Behind the scenes: the extras of Apocalypse Now

On the first day of filming, a small crew was created in my father’s house in Long Beach, California. We were shooting a short documentary on my father’s experiences of all refugees in the Vietnam War who were used as background additions in The end of the world now Nearly 50 years ago. Although my parents played a variety of characters – translators, Viet Kong, drivers, prisoners of war – they had neither face nor parts speaking. Director Francis Ford Coppola sought to authenticate his movie by appointing Vietnamese additions. My parents were filmed as background characters in the story they lived. We were hoping that the documentary would turn from the perspective, and to advance their stories instead.

In the kitchen, I met my mother. We have always had an easy relationship. Although we had to schedule its daily work, this part is clear. I felt as if every conversation I had with my mother.

I was tense from my father’s sharing. While he was also open to his life, our relationship was tense. I was an adult daughter, a born writer in the United States and is back to talking about my mind; It was a patriarch that grew up when it expressed opinions that did not match it. Our relationship was still recovering after my father said he was ignoring me for the third time. Now, we said a little for each other behind hello goodbye. My father agreed to the interview, but I was not sure of what would happen.

I was playing it about what could be expected, but when he returned home from work and saw the preparation of the lighting and preparation of the camera, he shouted at the Vietnamese, “What is all this? I have nothing to say. My life is not important.”

From what we knew, there are no accounts from the first reliable person with video by additions from a group of The end of the world now existing. We were trying to include stories about the Vietnamese people who were placed on the margins in this film. My father’s story He was important. But how can I explain this to him?

I looked nervously to the crew. You have set a week’s production date. I received grant financing, the director and film photographer from New York, a budget employee, and discovered housing. We had already shot in Vietnam and the Philippines two months ago. If my father is not participating, how will we make our movie?

My mother entered the kitchen and interfered: “It is a school project! You only need to communicate with him.”

Inside, she laughed. The school project was not. I was not in school for years. But this was my mother’s way to make this project a understanding of it.

My father nodded, still floundering, mixing in the bedroom to change from his clothes. When the crew appeared and monitored, his behavior changed. He may be fine in challenging his family behind closed doors, but he did not want to seem difficult for others. Smile, serve himself, shake hands, play the warm host.

The audio recorder released a microphones on my father’s shirts. My parents sat on the living room sofa. I played the TV and played a scene from The end of the world now. Their novel, sometimes, was sad, but funny, they were laughing while talking about a time of nearly five decades. I enjoyed my father’s collective novel, and the way they completed each other. I felt like a dinner table.

On TV, we saw two Vietnamese women shooting a machine gun in the air.

In reference to the screen, my father said, “At that time, your mother wore clothes like …”

“… Viet Kong,” my mother answered laughing.

My father was harmonious, “she was holding AK-47, and she was shooting on US helicopters!”

My mother nodded. “I was very afraid. I stuffed cotton in all of my ears.”

I insisted on my family because the world is outside my home – the school, library, television, radio and cinematic theater – lacks their voices. I felt the pain, and I sought to make the world outside my home home as well. This has become an artistic axis. However, I rarely felt comfortable to share my work with my family, especially my father. I wrote in English. Talk to the Vietnamese. In any case, I was not sure that they fully understood what I was doing as a poet, the author of a book for children, and now, the director.

My parents mysteriously understood that I was a writer. When I told my mother that I was getting a master’s degree in business management, she did not completely understand what I was doing until she made it clear that the degree would allow me to teach at the university level. When my first article was published in a number Poets and writersMy father offered a printed copy of the magazine, and announced, “Wow, that woman is very old!” The cover of Joan Didion appeared. When some of my poems from the English language were translated into Vietnamese and published in a major newspaper in Vietnam, my cousin sent a link to my father. His only comment for me was, “You know, in Vietnam, rhyme poems.”

When I started my own writing and made the arts to become public, I faced the issue of bringing my ambition to my family’s life. What seemed naturally like the self -definition process, and the sculpture of space where my family was no longer erased from the outside world, was also a shipment with questions about power, duty and responsibility. Were you writing about my parents from love, or did I extract their stories from them to make a profession in art?

Once, after I wrote about the anger of my explosive father, he told me that I have a poetic way to exaggerate in reality. He told me: “The war did not test directly.” “Do you know what an explosion can do?”

I was not. But I knew how I felt to be the daughter of my father, and I knew what I felt to experience the negative war, through his stories and through him. I knew what was silent. I did not want to choose silence.

My father once told me, “You are my daughter. Your job is to look down and say yes.” When I told him that I could not achieve this role, he said: “From here up, you are not my daughter.” It did not appear for the feast of thanks that year.

My father was painful. I cried for years and felt confused because of what to do or how to be in a world where my father was, the subject of many of my writings, does not talk to me.

For my project, I also faced a dilemma: I could no longer reach one of the main interview topics. I created this artistic project as a way to understand myself and my family. Suddenly, I didn’t know how to be around him. During those years, I faced the issue of what he means writing the story of my father without him in my life.

So I wrote poems in the mode of speculation, I wonder, Who are we for each other when we are no longer in each other’s life? I wrote poems in his voice, trying to understand him as a fully dimensional person. These poems will become an important braid in my group To become a ghost.

For years, I continued to write about my father’s life as a way to understand and disagree. Although I was very sad, I felt that I was older than writing about my father, and understood that our stories were overlapping, and that I also fell to tell these stories. In the end, my mother interfered and broke out in a fragile peace between my father and me. Our family gatherings have made less critical, but there is still unstable tension in the air. We will deliberately avoid each other to prevent another confrontation. When I met Chris Radcliffe, who would become a director and editor of the movie, things were between my father and I was still harsh. When Chris asked if I was thinking about making a documentary about my father’s participation in The end of the world nowI took the idea of ​​making a short movie but I am concerned about what it might require. I knew that my mother would agree to that, but I was afraid of my father’s snake responses.

At the dinner table, I asked my father, “Can I photograph you? I am a project about you and my mother playing additions to a set of The end of the world now. You just tell your story. ”

My father ignored and answered, “All you want.”

I resumed eating. I felt comfortable.

After receiving and completing post -production, friends were asking about what my parents thought about the movie. They kept insisting that my father should be very proud. proud? I thought. I did not think about her participation with my parents, and I did not think about the idea that my father would tell me that they are proud of me.

But editor for USA today He asked me to write a piece about watching the movie together for the first time, and I agreed to do so.

On Christmas day, we collected a family to open gifts and have dinner. I suggested that I check the movie. We all saw together in the living room. While my brothers and the oldest son were pulsed and curious, my parents saw silently. I recorded their reaction to my phone. I was pleased with my brothers and awaited anxious to find out what my parents will say. I couldn’t imagine them saying they are proud of me, or congratulations. But, maybe you were wrong? Maybe they were surprised.

Once we got to the credits, my mother applauded her hands together and said: “Well, it’s the time for dinner!”

My parents did not say anything else about the movie that night. Instead, the family liked the wonderful Christmas of my mother, stuffed with sticky rice and Chinese sausage. We took pictures of my mother’s achievement. She spent the evening in the service of others while eating the rest of the family, and praised us to cook it for the rest of the meal. I realized that this was the great art of my mother, not only the delicious food, but the way my family gathered around it.

In the end, we will check the movie, We were the scene, In festivals for different fans, she had the opportunity to feel the pleasure of sitting with my father in the living room and they told me their stories. My brothers attended the first show at Sundance and they were there when we won the short film award.

However, in that evening, he was a little bit, my father’s total interaction. I made the movie to honor them, and perhaps even to save them from the erasure of the narration. But that night, I realized that my parents did not feel proud in particular, and certainly did not feel that they needed me to save them. Their lives were full of their stories. For my father, the story of the stories was a way for their children to understand who they are and from where they came. Participate in my interviews out of love for me. They understood their participation in my hair and my films as something you wanted. Our storytelling has different priorities and different goals. I realized that I made the movie for me and for people like me – the people who felt the importance of this story in a world was not available.

The film had no strong effect on my father because they did not need it. While we had dinner that night, I could see that my father did not feel my hair from their marginalization. They were already the stars of their lives.