Loung Ung was 5 years old in 1975 when the soldiers marched into her
city. "That day, they were smiling," says the human rights activist.
"People were screaming, 'The war is over! The war is over!' I didn't
know we had been in a war. But they were wearing black shirts and pants,
and that was different for us because Cambodia is a very colorful
culture; we'd wear bright colors. My first thought was, 'If they are so
happy, why are they all in black?' "
Ung found out quickly enough,
much to her regret, as these seeming liberators began to torture and
kill anyone considered a threat, including artists and intellectuals
and, ultimately, her father, a military police officer. "Over the next
three years, eight months and 20 days, I would come to understand why
they were in black," she says.
It took decades before Ung was ready to tell her story in her 2000 memoir,
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.
And not even she ever expected to see her book made into a movie, let
alone one helmed by Angelina Jolie. (The film is now on Netflix and is
Cambodia's foreign-language submission to the Oscars.)
Sareum Srey Moch, the young girl who plays Ung as a child, was
discovered in a Cambodian charity school: "My teacher said they were
looking for a girl. I didn't know what the film was, but I like play
acting."
Jolie with Sareum. "We went to many different schools," says the
director of her search to find a leading actress. "There are great
artists everywhere."
The actress happened to be in Cambodia filming her first
Tomb Raider
movie when Ung's memoir was published, and Jolie called her out of the
blue. The women met in the city of Battambang, where Jolie now has a
home and a nonprofit organization. "We [were working] on returned
refugees and de-mining," says Jolie, 42, noting that land mines were
left scattered across the country after the Khmer Rouge's fall in 1979.
"We would meet with different schools and victims. And at one point, we
said, 'Let's go into the countryside and see and learn.' "
The
companions took off on motorbikes, wading through streams, where Ung
"taught me how to do a leech-check and catch frogs," recalls Jolie. At
one point, they were trapped by a monsoon and took shelter in hammocks
under trees. "We spoke [deep] into the night," says Ung. "And I was very
struck when [Jolie mentioned] wanting to adopt a Cambodian child and
asked how did I feel about that."
Their time together, as well as Jolie's incipient love of Cambodia
and her decision to adopt a baby (Maddox Jolie-Pitt, now 16, is a
producer of the film), paved the way for Jolie to turn Ung's memoir into
a movie. But at this early stage, she admits, the notion of directing
hadn't crossed her mind. "I was raised to be an actress," she explains.
"There wasn't ever a thought of, 'You should be a director.' Even in my
very progressive family, my brother was encouraged to go to directing
school, and I was encouraged to act."
After her first venture behind the camera with 2011's
In the Land of Blood and Honey, however, she "realized I really enjoyed directing, and then I thought of what's important to me, and it was Loung's book."
Still,
after the two had collaborated on the screenplay, Jolie delayed
filming, determined not to shoot until Maddox was prepared to embark on
that journey by her side. Instead, she went on to direct 2014's
Unbroken and 2015's
By the Sea,
until, well into his teens, Maddox told her he was ready. At that
point, she called Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos and asked
him for the funding. "I thought it was going to be $12 million or $13
million," she says, "and it ended up being $22 million," some of it
covered by Jolie herself.
In November 2015, a 50-day shoot got underway in Cambodia, with
Battambang standing in for Phnom Penh. Jolie was helped by local
producer Rithy Panh, whose archive of documents and photographs proved
invaluable, as did his memories of being a teenager during the Khmer
Rouge years, when it came to providing details of life back then. "For
instance," says production designer Tom Brown, "people who had been
handed over to the Khmer Rouge kept a spoon around their necks, because
they never knew when they were going to eat. And people were told to go
into the country to find vegetable dyes to take all the color out of
their clothes and make them black. That's in the movie."
Details
were one thing, logistics another when it came to filming in a country
without a cinematic infrastructure. Equipment had to be shipped in from
Thailand; extras hired, as many as 3,500 per day for the big scenes;
rice fields were planted at different stages to convey time passing;
special schools needed to be set up for the children; and some areas had
to be swept clear of land mines.
Then there were the reptiles and insects. "Tarantulas and snakes,"
remembers Jolie. "We killed some snakes and ate some. That's part of the
culture; there's a really good bug restaurant." She and her family even
learned how to cook reptiles.
Some key members of Jolie's crew
fell into place at the last minute, including Oscar-winning director of
photography Anthony Dod Mantle (
Slumdog Millionaire). His first
job: "We had to [figure out] how to maintain this point-of-view idea,"
he says, referring to Jolie's wish that the movie at all times give the
sense of experiencing the world through a child's eyes. "The idea was to
develop a small rig, which I could hold on one wrist in quite a stable
way and do agile camera moves."
Filming in a jungle meant sickness undermined the best-laid plans.
"We were shooting in immense heat, and there were people fainting, going
down, vomiting," says Mantle.
Just as hard as the physical
challenges were the emotional ones. "A lot of the older people were
victims of the war," notes Jolie. "We realized early we needed a
therapist on set." She was acutely aware that many of the locals were
not used to seeing film crews; some mistook the fictional for the real.
"You had scenes where you had masses of Khmer Rouge soldiers with
weapons walking down the street," she says. "We had people fall to their
knees, even though we tried to [warn them]."
The director was anxious about how Sareum Srey Moch, a 9-year-old
local girl cast as the young Ung, would handle some of the emotional
scenes. "I told her, 'Don't ever make yourself laugh, don't ever make
yourself cry,' " says Jolie. "I want you to just listen and be, and you
can never do anything wrong." (Those interviewed for this article
strongly rejected the claim that any children were emotionally
exploited, as a
Vanity Fair article alleged.)
For Ung,
who had lived the story now being filmed, there was only one moment when
her emotions ran away with her. "Surprisingly, it wasn't the scenes of
war," she says. "The scene that tore me apart was the family sitting
down for dinner. In my culture, every time you have a group celebration,
you leave empty plates for the family members there in spirit. And
then, to see a scene like that, where the family was just together
around the same table, it was almost as if they came back to life."
This story first appeared in the Nov. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
