based on the novel "Victory" by Joseph Conrad

Vadim was an actor and had played lead roles in over 100 movies when he decided to take up directing. I had known him through friends like Roland Gall and Joe Hembus. We had both worked with, but also through, George Panousopoulos, since they wanted to shoot a modern western in Arizona. Finaly Vadim made his "Desperado City" alone, while George shot his "Honeymoon".

Vadim placed the "Devil's Paradise" story in the interwar period on a little Indonesian island with an active volcano, and in the Dutch colonial city Surabaya. He had made a quick scouting trip to Penang and Surabaya, but the first of his troubles was that the insurers categorically precluded the location claiming that Suharto didn’t have control of all 3,000 islands.

The same thing happened to us in the Philippines, where we wanted to look for islands with mines and volcanoes, but after the Marcos-Aquino change martial law was declared in Mindanao, which had many volcanoes, and in Cebu. We saw the National Park near Manilla, where Coppola shot his "Apocalypse Now", and we did a little volcanic tourism around Pinatubo and Mayon. On the way to Magaso we luckily saw what was then perhaps the most primitive coal mine in the country. See LOCATIONS.

So we went to Thailand where Georg Mertensmeyer was waiting for us. He was a German resident of Bangkok running a company servicing foreign productions. We nearly had the same problem here, because in the non-tourist south that interested us, trucks drove in convoys at night in fear of the gangs that robbed cars on highways. Georg's production manager was William Melcher, a Vietnam veteran who stayed behind in Bangkok to prepare the rest of the location scouting while we started for the south. Fortunately, Georg understood exactly what we wanted and took the risk.