1735 km [p.2]

NHA: What was it like working with the film crew?

NQT: It was a young crew but we also had a few people who were more experienced and brought an old school mentality to the production. We knew there was a lot of young talent here in Viet Nam, they just needed a little experience, exposure and support. Our writer was 20 years old and still in school at Cornell College. She gave up a year to work on the project.

NHA: Was there any tension between the younger members of the crew and the more experienced people?

NQT: Our art designer almost walked off the set because he didn’t like taking orders from another crewmember who he felt was too young to know what she was doing. The tension was between the old crew saying, “You guys have no clue what you’re doing” and the new crew responding, “We don’t want [to make] these traditional Vietnamese films. We want to push the art direction and the costumes into new territory.” But that tension was good because we got these beautiful modern sets that were the result of both old school and new school points of view. Our intent was collaboration and experimentation, trying to see if there was another way to make films in Viet Nam.

NHA: Were there any challenges specific to filming in Viet Nam?

NQT: On the government side it was all about crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s. We had to find a Vietnamese partner to work with. We needed licenses to shoot everything and local police had to be present to check the film. You need to get approval from the government for the script, you need approval of what you’ve shot before you send it to Thailand to get developed, and then once the film is done, you’ve got to get final approval. It takes a lot of approvals.

NHA: Were you treated differently as a Viet Kieu?

NQT: Of course, but we also tried to be very careful with what we said in the press and how we presented ourselves. We didn’t want to come across like, “I’m a Viet Kieu, I know what should be right, and this is how it’s done.”

It was a challenge but we also got a lot of support from the people in Viet Nam because they were curious to see what we could do. If we did well, it was going to help them. The more we added to the system, the more chance there would be to do other types of movies. When people heard what we were doing, we got a lot of support from niche web sites run by young people saying, “What can we do to help? This is great, we need a voice.”

NHA: Producing independent films, especially in Viet Nam, must be a bit of a roller coaster ride.

NQT: There were several moments of “Ah shit, we’re not going to be able to finish this film” due to a variety of reasons. Funds that we thought were coming in didn’t, so we would just keep pushing it as far as we could until it finally came through. On one shoot the whole crew got food poisoning. We also had to deal with the insecurity of not knowing whether what we had shot was good or not. Viet Nam doesn’t have the facilities for 35mm film developing so we had to send everything to Thailand. We would shoot for a week, send it off and then wait a week to get the beta back which shows you whether the color and lighting was right. But for us, if anything turned out to be wrong with the film, it was too late anyway to fix it because we didn’t have time or the money to re-shoot mistakes.

NHA: You have a small comic role in the film. What was that like?