THE QUIET AMERICAN: BILL HORBERG...PRODUCER. 

 Bill Horberg of Wonderland Films has produced numerous projects for both film and television, including 'The Quiet American', 'Heaven', 'Blow Dry', 'The Talented Mr. Ripley', 'Sliding Doors', 'Searching for Bobby Fisher' and 'Fallen Angels'. AUSUS Magazine spoke to Bill about producing 'The Quiet American', working with acclaimed Australian director Phillip Noyce, and what he enjoys about being a producer.

 Q: What was it like working in Australia? 

I couldn't have had a better time working down there. I developed close relationships with a bunch of people and we actively stay in touch and are eager to find more projects to do together. On all the films I've done, even without Australian filmmakers, I've had a chance to work with a lot of Australian crew. John Seale shot both 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' and 'Cold Mountain', which we did last year in Romania. Steve Andrews, a prominent first assistant director, worked with us also on 'Ripley', 'Cold Mountain' and 'The Quiet American'. Ian Gracie, who did 'The Quiet American', is one of the best art directors I've ever worked with, and I always try to get directors to bring him on to other projects, even in the States.

 Q: How do you come to work with so many Australians?

Well, I just had a great experience working with Nicole Kidman in 'Cold Mountain'. I was lucky enough to work with Cate Blanchett in both 'Heaven' and 'Ripley'. It's funny, even my partner in my new company Wonderland, Rebecca Yeldham, is Australian. Australia has put out so many talented people, both in front of and behind the camera. Really from the wave of the seventies when all of us started watching in awe the films of Peter Weir, the early films that Phillip Noyce made, and George Miller. Phil, in particular, we just know each other. He was at Paramount when I was an executive there. He was making 'Patriot Games' and I would see him walking around the lot with his big duster overcoat on his way to the editing room. For 'The Quiet American' he really tracked us down. He found out that Mirage, which is Sydney Pollack's company where I was a producer at the time, had the rights to the novel. Phil had been traveling himself in Vietnam, found a copy of the book in English and read it on this trip he was taking with his daughter. He became obsessed with the idea of making a film from the novel and started to put out calls to his agent in Hollywood and found out, ironically, that the people who controlled the rights and had been developing it, were about one hundred yards down the block from him, because at the time he had a deal at Paramount where Mirage was also situated.

Q: How did he find the book 'The Quiet American' in Vietnam?

 It was incredible. He was in the Ho Chi Minh museum in Hanoi and had asked for a copy of Ho's diaries. He got a book in a brown paper bag and took it with him on the train and when he slipped it out of the bag he found they'd given him the wrong book. So he started to read Graham Greene on this train ride and like a lot of us who are devotees of Greene he just got mesmerized by the power of it, and how foretelling it became, written in the fifties, of the next generation in terms of the entanglements between the United States and South East Asia. So it was quite an odyssey. It took about five or six years to get made just from the time that Phil met up with us, and we had already been developing the book for several years before Phil came along. There's a man named Staffan Ahrenberg who brought the novel to Mirage and he's a producing partner on the film and he and Phil also knew each other, and so we were thrilled to have someone of Phil's stature get involved with the project. We hoped that this could be the impetus to push it over the top and get it realized. It was a long, challenging road from that point. But finally we got a script from Christopher Hampton and Robert Schennkan and we got Michael Caine and Brendan Frasier to commit, and we found backers in Guy East and Nigel Sinclair at Intermedia Films, and then we started to face the realities of how to get this film made. It's a complex story that's set in the past, a Saigon that doesn't really exist any more.

 Q: How did you decide where to shoot this film?

 Phil, from the beginning was quite passionate, and rightly so, about trying to film in Vietnam. There had been very few films of any size shot on location there. A little bit more with some French films, but Hollywood's experience had been virtually nil. So we started to collect the details of how we were going to do this and Phil introduced us to a great veteran Australian line producer, Antonia Barnard, and she became a real hands on partner in the making of the movie. She started to research and put together a production plan and a budget and a sense of how this could be done and what really existed in that world now and what was going to have to be built. It was quite a complicated process to try to recreate Saigon of the nineteen fifties, which had been mostly destroyed by the intervening decades of bombing and conflict, or more recently modernized and commercialized beyond recognition. We gradually discovered that we had to film most of it up north, in and around Hanoi, where the French colonial architecture of the period was more preserved.

Q: What was the ratio of Americans to Australians involved in the project?

At the end of the day there were only a handful of Americans involved with the production. I went over and was on location. Sydney Pollack came over for a spell. Brendan had a key make up artist that went over there, but it was an almost all Australian crew. In Vietnam we had a huge team of local Vietnamese working on all aspects of the movie. This became quite an undertaking in terms of translated interactions and trying to take what they had to offer and honor it. To try not impose our western outsider viewpoint on the film making process and not duplicate the same mistakes that had been made politically in the past. I felt that was something that was a real strength of Phil's. He'd been to Vietnam many times and he was quite liked and respected by the different center's of film making that exist there. Australia itself enjoyed a favorable relationship with Vietnam because of some trade history. The Australian ambassador facilitated almost all of the diplomatic process for us. How to work there, the permit process, how to work with their government and so on.

 Q: Where was most of the film shot?

 In the end most of the film was divided fairly evenly between mostly exterior locations in Vietnam and the interiors, which all got built at Fox studios in Sydney. We also did a couple of location shots in the wilds of Queensland, where we rebuilt the French watchtower set in the film, and consequently blew it up. Q: How did you tackle the cultural differences between Australia, the U.S. and Vietnam? I've always found the Australian crew the most flexible, the easiest to transport. There's just a kind of attitude. I don't know if it comes from the schooling or in their traditions, but they just seem to be open to anything. Where are we going, and what's the job, and what do we have to do and who are we dealing with. Whether it's shooting in Italy with 'Ripley' or in Romania with 'Cold Mountain' oddly enough it's always been the same. There's just been a kind of intrepid, adventurous spirit. Things that others might look on as too much of a daunting challenge and want to go home, the Aussies just look on as another enjoyable adventure. In Vietnam that was very much the case. It was the most complex place to work, trying to do business within that culture. Trying to understand and work with them on their own terms. It was a real learning curve for us. Phil led the way and the rest of the team followed in terms of being able to make a film that was going to honor and respect all the contributions the Vietnamese could bring. We hired an important Vietnamese director, Dang Nhat Minh, who became the second unit director and he was deeply involved in the staging of the explosion in the main square. We had a wonderful woman, Hoa Anh Tranh, who was a translator and researcher and right hand for Phil, who was a respected member of their film community. So we were choosing carefully those people to represent the face of the film in Vietnam to the Vietnamese. This became an important way in which people understood our intentions. They advised us and they found people to advise us to try and get it right. People who were there on the day. It was striking and powerful to stand there, particularly in that central square in Ho Chi Minh city, in front of the opera house and the Continental hotel, and to be recreating those events from nineteen fifty one, and having people show up who were there on the day and start talking about their recollections and their experiences. They let us know we were getting it right. Some of them were moved to tears to see this event staged live that was such a traumatic part of their past.

 Q: How did you find Christopher Doyle, your Australian DP?

 Phil and Chris had known each other for years, and had been looking for something to collaborate on. He and Phil worked on this and 'Rabbit Proof Fence' back to back together, so we picked up Chris and his crew, with just a small break between wrapping Rabbit and coming to Vietnam to start scouting our film. I really enjoyed Chris. He's a great character, and brings a lot of soulfulness and passion to his work, and a sense of humor. He understood the sensualness of the piece and his lighting and composition, and his obvious love of photographing Asian women, all worked their way into the fabric of this film. He and Phil worked on this and 'Rabbit Proof Fence' back to back together.

Q: Tell me finally Bill, what is it you like about being a producer?