“Blue Lagoon II”: To Hell and Back

“Beware of falling coconuts!”

That was the no-kidding warning on the call sheet of “Return to the Blue Lagoon,” which finished shooting earlier this month on Fiji’s Taveuni Island, with its uncluttered beaches, untamed waterfalls--and tall palms.

“A coconut weighs eight pounds,” producer Peter Bogart points out, “and coconut trees are 90 feet tall.”

“Lagoon” crew members, who prudently wore hardhats during filming, had to adapt in other ways: Twin-engine planes landed on a grass air strip. The washing machine was the nearest stream. A key beach location was accessible only by water or a 30-minute hike up and down a steep, muddy trail. Locals humped equipment overland; cast and crew shoved off in small boats.

There were no air conditioned trailers. At the beach base camp, cast and crew hung out in huts fashioned of palm fronds. Leading lady Milla Jovovich resigned herself to taking showers outdoors.

In the sequel to the 1980 hit film that launched the careers of young Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins, Brian Krause, 18, plays their son (the Shields and Atkins characters are now deceased), with Jovovich, 14, as a traveler stranded at sea by a shipboard cholera outbreak. Like the original, most of the drama is set on or near water.

During the shooting of one scene, director William Graham lay in the bottom of a small boat, “staying close” to a shot. “We were sailing along about one-half mile from shore,” recalls Graham, an experienced sailor. “Water started coming in, and suddenly it was up to my ears.”

The boat--actors, director and all--swamped.

Graham, who has directed 57 films, mostly for TV, accepted this assignment, he says jokingly, “because I thought this would be a couple of loincloths and a vacation.

“If this is paradise, I’ll go back to hell, where I belong.”