Return to Paradise
Director Joseph Ruben, writer Wesley Strick
and actress Anne Heche
Three young Americans hook up in Malaysia for a wild, no-holds-barred vacation before they commence their "real lives." This includes procuring a large amount of cheap hashish. When one of these young men is jailed as a trafficker, and scheduled for execution, the others are asked to go back and share the blame to save him.
"Hopefully in Return to Paradise, we were able to give the audience a question," says Anne Heche in Los Angeles, "and not necessarily the surface question which I think everybody asks themselves: 'Would I go back?' But 'Who am I to myself?' 'How truthful am I about my responsibilities?' 'Do I go into another country and abide by their laws?' As Americans, we're taught a certain freedom and then we're very disrespectful of other places."
"The Malaysian government isn't pretending they don't have these laws," she continues. "They have signs plastered all over the airport the second you walk off the plane: 'You will be hanged if you...' If you're going to choose not to see that, then that's your responsibility."
Return to Paradise (1998) is a remake of the mid-1980s French film Force Majeure (a legal term for an event which can excuse someone's actions) which was inspired by the real-life case of two Australian men who were sentenced to death in Malaysia for drug trafficking. The mother of one made him a cause célèbre, garnering attention from the international press and human rights organizations. More recently, a media brouhaha grew around the American teenager who was caned in Singapore for scrawling graffiti.
These cases were very much on the minds of screenwriter Wesley Strick, a former rock journalist for Creme and Rolling Stone, and director Joseph Ruben, a University of Michigan alumnus who made the cult film The Pom-Pom Girls (1976) and subsequently carved a niche in Hollywood as the director of thrillers like The Stepfather (1987), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), and The Good Son (1993).
After working as a script doctor in addition to writing his own screenplays (Final Analysis, the Cape Fear remake), Strick jumped at the chance to reunite with Ruben, his collaborator on True Believer (1989).
He watched Force Majeure and began making reworking the first draft of the American remake, which was written by Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I). Strick read Robinson's script before going to bed and "woke up in a cold sweat, it had such an immediate and intense emotional charge to it."
That version, which both Strick and Ruben call "brilliant," also had a problematic ending (all the events turn out to be a "fever dream").
"I just felt that putting an audience through the experience of being in this situation," says Ruben, "and then you learn it's a dream, they would legitimately hate you. We really wanted to make it more concrete and real in a sense."
Because of the politically sensitive — and provocative — nature of the film, Ruben and the producers opted to film in nearby Thailand as well as Macao and Hong Kong (the prison sequences were actually shot near Philadelphia, at a penitentiary turned historical museum). But Ruben traveled to Malaysia with some crew members to get a feel for the specificities for "the country we were going to be duplicating."
They sat in on trials and were able to visit the actual Kuala Lumpur prison where the Australians were held.
"They were about to tear it down," says Joseph Ruben, "so they've opened it up as a tourist attraction. The room where people were hanged, there are sound effects that they turn on: heartbeats and screams. It was actually very chilling and effective, in a primitive sort of way."
© 1998, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.