The Cambodian soldier hisses, "Today, you dead," into Matt Dillon’s face before smashing Dillon’s head to the floor of a dilapidated room.

Seconds later, James Caan and a group of gangsters shoot it out on a patchy lawn in front of a dark, imposing building, while doom-laden mist drifts up from the surrounding jungle, threatening to swallow the protagonists, whether dead or alive.

That was in 2002, in Dillon’s disappointing thriller The City of Ghosts. While the plot was forgettable and the protagonists two-dimensional, the film’s locations had a brooding, menacing presence filled with tension and despair.

No wonder – the movie’s key scenes were shot in and around an old casino, the Bokor Palace, a long-abandoned French hill station on a windswept mountain 1,000 metres (3,300ft) above the Cambodian coastline, and now at the centre of a national park.