THE QUIET AMERICAN Q&A with BRENDAN FRASER © 2005 PHASE9 ENTERTAINMENT

What was the appeal of playing a character like Alden Pyle? He was complex. The man has a separate agenda than the one he purports to have. I was drawn to the part for its complexity, elements of which had not been asked of me yet. Were you a fan of the Graham Greene novel? I had to go out and buy a copy of it. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know his work until I read the screenplay for THE QUIET AMERICAN that Philip Noyce brought me. I didn’t know enough about the historical period. I did my own research. I was interested to find that if you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962, which I think is telling because it is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons why the war happened in the first place. And that’s the world of the novel. So I dug deeper and I was awakened to the hundred years of Colonial rule and French occupation and the reasons why that happened. Philip Noyce sees the novel as the great unmade story of the Vietnam War. Do you agree? Well, we have seen so many films of the result of the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War. We have seen what it is like to be there during the jungle, with the hardships. I don’t know one film that tells us how and why it occurred, except for THE QUIET AMERICAN. What did you make of the 1957 version of the novel made by Joseph L Mankiewicz? The version done by Mankiewicz, I was told to not see by Sydney Pollock, who said it was full of rampant jingoism…they got it wrong. It was made during the McCarthy era, and writers in Hollywood were being blacklisted, so they turned the story on its ear. It was appalling what they did to the novel. They made it this pro-rah rah jingoistic…it was nothing about what the novel said. It toned down the whole idea of the book, the whole prescient nature of what Greene said. He wrote the novel before what became known as the Vietnam War. Why we haven’t seen that film since then, I don’t know. It’s probably because you can’t make a film about Vietnam in the American lexicon without expecting to show the American side. They’re only beginning to come to grips with it because an entire generation was affected by it. For that reason, the film is important. But also, while 58,000 American soldiers died, let us not forget that 3 million Vietnamese people died. It was a debacle from start to finish. It shattered the lives of so many people. When we made it, I hoped we would give people a sense of redemption when they saw it, but now, given world events and the terror of September 11, it has become a cautionary tale. Continued on page 2

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