We shot 3 stories in the film THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA. Only TWO stories made it in the final cut.
Here now, we present, THE LOST SCENES. Well, ONE lost scene. I'll call this one "AH NGAU GETS A BAZOOKA POINTED AT HIM".
In this scene, AH NGAU, the fisherman, gets kidnapped by two pirates/immigrants, who take him to the jungle in hope of a ransom payout. The pirates carry a homemade bazooka, which my prop master Lesly found on EBAY and bought for a few bucks. Or at least that's what he told me. I hear you can purchase homemade bazookas made out of sawed off pipe and other stuff for a couple hundred Ringgit near the Thai border. I tried to ask a pimp I knew back from the day while I was there, but he didn't have any on stock, so in the end, Lesly did what he had to do to acquire one.
Shooting the kidnapping scene was extremely difficult. We had TWO boats, as you can see from above (bigger boat is AH NGAU's one, smaller boat, the pirates'), and we had to coordinate a perfect entry. The water was choppy, and the tide was a bitch that just kept twirling our boat around so that we could never get the framing right. This is one of those scenes that look cool and easy on paper, but in reality was really difficult to pull off. Plus it was hot as hell.
I wanted the kidnapper's boat to ENTER the shot in the scene. And it's a WIDE SHOT. So it had to be away from the horizon, or far off to the side. But because our boat's position kept shifting, as the tide knocked us around and further out to sea, we couldn't get the trajectory of the kidnappers boat's entry consistent. It look almost a dozen tries to get a decent take.
And it isn't easy to stand on a small boat holding a homemade bazooka. A couple of times, Hariry, the actor holding the bazooka, stood up on cue, and then stumbled down again as a wave kicked the boat.
One long afternoon for a scene that got cut out. But now it's on this blog!
Tell me if you like the pictures.
