David Puttnam

Occupation

Filmmaker

The Killing Fields Review

By Christopher Null

Excellent

People never really got the message about Cambodia that they did about Vietnam. Thanks to movies like The Killing Fields the story can be told, and in fine form. Sam Waterston plays New York Times Sydney Schanberg, who's angrily covering the war from the front lines, but the film (and the Oscar, ultimately) belongs to Haing S. Ngor, who plays Dith Pran, Schanberg's Cambodian translator and assistant. When the shit goes down, Pran can't get out of the country as easily as Schanberg, and the story he tells from the months that followed are epic and heartrending.