It s a good thing he didn t come across a centipede in the bidet, or a tith polanga in the shower. Hall quoted Dimitri de Grunwald as saying, They don t make films like this any more. Every country has one great story to tell. This is Sri Lanka s. We ve simply got to put on a bigger show than TV to entice people back into the cinema.
TV can afford failures.
The God King certainly tried hard to be part of the bigger show that Dimitri wanted to create. Take the final battle scene, which was filmed at the Mahakandarawa tank, Mihintale. Last week they used 33 elephants in a battle. They lost one when it panicked and went flopping off into the jungle still in its gold and silver finery, leaving its quick-witted mahout clinging to a branch as he passed under it. It took two days to get the elephant back, and it gave coachloads of startled tourists something to write home about.