At a cost of about £14 million, The Killing Fields (1984) was then the most ambitious project for David Puttnam, the producer of the Oscar-winning Midnight Express and Chariots of Fire . A piece in Time magazine had caught his eye. It told of the emotional reunion in Thailand in 1979 of Sydney Schanberg, a reporter for the The New York Times , with his former Cambodian aide, Dith Pran, who had escaped from four-and-a-half years of servitude under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

For the film, Puttnam followed his instinct to boost first-time directors (Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Hugh Hudson) by choosing Roland Joffé, who had made his name with documentaries and political TV dramas.

“With a first-time director you don’t have a problem creating a team, because he doesn’t have a position to protect,” Puttnam has observed, noting that The Killing Fields marked the big-screen debut for many of the production team, including Chris Menges, who would win an Oscar for his cinematography. “A group applying themselves and working in harmony is better than an individual genius. Anyone talented will bust a gut on his first feature film.”

Bruce Robinson, who would later make the cult hit Withnail and I , delivered a script that heavily criticised US foreign policy in SouthEast Asia. Puttnam saw the film as more “about a friendship that happens to be set in a very emotive political context, not a political film with a friendship woven through it”.

The film is a tribute to Puttnam’s tenacity as a producer. With a third of the budget coming from Warner Bros he was under pressure to cast such big names as Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman as Schanberg and use a known director such as Sidney Lumet. But Puttnam didn’t want a star shifting the limelight from Pran; he later admitted that he may have exaggerated the dangers of shooting near the Thai-Cambodia border to put off Hollywood’s A-listers.

The self-effacing Sam Waterston got his first leading screen role as Schanberg. Pran was played by Haing S. Ngor, a doctor who had lost most of his family to the Khmer Rouge but managed to escape and make his way to Los Angeles. With grim irony, he would be shot dead in a robbery in LA in 1996. Puttnam praises Waterston’s coaching of Ngor, whose performance provides the core of the film’s emotional clout and earned him an Oscar.

For Joffé, despite delivering some nerve-jangling action, the film is not so much about war as people. “The idea was not to go in for masses of shocking imagery,” he says. “I wanted it to be a film about consequences. If there was an explosion it was not the major thing in the scene, but what the consequences of that act were.”

You can see this approach early on, as Schanberg and Pran visit a town mistakenly bombed by a US B52, with the emphasis on a wounded child and grieving people.

The film crew spent nearly 12 weeks shooting in Thailand, employing locals who had worked on The Deer Hunter and Platoon . The country’s military rulers were very cooperative, as they wanted the world to know about the Khmer Rouge in neighbouring Cambodia, a guerrilla force in the hills since being overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979.

Puttnam was also impressed by the cooperation of the Americans — the evacuation of Phnom Penh was shot in San Diego using US Marines and helicopters. He finds it hard to imagine similar assistance being afforded today for a story about Iraq.

The film certainly has strong resonances today. It has since been shown in schools in the Ukraine and the Philippines to show how an imploded nation can lead to a futile civil war. “Maybe,” Puttnam says, “it should be playing in Iraq right now.”

What The Times film critic said at the time

“The Killing Fields is certainly a remarkable feat of logistics for the director Roland Joffé, making his first feature film after successive careers in theatre and television.”

“Bruce Robinson’s screenplay is admirable for its economy in exposition and dialogue.”

“The ambition of The Killing Fields is undeniable and creditable.”

“Joffé’s management of the vast crowds, exotic locations and broad panoramas marks him as an action director of the kind for whom the British cinema has rarely provided great scope.”

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