The Other Side of Apocalypse: A Conversation on We Were the Scenery

Did retracing your parents’ migration story and the conditions that pushed them to move make you feel more grounded in the place you are today?

Che: I think of We Were the Scenery and Becoming Ghost as a restorative archive. My parents ought to be at the center of a narrative around the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now set them in the margins, and these works rightfully recenter them. Both works have also grounded me today as a person, artist, and activist. We are living in a time of immense state violence, which can lead people to feel powerless and hopeless. But the story of my family shows that wars, as terrible as they are, all eventually come to an end, even if the repercussions reverberate. At a time of multiple genocides fueled by the U.S. empire, I see more clearly the possibilities of an afterlife post-violence. I recall vividly a reading by the fiction writer and artist lê thị diễm thúy, who told an audience, “I want to bring whole Vietnamese bodies into the room, not just their trauma.” My parents’ lives are not only marked by pain but also filled with the intimacies of joy. When I started writing poems seriously eighteen years ago, I thought a lot about intergenerational trauma, but now, with this project, I’m thinking more about the possibilities of how a restorative work might bring about intergenerational healing.

What budgetary or practical challenges did you face during production? You guys were an intimate crew. How would you describe the economy of your production ecosystem?

Che: I was a bit surprised when Jess and Chris called our film crew tiny: the team felt right-sized to me. We were a crew of four. I don’t think I’d be comfortable bringing more people to shoot in my parents’ home, for instance. I don’t know that my parents would speak as openly, as naturally, or as candidly if we had been a larger production. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable, both as a person and as someone who had to watch over the budget, bringing more than the three of us to Vietnam and the Philippines. We stayed in my aunt’s home in Đà Nẵng. She, her husband, and her son drove us through the streets of Đà Nẵng on the backs of their motorbikes so that we could shoot. I guess, in my mind, having an intimate crew created fewer challenges and more possibilities. Otherwise, we’d have to delay work until we found even more money. I don’t like money getting in the way of something being made.

Radcliff: And as for equipment, we had Jess’s camera, a Super 8 camera we bought from Ebay, a bag of film, an H4n Zoom recorder, and a broken tripod. It was really challenging in a lot of ways, but also fun and playful, to be able to make something totally unfettered and exploratory without having to worry about the bigger, heavier enterprise that a larger production would entail. Being kind of stripped of any real gear with which to try to perfect an image was a nice reminder that it’s possible to make something on the fly, as long as you have a strong understanding of the essence of what you are trying to convey.

Jess, did you approach shooting each location differently? And were you seeking specific types of imagery in your travels to correspond with Hoa Thị Lê Chế and Huệ Nguyên Chế’s stories?

Jess X. Snow: I remember early on in the process, I showed Cathy and Chris a short film by Shuli Huang called Will You Look at Me. It was shot entirely by Shuli on Super 8 and 16 mm, and in it he returns to his hometown to have a long-overdue conversation with his mother. We then invited Shuli to Chris’s apartment to show us how to use a Nizo 801 camera.

To contrast with the lyrical first-person daughter’s perspective captured on Super 8, we embraced an additional omnipresent voice in the form of carefully composed digital footage to establish what these locations look like in the present day. We utilized nearly all natural light. The only scenes I actually lit were the night shots in Cathy’s parents’ house in Long Beach, where one Leko was used to add some soft dimensionality to their faces. Across the entirety of the shoot, the cinematography embraced the natural character of the locations themselves as much as possible. We searched for the poetry in the quotidian and worked with Haina Zhou, our sound designer, to bring the sensorial details of these locations to life.

 

Filming a documentary with my own family over the last couple years made me feel more responsible for confronting their contradictions on camera. What did you feel responsible for while capturing Cathy’s parents’ recollections in your respective roles? And was there anything that you ever felt the need to confront or that you ultimately decided to let be?

Che: I wanted the film to present their viewpoints fully, in all of their contradictions. For instance, the Vietnamese refugees were forced to play extras. They didn’t have a choice, but they all wanted to do it because it was more fun than being stuck and bored at their refugee camp. There could be a version of the film where we keep in the fact that they were forced to become extras but omit the line where my mother tells me that they all wanted to go. It would play more strongly into a single thesis centered on exploitation, but it would strip my parents and the Vietnamese refugees of their complexity. There’s a strange contradiction there: desire without consent. Also, desire born of circumstance. If my parents were not trapped in a particular political reality and were invited to join a film as paid extras, they probably wouldn’t have done it. Chris and I both wanted to include this contradiction.

Radcliff: Yeah, for me, as the director of the film and as someone not related to Cathy’s parents, basically a stranger, the only real responsibility I felt was to listen to them, to allow them to tell their own stories, and to put together a version of their retelling that, although it would need to be condensed, would ultimately feel accurate to their way of storytelling. To that end, I was totally fine letting their recollections be whatever they naturally were because what I wanted to capture was the specialness of their subjective experiences, as opposed to objective reality. To me that is where the personal poetry of the film comes from; it’s quite different from more journalistic reportage in that way.

Prior to reading “Apocalypse Yesterday, Already—Ifugao Extras and the Making of Apocalypse Now” [an essay in which three writers interviewed background actors about their experience two decades after the release of the film], I naively expected the local extras to feel greatly exploited or exoticized. But of course, for many, like Cathy’s parents in the film, it was a fairly unremarkable blip in their life experience. The American film production simply reproduced already normalized and embedded wage exploitation, destruction of the environment, and orientalism, stemming from the semifeudal, semicolonial Philippines.

Che: Yeah, the majority of Americans, myself included, want my parents to express that they’d felt exploited by being used as extras on the film. There is a gap between my opinion and my parents’ view of their experiences on the set of Apocalypse Now. I feel a stronger sense of critique over the ethics and power differential and sense of racial othering. But that’s never been their experience of it. They are deeply practical people, and in their view, Apocalypse Now was an opportunity to get paid, to get to be on a film set, to have a new experience. I think my parents do see it as a special story in their lives, but not more special than many of the other experiences in their own lives.

I was always struck by how easily your parents’ witty criticisms and commentary humble the inflated importance of this ostensibly canonical film. What do you take away from this humbling?

Che: My parents are masters of real talk, which I attribute to them growing up in villages in Vietnam. I sense that humility, hard work, and honesty are valued in those spaces. I also think of gossip, or communal storytelling, as an art form, one that my parents have honed over the years as our family’s key link to their lives in Vietnam. They are at the center of their own lives, and Apocalypse Now is at the periphery, and that experience shows up in their retelling. At a Q&A at Viet Film Fest, the Artistic Director Eric Nong asked my mother how she got to be so funny. She shrugged and said, I don’t know. It’s natural. I’m just being myself.

Radcliff: I think when you consider Cathy’s parents’ lives and the experiences they’ve had, of real war, real survival, you can’t help but regard a fictional piece of entertainment, however impressive it might be, as small in comparison. By trying to recenter their perspectives from the background of the frame to the foreground, we were ultimately trying to capture this dynamic. For instance, early on in our years of conversation about this project, Cathy showed me the archive of home videos her parents had shot after settling in California. I was really blown away by the quality of these images and the way they so clearly achieved their purpose—as Cathy’s father says in the film, he recorded them “so they could see what they were like when they were little.” And I knew I wanted to juxtapose their home videos with Apocalypse Now in a way that kind of created a sense of equity between the two very distant modes of filmmaking—collapsing these home videos and this canonical cinematic creation into one single archive. Because, in a way, that’s what Apocalypse Now is for them—just another one of their home videos, a tool for remembering a time from their past.