Original subtitles

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[Insects buzz]

Man: [Speaking French]

Wade: It's kind of an interesting question,

was this film cursed?

To take a Hollywood film set to Haiti

in the immediate wake of the revolution

was incredibly courageous.

That world of Haiti can be very intimidating.

Famously people either are repelled by Haiti

or they become absolute obsessives about Haiti.

And I certainly was in the latter category.

I became almost to a fault an evangelist for Voodoo.

My name's Wade Davis, I'm a Professor of Anthropology

at the University of British Columbia,

and a writer.

Now, this began as a kind of serendipitous assignment.

My great professor, Richard Evans Schultes,

was very interested in this rumored existence

of a folk poison in Haiti

that was said to bring on a state of apparent death

so profound, it could fool a physician.

So he casually asked me if I was interested

in going down to the island nation of Haiti,

and searching for the formula of the drug

reputedly implicated in this business of making zombies.

And naturally, I said yes.

Reporter: Zombies, the living dead,

have for years been the staple ingredient

of second-rate horror movies.

But is there any truth behind the Hollywood fantasies?

A couple of years ago, "Newsnight" took a look

behind the cinema clich,s,

and found that on the West Indian island of Haiti,

truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

- What drove the whole story was the discovery

by a man called Lamarque Douyon,

of the case of Clairvius Narcisse.

Male Reporter: This is 62 years old Clairvius Narcisse.

He's looking at the grave in which he was buried

19 years ago.

The funeral was attended by all his family and friends.

- He heard everything, when he was put in the coffin,

when he was put in the grave.

And he was showing you -- - A scar here.

- A scar here, it was a nail from his coffin.

Wade: So these lines of evidence led Douyon

to go public, saying he had found the first

verifiable instance of the living dead.

And what he meant by that is he had found an individual

who, by all accounts, had been pronounced dead,

and turned back up into the realm of the living.

These powders, of which I have somewhere, uh...

this poison doesn't make a zombie.

The question is, can this poison make someone appear

to be dead?

It's a whole plethora of ingredients:

Bufo marinus, the Caribbean toad,

with these big parotid glands

with the cardioactive steroids in them,

a number of toxic plants,

broken glass,

also um, human remains for magical reasons.

And the most powerful neurotoxin found on Earth.

It's called tetrodotoxin.

It comes from the viscera and the skin of a couple

of different genera of puffer fish, if you will,

which includes the legendary fugu fish,

which is prepared by specially licensed chefs

who are said in the West to eliminate the toxin.

One of the things that I was completely unprepared for

was how this would all kind of explode

over the American media.

So I walked off the street to a literary agent in London,

and secured a-a book advance.

And I used the book advance to finish the research,

but then I had to write a book.

And that's how "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

was actually written.

The book really did attempt to take a phenomena,

the Haitian zombie, that had been used

in an explicitly racist way

to denigrate a people and their religion,

and it tried to make sense out of it.

And I think David Ladd, the producer, really got that.

And I think that was every bit his intention.

- My name is David Ladd.

I was the producer of "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

What I saw as a commercial appeal was

the reality that zombies actually exist.

I mean, zombies have been fodder

for films for years, and years, and years.

But the fact that they actually exist

was fascinating to me.

And the lead character was a real life,

honest-to-God Indiana Jones.

He was the real deal.

- My favorite director at that time was Peter Weir.

And I thought that "The Year of Living Dangerously"

was a really remarkable template

for what I had actually experienced in Haiti.

David L.: All of a sudden Wes popped up and said,

"Gee, I'd really like to do this."

And we couldn't resist.

Wes was the hottest genre director in the business.

And you know, zombies, Wes Craven,

who could pass on that?

Wade was both grateful and horrified.

How can you do this?

This is a serious piece of work.

- No, I'm not at all a horror film fan.

I really have no relationship to the genre whatsoever.

- Well, I suppose I do now, you know.

Wes was very keen to move out

of the horror genre at the time,

and I remember Wes saying to me, sincerely,

that he thought "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

would be his sort of ticket out in a way.

Jonathan: My father was like a-kind of renaissance man.

He didn't set out to be a horror director.

I think that he was excited to...

kind of leave horror a little bit.

But I think that horror did allow him to work out

some of his demons from childhood.

He basically didn't have a father.

His father left him when he was very, very young,

and died when he was five.

His mother, Caroline, my grandmother,

was constantly trying to get my father

to stop making these terrible, awful movies you're making.

In "The Last House," "Hills have Eyes" era,

he was a madman. You know, that's it.

And people thought he should be locked up.

I thought it was awesome that he was making these films.

Marianne: In those days,

when you said you did those kind of movies,

people would make little comments like,

"I never watch those."

So he was a little bit insecure about that.

Well, when I first met Wes, I had an interview with him.

Two days before the interview,

I watched "Nightmare on Elm Street,"

and it was so scary.

And the night before, I watched "The Last House on the Left,"

and that was a little daunting.

But then when I met him,

he was so nice and charming,

and he gave me a job as his assistant on "Deadly Friend."

They sent us the book "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

What a story! You know, zombies and Haiti and...

This was a big studio movie.

David L.: Then we just started casting.

Bill, at the time, did a movie for my brother

called "Spaceballs,"

which was how I was introduced to him.

And I thought, Bill looks a lot like Wade Davis.

- Barf!

- And so we brought him in, and Wes fell in love with him.

And from that point on, the part was his.

Bill: That was the third movie

that I was a part of.

The first one, a small part, didn't shoot very long on it.

The second one,

a magnum opus, "Spaceballs,"

which was quite exotic.

But "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

took it all to another level.

And I thought,

Is this is what my life is gonna be like?

And it's only now that I realize, no,

that never happened again.

Never had quite the experience as we did

on "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

Cathy: After I did "Mona Lisa"

in 1986,

my agent mentioned about this film,

"The Serpent and the Rainbow."

And of course the whole, you know,

Voodoo for a Black person,

how Hollywood has interpreted Voodoo in the past

as being these savages.

So I wanted to get this right.

Male Narrator: A blonde captain

in the darkness of Voodoo land!

[Dramatic music plays]

- Where do we get this idea of Voodoo being

a black magic cult?

It largely comes from the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps

occupied Haiti in the 1920s and stayed for 20 years.

During the era of Jim Crow,

segregation in the South,

many of the Marines were from the South,

and everybody above the rank of sergeant

got a book contract.

And the books had names like "Cannibal Cousins,"

and "Black Bagdad,"

"Voodoo Fire in Haiti,"

"A Puritan in Voodoo-Land,"

"The Magic Island,"

and all this pulp fiction that gave rise to the RKO movies.

- [Gasps]

- She's making Voodoo. - She's making Voo do what?

- [Laughs maniacally] Man: Voodoo!

- I do? - Not "you do," Voodoo!

- "Zombies on Broadway," "Zombies of the Stratosphere,"

"The White Zombie Slave,"

were full of children bred for the cauldron.

Pins and needles in Voodoo dolls don't even exist.

And of course, notoriously,

zombies crawling out of the grave to attack people.

♪♪♪

Roger: It's very unfashionable these days

to have any anti-Black images, Man: Yes.

- But make 'em Voodoo priests,

because then we can absolutely exploit them

in any way possible, and I thought

there was a lot of not too far under the surface racism

in this movie that really offended me.

- My entire investigation

was trying to take this phenomena

that had been used in a racist way to denigrate a people,

and try to make sense out of sensation.

David L.: Wade was very much into the authenticity

of what we were doing.

No other people looked like the Haitians

or had the kind of culture of the Haitians.

That's something that lives in that island.

I mean, what an adventure to go and make a film in Haiti.

Jonathan: When I was getting out of school I was interested

in writing and directing, and all that stuff.

My father said, come on out,

and see what it's like to be on a real film set.

Weirdly, when I was a really little kid,

I was on "The Last House" set like, twice. [Laughs]

On the Lower East Side I had my balloon popped.

That had been the sum of my experience on a set.

[Pops loudly]

If you want to do this, this is a really,

really hard business.

So if you're gonna work with me,

you're gonna work your way up from the bottom.

David Anderson, who was doing makeup effects for his father,

was somebody I hung out with all the time.

Marianne: David Anderson, our makeup effects guy,

his dad took the job and said, oh, you can have my son,

because Lance didn't want to go to Haiti.

So we didn't know that was David's first job.

David A.: "Serpent" was the first feature

that I was working for my Dad on,

and he tapped me to go to set.

He said, I'm going to send you to Tahiti.

And I was really excited.

And then I realized it was to Haiti, not Tahiti.

Although, to me at that point,

there really wasn't a whole lot of difference

between Haiti and Tahiti.

Uh, but there is now.

♪♪♪

While I was getting off the plane in Port-au-Prince, Haiti,

I kind of recognized a couple of faces

that had been on the other flight,

and soon realized that we were on the same crew,

and that we were heading to the same place.

Dawn: This was such an amazing adventure.

We were all similar in age,

and we were all earlyish in our careers.

Marianne: Wes loved it. He was right there

in the middle of everything.

Wade: David Ladd called me up and said,

Well, what do you wear in Haiti? I said, I don't know,

but there's this outfit in San Francisco

you've never heard of called Banana Republic.

They make all these great linen and cotton clothes.

David: At the time, Banana Republic was a store

where you bought your stuff to go on safari,

you know, become adventurers like Indiana Jones.

I mean, they had the hats, and I mean,

it was, you know, you had a whole look.

Wade: When I got down to the set,

the whole goddamn production from grip to the director

was dressed head-to-toe in Banana Republic.

- It didn't really seem the kind of stuff

that Wade would wear, but David really said,

oh, wait 'til you meet him. He dresses like this.

Yeah, this is how he dresses.

And um, David had begun to dress like this.

And basically it was Banana Republic stuff.

David L.: The pants with the pockets on the side, and the...

it was great. [Laughs]

At the time when we first went down there,

Baby Doc had fallen

as the dictator of Haiti.

- The president for life they called Baby Doc

flew away from Haiti today, to France.

- A few hours before dawn today,

an American military transport plane

took off from Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince,

carrying President Jean-Claude Duvalier,

members of his family, and several staff people,

and security guards.

It brought to an end one of the longest-running

and most brutal dictatorships in the Caribbean.

As soon as the Haitian people heard the news this morning,

there was dancing in the streets,

along with numerous reports of violence

against members of the dreaded militia

associated with Baby Doc.

David L.: That was the Tonton Macoute,

which was the kind of secret police of the Duvaliers

and their reign in Haiti.

It was a wild time down there.

And unfortunately, I mean, Haiti has struggled ever since,

and-and before, long before.

♪♪♪

- These are all from Haiti.

I was taught to take more pictures than you need.

These are just continuity from the script.

So this was obviously Bill,

and he just got hit with the powder.

- [Blows] - Aah!

♪♪♪

- And this was from a scene that David Ladd,

I believe, shot, the second unit director scene.

That's where I learned the term "magic hour."

It's "magic hour!" What the fuck is "magic hour?"

[Laughs]

Before we started filming, we were all invited

to a Voodoo ceremony where we were all gonna be blessed.

It was like, okay, you guys are here in Haiti.

Well, guess what, you're gonna come into the jungle,

you're gonna get hammered on alcohol,

and then we're gonna show you some shit.

And that's exactly what happened.

- I don't know what the producers were thinking.

We went out at night

into the heart of the countryside

to a Voodoo ceremony.

- Women and men would come out and do these dances,

and then allow themselves to become possessed.

- You'd see that moment of possession.

Now this person is being ridden by a God.

- It was all real at that moment.

These people believed it.

And after that evening, so did we.

What it did is it turned this group of strangers

into a family.

It was a ceremony to bless us,

and take away all the evil spirits to protect us,

so that we could successfully make this film in Haiti.

[People chatter, rumbling]

Jonathan: It felt to me that every day was 16 or 18 hours.

It was an insanely ambitious amount of material,

and not a lot of control.

Everything was shot on location,

so you're always in a village,

many which had never seen a film crew before.

There were tons of extras around,

and people that didn't know not to look into camera,

and it was definitely not a normal film set experience.

Cathy: Thinking back on it, I just think,

who was protecting us as a film crew,

Because we did not come across the Tonton Macoute,

but they were there.

[Flames roar]

Dawn: I think the producers really underestimated

the danger of Haiti.

I just kinda had a sense that this isn't gonna be

as easy as you think.

David A.: I wasn't qualified to be there at all.

You know, whether I was a seasoned filmmaker or not,

nobody had an advantage over me,

because it was all new.

Bill: We were wanting to honor their traditions,

and particularly their religion.

Part of it was I think everybody knew

we needed to have them favor us.

And that if we didn't get their favor,

we would have a hard time shooting.

Things could turn bad.

- No! [Screaming]

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

[Drum thumps]

Marianne: I had done some travelling.

But you still get culture shock

when you're somewhere like that.

And everyone had culture shock,

especially a lot of the actors had culture shock.

Um... many people,

a few people had nervous breakdowns over there.

David L.: We had a writer, Richard Maxwell,

who literally was possessed at a certain point.

That was one of the most odd experiences of the film,

and of the making of it.

Richard was down there, and of course, uh,

he wanted to be exposed

to as many of the authentic characters and places

as he could possibly be,

as he was doing a kind of final rewrite with Wes.

And I don't remember the specifics of it,

but Richard got involved with a Voodoo practitioner

who he thought had put a curse on him.

- Richard was a nice guy.

But--and he was very sincere about Voodoo,

but he got so shaken by the experience

he had a nervous breakdown on the set.

Marianne: I think they sent Jill Simpson to his room

to see how he was doing,

and he was only in a t-shirt.

And as I recall, it like, had a bullseye on it,

and that was it. Nothing else.

- You know, it was-it was...

- So obviously, she came back, she said, oh my God,

we're in trouble.

Bill: I'd see him at dinner or something, and...

"how are the rewrites goin'?"

But it was the moment when he said, yeah,

I really got a lot done.

I, you know, there was...

trouble with the original name for my character,

and uh, it had--

eventually the lawyers

decided that "Dennis"

would be a good first name, and I hated that name.

I just never liked Dennis.

But that's what he had to do.

And I remember he said, uh, I got a lot done.

I've changed all the names.

So every one of 'em says "Dennis."

And then I realized, oh, that's like, a click,

with software.

- This one morning, we, we found him

standing outside Wes's door completely naked.

And around him were

25 cigarette butts.

- Wes opened the door and there he was,

and he's just like, I'm sorry, man, I can't do it.

- And he just stood there and smoked

until Wes got up.

And Wes came and got me.

I got on a plane with him and got him to Miami,

handed him off to his wife, and he was flown home.

But he-he was completely under some kind of a--

what he thought was a Voodoo spell.

Marianne: Other people had nervous breakdowns.

Jay: Who else had a nervous breakdown?

- I don't know if I can tell you.

It might have been one of the actors.

And I think they had... a nightmare or a vision.

- Uh...

really, I always have a hard time talking about this,

because I don't know the audience.

You know, I don't know people's openness.

I went through this ceremony,

and um, just a really--

some-some unsettling things happened

in that-in terms of things that I perceived about myself,

and different environments and everything, and so--

the-right away, Wes says, like, what'd you take?

What'd you drink? Did you smoke anything?

You know. [Laughs]

Some of it is pretty much um...

some things that people probably have experienced

in different times with clairvoyance

or a sense of past lives or something.

[Birds chirp]

I had a lot of uh,

sequences to do with travelling really quickly

over the surface of Africa.

And moving towards a gathering of people

out in the middle of nowhere.

And I realized that it was a convocation of people

of all skin tones and colors.

And that there was this-- steps with an oration.

That was an experience where I was so disturbed,

I cancelled the rehearsals the next day.

They said, what's the matter with you?

And I didn't want to talk about it, you know.

I just, but Wes was really like,

this is why we came here.

Davud A.: We shot a scene in a cemetery at night.

And I actually had to get into an open grave

that one of our skeletons had to go in,

that I had to get in and dress.

That's just one of those moments where you just go,

what the fuck am I doing here?

Getting into the hole,

I'll never forget looking and seeing the rocks

around the wall of the hole that they had dug for me,

and coming to the realization

that those were not rocks, that those were bones.

And they were at all levels.

There were bones, people piled on top of people.

- Oh shit! Oh sh-- - Are you okay?

David A.: And we just dug...

this horrible hole right in the middle of it all,

And excavated all these body parts, and bodies,

and put 'em aside, and put our fake skeleton in there,

and shot the scene.

And uh...

for that I'm probably goin' to Hell.

Jonathan: There's all these scenes with piles of skulls

and piles of bones everywhere, right?

The set dressing was three or four

enormous gunny sacks of human bones.

And I never asked where they got 'em.

I didn't want to know.

Should I even be talking about this?

Like, I-I don't even know that this is cool, you know.

This is not cool. Like-- [Laughs]

Dawn: We had several members of local crew.

And this one woman in particular

was going to help us wrangle some bones for an altar

that we were creating.

And um, when she delivered the bones,

we realized they were real human bones.

And she had uh, robbed a grave. [Laughs]

- Ah! There's a lot of stories

I don't know if I want to tell,

I don't even know if I should've told the bone story,

but um... Jay: Too late.

- Yeah! [Laughs]

When they go to make the Voodoo potion in the cemetery,

there's a shot where the camera

kinda dollies through the gravestones.

And I don't want to accuse anybody of this,

somebody told me like, we're gonna put

a dolly track down here,

so those two headstones have to move, and...

and you-you know, clear the path.

Like, make a level path.

And um, the graves were not deep.

And the bodies didn't seem to be in coffins.

So there was sort of some moving of bones,

and you'd kind of move a headst-- you know,

take a picture of the headstones, and move it,

and put it back later.

I think we may have... desecrated some stuff.

I'm not sure. But I don't remember.

I could-it could all be a hallucination.

Please don't hold me to any of this.

Dawn: To me, when a bunch of Americans

try to recreate something that's happening

in Haitian culture, that's enough to be

a little nerve-wracking right there.

If we had disrupted something there by doing something wrong,

would we have called in a God that was angry at us?

I don't know.

[Beep]

[Birds chirp]

David L.: At this point we'd been there

for a number of weeks.

But nobody had really dealt

with the desperation of the people.

So it was kind of a little bit shocking,

and a little bit frightening

to see this all of a sudden change

in the way that it had.

David A.: We were shooting the giant procession.

So we had our main characters,

and literally thousands of Haitian extras.

I think there were 2,000.

Wade: They hired like, 1,500 extras,

but of course it quickly grew to 3,000 or 4,000 in Haiti.

Then they had the naivete to think

that the assistant director could go, "cut!"

Well, you don't let loose 4,000 Haitians,

drums, night, torches, and music,

and song, and chant, and go, "cut!"

I mean, this was a full-on ceremony at this point.

[Crowd shouts]

[Overlapping shouting]

And rumor went out that everybody

wasn't gonna get paid.

- Some of the extras found out that other people

were getting more money.

And so they all were demanding to be paid

the greater amount of money.

And it may have been the difference of a dollar

to ten dollars, which, it--

you know, that many years ago, in Haiti,

was an, an incredible amount of money.

Bill: There was a lot of people.

Even before we came down there, that said,

you're gonna come into Haiti,

and you have an insane amount of money

for this conditions that these people live in here.

The average pay a day is a dollar

for cuttin' sugar cane,

one of the worst jobs you could ever have in this life.

And I think production was trying to get--

well, we'll give 'em three dollars a day.

- They felt that we were underpaying them,

and I think we probably were.

And they wanted more money.

[Crowd shouts]

Bill: You know, suddenly I began to get a feeling

that people were getting anxious.

And I was hearing from ADs that there was uh,

talk of a strike,

that the extras were gonna strike.

And then, you know, that kinda became louder and louder,

and then it became more like a little bit of an unrest.

- And I'll never forget, at this point,

I thought I had a great bond with these people.

And I got up on top of a bus,

and I was trying to negotiate with them.

- I remember him with a mic-- a megaphone,

in his Banana Republic outfit.

And on top of this building with the megaphone

and a translator,

trying to talk everybody down.

- And I looked down, and they all had rocks in their hands.

- And the negotiations fell apart,

and they revolted, and started throwing rocks at us.

- And they started to kind of riot.

- We had to leave our camera equipment,

everybody had to-- we had to run into a church,

and lock the door.

- We were surrounded, and...

we...we needed to get out.

David L.: In the meantime, Doug had ensconced himself

in a house, and was paying the extras

with what money he had.

The word was out that we are out of here.

And I literally ran straight from set into a bus,

got in the bus, and off we went.

And I was in one of the first buses that left,

um, with rocks pelting the back of the bus as we left.

We went straight from that location

straight to a running plane,

and straight to the Dominican Republic.

That was it for Haiti.

Cathy: I-I do like to be an adventurer.

But with adventure

comes responsibility as well.

Marianne: No one had thought about, you know,

you're gonna gather a thousand people together

who are making three dollars a day.

I think it was a naive decision.

Wade: We all got over to Dominican Republic,

Santa Domingo.

Everybody is completely exhausted.

And uh, the luggage doesn't appear. [Laughs]

Obviously there's a scam happening,

So I got on the luggage rack and I crawled through the door

and went out on the tarmac,

and came around the side of the luggage van

with-filled with luggage from the plane.

And I saw like, five Dominican cops

trying on everybody's clothes. [Laughs]

Caught them red-handed.

And I just said, no. You know, I speak Spanish.

I said, yeah, no, no.

No es posible, hermanos, por favor.

[Laughs]

David L.: When you make a film, you become a family.

This is a group of people that are brought together

anywhere from three or four months' worth of time

to a year's time.

And you share your life with them,

and they share their lives with you.

David A.: And Marianne, she and Jill,

this is Jill Simpson here,

were this dynamic duo.

And without them, I don't think Wes could have functioned.

Marianne: "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

was the movie that Wes and I decided to become partners on.

I started working with Wes as a producer on "Shocker."

We did "Shocker," and "People Under The Stairs"

for Universal.

We clicked, and we were really good friends,

and we just had a really good partnership.

I just thought Wes was gonna be here forever,

because he was so full of life and interested,

and intriguing.

And it-it just kind of doesn't make sense that he's gone

even to me now.

It was family.

Obviously for David as well.

I mean, he met his wife through "Serpent and the Rainbow."

David A.: I had to ask for his approval to marry Heather,

basically. [Laughs]

I didn't even ask Heather's father.

I had to ask Wes Craven.

So, there you have it.

Thank you, Wes.

Jonathan: People loved him.

People went through Hell for him,

and did it gladly.

Like, were happy to be there.

You know for me it could be challenging at times

because I was like, the film crew is really your family.

Everybody worked with my father,

and people would interface with him and interviewed him,

and knew him, oh my God, he's such a great guy.

And he was. He was a great guy.

He was not a great father.

I've talked to a lot of people about it.

It just-it just wasn't something that he could

really wrap his head around.

He wanted to, I think, but...

he didn't want to do that more than he wanted to be a director

and wanted to be who he had become.

He tried to branch out and do other things.

He's-he comes back to horror.

That's where the opportunity is,

and that's where he gets to process

whatever happened to him as a child,

which, I know broad strokes of.

There's definitely trauma there.

I think he did what he did really well,

and he put everything into it.

And he had a lot of compassion for the people

who were around him.

I think he had a lot of compassion for me

and my sister.

I think he didn't always know how to connect.

And uh, and that's... that's true for a lot of people,

a lot of fathers and sons.

We're not gonna be like, super cozy as father and son.

But we were able to come together on film sets,

and that was a beautiful thing.

[Low hum of chatter]

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

Wade: When the film came out,

I was disappointed.

These gratuitous horror elements,

to my mind, completely deflated the power

of the truth of the story.

But I also clearly recognize that it wasn't my film.

It was Wes Craven's film.

In my book I had targeted these movies

as being the perpetrators

of the grotesque stereotypes about Voodoo.

- [Gasps]

- And then suddenly, I'm held responsible

for a Wes Craven movie that by all accounts

essentially perpetuates that same stereotype.

Cathy: That's when I started to think about representation.

And I guess, you know, the white saviorism.

Probably the protagonist would be Black now.

I felt that Bill was the right actor, though.

He was very sensitive to his role,

you know, and other people.

I think for young Black actresses now,

there's a record of somebody who worked there in 1988,

and did the female lead.

I'm proud of that legacy.

♪♪♪

David L.: I think that Wade, you know,

he has very mixed emotions about it,

because on the one hand, you know,

he felt that maybe we had, to a degree,

bastardized this serious piece of work.

- But on the other hand,

it made Wade Davis, Wade Davis.

Wade: I literally went from being kind of the darling

of the Haitian community,

to being a so-called controversial figure.

So it was a very bittersweet

convergence of forces that occurred.

That said, I totally honored the people

that worked so hard to make it.

And I left it all behind me, without bitterness

or contempt, and only joy.

But then I just went on with a new phase of my life,

and became an activist

working on behalf of the last nomadic people

of the rainforest of Southeast Asia.

And I have not been back to Haiti since.

David A.: All in all, when I look back on it,

I believe there was a curse.

I believe there are curses.

I believe we were actually blessed and protected.

What may have happened had we not gotten that blessing,

you know, God only knows.

But there was a certain confidence that was given

to us all that night.

I basically learned my craft through all of these people

that I was now on an island with.

Every experience just got soaked in,

and filed, and became like, the foundation.

- David LeRoy Anderson, for "The Nutty Professor."

[Audience cheers]

- And what I was able to achieve there

with this film crew,

and with this film community,

was enough to make my Dad proud,

and make me feel successful,

and make me come home excited about what I had done.

But very, very aware of the fact

that I didn't do any of it alone.

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