some purpose for me to fulfill.

  We got to the theatre, but the screening was almost over. We only saw the last half hour of the movie. The audience filled out forms rating the picture in different categories, excellent, good, fair or poor. The forms I saw were all marked ‘excellent’ for both me and Sam Waterston. People crowded around me asking for autographs. Nobody had ever asked me for an autograph before.

  In the following weeks there were prerelease screenings in LA. Because of one thing or another I always got there late. This was irritating, because I had never seen the entire film in sequence, just rough cuts of the scenes in Roland’s editing room in England. The audiences clapped long and hard. As I was leaving the screening at the University of Southern California, a woman student threw both her arms around me and began hugging and kissing me. She said she wanted to marry me. She had never even met me before.

  In December the film had its world premiere, in New York. Once again I missed the showing of the film. It was a confusing and hectic visit, signing autographs, having my picture taken, being led from one set of hot television lights to the next for interviews. My name was called out at a banquet, and people stood up and clapped. I shook hands with thousands of strangers. The whole time, I was asking myself, Why me? Why am I being treated this way? I just got to this country. What’s going on?