Obviously a challenge to this film was finding original footage and music after a regime that went to great lengths to destroy these parts of history. Where did you start?

You want me to reveal my sources? I’m kidding! Look I really want people to go and do more with what’s out there.

It’s impossible to overstate how much putting word out in the Khmer community helped. We got back all these personal photos and old album covers. Those are all really great. But when I started, everyone told me told me “You won’t find anything. It’s all been destroyed.” Not just from the Khmer Rouge, but we’re talking about the tropics and there just weren’t archives. So a lot of material was lost or decomposed. Also, for the first ten or so years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge people weren’t thinking about archiving their past; they were thinking about eating and surviving.

So in 2004 I went to Phnom Penh and visited the Department of Cinema. I knew the woman who ran it and told her what I was looking for. She just said, “Come back tomorrow.” The next day she put me in this room with a VCR and an old beat up TV and handed me a stack of VHS tapes: They were all of King Sihanouk’s films from the ’60s. They had a sort of Bollywood feel to them—there’d be a dramatic scene, and then a comedy scene, and then an action scene, and then a musical number, and then all over again. In these musical sequences he’d use all the stars of the time. I said: “This is amazing. It there any way we can use this? Are there better copies?” And she responded, “Well the King now lives in Beijing. If you go to the royal palace you can fax him,” with this look that said good luck. What she didn’t know was that I had a friend who had corresponded with the King before, so he emailed the King and three days later we got a response with an official seal and letterhead that gave us permission to use the film.