Trivia / The Killing Fields

• Actor-Shared Background: Haing S. Ngor himself was a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime.
• California Doubling: The film was actually shot in Thailand, since shooting in actual Cambodia was out of the question.
• Completely Different Title: Known in France as La Déchirure ("The Tearing").
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Haing S. Ngor lived through the Khmer Rouge eradication of the educated, so he had to pretend to be uneducated, even though he was a gynecologist, meaning he was forced to watch his wife go through a miscarriage and not help her. Roland Joffe admitted it was strange to give Ngor instructions: "During shooting, I would sometimes crawl below the camera and call out to him: 'Remember how you felt!'"
  • One attack scene which shows a girl sitting on the back of a cart with her hands over her ears and crying. In real life, the girl actually had a happy disposition and director Roland Joffé was having difficulty getting her to cry. Finally, the Thai interpreter told her that she and everyone else (cast and crew) would have to stay there and couldn't go home. The girl burst into tears and the shot was achieved.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Stanley Kubrick once considered making the film, but a close aide reviewed the book as "un-cinematic", according to notes and letters in the Kubrick archive in London.
  • Alan Arkin, Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider were interested in playing Sidney Schanberg, but the filmmakers went with an unknown.
  • Kevin Costner was considered for Al Rockoff.

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