How did you find Panama?
Panama is a curious mixture. Panama City is quite a sophisticated city with banks. Outside of the city, you find widespread poverty. Then you have the canal. It's like you step over this invisible line and you're in America. It's extraordinary. Being a little worm [of land], you can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 45 minutes. This has a kind of psychological effect on the people who live there. Being in this narrow isthmus, with North America on one side and South America on the other, and all these contradictions of rich and poor - with the canal cutting it in half - there's much superstition. Somehow some people feel it's almost a sacrilegious thing, to cut a continent in two.
How were you received in Panama?
With some hostility, because people knew the book. There was a lot of press reports that were very hostile. I had some difficulties. I had to decide whether or not to shoot there. Other than the canal, I could've made it elsewhere, but I wanted it to be Panama, so I persisted. Then again, they wanted the attention a major film would bring to Panama.
How did it work out for you?
What really worked for us was Pierce Brosnan. The President of Panama was a very nice woman. Rather frivolous and enamoured of Pierce. Everything I asked for, I got. I said "I'd like to shoot in the Palace" and she said "Will Pierce be there?" and I said "Oh, yeah". He wasn't, of course. She did ambush him on one occasion. He was going back to Los Angeles, because he had a couple of weeks off in the middle of the picture. She had her spies out. When he got on the plane, he found himself sitting next to her. He had this terrible hangover and wanted to go to sleep. And there she was sitting next to him all the way. Then she just got on another plane and came back.
