Wrong film – Right book
The helicopter landed gently in the clearing. My cameraman wanted to reload with film. The Philippine commando pilot turned and grabbed something from beneath my seat. A lethal machine gun, spilling a belt full of bullets. He pointed it into the jungle.
‘Hey whoa what’s happening?’ I cried, admittedly with panic in my voice.
‘Insurgents’ was the whispered reply.
The film we were making was about the environment, not a bloody war film.
‘Well let’s take off and load the film somewhere else,’ I said shakily, trying to sound cool.
Wrong film but, later in life, the inspiration for the right book. My documentary films have taken me from the African Bush to the Indonesian jungle. Every location provides its own adventures, ones that I weave into each of my novels. The plots of my books are fictional-well some of them anyway-but the events and locations experienced by the crew are all based on fact. Hardly surprising then that the exploits of documentary film director Nathalie Thompson adds veracity to the world of crime and terror that she inhabits.