The Emerald Forest

According to TV Guide, an article by Leonard Greenwood was published in the Los Angeles Times in October 1972. It told of a Peruvian engineer whose son was abducted by an Indian gang and of the man's successful search to find the boy's whereabouts. Screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg saw the article and brought it to producer-director John Boorman, and the film was the result.

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Powers Boothe nearly drowned while filming a scene in which Charley Boorman helped him cross a river. Boorman's calls for help were initially taken by distant crew members as part of his performance.

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Charley Boorman broke the same toe four times during production. After the long shoot, which he spent almost entirely barefoot, the party trick he came up with was striking a match on his bare feet.

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Dira Paes, who plays an Indian, was cast after a test in which she gained an advantage by answering the casting director in English. Even counting only the plays she had performed at school as experience, she had already shown herself professional enough to forget what the word "modesty" meant. "I'm always naked, I have a G-string but my breasts and buttocks are exposed. I was 15 and I had my 16th birthday on the last day of shooting. I was a girl and it comes back to me as a reminder of when I was still a virgin. But it wasn't hard to do because everyone was Indian and naked. It wasn't great, but it was nice to be without limits," she recalls.

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The lead role is played by Charley Boorman, the son of director Sir John Boorman, who had taken small roles in the director's earlier films such as Excalibur (1981) and Deliverance (1972) and in his later films such as Hope and Glory (1987) and Beyond Rangoon (1995).

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Because many of the native South American actors were reported to wear very little in the film, each day's shooting began with the non-South American cast and crew doing nude aerobic exercise.

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The film's closing epilogue reads: "The Amazon rain forest is being destroyed at the rate of 5,000 acres a day. Once four million Indians lived there. 120,000 remain. A few tribes have had no contact with the outside world. They still know what we have forgotten."

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This was Dira Paes's debut.

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Rospo Pallenberg strongly opposed the casting of Charley Boorman, which led to a serious disagreement with John Boorman. It was the last film they worked on together.

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The film was shown out of competition at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.

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According to the entertainment trade paper "Variety", the film "is based on a true story, not mentioned in the title, about a Peruvian whose son disappeared in the Brazilian jungle".

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The trailer was narrated by Percy Rodrigues.

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Simon Holland was first hired on this film as an assistant to production designer Michael Seymour; however, John Boorman fired Seymour early during shooting (largely to the latter's surprise), and Holland was promoted to full designer on the film.

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The real person on whom Tomme / Tommy Markham (Charley Boorman) was based was named "Ezequiel".

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Many of the film's posters carried the following long tagline: "What kind of man would return year after year for ten years to rescue a missing child from the heart of the world's most savage jungle? His father. 'The Emerald Forest'. Based on a true story."

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The film was made and released roughly thirteen years after the original newspaper article that served as its source was first published.

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The film's first title card does not appear until about ten minutes into the film.

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The tribal name given to Tommy Markham (Charley Boorman) was "Tomme", while the tribal dream name held by his real father, Bill Markham (Powers Boothe), was "Daddé".

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Actor Powers Boothe had previously shared the lead in Southern Comfort (1981), a film often compared to Deliverance (1972). Boothe later appeared in The Emerald Forest (1985), whose director, Sir John Boorman, had directed Deliverance (1972).

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The hydroelectric dam construction company was named "Amazco Corporation".

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John Boorman again includes the element of dam construction threatening nature, which had featured in his previous film Deliverance.

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The time it took father Bill Markham (Powers Boothe) to find his son Tommy Markham (Charley Boorman) in the Brazilian Amazon rain forest was ten years.

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The Australian DVD sleeve notes describe it as an official "true-life Tarzan saga".

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