The festival juggernaut rolled on to Singapore, and it was my great pleasure to attend a masterclass with Lord Puttnam (or David Puttnam, before he was made a peer of the realm). He is a bit of a Local Hero in Singapore. The school of film and animation at the Lasalle College of the Arts is named after him. In case you are wondering why Local Hero is capitalised, it is because he is the producer of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), pun intended.
Puttnam has also produced a few films that you may have heard of. Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977), Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (1976) and Midnight Express (1978), and Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire (1981) — an Oscar and BAFTA-winning bona fide legend in other words.
At the masterclass, Puttnam was in conversation with Singaporean filmmaker Boo Junfeng, director of Apprentice (2016). Puttnam chose to open with the last seven minutes of The Killing Fields, where Dith Pran, played by Haing S Ngor — who won an Oscar and a BAFTA for his performance — finally escapes the Khmer Rouge and is reunited with his friend Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston).
All these years later, Puttnam is still rankled by the fact that when Pran and Schanberg leap into each other’s arms at the film’s end, the decision to play John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ on the soundtrack was labelled as a creative misstep by a prominent publication. Puttnam said that it was a deliberate and practical decision. The film is tough to watch, and it needed the relief of the song to ease the journey, he said. Besides that, at the time when the film is set, the song was number one around the world.
In those closing moments of the film, Pran is not alone. He’s escaping through the jungle along with his friend, who has a young son. The friend dies in an explosion. Puttnam explained that they chose to use a step grenade, where the audience can hear a click when the friend steps on it, thus racking up the tension, knowing that there will be a fatal explosion the moment pressure is released.
In keeping with the Cambodian theme, I also had the opportunity to have a freewheeling chat with another legend, Rithy Panh, who is the recipient of the Singapore International Film Festival’s honorary award. Panh tells his stories from personal experience — he is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide — and each of his films about that harrowing period in Cambodia’s history is deeply personal. His documentary, The Missing Picture (2013) was Oscar-nominated, and First They Killed My Father, produced by Panh for Netflix and directed by Angelina Jolie, was Cambodia’s entry to the Oscars last year.
Panh’s latest directorial effort, Graves Without A Name, continues his exploration of the aftermath of the genocide, and is again, Cambodia’s entry to the Oscars. Sadly, as Panh ruefully told me, they don’t have the kind of money needed to run an Oscar campaign. “I can make my next film with that budget!” Panh said.
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography, and tweets @namanrs