Word: cambodia
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...actors sported in There's Something About Mary and the man-eating crocodile that finished off his character in Wild Things. But neither of those compare to the pesky monkeys that tormented Dillon during the filming of his directorial debut, City of Ghosts, a crime drama set mostly in Cambodia and scheduled to open on April 25 in the U.S. "We had to smuggle in a monkey from Thailand for some scenes, because our Cambodian monkey was untrained and bit a chunk out of the prop lady's ear," Dillon recalls. "The Thai monkey escaped, and its trainer was yelling...
...shooting in a country where no Western film crew had completed an entire movie since 1964, when Peter O'Toole braved cobras, heat rash and corrupt officials during the making of Lord Jim. Although many Asia hands advised Dillon to shoot in neighboring Thailand instead, he insisted that Cambodia, with its French-influenced architecture and postwar fragility, was a location that couldn't be substituted. "There are things you'd never worry about in other places?land-mine clearance, having roads rebuilt, getting real security," says Dillon. "But it's not like anywhere else, and I don't like...
...year-old actor-director conceived of the idea for City of Ghosts in the early 1990s while vacationing in Southeast Asia, where he met a slew of grizzled expatriates with shady pasts. Later, an International Herald Tribune story about felons hiding out in Cambodia due to its lack of extradition treaties further sparked his imagination. Working with writer Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart), he penned a noirish yarn about a Manhattan yuppie (played by Dillon) embroiled in a major insurance scam who travels to Phnom Penh and reunites with his mentor, portrayed by James Caan (The Godfather). The plot follows...
...Most of the Western actors and crew had never visited Cambodia before and the culture shock was considerable. "The mosquitoes were as big as Buicks," recalls Caan. "When I first got to Phnom Penh, I saw whole families riding single mopeds on streets with no lanes. There were kids laying in the mud, people walking around with missing limbs. If you take a sip of the water, you're in the hospital. We're so frigging spoiled in the U.S.?people complain about being born in Brooklyn or Watts, but this gave me a whole new perspective on things...
...Given Cambodia's reputation for being politically dysfunctional, Dillon had surprisingly little difficulty securing permits and permissions from the local Culture Ministry. The country's cultural czars were irked a couple of years ago when Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which was partly shot in Angkor Wat, mistakenly showed people wearing Vietnamese hats, not Cambodian ones?an unwelcome reminder of Cambodia's historic enemies. But besides trimming a few ultra-violent scenes, Dillon was required to do little more than translate the script for curious officials. "I was afraid of censorship, but they seemed more concerned that the movie was truthful...