232 MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE
men in a World War II Japa nese prisoner of war (POW) camp: two Allied and two
Japa nese soldiers.Background
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post (1906–1996) was a South African– born author and
Jungian mystic, advisor to Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher, and the godfather
of Prince William, among other distinctions. After his death, however, an exposé
by J.D.F. Jones— Storyteller: The Lives of Laurens van der Post— revealed that van
der Post had been a lifelong opportunist and con man. During World War II Van
der Post, who was fluent in Japa nese, served in the British Army in the Dutch East
Indies (present- day Indonesia) and was captured on 20 April 1942, when Java
fell. Van der Post spent the remainder of the war as a POW in Japa nese prison
camps in Sukabumi and Bandung, both in West Java, Indonesia. After the war
he wrote three books of fiction based on his prison camp experiences: A Bar of
Shadow (1954), The Seed and the Sower (1963), and The Night of the New Moon (1970).
In the early 1980s Japa nese director Nagisa Ôshima (In the Realm of the Senses) col-
laborated with British screenwriter Paul Mayersburg (The Man Who Fell to Earth) on
a script based on the first two stories in The Seed and the Sower and mounted a joint
Anglo- Japanese film proj ect produced by Jeremy Thomas and financed by New Zea-
land, British, and Japa nese investors. Singer/actor Kenji Sawada was Ôshima’s first
choice for POW camp commandant Capt. Yonoi— a character conceived in the
image of Yukio Mishima— but Sawada had to drop out due to scheduling issues.
Ôshima briefly considered Tomokazu Miura for Yonoi but hired rock star Ryuichi
Sakamoto because he had an androgynous appearance similar to Sawada (Saka-
moto also composed the film’s musical score). Samurai movie star Shintaro Katsu
(Kagemusha) was first choice for Sgt. Hara, but the part eventually went to Takeshi
Kitano. Robert Redford was allegedly considered for the role of Major Jack Celliers
but Ôshima cast the more age- appropriate David Bowie after seeing him in a Japa-
nese TV saké ad and then in a Broadway production of The Elephant Man in 1980.
British stage actor Tom Conti was cast as van der Post’s fictional counterpart (and
Celliers’ foil), Col. John Lawrence.Production
Filming took place over a seven- week period (September– November 1982). The
first five weeks of the shoot occurred on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, northeast
of New Zealand. Ôshima hired lots of island natives as extras (British POW extras
were recruited from New Zealand). He also had a complete POW camp built, but
only filmed small portions of it. Ôshima meticulously directed his Japa nese actors
but when it came to the British actors, they were told to “do what ever it is you
people do.” Ôshima worked fast; he shot only one or two takes and did not screen
dailies or even make safety prints; prints of each day’s shoot were shipped to his
editor, Tomoyo Oshima, in Japan (she had a rough cut of the film completed within
four days of Ôshima’s returning to Japan at the end of the shoot). For the last two
weeks of the shoot the com pany moved to New Zealand. Scenes were shot at
Wanganui Collegiate School, doubling for a boarding school in South Africa; at