Journalism under threat amid human rights violations. That sentence certainly describes our current moment, but it also applies to the Roland Jaffe classic “The Killing Fields.” That film from 1984 focuses on the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s rule in Cambodia, and features an Oscar-nominated performance by Sam Waterston.
Waterston plays “New York Times” journalist Sydney Schanberg. On June 7, Waterston will take part in a screening and conversation with filmmaker Matthew Penn about the film’s enduring resonance at The Triplex in Great Barrington.
Is this a movie you go back and look at regularly? And I ask that because it's such a difficult film to watch.
I haven't watched it in a long time, and I'm halfway planning to be there for the screening and not just for the Q and A afterwards, because of that. And your introduction sort of sums up why, because my feeling is that it has a lot of bearing on what's going on today, and I'd like to verify that by seeing it in person.
One time I worked on this special hourlong interview that you and Sydney Schanberg did with our Alan Chartock here at WAMC, and you two talked about how you portrayed Sydney Schanberg and Schanberg’s experience of the war in Cambodia. He's gone now. So do you feel a certain responsibility to carry on that legacy as the star of the film?
I think it puts me in a position to point at what I really think is a very great movie, which I happen to have been very lucky to be in. But I don't think as much a responsibility as it is an opportunity, because, because of what you were just talking about in the introduction, and because the times we’re in.
I remember in that interview, you talked about how much the movie had changed your life. It opened up a world of activism in your work away from the set. Can you talk about what impact it had on you?
I think it's a thing that happens when you get to play characters that left a big mark in the world, the way Sydney did. You receive the script. You do your very best to walk in the footprints of the character you're playing. You memorize their words as portrayed by the screenwriter. You visit the places, sometimes literally, go to the very places where the events that you're portraying took place, or to their recreations. There was a time when they built a set in in Bangkok, Thailand, where much of the movie was shot. That was a mock-up or a recreation of one of the main streets of Phnom Penh, and to a person, the members of the film company, who were Cambodian and who had lived through the actual experience, stepped onto that set and burst into tears.
These things make a mark on you, and they change you, and you know, they simply become a part of who you are, and as is true for a lot of us, it's also true of me that I can't really account for the ways, or name them, or be terribly specific about what they did. I mean, they did lead me to join Refugees International as a direct result of having done ‘The Killing Fields’ and the experience of the killing fields and learning about the history, but it changed me in a whole lot of ways that I can't really name, except that I think they do me a lot of good.
It occurs to me that you know the heroes of the film are on the one hand, the Cambodian people who are dealing with the Khmer Rouge and its brutality. But also it puts journalists front and center, to tell the truth and to tell the truth through all kinds of obstacles. How do you think that will resonate with an audience seeing the film right now in 2025?
Well, I hope it revalidates the function of journalists for a modern audience, because journalism has taken a big beating recently, and because the kind of journalism that you and I are talking about is now functioning in a mediascape that is full of opiners and bloviators and non-fact based commentators and it has distorted the picture. So for good reasons and bad, journalists have been lumped together with this kind of, I don't even want to call it reporting, this kind of public speaking and it's a good thing to be reminded of what the fundamental function of journalism is and how essential it is to getting the truth out into a functioning democracy. I mean, I think it's the only profession that's actually named in the Constitution, and that's for a really good reason. We sorely depend on it, and we have a perfect right to insist that it operate at its best, but we are crazy if we think we can do without it.
Another thing about the film, and a reason it works so well, is the authenticity that you were talking about with many of the people who worked on it. Can you tell us about the experience of working with Haing Ngor in the film, who portrays Dith Pran and is very much tied to your character?
Well, Haing Ngor had lived the experience, not the exact experience portrayed in the movie, but he had lived through that period in Phnom Penh. The first thing that Roland Joffe did with us when we arrived in Thailand, before we even started to shoot at all, was to send us up to Chiang Mai and we spent four or five days there, and he told us his story. There isn't any more anchoring experience that you ever could have had. And then Roland sent us out in Bangkok as reporter and and stringer and I found out what it's like to not be able to navigate because you're made blind by inability to speak the language, and can't navigate for yourself. And Haing and I went around the neighborhoods of Bangkok and did mock stories that Roland did assigned us and a real bond was created that that continued well past the shooting in the movie. I don't know if you know how he died.
Yeah, a tragedy.
He was back in America, and he was murdered in Los Angeles in a crime that was never solved. So I said the movie made a mark on my life, but he in particular had a mammoth impact on me.
So you kind of alluded to this a little while ago, about the responsibility that you felt with portraying Schanberg in this story, and I'm just wondering, you've had so many roles and some iconic ones over the years, but as an actor, do you approach things differently when it's a real-life person like George Schultz or something, or Sydney Schanberg, as you do a fictional character?
I think I would have answered this differently a few years ago, but I do think that they tend to merge. When you're playing a make-believe character, the whole point and purpose of what you're doing is to make that invented human seem completely real. And when you're playing a living person, you have this added layer of not wanting to betray or misrepresent them, but bringing them alive is the same act of imagination in the end as it is bringing in an invented character alive. And some of the really great writers wrote invented but fully living people, so the distinction starts to disappear.
Are you working on anything interesting or compelling at the moment that you can share?
Well, years and years ago, I started to try to wrestle with the life of Andrew Mellon, and I'm still fascinated by it. I think I might have imagined myself playing him in the beginning, but I think that moment is probably past, but I'm still fascinated with that, and I hope I will have something to show for it in the not too terribly distant future.
What was it that captivated you about his life?
Well, it's particularly interesting today because we have an administration that is speaking fondly of returning to the beginning of the 20th century, which is really Andrew Mellon's heyday, and to the world that men like him built then and I think there are people who sincerely hope that they will be able to get all that back and have the United States functioning that way all over again, which I think it very much depends who you ask about whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing. I think people like Andrew Mellon himself would very much see the value in that. In fact, he was a big advocate for the business cycle having its cleansing effect and he had a strong feeling that all of us should understand that there was the business cycle that did involve ups and downs, and we should prepare ourselves for them. That leaves out the people who don't have the means or the ability to do that. And I think that's kind of a short form, a short description of what it was that the New Deal was trying to take account of. But so here we are again, and the subject has new and immediate import, I think.
I have one very frivolous question for you compared to what we've been talking about, but I gotta ask you. You officiated the wedding for your co-star Olivia Munn and John Mulaney, who is so, so funny.
Yes.
I've had the pleasure to officiate a couple of weddings, and I always tried to get a joke in there just to win the crowd over. Did you tell a joke while marrying John Mulaney and Olivia Munn, who are so funny?
You have to be kidding. No, not at all. But I did have to give a speech a day or two after the wedding, and I didn't know John at all, but I was struggling to come up with jokes, which are sort of required part of giving the speech and so I asked him, and he, and he just produced a bushel of jokes immediately. ‘You could say this.’ I mean, it was just, it was an embarrassment of riches. I couldn't use them all.
Thank you, Sam, for everything that you've done for our station over the years and for this conversation.
Thank you very much.
