Trivia for
The Killing Fields (1984) More at IMDbPro »

• Supporting actor Spalding Gray wrote a monologue about his experiences filming this movie, which was later filmed as Swimming to Cambodia (1987).
  
  
• Haing S. Ngor became the first Southeast Asian (and the first Buddhist) to win an Academy Award in an acting role.
  
  
• The Coke factory in the movie was originally supposed to be a Pepsi factory, but Pepsi declined to be featured in the movie.
  
  
• At the Oscar's, when Haing S. Ngor won the Oscar for best supporting actor, he walked onto the stage with his 15-year-old niece. Upon walking up to the stage, John Malkovich jokingly shouted something in Cambodian to him which shocked his niece and made Haing Ngor laugh. He shouted, "The award's mine, asshole!" In Haing Ngor's autobiography, he describes John Malkovich's keen interest in learning Cambodian swear words.
  
  
• Nigel Havers was originally offered the role of the British journalist Jon Swain but had to decline owing to his filming A Passage to India (1984).
  
  
• The real Dith Pran was born on September 27, 1942 at Siem Reap, Cambodia, and died of pancreatic cancer on March, 30, 2008 in New Jersey, USA. He was 65.
  
  
• Of all the real people involved in the story, the only major participant who refused to collaborate in the making of the movie was Al Rockoff, the character portrayed by John Malkovich.
  
  
• Roy Scheider, Alan Arkin and Dustin Hoffman all expressed a keen interest in the lead role in the film. However, producer David Puttnam and director Roland Joffé had already decided to use Sam Waterston. The studio were not too happy with the decision to cast a relatively unknown actor in the lead, and Puttnam and Joffe were afraid that with the interest expressed by such well known performers as Hoffman, the studio may actually force them to cast someone other than Waterston. As such, when describing what the shoot would involve, they greatly exaggerated the danger of the location shoots, leading to most of the interested actors dropping out.
  
  
• David Puttnam sees this as the best piece of work he was ever involved in.
  
  
• The year the film was released, Time Magazine's Cultural Highs and Lows of the Year, had as the lowest point, 'David Puttnam's decision to use John Lennon's Imagine in The Killing Fields'.
  
  
• At the time of the film's release, the Ukraine was a deeply polarized country, with many commentators feeling that Civil War was inevitable. The film was a big success in the country, especially amongst children, and it was used in schools to show the younger generation what happens when a nation implodes. According to producer David Puttnam, during the Orange Revolution, the main reason there was never much of a possibility of a civil war breaking out, was because the generation staging the revolution had been inculcated by the film not to go down that road.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick once considered filming ‘The Killing Fields’, but a close aide reviewed the book as "un-cinematic", according to notes and letters in the Kubrick archive in London.
  
  
• According to the passport that we see at the beginning of the movie, Sydney Schanberg has the same birth date, Nov 15, 1940, as Sam Waterston who plays the part. The historical Sydney Schanberg was born Jan 17, 1934.
  
  

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