Quotes

[on William Hurt] Hurt promises you a bad time and he delivers on his promises.

[on At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991)] In total it was close to two years between location scouting and scriptwork. And then one day we started to film. It was 170 days of continuous filming in the Amazon. We went to work and I was unlucky enough to make a wrong casting choice - the decision to go with Tom Berenger for the lead role is not what my heart would lead me to do today. Tom Waits was tremendous, I'd already worked with him in Ironweed (1987). Daryl Hannah was a delight, a perfect fit for a missionary, blonde, thin, bulimic and totally devoid of western sexuality and Aidan Quinn is a great Irish-American actor who played the man who doesn't want the name of Christ to be used in vain to convert Indians. For people who don't need to be converted. So the film is very complex in religious terms. In one way or another, it's the most sophisticated model, at the time we made the film, that capitalism had found of inserting itself in an area with large mineral resources. Gold, diamonds, even petroleum. And the missionaries were used by the large international chemical and mining companies. They would send an employee to the jungle with strategic posts for engineers, but that's another political conversation which is dealt with in a book called The Gates of Splendor by someone whose name I can't quite recall. There is a lot of literature about the political use made by large corporations who finance churches and help them set up in areas where they have political and financial interests. And so I made the film and it was a wonderful journey. It's easy to spend two years living in the jungle with a sophisticated infrastructure, eating grilled fish, drinking coconut milk, and eating ice cream made with exotic fruits like cupuaçu, bububú, tretrerê, and so many of the plants they have up there. And we defended the film until the very end and obviously the film didn't please everyone because it's not a film about praising indigenous culture. It's a film about the Indian holocaust. It's a film about the massacre that happens when a white man comes into contact with other civilisations, and it's the model the Spanish have defended ever since arriving in the Americas. And so the film has a very clear political slant for whoever is capable if seeing it, and it's obvious that in the developed nations, it's considered to be a film that, as the Americans say, "misses the point", or hit the wrong target. You looked over there but the shot got fired in a different direction. It's about the wrong way the film was read.