Surviving the Raiders of Angkor Wat

By Tim Winter

        AFTER months of anxious planning and intense media speculation, location shooting for the Paramount Films production of Tomb Raider finally took place in Siem Reap from November 22 till 29.
        Beginning on November 18, the Paramount Films entourage, including Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie, rumbled into Siem Reap in a fleet of 30 trucks, Angkor Wat's first brush with Hollywood since Peter O'Toole hit town in 1964 to film Lord Jim.
        As John McGeoghan, the film's now-exhausted transport coordinator told the Post, "People just stopped their early morning activities, frozen by the sight of a line of green flashing truck lights stretching way off into the dusty distance."
        Indeed, in reflecting on what he has had to organize over recent weeks, McGeoghan is still staggered by the sheer scale of the whole operation.
        "Besides overcoming the infrastructure problems of getting a convoy of thirty service trucks from Thailand, we had to hire over a hundred vehicles locally, put together a team of thirty interpreters, four hundred extras and even build a village in Angkor Wat before filming could begin," McGeoghan said.
        The arrival of over 150 film crew, referred to by Paramount's spokesperson Sue D'Arcy as "like an army on the move", has had what the production's location manager Nick Ray says is a "great and desperately needed" mini economic boom.
        It was a boom, however, that some local residents grumble could have been distributed around town more widely.
        Decisions to locate virtually the entire crew in the Thai-owned Sofitel Royal Angkor, and Paramount's insistence that much of the on-set food be flown in from Thailand meant that other locally owned hotels and food producers were cut out of the supply market loop.
        Concerns about how the film would portray Cambodia internationally were also proven to have been warranted.
        As Angelina Jolie jumped and dived around Angkor over the course of eight days of shooting in her role as Tomb Raider femme fatale Lara Croft, the film's depiction of brightly dressed monks and seemingly idyllic villages populated by people inexplicably wearing traditional Vietnamese hats, (much to the annoyance of the locally hired extras) showed little awareness or sensitivity to the reality of modern Cambodia.
        Ang Choulean, spokesperson for Apsara Authority, which is responsible for conservation of the Angkor Complex, dismissed such criticism, calling it "ill-informed and thus inaccurate".
        And although the film has been touted as a vehicle to boost tourist arrivals to Angkor, Apsara has acknowledged complaints from tourists of "rude and aggressive" treatment by film crew members during filming.
        However, in spite of an incident in which a film crew member attempted to climb scaffolding to get on the temple roof, Apsara spokesperson Ashley Thompson said the filming in no way harmed the physical integrity of the Angkor Wat site.
        "At this point we are completely satisfied with our temple protection program, and our initial post-shoot reports show everything is completely as it should be," Thompson said.
        The real fragility of Angkor, however, lies not in the stones themselves, but in its vulnerable image as an emerging global tourist destination.
        As tourists come to see Lara's Angkor, where Cambodians dress in Vietnamese hats and live in a fishing village on the steps of Angkor Wat, the temples will be framed by a new, contemporary mythology, that might one day rival the original Angkorean myths of creation. Tomb Raider tours, T-shirts and theme bars may well become the film's most tangible legacy to nearby Siem Reap.
        "We are unsure what the long-term impact Tomb Raider will have," Choulean said, adding that he hoped the film will raise international awareness of the threat to the temples posed by the illegal antiquity trade.
        While the physical structures survived Paramount and Jolie, only after Tomb Raider's summer 2001 release will it be possible to judge whether Lara's visit has protected, or indeed looted, the cultural value of Angkor Wat.

from Phnom Penh Post, Issue 9/25, December 8 - 21, 2000. Reprinted with permission of Tim Winter.
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