Rescue Dawn

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here. (mpeg format)

Release Date: TBA 2006

Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Marshall Bell, François Chau, Jeremy Davies, Craig Gellis, GQ, Zach Grenier, Pat Healy, Toby Huss

Director: Werner Herzog

Premise: This film tells the real-life story of U.S. fighter pilot Dieter Dengler, a German-American shot down and captured in Laos during the Vietnam War. Dengler (Bale) organized a death-defying escape for a small band of POWs, including Duane Martin (Zahn).

[pete]

I dunno why or how I missed the trailer, but I just saw this and it looked awful.  I'm sure the film will still be great though!

[matt35mm]

Your link doesn't work.  Since I don't have administrative powers, I'll just link this again until someone else fixes it.

It's not that it looks awful.  It's just that it's cut like a foreign film trailer (no dialogue, probably more actiony looking than it really is), and over the final title card, sounds like that theme from that old TV show A Current Affair.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[Ghostboy]

I saw this a few months ago and it's pretty good. As a standard POW-escape movie, it's totally satisfying - even sort of fun, at times - but then two third of the way through, it gets all Herzog on us. You know, jungles and shit. Good stuff.

Christian Bale continues his commitment to going all the way for a role, this time not only losing tons of weight but also eating worms. It's an amazing performance - but let's hope he doesn't get so committed that he turns into this generation's Nicholas Cage.

[MacGuffin]

Director Herzog always has a ball with confusion

Most directors strive for control. Werner Herzog thrives on chaos.

Throughout his career, the Germany filmmaker has delved into the most hostile terrain accompanied by volatile personalities like longtime collaborator Klaus Kinski to realize his uniquely ambitious cinematic visions.

With such classics as 1972's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" to "Fitzcarraldo" a decade later to the more recent documentary "Grizzly Man," Herzog has demonstrated a thirst for madness.

His latest film -- MGM's "Rescue Dawn," which opens July 4 -- marks the director's first foray into a more conventional commercial genre. Nevertheless, Herzog continued to embrace the unpredictability that has defined his 45-year filmography.

"He's about accepting accidents, really, which can often be the most interesting moments in a film," says Christian Bale, who stars in the true-life story of Dieter Dengler, who beat incredible odds by breaking out of a Laotian POW camp and surviving a jungle trek to freedom. "The possibility of some kind of chaos is always more interesting than order."

Despite the systematic disorder, the film's cast kept complete faith in their captain during the three-month shoot in the unfriendly Thai jungle.

"He's very comfortable with chaos," says Jeremy Davies, who plays a fellow American POW. "He has the capacity to remove himself, detach himself from any fear. To be a great filmmaker, you need that because so many things can derail a film."

With Dengler, the director found a kindred spirit -- a man unafraid to look into the void. In fact, before filming the narrative "Rescue Dawn," Herzog helmed a documentary about Dengler titled "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." Although Dengler died six years ago, Herzog says that the German-born U.S. Air Force pilot continues to be a guiding figure.

"In a complicated situation, I ask myself, 'What would Dieter do in this situation?"' says Herzog, who says fear doesn't appear in his vocabulary anymore.

Steve Zahn, who played the third American POW in the camp, found the experience of working with Herzog to be exhilarating and even entertaining.

"He loves chaos; that's how he works," he says. "He would set things up so that people would get crazy, start a rumor. Werner would send an e-mail and say, 'The film is falling apart tomorrow.' The script supervisor would be going out of her mind. He pays no attention to continuity whatsoever. But it really kept you on your toes."

Bale likens Herzog's directing style to running a marathon every day. "He wants to feel the effort, feel the challenge of it and know that other people are on board in challenging themselves."

[MacGuffin]

Werner Herzog's night vision
The director's new film takes him back into the heart of darkness -- to a POW camp.
Source: Los Angeles Times

In the living room of his cozy home in the hills above Los Angeles, Werner Herzog has a quiver of brightly colored arrows from a tribe of Amazon Indians he met while making one of his many documentaries. Tribe members were the last people in the Amazon to be, as the filmmaker puts it, "contacted" by white people.

As I went to touch the point of one arrow, he cautioned, "They're still quite poisonous. The brown stuff on the inside is anticoagulant. If you get hit with one, you won't stop bleeding easily."

When Werner Herzog issues a warning, it's prudent to obey. At 64, he is our filmmaking god of dark adventure, a willful but adventuresome artist whose characters — both in his features and documentaries — test the boundaries of human madness and quixotic folly. Herzog is best known for German classics such as 1982's "Fitzcarraldo," the story of a man who attempts to build an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian jungle. In recent years, he has devoted himself to documentaries about equally obsessive characters, notably "Grizzly Man," the 2005 film about Timothy Treadwell, the ill-fated adventurer whose affinity for bears led him to a grisly end in the wilds of Alaska.

Herzog's new film is something of an event, being his first widely distributed feature since the early 1980s. Due out July 4, "Rescue Dawn" is another one of his fables about the dark recesses of human nature. Set during the Vietnam War, the real-life story stars Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler, a German-born U.S. fighter pilot who escapes from a POW camp after being tortured by the Pathet Lao deep in the Laotian jungle. Audacious and ingenious, Dengler is the most accessible hero Herzog has ever put on screen, brimming with take-charge swagger even as his fellow captives teeter on the brink of despair.

In anyone else's hands, the story might have drifted into triumph-of-the-human-spirit territory. But Herzog knew Dengler personally — he did a documentary about the same events in 1997, called "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." Well acquainted with the horrors of war, having grown up starving and fatherless in postwar Germany, Herzog refuses to shy away from the brutality that Dengler — who died in 2001 — and his fellow prisoners suffered at the hands of their guards.

As with so many of his films, Herzog shot much of the picture documentary style, filming for weeks in the jungles of Thailand. He instructed his actors to lose weight — Bale lost 55 pounds to give himself an appropriately skeletal look — and dropped nearly 30 pounds himself as a form of "solidarity."

Even if the filmmaker's reputation for rigor hadn't preceded him, the actors knew they wouldn't be coddled. "My first question to Christian was, 'Would you be prepared to bite a snake in two?' " Herzog recalls. "He immediately said, 'Yes.' As it happens, he did catch a snake that tried to bite him. But it wasn't poisonous." The filmmaker sighs, as if brooding about a deadly snake was hardly worth the bother. "I always offered to demonstrate anything the actors were worried about."

What America stands for

THE film's harrowing scenes of torture have an unsettling resonance today, with one former prisoner of war, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), running for president and the country at odds over America's treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Herzog is especially proud that "Rescue Dawn" arrives on the Fourth of July.

"It's a day, after the fireworks and the beer, that America looks at itself," he says. "The film doesn't engage in any America-bashing or primitive patriotism. But I would say that everything that is great about America was contradicted by Abu Ghraib. If Dieter had been in that prison, we wouldn't have seen what we did. One single man could've made a difference, especially someone like Dieter, who came to America as an immigrant wanting to live out his dream — a dream to fly."

Herzog is also an immigrant to America, though his dreams have always been more complicated. The filmmaker's worldview is best captured in "Grizzly Man" when, in his role as narrator, he says, "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility and murder."

Even a simple conversation has its hazards. During a recent interview with the BBC conducted on a hillside near his house, Herzog was hit in the stomach by a stray bullet from someone with a rifle on a balcony. When we spoke he downplayed the event, saying, "It was a very insignificant bullet."

But he isn't taking chances. During a follow-up e-mail exchange, he asked me not to supply any "precise hints" about his address. His explanation offers a window into the Herzog universe: "I have had quite a few encounters with clinically insane people coming after me. Having been shot during an interview was rather a coincidence, an arabesque. I have seen much more serious things coming after me in the past."

L.A.'s substance behind the glitz

AFTER years of traveling, he and his wife, Lena — a photographer who grew up in Siberia — settled in Los Angeles in 2001. It marked the beginning of a love affair with this much-maligned city. "We lived for a while in San Francisco, but it was too chic and leisurely," Herzog explains. "New York is only a place to go if you're into finances. But we wanted a place of cultural substance. And if you look behind the stereotype of glitz and glamour, that is Los Angeles."

Herzog likes Los Angeles because, in his eyes, it is so un-chic, its treasures so unappreciated. "If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place."

His friends include everyone from magician Ricky Jay to David Wilson, the founding director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. "I suspect Werner likes Los Angeles because there's much more mental space here," says Wilson. "You realize pretty quickly that he's interested in people who've learned what they know viscerally, through life experience, not through some conceptual knowledge."

Herzog spends a lot of time at places like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Institute for Figuring and an obscure warehouse in Pasadena that he says has a treasure trove of archival information about NASA space missions.

"It has all of the photos and test results going back to the 1940s, a cornucopia of the exploration of our solar system," the filmmaker says. "But no one knows it's there. Everything is untouched in cardboard boxes. It's like going to Seville to see the archives there with the logbooks of Columbus as he conquered the New World."

He discovered unseen footage there that was filmed by the astronauts during a 1989 space mission that he used as the centerpiece for the recent film "The Wild Blue Yonder." The picture blends a tale told by a wild-eyed Brad Dourif, who claims he's from the outer reaches of Andromeda, with real NASA footage and interviews with egghead physicists.

For Herzog, the borderline between fiction and reality is hazy at best. Facts, he says, are for accountants. He often tells stories that seem as hyperbolic as anything in his movies, beginning with the tale that his childhood was spent in a Bavarian village so remote that he didn't see a banana until he was 12.

Who would believe, for instance, that when Joaquin Phoenix flipped his car driving down a back road in Laurel Canyon it would be the eccentric filmmaker knocking on his car window. As he later told The Times: "There was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' ... And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!' "

When I asked about the incident, Herzog offered the sort of droll detail you'd expect from a master storyteller. "The danger wasn't the accident, per se," he says. "It was the gasoline dripping from the car and the fact that Joaquin, then upside down, was nervously fumbling for a cigarette, an act I had to talk him out of. Once I saw the gasoline, I thought the idea of him smoking would be a very bad idea."

For Herzog, in true art, the story is always changing. When filming "Rescue Dawn," it drove his crew crazy that he couldn't remember anything about the script, even though he'd written it himself. "I never read a screenplay once I've finished it — it stifles life on the set," he says. "It's unhealthy to be too absorbed in your own text. When I'm shooting I want to discover the story all over again."

His own style of filmmaking

THWARTED for years from doing a major feature, Herzog wasn't all that choosy about who financed "Rescue Dawn." His neophyte backers included L.A. nightclub operator Steve Marlton and Los Angeles Clippers star Elton Brand. According to a New Yorker piece that ran not long after filming was completed, key members of the crew quit in disgust or were fired during production when paychecks didn't materialize. The crew also was frustrated by Herzog's unorthodox shooting style, which included an insistence on using himself as a stand-in for Bale and other actors.

Herzog notes that, outside of longtime cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, most of the crew had never worked with him before. "They came with the pedantic thinking of the studio system — that, for example, you must first do a master shot with everyone in frame before you do close-ups."

Herzog insists there was a method to his madness. "By being the last person out between the actors and the technical apparatus, I could tell when the actors were sometimes not ready for a scene. So I would stall, without the crew knowing, by pretending to change a camera filter. But I only could sense a problem because I was right there, next to the actors."

The movie's finances were so shaky during filming that Herzog never saw dailies. "No one had paid the lab, so they wouldn't release our footage," he says. But he insists the problems were from ignorance, not malevolence. "The producers' inexperience was a nightmare, but it was a blessing too, because by them not knowing what was going on, I was allowed to do exactly the movie I wanted to do."

He shrugs. "Why shouldn't I do a movie with a producer who's a nightclub owner? May I remind you that Sam Goldwyn was a glove salesman and Jon Peters a hairdresser? The real question is — did I ever compromise? The answer is no."

Herzog has done things his way for so long that he is almost immune to convention. One of the menacing prison guards in "Rescue Dawn" is called Walkie Talkie, a wry touch of humor, since he never speaks. The actor's silence was more pragmatic than plot-driven because he was Cambodian and spoke no English, Thai or French.

"I explained the part to him in sign language," Herzog says. "But I didn't want anyone else. He had a dangerous stare in his eyes that fascinated me."

For all his roguish tales, Herzog is someone who believes that what counts is pura vida — real experience, not theory or fantasy. He sees tourism as a sin, traveling on foot as a virtue. He would boot everyone out of film school until they'd done something real, like been a warden in a lunatic asylum or worked as a bouncer in a sex club. His favorite writers — Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy and Bruce Chatwin — are men who have been out in the world.

"When someone comes to me who's earned a living as a boxer or been in jail in Africa, they would be a lot more qualified to be my assistant than someone who came from Harvard film school," he says. "What counts is the raw life."

[MacGuffin]

Werner Herzog Is Still Breaking the Rules
Source: New York Times

WERNER HERZOG'S films tend to thrust man up against nature, and nature is not a particularly forgiving adversary. In the jungles of South America ("Aguirre, Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo") or the wilderness of Alaska (the documentary "Grizzly Man") Mr. Herzog's characters — real or imagined — attempt to hold on to their sanity and lives.

His latest film, "Rescue Dawn" (opening Wednesday), revisits these themes as it follows the ordeal of the German-American pilot Dieter Dengler in the jungles of Laos after he is shot down by the Vietcong in 1966 during a secret bombing raid. "Rescue Dawn," the first screenplay Mr. Herzog has written in English, is in many ways a mash note to America. Christian Bale plays Dengler, who for Mr. Herzog represents the quintessential American, filled with optimism, courage and loyalty.

Though the "Rescue Dawn" shoot in Thailand was mishap-filled, the tumult didn't apply to the director's relationship with Mr. Bale, a far cry from Mr. Herzog's storied battles with the German actor Klaus Kinski. On "Cobra Verde," for example, Kinski attacked Mr. Herzog before quitting the unfinished movie, while on "Fitzcarraldo" one native chief's offer to murder Kinski was declined by Mr. Herzog.

Mr. Herzog, 64, spoke recently with Mekado Murphy about the sometimes chaotic process of putting this story on the screen a second time, the differences between Mr. Bale and Kinski, and the search for the "ecstasy of truth" during more than 35 years of filmmaking.

Q. You made the 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" about this subject. Why did you also want to explore the material through a feature?

A. In a way "Rescue Dawn," the feature film idea, was always first. When I met Dieter, I had the feeling this was a very big epic story with a character larger than life. But since it took quite a while to get the money together for the feature, we did the documentary first.

Q. Why did you decide to write the screenplay for "Rescue Dawn" in English?

A. I did not want to do the detour via my native tongue and then go through translation. Some of my work, like "Invincible" for example, always sounded a little bit like translated English. There was something culturally not right about it, and audiences had their difficulties with it.

Q. Nature and the natural world are recurring themes in so many of your films. Why does nature intrigue you in relation to the cinema?

A. For me landscapes and nature always have been an inequality of us. For example the jungle in "Fitzcarraldo" is the locale of the fever dreams of imagination, of the mysterious, of the incredible. It's as if the jungle were a human quality. With "Rescue Dawn," I would say the film is very physical. You see the prisoners who escape plow into the thickest vines and underbrush. It's almost impassable jungle.

If you look at it, you wonder how a human being can get three feet into it, and they are plowing into it and the camera right after them. And it appears almost as if we as an audience were yet another fugitive with them. So it's a very physical directness, which I liked a lot.

Q. You've been known for improvising parts of your movies in the past. Was this done with "Rescue Dawn?"

A. We need a definition of improvisation. It is not like in free jazz where some musicians meet and they start improvising in a jam session. Improvisations and modifications are possible, but always within a very clear framework of perspective regarding the content of a sequence. For example, there's a scene with Jeremy Davies [who plays the P.O.W. Eugene DeBruin] and Christian Bale where I tell him, "You need to silence Christian down," but I don't give him a dialogue line of how to do it. He's so lively because he doesn't have the strictures of written dialogue.

Q. How would you compare your working relationship with Christian Bale to the one with Klaus Kinski?

A. It's hard to even try to compare. With Kinski it was always: How can I domesticate the wild beast, and how do I survive his next tantrum where he destroys the whole set? How do I make his utter madness and irresponsibility productive onscreen? This was not so with Christian. He was the most disciplined, wonderful man. And he has great emotion of depth. Christian was so dedicated to this film. He did things that an actor of his caliber normally would not do, like eating maggots or catching a live snake. You just name it. It's unbelievable.

Q. There were reports from the shoot about controversies on the set, according to an article in The New Yorker last year, which referred to clashes with the crew who complained that they didn't understand your directing style and thought it was "strange and impulsive." What is your reaction to these claims?

A. Well, in general this very well-observing journalist from The New Yorker was there during the very first days of shooting. So that was a time when an American crew, a European crew and a Thai crew had to become coordinated. Of course, in the first couple of days, you have the frictions of adapting to each other. And with the exception of the cinematographer, no one had ever worked with me before.

I ignore quite often the so-called rules of how a film has to be made. The Hollywood school or the normal professional would go and do a master shot and then some details and a reverse shot and this and that. And I would always know I do not need a reverse shot. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of raw stock. It's a waste of money. So I just don't do it.

They were kind of puzzled that I do not follow the book of rules. But they got adapted very quickly. So the moment after our witness was gone, things were quite different.

Some slight trouble on the film set is the most natural thing in the world. Nobody should have a sleepless night over it. I do not know of any movie project that went as smoothly as a boat ride in Hawaii.

Q. There have been some accusations that you've taken liberties with facts in some of your documentaries and in "Rescue Dawn," particularly from the family of Eugene DeBruin. What is your reaction to those accusations?

A. If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I'm imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate.

[Mesh]

Pat Healy's an acquaintance of mine.  Can't wait to see this.  Litter Dieter Needs to Fly is pretty great itself.

[MacGuffin]

Rescue Dawn's Christian Bale & Steve Zahn
Source: ComingSoon

Werner Herzog's first dramatic feature in five years is Rescue Dawn, retelling the story of Dieter Dengler, the subject of Herzog's 1999 documentary Little Dieter Must Fly. Christian Bale plays the navy pilot whose plane was shot down over Laos in a pre-Vietnam War mission. After trying to survive in the jungle, Dengler was captured, tortured and thrown into a POW camp for months of rigorous conditions before finally escaping.

ComingSoon.net spoke with Bale and his co-star Steve Zahn, who played Duane, Dieter's accomplice in their great escape from the POW camp.

ComingSoon.net: Had either of you seen the documentary about Dieter before hearing about this movie?

Christian Bale: Not prior to meeting with Werner. That was the first time I'd heard of Dieter at that point, but I did research him, watching the documentary numerous times, and then I got in touch with his family as well. Actually, I bumped into his son at a supermarket out of nowhere, that was a weird coincidence. Then obviously I talked with Werner, because Werner and him were good friends. Werner was never interested in describing him too much to me. He wanted me to kind of invent it myself and said to just feel free and take license and do whatever I wish with it. I just felt that he was such an interesting character and he had some peculiar mannerisms, which in many ways were too strong for me to actually perform in the movie, because his voice for instance was something as he got older, he really had tried to reduce the audity of his voice, but he had a very strange tone to it when he was younger, this kind of uneasy dorkiness that I saw in him as well, this kind of prankster naivety and childlike nature, but not entirely comfortable in his own skin. Certainly not your typical tough-as-nails wartime hero. I just took bits and pieces from the various resources at my disposal and then just made up the rest of it.

Steve Zahn: I was very familiar with his work, I was actually a big fan of "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," it's one of my favorite documentaries. That was brilliant, partially because he's so cinematic with his work and he directs his documentaries, even Dieter he directed in that, you can tell. It's fascinating and I had so many questions for him on that, and I was so moved and inspired by that story, so when I heard it was going to be a movie I just jumped on it. I had to be a part of it, and I was fully prepared to not get it. That's the kiss of death, being into it, and there's plenty of jobs that I've been that excited about and never got.

CS: Can you each talk about your first meeting with Herzog?

Bale: I met Werner first of all—I wasn't really very familiar with his work. I'd seen in video stores like "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" and that sort of stuff. I met with Werner after reading the script which I liked a great deal, met with him and liked him. Some of his first questions were (puts on a German accent) "Would you like to swim in snake-infested waters and eat snake and have leeches all over you?" I thought that was kind of an unusual job interview, and then, it happened pretty quick. He seemed to think I was up for it. I was down in Tierra del Fuego with my wife backpackin' around down there and I got an Email from Werner sayin' "How about playing Dieter?" and that was probably back in late 2002 or something like that. I was working, he was working—because Werner never stops working on different things and documentaries. Werner's also just perverse, like we got offered money by reputable production companies and things like that, and he just had no interest in working with them, so we waited until we'd get somebody that it was going to make the movie very tricky, and said that those were the people he wants to work with. It took until 2005 to get it off the ground.

Zahn: Werner called me and said, "What do you like to eat?" and I thought it meant something other than eating, and I'm like, "F*ck, what do I say? Peanuts?" He said that he just wants to know what I want to eat, so I said, "Steak" and he said, "Come over to my house and I'll cook you a steak" and I stood in Werner Herzog's kitchen as he cooked a steak for me in his skillet. And it was wonderful. We talked about a lot of stuff. I had two dinners with him, and then he said, "I want you to play Duane in the movie", and I was thrilled. That was before they got financing, and I was just waiting for it to get greenlit and get financing and when they did, I was more into this truly than anything I've been involved in as far as artistic reasons.

CS: What's it like to work with Werner on the set?

Bale: He's somebody that I like a great deal because he provokes reactions. I enjoyed it because it was very memorable. We had our disagreements, but if I think about any proper friends that I have, they're all people that I've been through arguments and had disagreements with. When you see a different side of somebody and suddenly when you become adversaries instead for a short time. I saw that in Werner and his incredibly soft, gentle side as well which most people have no idea that he has there. I just liked that with somebody that I might want to strangle him in the morning and then by the afternoon, I was like giving him a hug. It was kind of ridiculous the gamut of emotions that you go through with the man.

Zahn: I've worked with some tyrants, but I expected more of that from him. I think he's just a fascinating guy. He loves there being conflict and this weird dissension on set and people fighting. He likes that, he wants that to happen. There's something kind of interesting and good. It creates a different atmosphere, as opposed to like everybody visiting from the studio, that to me is mind-numbing when you have this guy coming in with this striped shirt on that says Rage Against the Machine and he has dyed hair, and he's a producer that's talking too loud and a little too fast. THAT is a distraction. To not have chairs and food on set and not to have that kind of high school grab-ass going on and to have really good people there because they want to work with Werner. Some people were frustrated because he doesn't use people in a way conventional movies do. He doesn't want extra people around, so sometimes he'd use people, even script supervisors, and sometimes he wouldn't, which was frustrating at times for everybody, but in the end, it's his movie, and he knows what he's doing. You trust that and you just go with it.

CS: I was surprised by your weight loss in this after you did it for "The Machinist" because you seemed to be back in shape for "The Prestige." Have these drastic changes in weight caused any health problems?

Bale: Well, I've got no idea, I feel good. "Rescue Dawn" we made at the end of 2005, I made it before "The Prestige."

Zahn: I didn't follow his route [for weight loss]. That was crazy, even he admits that. The hard thing about losing weight on this one was that we had to run and be physical all the time, so I knew when I started losing the weight that I gotta be in shape, too. Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to do what I'm supposed to do. I did it really healthily. I ate all day and nothing processed and drank water and ran five to ten miles a day and it came off, it was amazing.

CS: How important is it for you both to do things yourself while making movies like this?

Zahn: If you're doing something that's important and challenging, you want to do it. You don't want to fake it but when the cameras aren't rolling, you shoot the sh*t and have fun, and it was a blast. What would have made this job really horrible wasn't the leeches and the river and the barefoot for two months and the jungle and dealing with all that. It would have been working with people that weren't fun and weren't good, that would have been hard. Because everybody was cool and very talented and devoted, all the other stuff was par for the course.

Bale: I just have fun doing it. I kind of feel these are experiences I'm not going to have possibly ever again in my life, and so I want to do it. I'm not scared of doing 'em. I'll take professionals' advice if they're telling me "this one is going to kill you." I'll say, "Okay, maybe not this time." There's numerous times where I turned to stunt guys and said, "Sorry, mate, there's no way I'm steppin' up for this one. I've gotta do it myself.' We have these fantastic army helicopter pilots who were crazy bastards. I just hung on the railing on the side and they would take off, and they were taking off tree branches. The back rotor blade was just whippin' around and hittin' trees, we were flying so low over it, and I'm hanging out of it. I've got an incredible little sightseein' tour of the Thai jungle and the waterfalls and the exhilaration of hanging out of a helicopter and chasin' the snake and grabbin' it and all that, it's what I like. It's probably my favorite thing about doing what I do is that I do get to have these very unique experiences.

CS: What was the hardest thing to do while making the movie? Eating bugs?

Bale: Visually, people go ewwwww, but there's not a whole lot to it. It's more a texture than anything else. It was something I was doing off-camera, not live ones, but in the Thai markets, they fry pretty much everything, like all these insects and add salt and pepper to them and stick 'em in a bag and I'd be munching them around the place anyways.

Zahn: The hardest thing was being in that prisoner hut, just because it was so damn hot and it was uncomfortable and it hurt. I remember just standing outside and they'd say "we need you inside" and just standing at the door going, "I'm going to be the last one in." Going down the river and eating maggots or whatever, that stuff was a field trip, like going to the planetarium in elementary.

CS: Was there anything in particular you remembered while shooting the movie?

Zahn: We were rehearsing and Peter had the camera and sometimes Peter rolls while we're rehearsing, and as we were coming up on this ridge, and it was all jungle and it had been raining all day. Christian turns around and says something and we keep going. We were rehearsing it, and as Christian turns around, we heard this huge loud noise and we turned, and this... I dunno. In Kentucky, it would be a 300-year-old sycamore [does big crashing sounds] just down this hill...BOOM! Like 50 yards in front of us, not even that, and we all just stopped, and Christian and I kept going, and we kept walking and Werner was like, "Were you filming?" Unbelievable, this thing growing for 300 years and we just happened to be there with Werner Herzog and he doesn't get it on tape. You can tell he was like, "I can't believe we didn't get that on film" which would have been truly brilliant.

[w/o horse]

I didn't like it like I liked his German speaking narrative films and it might have to do with the inescapable oddity of the German language and Herzog's personality and how they combine into a great big weird thing.  But it was something else, and had most of Herzog's magic, and although I think it fell into some of the POW genre traps, it had a human quality commensurate to the poetry of the image because it was after all a tropical forest film from the, I'm pretty sure, master of tropical forest films.

[Sunrise]

... because it was after all a tropical forest film from the, I'm pretty sure, master of tropical forest films.

I'd put him second to this guy:



Anyone know when or if Rescue Dawn is releasing outside of just select cities?

[pete]

who is that guy?  and alledgedly (according to IMDB), a wide release on july 20th.

[I Don't Believe in Beatles]

who is that guy?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

[Pubrick]

who is that guy?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

oh, i thought it was Awoprpoffllflf Wltkjnjckhuvbr. don't I feel stupid!