No Subject

But that was one problem that didn't materialize, Bui says. "They're so
past that--they had 1,000 years of war. Before the Americans they fought
so many people, after the Americans they fought people--the Chinese, the
Cambodians." With his fresh, open face and small ponytail, Bui is the very
picture of Californian health. He talks quickly, his words slurring over
each other as if his thoughts cannot get out fast enough. "The American
conflict was one war in their lives, and they've moved on." 

He did run into numerous other difficulties, though. The Ministry of
Culture had to approve the script, and Bui had innumerable meetings over
it--as well as being obliged to show the rough cuts of each day's shooting
to officials. "They're very respectful and kind, but they're tough, to the
point they read way too much into everything," Bui recalls. "I understood
where they were coming from--ultimately they want a film to portray the
country in a decent way." In 1995 the authorities had been infuriated by
the release of French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo, which
turned out to be extremely violent, and they wanted to avoid a repeat. 

Not surprisingly, Bui's desire to detail the extreme poverty and the
prostitution in Ho Chi Minh City was a source of conflict. Fortunately, he
points out, "they didn't mind my making a film about the lowest level of
society as long as it was moving towards something that was a redemption,
some sort of peace, some sort of life. They don't mind so much the
darkness as long as it's balanced out by the light." 

The characters in Three Seasons are composites of people Bui has met over
the years. "These were the people I knew, they were my friends," he says.
As seen through the film, they are rather poignant individuals striving
for a better life with whatever modest means at hand--whether it's
peddling a flashlight, a cyclo ride, or their bodies. Critic Kevin Thomas
of the Los Angeles Times called this "a movie for any and all seasons,
[which] gazes with a sense of beauty and compassion at hard realities
without glossing them over." 

Bui's focus on the downtrodden and the indigent was deliberate. "I wanted
to make a film about those most affected [by change]," the director says.
"I wanted to give them a voice. The things they were telling me were so
interesting, so different from the way I perceived it growing up in
America." Some critics have found Three Seasons overly pretty and
sentimentalized, but for Bui, Vietnam is a country of hope. 

Since much of film-making is done in a cocoon, opening at Sundance was
"very scary and very gratifying," he says. Scary because hardly anyone had
seen it before, gratifying because it received a standing ovation. "As the
week went by, there was so much buzz about the film that I knew I was
accomplishing one of the important parts of the process for me," Bui says,
"which was to make a film about some people's lives and to capture the
spirit in a way that would be universal." Bui had lived up to what
Geoffrey Gilmore, a Sundance official, wrote about the film for the
festival catalogue: "With sweeping directorial vision and a powerful
poetic narrative, Tony Bui has created an enormously impressive feature
debut about the 'new' Vietnam." 

This spring the film opened in the United States to equally laudatory
reviews. It also drew $2 million at the box office, considered exemplary
for a foreign-language film. It is slated to open later this year in
Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and other Asian countries. Bui is now
dodging the temptations of lucrative Hollywood offers which poured in
after his Sundance success. He continues to focus on personal
projects--producing a film about a Vietnamese refugee camp in the U.S. is
one, directing a film about a dying man's search for meaning is another. 

"There are definitely stories in my mind which will require a bigger
budget," he says, "but right now I want that creative freedom to do what I
really want to do. Later maybe I'll get that creative freedom on a larger
project after proving myself through a body of work."