10 Things You Didn't Know About Butterfly Man
1. Kaprice and Tom first met at Cannes in 1997 at a screening of Monk Dawson. Kaprice was about to take the trip which was to prove the inspiration for Butterfly Man, at the time he had no idea that Tom was half-Thai.
2. In the original draft, Kaprice wrote about the actual village at the end of film from imagination. When he returned to Thailand to look for the village, a young girl on the southern islands wrote her address on a scrap of paper in Thai. With this, Kaprice travelled 500 miles to find the village - the same scrap of paper was used by Adam to find Em's village in the actual film. And the actual monk and villagers were cast in the film!
3. Tom and Kaprice even flew to Los Angeles to look for money and cast Gavan O'Herlihy (Bill Kincaid). Driving from the airport they passed a freshly-shot corpse only yards away from where they were to stay near Venice Beach. They called 911 from a nearby house and within minutes the Santa Monica Police Dept promptly arrived on the scene. It could have been a scene from a John Singleton movie!
4. Kaprice eventually had to move to Thailand to get the film made. When Tom arrived for pre-production he found Kaprice's office/studio inhabited by local toddlers running riot. They helped load the film stock into the fridge!
5. To get the film passed by the Thai Film Board, the 90 page script had to be translated into Thai and then photocopied 40 times. 2 officials had to attend the shooting at all times. Some of them ended up helping to make props and appeared as extras in the film.
6. Kaprice spent two years looking for a Thai girl to play Em. He spotted Mamee on the Khao San Road, two days before leaving for the location. (Months later one candidate flew into a fit of anger cursing her bad judgement after seeing the rushes and realising that it was a proper film and not a sequel to Emmanuelle. )
7. The night one of the crew arrived in Samui, his room was broken into and his money stolen - just as it happens to Adam in the film. It wasn't the last time that "life imitated art" on the production.
8. Kaprice didn't have any hesitation in casting bar girls, local masseuses and Wit, a neighbour who is homeless and often sleeps on his doorstep. When Wit and his wife stayed at the hotel it was the first bed they had had for years. They ate the entire contents of the mini-bar, too shy to come to the restaurant.
9. Thailand had a powerful effect on the British crew. Apart from the appeals of the Samui nightlife various members didn't leave until months after the film had wrapped.
10. Mamee Nakprasitte, who plays Em in the film, starred in the title role of Mae Bia, Thailand ten biggest grossing film in box office history, and became an overnight sensation. She is set to appear in Oliver Stone's new production about Alexander the Great.
