Method Acting : Vietnamese Draw on Past Anguish for Casting Call
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WESTMINSTER — From Los Angeles to San Diego, more than 3,000 Vietnamese-Americans flocked to a church in Little Saigon Saturday to try out for a new Oliver Stone movie about a peasant family’s anguish from the war in Vietnam.
It was the eighth and final casting call for his new “humanistic” movie about Vietnam, said to be the first major Hollywood movie to be told from the perspective of Vietnam’s war-torn people.
And like earlier casting sessions held in San Francisco, New York and other cities, this one was an emotional experience for Vietnamese immigrants who waited from two to four hours to submit photographs, go through a brief interview and, for a lucky 500 or so, receive an invitation to act.
But that acting exercise, when it finally came, became almost a psychodrama for still-wounded survivors reliving the Vietnam war.
For in impromptu skits--videotaped by Stone’s casting crew--would-be actors drew on painful memories of Viet Cong brutality, lives lost, and families torn apart in a war the Vietnamese common people did not want.
Anthony Lam, a 21 year-old student from Long Beach, drew praise from casting staffers when, on about 30 seconds’ notice, he portrayed with vicious realism the role of a Viet Cong soldier threatening to kill a captured South Vietnamese soldier.
Although Lam said he had sent his photograph to producers months ago, his improvisational acting stirred “memories of a violent world.”
Choking back tears, he explained that his family, Vietnamese natives who were ethnic Chinese, had been living in the village of Tuy Hoy in central South Vietnam.
After the United States pulled out of Vietnam, his 23-year-old brother was killed by Vietnamese soldiers “because he had epilepsy,” Lam said, and his family’s business was confiscated.
In 1979, Lam’s family fled Vietnam by boat to Hong Kong, surviving despite little food. The conditions on the boat were so grim that when a baby on their crowded boat died, “we had to throw the baby overboard and a whale ate it right up,” Lam said.
After being imprisoned briefly in Hong Kong, Lam and his family eventually gained freedom and made their way to the United States in 1989.
Lam praised producer Stone for making this movie because, even though the script has not been written yet, Lam said he believed “Oliver Stone is the only person who is not afraid to capture these kind of memories. . . . This happened. This is history.”
Also coping Saturday with painful memories was Thi Nguyen, 41. Accompanied by her 19-year-old son, Dennis, the San Diego secretary drove 90 miles to be interviewed and to perform a short, impromptu skit, “because I want to put myself in this movie. It is the truth.”
But the skit she was asked to improvise came chillingly close to psychodrama for Nguyen.
When casting director Heidi Levitt asked Nguyen to pretend she was ordering her son to leave Vietnam to save his life, Nguyen complied with fervor.
“You have to go, you have to go,” she pleaded. “You have to think you have a future--and not die like us.”
Later, Nguyen confided, the scene was very hard for her because long ago, “someone tried to convince me to leave too.”
On April 25, 1975, when she left Saigon on one of the last planes out of her country before it fell to the Communists, she was accompanied only by Dennis, who was then 2 years old.
She was a housewife then, Nguyen said, but her family “was involved” with the South Vietnamese government. Her husband was supposed to join her in a month, she said, but she has not seen him since.
Kieu Chinh, once a leading actress in Vietnam and now a consultant to producers Stone and Robert Kline, said the point of videotaping so many Vietnamese was to capture their experience in the movie.
“Like Haing Ngor (the Cambodian doctor who starred) in ‘The Killing Fields,’ sometimes to be so good, you don’t have to be a trained actor; you just act from your own experience,” Chinh said.
Added Kline, who was supervising Saturday’s casting call: “Hollywood has never done a film of Vietnam of this scope, this perspective.”
The movie, still to be scripted by Stone, will describe the saga of a teen-age Vietnamese peasant girl and her family during the Vietnam War, the bombing of their village by U.S. planes and their disrupted lives afterward, officials said.
Kline added that the movie is to be taken from an autobiographical book, “When Heaven And Earth Changed Places,” by Vietnamese-American writer Le Ly Hayslip, now living in Escondido.
Stone had “changed the conscience of America in ‘Platoon,’ ” a grimly realistic movie about U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, Kline said.
Stone also produced “Born on the Fourth of July,” a film about a Vietnam veteran’s bitter return home.
“But no one has ever done a movie on the Vietnamese experience,” Kline said, that was an apolitical but humanistic portrait of its people.
Casting officials said those who tried out may not know for three to six months whether they will have parts in the movie. However, they told each participant, “Thank you. You will hear from us.”
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