August 23, 1995
From Entertainment Correspondent Mark Scheerer
NEW YORK (CNN) -- It's almost as if a Hollywood press agent dreamed it up. The movie, "Beyond Rangoon," features actress Adele Lutz playing Aung San Soo Kyi trying to lead her country, Burma, toward democracy.
Under house arrest since 1989, the real-life Nobel Peace
Prize winner was unexpectedly freed in July, which thrills
"Beyond Rangoon's" star, Patricia Arquette. "Up until very
recently, a week before they released her, they said they
were going to keep her captive for another year," remembers
Arquette. "So it's a very exciting time because she's a very
important political leader, and it's important to know about
the history that she's making."
Arquette plays an American tourist who runs afoul of the
military dictatorship in Burma, which now calls itself
Myanmar. Arquette admits that she, like many Americans, had
no idea of the situation in Burma before she became involved
in the movie even though she does follow the news. "I read
newspapers, but it wasn't covered that much, and it goes to
show you. We know everything about Roseanne Barr, if she's
changed her hair color and this and that, and the Simpson
trial, and Marcia Clark's hairdo. We know everything about
that, but there's important things happening in the world
we don't know about."
Director John Boorman took his film crew into Malaysia, where
six months of shooting took an emotional and psychological
toll on Arquette. "It was very difficult," she says.
"There's a tomboy in me and there's not a tomboy in me.
There's a realist in me going, 'there are crocodiles in the
water. I don't want to go in!' But regardless of how hard
it was, leeches and snakes and whatever it was, it was easier
than living during wartime, living under a government like
that."
Patricia Arquette hopes "Beyond Rangoon," will entertain as well as focus international attention on Burma, much like the movie "The Killing Fields" did on Cambodia.
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