‘Lagoon’ Is No Vacation for Pelikan

So, you want to be a movie star? Maybe you should check first with Lisa Pelikan.

Pelikan spent more than two months on a tropical island fighting daily rain, two squalling infant actors, falling coconuts, plagues of buzzing mosquitoes, lack of sanitary facilities and sinking in a boat at sea while filming “Return to the Blue Lagoon.”

Still, she would do it all over again.

The film is a sequel to the hit 1980 film with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins.

Pelikan plays a young widow shipwrecked on the same island with two babies of different gender. The kids are seen first as infants, later as 8-year-olds and finally in their late teens.

“It’s one picture I won’t forget,” she said. We shot in roughly the same area as the first film, on the island Taveuni. Unfortunately, they didn’t have bathrooms at our locations on the beaches.

“We started in May and stayed until July, a season when the weather is supposed to be sunny. But it poured rain every day. Every day! We were soaking wet throughout the shoot, working six days a week. All I had time to do was work and sleep.

“The children got sick. There was a strange tropical fever that struck down all but five or six of us at one time or other.

“Some people were sick for weeks; some were sent home. At one point the whole camera crew was out.

“I was lucky, except for the coral cuts on my feet. One crewman was stung by stingrays and almost died. A coconut fell out of a tree and fractured another crewman’s shoulder.

“(Even) knowing what I know now about the Fiji location, I’d do it again.”