• About

Cinezine Kane

Cinezine Kane

Tag Archives: Toshirô Mifune

Lessons learned: John Boorman remembers “hell” in the Pacific

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by cinepam in Interviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Hell in the Pacific, John Boorman, Lee Marvin, Queen and Country, Toshirô Mifune

hell 1While recently chatting with John Boorman about his latest (and perhaps final) film Queen and Country for a San Francisco Chronicle feature, the talk turned to Hell in the Pacific. Made in 1968, a year after the tense, striking, wholly inventive thriller Point Blank established him as a directing great, the World War II drama starred the earlier film’s lead Lee Marvin and iconic Japanese leading man Toshirô Mifune as enemy soldiers stranded together on a deserted South Pacific island. It was a fraught shoot. Boorman and Marvin experienced real terror shortly before filming commenced when a plane they were on nearly crashed into a volcano. The director cut his knee and it became badly infected. Mifune, an actor Boorman had admired in so many Akira Kurosawa films, refused to take direction.

Looking back on it, Boorman describes Hell in the Pacific, which was shot on the Pacific Ocean island of Palau, as a kind of teaching moment that began when he was in Tokyo working on the script and realized that that he did not have an ending that satisfied him. He saw Kurosawa and explained the problem. Did the legendary auteur have any ideas?

“He thought for a long time, then he said, ‘They meet a girl,” Boorman laughs. “I have to say there are moments when I wish I’d taken his advice.”

Even if Mifune had been more cooperative, Marvin hadn’t been working through the trauma of returning to the same area of the world where he’d fought (and nearly been killed) during World War II, and his leading men could actually understand each other’s language, Boorman realizes in retrospect that the shoot still would have been challenging. And it didn’t need to be.

“I shot it on a very, very remote island,” he says. “We lived on a ship and went to work on this beach every day in a tank landing craft. I could have shot it in Hawaii and lived in a comfortable hotel. I’m not as foolish as that anymore.

“Sadly, the lesson I learned there was don’t make it too hard for yourself.” –Pam Grady

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Categories

  • Interviews
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Short Takes
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • Celebratory Hector Babenco doc streams in virtual film series highlighting 2021 international Oscar picks
  • Oh to be in GREENLAND at the end of the world
  • THE LAST VERMEER sketches out Dutch artist’s postwar peril
  • A monster in the White House in ’70s-era THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON
  • A woman warrior claims her destiny in MULAN

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    %d bloggers like this: