Confronting the Past: Ham Tran on the Making of Journey from the Fall (Part 2)

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[The following discusses the content and style of Journey from the Fall, and contains some spoilers.]

APA: How familiar are you with films from Vietnam after the Vietnam War? Because it seems like they also had to go through a period where they fixated on the war, perhaps more obliquely..

HT: Yea, that's another point I wanted to bring up. Because the Vietnam War, taught in Vietnam, is called the American War. This is the disparity between the Vietnamese communities, because now we have two Vietnamese communities. There are the VKs, which are the Vietnamese abroad (Australia, France, Germany) and you have the people in the homeland. And the version of history that is learned is completely different. [For VKs], April 30th is Independence day -- fireworks, tanks, parades, victory, victory! Over here, it's called Black April. And people have candlelight vigils for the dead. So that is the disparity, and that has created a lot of resentment on one side and mistrust of anything that represents the other side.

And here from the Vietnamese community, they're very sensitive about the way the world views them. You've heard about, [actor] Duong Dong being put under house arrest and he wasn't allowed to leave the country. And Tony Bui and Tim Bui [his nephews] had to get all these Hollywood stars to sign a petition, all these government officials to sign a petition, and they got him out as a refugee. He's no longer living in Vietnam, and he can't go back anymore because of his role in We Were Soldiers. Because of his role in Green Dragon. In We Were Soldiers, he played a communist official. But the bad thing he did in the end was just to put up the American flag. And boom. That was like, "No, no, no. You don't do that. You don't do that."

So you have a disparity in the way history is taught. I've been traveling around all year to different Vietnamese student conferences promoting this film and showing clips, and this woman in Austin came up to me and she says, "I'm studying abroad from Vietnam, and I came over. And I have to say that's amazing, because I never knew. In Vietnam, this isn't taught."

And I thought about it, and wow, it's true. They don't teach this side of it. There're no re-education camps. Boat people? That's kind of a hush-hush taboo topic; nobody talks about that. And I asked myself, OK that's fine, I understand. They don't teach this in college, but why don't they teach this at home? I mean, there are survivors. The parents' generation -- they don't talk about this with their kids?

And it wasn't until I talked to another woman, and she said, "Of course not. Because everybody was scared." If you talked about it with your kids, and they're six years old, and they go to school and talk about it, guess who's in trouble? So, you don't talk about it at all. And that's what you have. So there's a lot of friction and tension and self-consciousness on both sides.

But I'm hoping that, in time, if this story is recognized, it's out there. There's no way you can look at it and say no anymore. You talk about Nanking, the Rape of Nanking, and systems of governments are going head to head, saying this is true, this is not. Or "You can't call this a Holocaust, because there's not enough people who died to call this a Holocaust." And the thing is: What do you say about the hundreds of thousands of boat people who died just crossing that little channel, the Gulf of Thailand? What do you say about those who were killed in the re-education camps? So, can we call this a holocaust? There's a lot of history that that country is not willing to acknowledge because it makes them culprit to some wrongs that they have committed. But what we have to understand is that we have to be able to recognize it to move beyond it. Burying it doesn't help.

The Vietnamese government is trying to get the American government to compensate those who were affected by Agent Orange. "You sprayed all this stuff, and look at all the birth defects and all the people who are still living with the effects of Agent Orange." And America's like, "Oh, there's no proof of that, that it causes birth defects." And they don't want to pay. The Vietnamese government is trying to get them to pay. But I think, by the same virtue, can some of the Vietnamese Americans here say, "What about the land that was confiscated from us, can we get that back now?" So where do you stop? So it's very touchy, it's very political. And I might not go back to Vietnam again for what I just said.
 
APA: I think what's so revolutionary about your film is that it breaks so many categories that we're used to: a Vietnamese film, an American film, even an Asian American film. What you're saying is that this is even a VK film, a film that represents people from all around the world who went through a similar experience. And what made me think about this was the structure of your film -- and I timed this yesterday at the screening. At about 80 minutes into the film, [spoiler] that's when the father dies. Some films are 80 minutes, so you almost feel like the film should end now, but you refuse to let that happen. You're saying that this is only half the story. Was that a very conscious decision from the very beginning?

HT: Well, [laughs] the conscious decision at the beginning was: Should we make a trilogy, or should we just make one film that has all of this stuff. Because you can make 10 films of just one of these stories alone. But it was like one of those things where we just had to eat it, and say, "Look man, it's the first film, so we're just going to have to touch upon these subjects." And there are people who come up to us and ask us, "Hey, what about the refugee camps? Once you get rescued, you don't go from the boat to the plane to America, you go to a refugee camp." And we're like, "Sorry, we don't have time to tell that part of the story."

But it was a conscious decision to tell all three sides of the story. The initial script was actually in three parts: it was the re-education camps, the boat people, and America. But the boat people: we didn't have enough money to shoot all the scenes we wanted to shoot. Because it costs a lot more money to shoot on water than on land. So it ended up being: the first cut of the film was 45 min of the re-education camp stuff. And then you have to boat people, the boat escape, and all that is in the present. And then you come to America, and all that is in the present. And you kind of tie in at the end.

But we watched it, and we were like, "Man, these poor boat people; they are slammed in between these two giant walls of stories." We needed a way to even that out. Tim Bui watched it -- he did Green Dragon and he was an advisor on the film -- and he said that when they made Three Seasons, they had the same problem. Three Seasons was written with four different stories. He said you have a lot of interesting parallels between the boat escape and the father in prison; so why don't you try that?

So I tried that, but it felt like two movies. Like, Done! But when you feel like you're supposed to get up and go, you sit back down for another 45 minutes. And for me, it wasn't planned to be that way, but I liked that it was that way. Because there's a sense that when you come over as an immigrant, you put everything behind you. Emotionally you have to be detached in order to move on. For the boat people who had gone through all those crazy things, I think if they stopped to think about it, they'd go crazy. So the choice is: don't think about it, move on. Don't talk about it with your kids. Move on. So, that was America.

And you start to see it that way. Because it's like, Damn, all these crazy things just happened. But now I'm in America. It's all about family dramas, it's all about suburbia. Life. When you have all this insanity in your head that you still have to keep.... It's one of those things you don't think about when you think about immigrants coming over to America. You don't think about what they went through, what their lives were like. It's almost like having two lives, starting fresh. So that quality ended up being very appropriate for the film. But then you realize that past has to be reconciled, or it's going to explode. And it does explode. So that's how the structure of the film came in.

APA: I also liked liked that in the U.S. portion, the film emphasizes objects and rituals that can't seem to go away. There's this fixation on the food, the taste of the food.

HT: Food, I love food. I love cooking. And the one thing you can say about Vietnamese people is: food. You can have a huge meal and you're totally completely full, but after you're full, you talk about the food you want to eat. For me, food is a ritual. It's culture. I believe that if you go to any different country, one of the things you have to understand in order to understand their culture, is to try their food. Because there is a lot of history behind how food is made, there are stories behind food.

APA: Other rituals that survive into America are holidays. We can still celebrate. It's not the same, but we can still celebrate it here. And I noticed three other things: the music (the song that's replayed). And the photographs. And the memory footage that you use shot in small-gauge 16mm style.

HT: Hand-cranked Bolex. We shot until literally the Bolex broke. Couldn't crank it anymore. So all the streaking, that wasn't done by me, that was done by the camera that broke, and I was like, "That's beautiful." Meanwhile, the producer's like, "What's wrong with the film? Are you really going to use that?" [laughs] I was like, "Yeah... that's beautiful."

Old photographs: I have a fixation with them. I love old photographs; my production company is called Old Photo Films. And you'll see at the beginning of all my films, there's an old photograph. But it's different for every film; it relates to the film.

With the music, it was very specific because I had worked with Chris Wong before on The Anniversary. So I trusted him and knew. And I made him work backwards. For a film, a composer's supposed to get the film cut, watch it, and go - what mood do I feel here, what can I punch up? I asked him, "Hey, can you write me a score? Can you read the script and write me a score so I can have it while I'm shooting?" So, he comes up with different themes and we select the themes, and I play it for the cast and crew as we're driving to set -- "Hey guys, what do you think about this for the opening music of the film?" And as I'm writing, all that source music, the old school Vietnamese music, I'm writing and I'm being inspired, and I'm seeing it, and that goes right into the script. Where you hear the song is where in the script, it says "This song is there."

And the guitar. So my production designer, his uncle was put in a re-education camp. He lived in Saigon, his uncle lived six hours away. So, he was 8 or 10, and he started learning the guitar, and word got to his uncle who was in the camp that his nephew was learning how to play the guitar. So the dude, in the course of three years, built a guitar in the camp -- with wood, found scraps of metal. The strings were telephone wires, because a lot of the camps were there to clean up the wreckage from the war, so you had old airplane parts, and you had people who make cones from metal or tin founded from war scraps. And it's true, when we were auditioning and we went to San Jose, there was a museum where there was this case display of treasure boxes they had made for their families -- cones, a thermos. All these things: they made them by hand in the camps.

So, his uncle make a guitar and sends it back to him after three years but by then he had stopped playing. So then he let his cousin borrow it. But he remembered this guitar, so we went back to his cousin's place and brought it over while we were doing pre-production, and he said, "Dude, check out this guitar." And I saw it, and I had to include it in the film. So I called Chris up and asked, "Can you write a guitar piece?" [laughs] Because I want a story in the film where a guy makes a guitar, and at the end, he finishes the guitar and he plays it for his friends and they sit around and just listen to music. That's also a ritual that they do, a lot of the prisoners. They had to bond, so they sit and play music and be nostalgic and all that. So Chris wrote that and we had a guy play it on set, and it went into the film. But the interesting thing is that you never hear the beautiful, nice, clean version played with a real guitar in the entire movie until the end credits. In the movie, you just hear the twangy, home-made guitar. So there's that element.

APA: I think it definitely speaks to the resilience of culture, the flexibility of culture to adapt especially if you've been displaced from your homeland. I thought it was funny that the turtles from the folktale was made out of Coke cans...

HT: The great thing about film is that you get to bring these silly things as a kid, you can make it as personal or as not personal as you want it to be. For The Anniversary, I was able to bring back toys I played with as a kid. I had one of those hollow pipes, and you put spit wads in there, and go Pow! and you shoot it across the room. And the spit wads -- they hurt. so I was able to put that in there. I was able to put other toys and relics from my childhood. For this film, it was these little Coke cans. Man, they made cars, they made tanks, they made helicopters, they even made cyclos with these little Coke cans. For me, it's all the richness of culture in Vietnam that I remember when I was growing up. That's coming out of my childhood.

APA: Is there anything from your childhood growing up in America that was used in the part of the film set in America?

HT: A lot of people ask me how autobiographical it was. And, I'm not a boat person. My dad wasn't in the re-education camps. So really, the most autobiographical part was really just in America. I got my ass kicked when I just came over here. And I, in turn, kicked some ass too. [laughs] Because that's the culture. You come in and it's almost like hazing. That's how I met my childhood friend. We sort of ganged up and beat them up.

And I don't know why, but I have this thing. When I was a kid, I was totally in the superhero mentality, so I was Heatman: the boy who could withstand heat. So, turn on the faucet and the hot, boiling, scalding water, and I was Heatman, so I could take it! I don't know why, but that was something I did as a kid [laughs].

APA: And that's in the film.

HT: That's in the film. And a lot of people don't understand it. What is he doing to himself? But to me, it felt natural to have the kid have his own ritual as a coping mechanism, and you don't really understand it, and you don't really even talk about it. But that's what's so great about kids, they have their own rituals, and you don't understand it, but they do it because they feel like they need to do it. So that's something very personal that I put in there.

And the drawing. I started drawing when I was six years old in Vietnam. I did cartoons, superheroes. I carved my own Thundercat sword -- that's going to make its way into my next film. But the kid that I had cast, he actually did the kid's drawings in the film. It was great. He had just arrived in America for six months, so he was still wide-eyed. It was the perfect look I was looking for. Language was a problem, eyes were wide. If I had to shoot in Vietnam, he'd be comfortable, because that's what he has known. So we talked to him, he didn't want to be in the film, the grandfather came to audition, and he just came with his grandfather.

But the best thing was when he started smiling. And you realize, that kid's got charm. You look at him, and he's pouting all the time, but when he smiles, you see... he's got charm. So we talked to him, we asked him about the myth, the legend. "Yeah I know the legend." "Why don't you tell is to us. I notice you have a pad over there, can you draw?" He said, "Yea I can draw." "Why don't you draw us the turtle?" He sketched the turtle for us. So after we cast him, I bought him a drawing kit, and said, for the next two months, just draw. Draw whatever you think of the story. So he would send me these sketches in the mail. Dragons, village, boats, the king. So we had to select a few of them. The sketch of the mother, the beautiful, Modigliani-like portrait. The eyes were freakin' amazing, right? He did that on the spot as we were rehearsing and lighting. He needed something to do, so I said "sketch your mom." So he's sketching her, by the time he was done it was perfect. Oh, we can use this when the father gets the book, wouldn't that be cool? So these were the little things we added in the film.

APA: Did you grow up in Orange County? How much of its visual style did you incorporate in it? 

HT: I grew up in Santa Ana. The interior set was a mockup of the apartment that we lived in when we first moved to America. It was a two-bedroom apartment, but the living room was a long ass room, so they put a curtain in the middle of it, and said, "this is your room Ham." So me and my brother shared the room behind the curtain. And I called my dad when we made it -- "Dad you gotta come see this. Doesn't this look familiar?" Because I had photographs of the apartment that we had taken, I gave them to my production designers. I want non-matching chairs. I want those cheesy tables with the fake marble plastic sheets on top. We had no home entertainment system. I want a stupid old coffee table with a TV. So it was all designed immigrant-style [laughs].

When I was location shooting, I wanted to shoot in the actual place. And I went back and there was a family living there, but the landlord wouldn't let me shoot. I wanted to shoot on the actual streets, but the cop said, I can't guarantee your safety after the sun goes down if you shoot here. And we said, "Oh we'll be ok." And he said "I can't guarantee your equipment will still be around." "Oh. We can't shoot here." [laughs] So our own personal safety: we'll take that chance. Equipment? Forget about it.

Where we grew up, in Santa Ana, in that block, you had all Mexicans living there. And then in the early '80s, suddenly the Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, they were all tossed in that little corner. I think to some extent, it was a conspiracy. Let them deal with each other. But that street I was on, I later learned, was the street you go to score some coke. So there was a lot of cocaine being sold on our street. And there were a lot of gangs -- that's going to make its way into my next Vietnamese film. It's sort of like Once Upon a Time in Little Saigon. So there are all these gangs. All the Asians had to form their own gang. They had a pact, we're going to form Nit 14, because there were three Mexican gangs and we were outnumbered. And there was a gang war, where one of the gangs were all killed, eliminated, the entire gang, overnight. But you're going to see it in my next Viet film. 

Journey from the Fall opens on March 23rd in select cities. For theaters, check out the official site (http: //www.journeyfromthefall.com/).

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