Filming for the new Nicholas Cage mobster flick was interrupted this week by Thailand’s military coup. The people of yahoodaily.com give us this:
When news of the coup on Tuesday night reached the crew, Cage was sent back to his hotel. Crew members remained on the set to keep an eye on prop guns until Cage persuaded the producer to send everyone home, according to the report. Hong Kong-born twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang are remaking their 1999 film, “Bangkok Dangerous,” Sina.com said. Filming was scheduled to be completed next month, but may be delayed by the coup, which saw the military overthrow of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Scary, very scary. Good for Cage for convincing the production to let everyone go home, nobody should die over a prop gun. People sometimes lose perspective on an expensive set, but lives should always take priority. It’s not always just another day on the job for film makers. When the exciting story that a film is capturing suddenly becomes secondary to the real life events that surround the location things can get very interesting.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, when Deepa Mehta was filming her movie Water in India there was such an uproar over her possibly portraying their culture in an unflattering way that people actually were rioting in the streets and on one occasion burned an effigy of her. But after numerous delays she finished movie and it is a masterpiece.
I wonder if hard times on a set, when they are because of outside conditions make everyone on the inside work extra hard, thus making it exceed original expectations. I’m also curious about how many people have been left in frightening conditions in order to guard movie sets. Any thoughts, stories?
