The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [131]
We received fantastic co-operation and help from the Vietnamese authorities during filming. At a key point in the movie, which is based on a real incident, there is a huge bomb explosion and the city council allowed us to close streets all around the city centre so we could recreate this. I think they did it because the book and Greene himself were seen as anti-American – although the Communists were blamed for the explosion at the time, Greene suspected that the bomb had been planted by the Americans and he is likely to have been right. The Americans ignored his advice (which made him very unpopular at the time), which was to keep clear of a war the French were already losing – although I think they would take a different view in hindsight. I had served in Korea alongside Americans and at the time, I fully expected the British to go into Vietnam with them. I was very surprised when we didn’t. It was only when I was in Saigon for this film, and realised that Greene was in British Intelligence in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, that I put two and two together: maybe he advised the British government against it. Perhaps he really was ‘Our Man’ in Saigon.
Letting off our explosion in the square caused some considerable excitement. First of all we had a very special secret visitor on the set: a tiny Vietnamese man who turned out to be General Giap, the general in charge of North Vietnamese forces who had finally beaten the Americans. He just wanted to witness our recreation of the incident that had started the war . . . Then, as we worked setting up the scene, we noticed a man with a bicycle standing right next to one of the cameras and watching what was going on intently. When the explosion went off – and it was a very big one – he went nuts and started running round and screaming in Vietnamese. Our interpreters shouted translations at a surprised Philip Noyce, the director. ‘That was exactly it!’ the man was yelling, pointing to a spot about twenty yards from where the ‘bomb’ had gone off. ‘I was riding this bicycle right there – I could have been killed, but I was late for work!’ We obviously got something right . . .
We finally left the hustle and bustle and the three million motor scooters behind and while the unit prepared to move location, we escaped to the paradise of the Furama Hotel and spa on China Beach, near Da Nang. It was the first free time I had had – I have never worked so hard before or since on a movie – and we were determined to make the most of it. It was also a chance to see the traditional Vietnam – and we weren’t disappointed. One night, after a night shoot, we were coming back to the hotel when we suddenly came across a massive vegetable market sprawled across the road for about a quarter of a mile. The car screeched to a halt and we slowly picked our way through the stalls as ladies moved their mats and baskets of fruit and vegetables out of the way. When we finally made it safely to the other side without killing any of the vendors or squashing so much as an onion, I asked our driver, who was a local man, what on earth they were doing holding a market in the middle of the road anyway. He shrugged. ‘They were there first,’ he said. ‘They have been there for a thousand years and weren’t going to move, so when they built the road right through the middle of the market they were prepared to change the time of the market to night time when there is less traffic, but they refused to budge.’ That’s what I