Artist in Residence Tony Bui: “We're Trying to Tell Our Stories”

“For me, it's always about whether something is a great story. I try not to put too many restrictions on myself.”

That’s Weatherhead Artist in Residence Tony Bui, independent filmmaker and a professor in the Columbia University School of Arts graduate film program, speaking over Zoom from Phuket, Thailand, in late November.

As Weatherhead’s 75th anniversary year was drawing to a close, we had reached out to Bui both because we wanted to hear from a key participant in the summer 2024 events in several countries that commemorated the Institute’s anniversary and because 2024 was a momentous anniversary year for him personally as well.

A quarter-century ago, Bui’s debut feature Three Seasons launched the then-26-year-old filmmaker to prominence when it won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. The feat was even more remarkable considering that Bui’s modestly budgeted movie was shot entirely on location in Vietnam, with a mostly Vietnamese cast speaking their native language, and that it centers on a set of ordinary people leading hardscrabble lives in and around Ho Chi Minh City during the first decade of the Đổi Mới (economic reform) period.

This past January, for Sundance’s 40th anniversary, the festival selected Three Seasons as one of ten films representing its four decades to revisit. The festival screened a newly restored version of Three Seasons, after years in which the film had been out of circulation and increasingly hard to see. In the months since, the restoration has won over a new generation of viewers at Lincoln Center in New York City and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, among other venues, and further high-profile screenings are scheduled well into 2025.

Bui was clearly grateful for the opportunity to talk about Three Seasons’ renewed visibility, but our conversation with him was by no means purely retrospective. He was equally eager to discuss his activities with Weatherhead this past summer and, even more, his forthcoming projects. The latter include a narrative feature film inspired by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photo “The Terror of War” (aka “Napalm Girl,” arguably the most haunting image to come out of the Vietnam conflict) as well as some tantalizing opportunities for cultural dialogue timed to the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in spring 2025.

Bui spoke to us from Phuket in late November, at the tail end of his latest Asia trip. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Watching Three Seasons today, and then reading about it afterwards, took me back to a kind of heyday of American independent film when there was a whole infrastructure in place—Sundance, nationwide theatrical distribution, reviews in the alternative weeklies—that doesn't exist anymore. If you were an emerging 26-year-old filmmaker today, making a debut feature that goes against the grain, in a foreign language, do you think it would be harder? Easier? The same?

It's a good question. The landscape has changed a lot, for sure. I feel extremely privileged to have experienced independent films in that heyday, with the film coming out in 1999 and experiencing that boom. I got to catch the tail end of that.

Is it harder? Very much so. You witness it in many forms, and one of them is just the film festivals. Film festivals used to have this incredible pull and power, because it was a vibrant film market as well. When Sundance happened back then, there was a flurry of executives, buyers, and agents who would go to the festivals, and there would be a buying spree. It put independent cinema in the spotlight, and in the news cycle.

This is happening much less now. There isn’t the same kind of buzz for independent cinema. Unfortunately, there are a lot more distractions. We have everything from TikTok to YouTube to Instagram. . . . Going out to the movies, not just independent films but films in general, has declined tremendously. The Covid years also had a negative impact by changing people’s viewing habits. Theatrical viewership hasn’t returned to pre-Covid numbers, especially for indie films, and maybe never will.

Talking about it right now brings a lot of nostalgia, but also a lot of sadness. People are still making films; there are still companies out there like A24 and Neon trying to do that good work, but it's not the same. It's a lot tougher. I don't think we see much light at the end of the tunnel right now.

On the other hand, it does seem as though young Asian American filmmakers are more visible than they were when you were breaking through. I'm thinking of movies like Columbus, The Farewell, and Didi, from earlier this year. Has something changed?

Without a doubt. So yes, to add to what I was saying earlier, for sure, independent cinema is on the decline. But interestingly, Asian cinema—Asian American cinema—is definitely on the rise in America.

The filmmakers have always been there, but it's always been difficult to get financing. If you want to film mostly with Asian or Asian American actors, it's very difficult. Starting out, when I would go to Sundance, it would be really hard just to find another Asian. Sometimes I'd be the only Asian person in the room. And now we have a lot more films playing, but also a lot more Asian Americans attending these festivals, and that's a product of having a lot more representation. It’s really a product of the success of films like Crazy Rich Asians, and Columbus, and The Farewell. And then, of course, Everything Everywhere All at Once and Parasite. When these films blow up in such a significant way, it lifts all boats.

So we have this incredible wave that's happening now. It was so low that . . . just the fact that it's a little bit better is an improvement. We'll take it. There's still a lot of work to do, but it's a step in the right direction.

I can tell you this. I've been in meetings, I've been on projects, where I wanted just one Asian or Asian American actor in there out of five actors. I directed a TV pilot and the executive gave notes that were like, “If these 10 actors say no, then we can have a conversation about your one Asian actor,” and it was a list of 10 actors who wanted to work. There was no way all 10 actors were going to say no. It was their way of saying they didn’t want an Asian actor in a lead role at the time.

This is not that long ago. But today that conversation would be different. If I were to say, “Let's have one of these actors be an Asian actor,” I think we would have a meaningful conversation about that.

As Weatherhead’s Artist in Residence, you were able to interact this past summer with a lot of your peers all over East and Southeast Asia. What do you take away from these conversations with Asian filmmakers?

One of the great things about being a Weatherhead artist in residence is that I get to work on my own projects but I’m also able to put together events, talks and panel discussions, both at Columbia and abroad. I was fortunate that my residency (which is still going on until the summer of 2025) happened during Weatherhead’s 75th anniversary. Part of what we did over the summer of 2024 was to reconnect with Asia. There were a lot of events. I came on board for Hanoi, Saigon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Beijing.

I traveled with several my Columbia colleagues, who would hold talks and speak about their fields, usually poli sci or history. I teach film at Columbia, so I would obviously hold talks on cinema and storytelling, and the theme of my talks, which I did in every city, was “Conversations on Storytelling: Regional Voices, Global Impact.” It was a look at the importance of regional filmmaking and its impact globally. What's the importance of that? And how do we maintain that? Preserve that? In every one of these cities, I spoke with the top filmmakers and producers and then the up-and-coming filmmakers.

I interviewed Anthony Chen, the first Singaporean director to win at Cannes, and also Derek Tsang, an Oscar-nominated director in Hong Kong, and Dr. Wilfred Wong, who’s the head of the Film Development Council in Hong Kong. And then I went to Beijing and did the same with a group of emerging filmmakers who had won major film festivals with their short films to learn how they see their future. It was really exciting to hear all those different voices, see what's impacting them, what's important for them regionally, how they’re trying to maintain their personal voices but also have an impact on a larger, more global scale.

It's interesting because a lot of what we're dealing with here in America isn’t the same for them in their countries. We're all dealing with different forces and different changes, but what’s common is that we're trying to tell our stories. We're all trying to make films that are authentic and still have an impact.

I chose my filmmakers specifically for this who are authentic to the region, in this case East Asia and Southeast Asia, but who are also doing work that has a meaningful impact across the globe as well. It was a really engaging experience, and to be able to do that with Weatherhead made it really special.

Do you have a favorite moment from your summer travels?

I have multiple favorites. But one of them was being able to sit down and have a talk with Dang Nhat Minh, who's closing in on 90 now. He is amazing for many reasons. He was the first Vietnamese national filmmaker to have his films play in international film festivals. He started making documentaries in North Vietnam during the war and then pivoted to narrative filmmaking. He’s just a legendary figure who has seen so many changes in Vietnam, and to sit down and talk with him with an audience was definitely a memorable moment for me. I am now working to bring him to Columbia for our 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War events in the spring of 2025.

Since you were in Ho Chi Minh City this summer with Weatherhead: Is it possible to find any of the locations in Three Seasons in today's Ho Chi Minh City? I’m thinking of the intersection where the cyclo drivers hang out on their breaks, for instance.

It's interesting you're asking this because I just participated in a magazine feature based on the locations of my film—a “then and now” kind of article. They're going to show clips of different scenes in different locations where I shot in Saigon, and then show how the same locations look today. So it's going to be all about how Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) has transformed over the last two decades. I haven't seen the article yet (it comes out in two months), but I'm actually really interested myself because I haven’t been back to every one of the locations.

But the city of Saigon in general has changed tremendously. One of the themes of Three Seasons is Westernization, modernization. And of course, now we've had over two decades of it. Three Seasons is a time capsule of that change in postwar Vietnam. Which is why the fact that we were able to restore and digitize the film and go to Sundance with it again this year was something that we were really happy with.

Three Seasons is a film partly about reconciliation in which the war remains offscreen. Whereas now you're developing a feature around the famous photograph of the nine-year-old napalm victim. That suggests you're addressing the war head-on; do you think you needed to be a more mature artist to do that, or it took time?

[Note: Bui moderated the March 2024 Weatherhead panel discussion “Napalm Girl: After the Dragons Left,” featuring the photo’s subject, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, photographer Nick Ut, and war correspondent Fox Butterfield, who was present on the scene the day the photo was taken.]

That's an interesting question. When I started out, one of the reasons why I wanted to be a filmmaker was because I was really frustrated with the films depicting the Vietnam War that were coming out of America.

Now, a lot of these films are great from a filmmaking craft perspective. I teach them, I talk about them—Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Platoon—all these films, as standalone films, are notable.

But the way the Vietnamese were portrayed in all these films was horrific, right? Caricatures. The actors weren't even Vietnamese. They're speaking gibberish, but they're pretending to be Vietnamese, because I'm sure the film producers were like, “Oh, it doesn't really matter, no one cares what Vietnamese sounds like anyway. So we'll just put in a Thai actor, a Filipino actor, and have them say gibberish”. . . and it literally is gibberish. The only Vietnamese characters I ever saw on television or in cinema were either background characters or the enemies, running through the jungle just to be shot at.

So when it was time for me to make my films, I wanted to make sure I didn't make a film that was directly about the Vietnam War. I didn't want to make films where any Vietnamese person had to hold a gun or be shot at, or act crazy, or anything like that. So I avoided that in the beginning, purposefully. I wanted to make sure we showed real Vietnamese people speaking real Vietnamese dialogue. If it was going to be about Vietnam, I wanted to shoot on the actual soil of Vietnam, where those other films pretended to be Vietnam.

Most importantly, I wanted to make sure the Vietnamese characters were no longer background characters. I made them foreground characters, and they got to be the heroes of their own stories, or romantic partners, or mentor figures. That also meant that they would have flaws, but also have a chance to transform within the story and be three-dimensional characters.

But as the years pass, for me it's always about whether something is a great story. I try not to put too many restrictions on myself. I'm inspired by certain things. So now, I'm okay with making a film that deals directly with the Vietnam War.

Yes, my next film is based on the famous “napalm girl” photo. But my approach is a little bit different. It's not exactly about the photo; my approach deals with the war, but there's a lot more as well. I use the photo as a jumping-off point to tell a bigger story, and I'm excited to tell it in a way that is unexpected.

In tandem with that project, you've alluded to a collaboration with the Criterion Channel that’s also timed to the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, next April. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

It's a great project. Criterion’s head of programming, Aliza Ma, reached out to me early this year when my film screened at the Udine Film Festival in Italy. She had seen it there and came up with this idea for me to curate a program for Criterion to honor the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. The idea is to put together 10 to 12 Vietnam War-based films and make them available to stream on the Criterion Channel. That’s super-exciting for me, because I already teach a class like that at Columbia called “The Vietnam War in American and Vietnamese Cinema,” so I was able to pull the information and film selections together easily.

But it also means a lot to me to have the chance to pair up American films that we all know with Vietnamese films that most people don’t know. I'm pairing up films with similar themes to give both the American perspective and the Vietnamese perspective.

Parallel to that, I will also be doing, with Weatherhead, a panel discussion where I will bring well-known American directors and pair them up with legendary Vietnamese directors like Dang Nhat Minh, who all made Vietnam War films, for a sit-down discussion in New York City. This has never been done before. It'll be a great way to honor the 50th anniversary from a storytelling and filmmaking perspective. This is also based on my course at Columbia. Taking the filmmakers I talk about [in the class] and putting them on a panel for the 50th anniversary will be exciting.

Here in the U.S., we really don’t get to see those Vietnamese films (about the war) you mention. Even if you're someone who goes to museums and repertory cinema, they just don't seem to circulate over here. Why is that?

One, it's accessibility. It's hard to get access to some of these Vietnamese films. They’re just not taken care of well. A lot of times they're only on celluloid or they’ve been digitized poorly. It will be a bit of work for us. I gave Criterion a list of the films that I want and on the American side, it's easy. On the Vietnamese side, it's going to be more difficult. We're going to have to re-digitize some of them, or for sure we're going to have to redo the subtitles. Some films may not even have subtitles, so we have to add them.

But it's culturally important. Once we're able to digitize these movies properly, and at least add good subtitles, then more people can get to see the perspective of the Vietnamese filmmakers who were making films during the war, or immediately right after, which I think is an important perspective to discuss. I know discussions in my class are always very lively, so hopefully this collection will jump-start some meaningful conversations among audiences outside of class as well.