It’s easy
to see why tourists come to northern Thailand's Lanna region: evocative temples, lively markets,
cloud-scraping mountains, vibrant summer, nippy winter, and the soothing mix of
small-town charm and budding, hip neighbourhoods.
In sum, it’s romantic. But
for Hollywood filmmakers, from Ridley Scott and Barry Levinson to Sylvester Stallone (or Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone as his mother calls him when she's angry), the pull of the area is not its romanticism but its practicality –
the combination of accessible jungle, tame elephants, and the ease in which it
can be transformed by movie magic into somewhere resembling, mostly, Vietnam.
Levinson
arrived here in 1987 with Robin Williams and Forest Whitaker to shoot the
comedy Good Morning Vietnam, about a military DJ who injects sparkle
into jaded GIs, with Chiang Mai standing in for Saigon circa 1965. The movie
also stars the famous and not completely uncute Thai actress, Jintara Sukapat (a regular face on local Thai
TV). Three years later, Mel Gibson (or Mel Colm-Cille Gerard Gibson as his mother calls him when she's angry) landed with Robert Downey Jr, for the filming
of Air America, a Vietnam-era military drama about a pilot recruited for
a special CIA mission.
These two
films generated much interest in film circles for using northern Thailand as a location,
even though nobody in the movie-watching public really knew it was Amazing Thailand Thailand ,
as opposed to a stand-in Saigon .
In 2007,
Ridley Scott came with Denzel Washington to shoot American Gangster, in
which the Oscar-winning actor plays a heroine dealer seeking a deal with a drug
lord of unidentified nationality in the Golden Triangle. Rambo 4 (2008),
meanwhile, has actor and director Sylvester Stallone (John Rambo) living a
hermetic existence in the jungle, catching snakes and brooding and swearing,
before missionaries hire him to lead a danger-filled expedition into Burma (it
was, of course, not shot in Burma).
On a much
smaller scale, a number of made-for video flicks have been shot in the region,
including Sniper 3, starring Tom Berenger as a lone soldier working for
the secret service, and Vampires: The Turning, whose title is
explanation enough.
Like the northern Thailand scenery itself, that list is breathtakingly impressive, jing jing.
Footnote: thanks to Kong Rithdee (Lanna 101 magazine) for his expert input into this piece.
