"Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle"

Let's draw that analogy out a little further.

Well, George Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle! He's hardly been out of the country, he's steeped in good intentions, believes he has the answer, is very naive, ultimately not that bright, and extremely dangerous. One only hopes that his advisors like Colin Powell are listened to carefully.

So how did a filmmaker like you become a political historian?

These last two films just came from experience. I didn't study modern history at high school or in university. I studied ancient history; I actually took Latin!

I bet that comes in handy.

Yes, sometimes "O me miserum" comes in handy: "Woe is me." But in the case of this movie, like so many Americans at the time, we in Australia went through the same journey from enthusiasm to complete and utter disillusionment. Except maybe we went through it more vividly than Americans did because we were the big domino at the end of the dominos that were due to fall. Remember, the domino theory was that unless a stand is taken against communism somewhere in Southeast Asia, inevitably this virus would spread from democracy to democracy and each would fall and the bottom of the dominoes was Australia. Huge island continent, which at the time had 13 or 14 million people, absolutely undefendable, except with the assistance of Uncle Sam. So we became involved in Vietnam as a means of spilling blood in order to impress America with our enthusiasm for its policies in the hope that -- as in the Second World War -- America would come to our aid, would defend us.

Would the phrase "human sacrifices" be apt? Australia ended up sending hundreds of thousands of people over there.

Yes, we did. That's correct. We committed the same number compared to our population as America did, and we had the same number of casualties, as a percentage of our commitment. We went though the draft, we waited every three months as a lotto wheel was spun and a celebrity pulled out a marble with a birthday on it, and if your birthday came out, you ended up in the jungles of South Vietnam. It was like a reverse lottery. If you win, you're in trouble. So I had two brothers, and next door was a family of two brothers. They went, and none of us were called out. Both came back, you know, and spread the disillusionment as they told us the truth of what was going on, the ridiculousness of it all. And I was taught, as a 14-year-old, to kill Vietnamese, during compulsory military training in Australia, in my high school, and to avoid a Vietnamese bamboo booby trap, and in a sense, as a 14-year-old in 1964, it was right to "go all the way with LBJ," which was a motto that our prime minister coined.

Prime Minister Holt.

Yes, who later drowned. So my interest in Vietnam came from having lived during that era, but also the interest in the CIA operative came from the fact that my father was in the Australian equivalent of the OSS. He was a spy. He was in the Zed force doing exactly the same thing, training operatives to go behind enemy lines. He didn't go, he just trained them on an island off the east coast of Australia. This was in 1945. And he told me the story of one guy called Minh who said to him, "I don't care about the Japanese, I'm just here to learn how to defeat the French." And at the time, there was no such place as Vietnam, there was just Indochina, and [my dad] realized of course that he was training a Vietnamese operative.

So that sounds like it's where you got your interest in politics.

I'd certainly been steeped in World War II spy stories from an early age. And making "Clear and Present Danger" and "Patriot Games" was a way to explore that world initially. "The Quiet American" extended that.

It was a nice decision to shoot most of the film in Saigon. As a result, the movie is a mystery and a love story, but might also be a travelogue. It's gorgeously evocative.

I suppose I was lucky to have [my cinematographer] Chris Doyle. In many ways, he is Thomas Fowler. He ran away from Australia and reinvented himself in Asia. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" [which he shot for me] was the first film that he had shot in his own country. He's found himself, like Fowler, in Asia. He could not exist in Australia. He goes there for a day or two and is always on edge. While we were shooting "Rabbit-Proof Fence," he would fly back to Asia for the weekend. On Friday morning he'd go straight from the set to Seoul, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, just because he needed Asia. He's spend Saturday and Sunday and then on Sunday night he'd leave Beijing [or wherever] and arrive in Sydney at 6:30 on Monday morning, and be on set at 7:30. Constantly. Like Fowler, he is addicted to Asia. It's his lifeline.

But also, the location shoot is greatly helped by the passion that the Vietnamese have for this novel, for this story, because as much as it helps us to understand why we did what we did, remember that we rained hell on them. It's of even greater importance because they're on the receiving end.

Who was responsible for the extras in the bombing of Saigon square, some of whom I understand were actually limbless mine victims, rubbed with fake blood and raw meat?

The one who found all the extras for that sequence was my second unit director, Dang Nhat Minh. His father [a doctor working for the north] was killed by a B52 bomb. Dang was given the task of portraying the agony of the aftermath of that bombing. So he cast all of the extras, prepared them, trained them, worked with them, made it seem realistic.

The scene is crucial to the film, particularly for an American audience, because there's a huge turn there. The audience needs to be upset by what they see, because a huge shift is going to be required in their allegiance. They have to identify with Fowler's decision to act as judge and jury and executioner on his rival, and so the details in the description of the agony are what was important, and Dang Nhat Minh gave us those fine details in ways that I could never do as an outsider. Just the mother with the father who's dying, and the mother who shields her child with her conical straw hat. The casting of those people was all up to him.

You spent a good number of years scouting out possibilities for this film. What would you have done had Miramax not cleared the film for release in the States?

Well, eventually, we would have won because it was positively received in its U.K. release. We don't know if Michael Caine will be nominated for an Oscar at this moment, or if he'll win. But if he is nominated, and he does win, neither event would have occurred if the film hadn't been released in time, and that would have been a pity. To defend Harvey [Weinstein] for a moment, he already had so many horses in the awards race, with "The Hours," with "Chicago," "Gangs of New York," "Frida," that he had too many contenders to cope with as it was. Secondly, he had a genuine concern about the competition the film would have to face coming out in the fall.

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