deserve what you get. [Laughs.] "It was unbelievably tough", said Powers Boothe. "The actors would clamber out of the muck just in time to get back into it. The situation was even harder on the crew. They'd set up a camera platform and it would slowly sink into the bayou. Or with a tripod, one leg would sink. And how can actors hit their marks in two feet of water?... I have to give Walter Hill credit for making the three months as endurable as possible. We didn't lose our senses of humor until late in the shooting. Taking two weeks off at Christmas time helped keep our sanity." Walter Hill said the film was "not a simple action movie where the people chasing the other out there is bad": It is clearly in a sense the kind of fault of our guys for getting into this situation. In the collective group, there are individuals who are not as highly evolved as the others. And the answers to the dilemma, I mean both nature's noblemen, those of higher character through some innate quality. And you have people that operate on a sliding scale downward to the brute level in their response to the situation that they have gotten themselves into. All of which I think is a kind of, war is terrible. It's a wartime situation. With mixed results and accompanying paranoia even by those who are the best and the brightest of the bunch... None of us are quite as good or bad as we construct them. Southern Comfort is trying not to be an easy drama. Soundtrack The music was done by Ry Cooder who had just worked with Hill on The Long Riders. Cooder later said: Because my own musical fantasies and Walter Hill's film fantasies arc in sync, it's possible for me to score a film like Southern Comfort without understanding the first thing about its environment. All I had to do was think about this weird swamp, and the Cajun people that nobody knew about. I had to imagine what they were going to sound like, and I figured on the style of John Lee Hooker's music. Reception Walter Hill later said he was "always amazed" by the reception to the film. "The American reception was a real kind of nothing. But it was very nicely received around the world." He added that the movie