This Jungle for Hire : Political Unrest Hasn’t Stopped Some From Filming in Philippines

When veteran producer Kurt Unger was about to leave Los Angeles to spend millions of dollars filming his World War II epic “Return From the River Kwai” here, friends and colleagues looked at him a bit strangely.

“Everyone said, ‘The Philippines? Are you crazy? They’re throwing bombs over there. You can’t make movies there,’ ” recalled Unger, whose 47 years of film making have taken him to some of the most obscure corners of the world.

Indeed, just weeks before Unger and his team of more than 60 actors and production technicians arrived in Manila, an ambitious $12-million Home Box Office miniseries production on the 1986 revolt that overthrew President Ferdinand E. Marcos had been effectively booted out for political reasons.

Even before that, Los Angeles-based Cannon Films had soured the image of foreign film makers when a $5-million armed forces helicopter gunship crashed while on loan for a production of Chuck Norris’ “Missing in Action III.” A half-dozen key Philippine Air Force men were killed in the crash, which triggered a series of lawsuits.

And, as Unger prepared to board his plane to Manila, the bloody Communist insurgency that has tormented the Philippine government for nearly two decades continued to claim victims.

But Unger did not heed the warnings. And this day, he couldn’t be happier.

“There’s no guarantee anywhere when you’re shooting on location,” said a smiling Unger, in his production suite at a five-star hotel in Manila’s business district. “And it’s true that some people are very concerned about coming to the Philippines. I guess I was a bit apprehensive myself at first.”

Unger now ranks among the Philippines’ biggest boosters.

“I think it’s more dangerous to cross Wilshire Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon than it is to make a movie here,” he said.

Perhaps none could be more pleased with Unger’s success than the thousands of Filipinos whose livelihoods depend on the country’s large motion picture industry.

As Unger and his cast and crew wrapped up their $15-million production, they broke a jinx that many feared would mark the end of foreign film making here--a move that would cost this already impoverished nation millions of dollars a year in foreign exchange and lost jobs.

When asked if he, too, had fallen victim to bad luck here, Unger concluded: “Hardly. From Day 1, it has been a smooth-running production.”

And, he added, “I don’t think we could have been able to make this picture in any other Far Eastern country and gotten the kind of infrastructure we did here.”

Such praise is hardly idle. The successful filming of “Return From the River Kwai,” under the direction of Hollywood veteran Andrew McLaglen, comes at a time of intensifying competition among the developing nations of Southeast Asia for the tens of millions of dollars that American motion picture companies are pouring into their on-location shoots.

At the moment, director Brian De Palma is spending his millions in the jungles of southern Thailand, where a cast headed by Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox is filming “Casualties of War,” De Palma’s extravagant contribution to the recent litany of Vietnam War epics.

Last year, Hollywood’s John Milius selected the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo as the location for his World War II adventure film “Farewell to the King,” which will be released in the United States this fall by Orion Pictures. “Farewell” stars Nick Nolte as an American deserter who becomes the ruler of a tribe of Borneo headhunters, then leads the tribe against Japanese occupation forces.

Several years ago, though, Milius was in the Philippines shooting the now-legendary “Apocalypse Now,” and in recent years the wild, verdant island of Luzon, where Manila is located, has provided the settings for such Vietnam-era films as “Platoon” and “Hamburger Hill.”

Unger concedes that before selecting Manila, he scouted locations in Thailand, Malaysia and the other countries now competing in what has become something of a jungle-for-hire industry. But, in the end, there was no other choice for him.

“Eighty percent of what we needed was already here,” Unger said. “We needed World War II ships, and the Philippine Navy is still using them. We needed a harbor that looks like Saigon in the 1940s. Manila Bay was perfect. We needed World War II planes, and the Philippine Air Force is still using Japanese Zeros as training planes.”

He added, “The other 20% we built ourselves, and we built our own studio in a warehouse in the suburbs.”

Such infrastructure was tailor-made for “Return From River Kwai,” an old-style production that features an international cast, including Nick Tate, Edward Fox, Timothy Bottoms, Christopher Penn and George Takei. It has not yet been scheduled for release.

Unger describes his film as a docudrama based on a novel of the same name by Joan and Clay Blair Jr. He said his film is based on factual events, unlike David Lean’s Oscar-winning “Bridge on the River Kwai.” That 1957 film depicted a commando unit blowing up a railway bridge that Allied prisoners were forced to build for their Japanese captors in the Burmese jungle. In reality, no such attempt was made.

Although Unger’s film traces a group of prisoners who worked on the Japanese railway along the River Kwai, he bristles at suggestions that his is a sequel to the first “River Kwai” film.

“This is not a sequel,” he said. “It is a story that stands completely on its own, and it is a factual story. The event is not known in America. It is known in the Pentagon, but not by the general public.”

Still, the film has a large dose of the old Hollywood flavor that characterized the first movie. Director McLaglen, a physical giant who looks as if he could play John Wayne’s double, is a veteran of such Wayne classics as “McLintock,” “Chisum” and “The Undefeated,” as well as other World War II epics like “Wild Geese,” which starred Richard Burton and Roger Moore, and classic Westerns like James Stewart’s “Shenandoah.”

Asked if there are any down sides to film production here, Unger smiled and said, “Yes. The heat. I never knew it could be so hot.”

But aside from the weather, Unger had nothing but praise for his months in a place that everyone said he shouldn’t come to.

“After our experience here, I can honestly say I have no major apprehensions as far as making more pictures in this country,” he said. “And I’m looking forward to coming back someday.”