Director Stephane Gauger picked up the Best Narrative Award at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival for his first feature, The Owl and the Sparrow. Still at the very beginning of its festival run, The Owl and the Sparrow has generated positive buzz for his story about an orphan girl in Saigon who befriends two adult strangers.
The Owl and the Sparrow fuses director Stephane Gauger's European film influences with his desire to tell a contemporary story in the frenetic, bustling streets of Saigon. Born in Vietnam and raised in Orange County, Gauger has been consistently working on independent film productions throughout the US and Southeast Asia, predominantly in the lighting and camera departments. Although this is his first feature, he has been involved with many of the dominant Vietnamese American films in recent years. He worked on Tony Bui's Three Seasons (the only film to win both the Audience and Grand Jury awards at Sundance), acted as the chief lighting technician in Ham Tran's Journey from the Fall, took an acting role as a French lieutenant in Charlie Nguyen's martial arts drama The Rebel, and is currently in pre-production for a script he co-wrote with director Timothy Bui called Powder Blue.
Through his invaluable on-set experiences, Gauger gradually built knowledge about how he wanted to direct his own feature. Knowing that he wanted to shoot it in Vietnam, he navigated through the country's strict ministry of culture, which luckily approved the script and gave him permission to shoot in thirty locations for fifteen days. Local crews were hired to help with the production, and except for Cat Ly (who Gauger had previously worked with in Journey from the Fall), all the other actors were cast in Saigon as well.
APA talks to director Stephane Gauger in the midst of his film festival travels, mere days before he picked up his first award for Best Narrative Feature at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. --Ada Tseng
Interview with Stephane Gauger
March 20, 2007
Interview by Ada Tseng
Video edit by Oliver Chien
Transcribed by Ada Tseng
Asia Pacific Arts: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? Would you characterize yourself as Vietnamese American?
Stephane Gauger: I would characterize myself as a Vietnamese American with European influences. I have Vietnamese roots, and I grew up in America, but I have French family, so I spent a lot of time in Europe. So I'm really a fusion. And, with this fusion, I try to put it in my work. So in my writing, in my material, it's not specifically Vietnamese, not specifically American. Hopefully it's more global, more universal.
APA: What made you want to set your first feature in Vietnam in Vietnamese?
SG: My first film [The Owl and the Sparrow] was done on a whim because I had the itching to direct a feature, and in the back of my mind, I wanted to do something in Saigon that was different than some of the films that I had seen that had always been from another time period, like the 40s/50s colonial period or war time in the 60s/70s. Also, they tended to be political. Or maybe a refugee drama, but there's always some kind of politics with that. I like films like Chungking Express that are a little bit more urban and contemporary. So I wanted to do something with everyday characters today, in 2006. So it was coming up with characters I wanted to see onscreen to portray modern Saigon.
APA: The characters are unique -- a zookeeper, a flight attendant, and a flower girl. What inspired the professions of these characters?
SG: I had befriended a lot of flower girls selling in Saigon, and I just thought they were adorable, and they had great stories of why they were doing what they were doing. And some people tend to think that if there are children selling things on the streets in a Third World country, selling lottery tickets and flowers and things like that, that it's depressing. It's actually not. They're quite jubilant children, and they're just smart and savvy because they have to sell at such a young age to buy schoolbooks or whatever.
With the other characters, I think it's just little bits of inspiration, worlds that I wanted to tap into. I went to the zoo for the first time in Saigon, and I fell in love with the zoo because it was the few places in the city that it was quiet. Everywhere else, it's just like millions of motorbikes, screaming and honking. And you enter the zoo grounds, and all you hear are birds and animals. There was a little cafe on the zoo grounds, and there was a family there, and I started becoming friends with the family, and from that, I developed the zookeeper charcter.
The flight attendant was just a meditation on the single lifestyle of the modern Vietnamese woman today, because you see a lot of single Vietnamese women are climbing up the ladder socially, but they're still a little empty sometimes it's just hard to find the right guy.
APA: Can you talk about how you found Pham Thi Han to play the lead role?
SG: [laughs] A lot of people are in love with Han. In the beginning, because I wanted some authenticity, I wanted to cast a real flower girl. But I was advised against it, because she [the actor] has to be able to go up and down in emotions, and she has a ton of dialogue, so to cast a regular girl from the streets, they might not be able to handle it. Han was the most ideal choice. I saw other girls that were smart and fresh-faced who had done more commercials, but when you're casting a little orphan girl, you want her to look more natural.
APA: Did you write the script in English or Vietnamese?
SG: The script was written in a month, and I couldn't possibly do that in Vietnamese, because I just can't read or write that fast. So, it's easier for me to write in English, have it translated, and that is the blueprint for the actors. With the dialogue that they have, I stress to my actors that they should change words here or there to fit the vernacular of their dialogue, to be a little more comfortable with their speech. Because I've seen other Vietnamese films where when actors read the scripts verbatim, they become stiff and stilted, and it shows in the performances. So the performances hopefully are natural because I gave them the liberty to change words here and there, but to keep the meaning.
APA: How familiar are you with Saigon, and how did you want to portray the city in your film?
SG: I'm pretty familiar with Saigon. I had worked on four other films in Saigon, so I had already known the system of working there. What I wanted to portray in the country was something that wasn't too exoticized. I didn't want to do a film where there were lingering shots of the landscape, a girl in a traditional dress standing behind a tree. Sometimes people can exoticize a country like that. But I wanted the film to be a little grungier, I wanted to capture the feverish energy and neon nights and keep the cameras always moving to capture the sense of "Wow, there is a lot going on here."
APA: Can you talk about the process of getting permission to make a film in Vietnam?
SG: As far as shooting in Vietnam, you have to be very careful about what kind of film you want to make, what kind of material you're going to be writing. That's why my film, when I was writing the script, I never went too dark because I would risk having the script denied. So I tried to have just enough of reality, but not push it into a dark place, because I think the censors would have a problem with that. They know that I'm going to be showing this film internationally at festivals, so Europeans are going to see it, Americans are going to see it, and how I portray society over there, they're very very wary of that. So, they actually really enjoyed the screenplay because it's warm. I think got it.
APA: How did your European influences come through in this film?
SG: European films tend to be a little more subtle, the ones that I grew up with and I enjoy seeing today. I think that with European dramas, they tend to go for the truth, and with this one, I was going for the truth. For instance, Jean Luc Godard did French new wave in the 60s so cameras were always on the streets, they were never on sets. And he threw the actors onto the streets as well in Paris. He always had the camera very loose and off the tripod. I kind of wanted to use that technique, though with Vietnamese actors. Throw them on the streets, have hand-held cameras. And keep it loose. So that's one European influence. Also, the fact that you don't want to say too much in films. So my dialogue, I try to keep it sparse and short and concise, so you let the viewers piece it together.
APA: At the screening, the programmer was talking about how this film is Vietnamese, but it's made by an outsider, and it couldn't have been made by a local Vietnamese person. Do you think that's true?
SG: It's true. I think a local Vietnamese person will not be inclined to use French new wave techniques: shooting the film entirely hand-held, shooting the film on the streets with live sound. So it takes more of a maverick, independent filmmaker to go there and say, "OK I'm going to shoot the film as raw as I can." They're very afraid of shooting film very raw. They'll always have tripods and mastershots, and a lot of times they won't even do live sound, because they feel that it's safer to do dubbing afterwards. So in that sense, yea, they weren't used to my techniques with this film, as far as shooting two cameras simultaneously and shooting in the streets with an incredible amount of noise.
APA: What was it like working with the local film crews in Vietnam?
SG: It was fun. What I noticed, if I can shed some light, is that there's a changing dynamic now. Before, if you wanted to be a filmmaker in Vietnam, if you were local and you wanted to make a film in Vietnam, it was very hard. It's still hard, but films that are produced in Vietnam tend to be sanctioned by the state, so they'll use older filmmakers who they know will not break out of the mold, the cookie-cutter film that is safe. But now you have younger people coming out of film school in Hanoi and Saigon who are yearning to do more fresh things and more contemporary things, so I think it's an exciting time -- if we can help them through financing, getting those visions on screen, the younger filmmakers that are rising now in the late 20s out of Vietnam.
APA: Timothy Bui and Ham Tran are the executive producers on The Owl and the Sparrow. How did you guys collaborate?
SG: They came on, Tim and Ham, after I had finished my film. I shot it, and I came back to Los Angeles, and I said, "I'm going to cut this film; I'd like you guys to come on board and help me reach an audience." So basically, that's how they're serving the film right now. They're fans of the film, so they'll take it out and reach an audience through festivals and distributors and companies, so we can have as many people see it as possible.
Right now there's a small network of Vietnamese filmmakers that are very supportive of one another. Me, Tim, and Ham are a few of those, and we'd like to do more outreach and extend that family more. It's about nurturing one other, pushing each other, and collaborating too. I'm collaborating with Tim right now on his next film. Even though it's not a Vietnamese related film, it's still Tim being a Vietnamese director. It'll have a bit of a Vietnamese touch to it, even though he's using American characters.
Owl and the Sparrow official site