Tran Anh Hung
Filmography Tr a n A n h H u n g N o r w e g i a n Wo o d I Come with the Rain Ve r t i c a l R a y o f t h e S u n Cyclo T h e S c e n t o f G r e e n Pa p aya
(2010) (2008) (2000) (1995) (1993)
Inner Magic Interview by Martyn Conterio
rench-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s career got off to a flying start with festival wins at Cannes (The Scent of Green Papaya, Camera d’Or, 1993) and Venice (Cyclo, Golden Lion, 1995). He was hailed as the most exciting voice in Vietnamese cinema, with a style of filmmaking whose drama, intensity and philosophical nuances came with the kind of exquisite imagery and movement only cinema can achieve. After a near-decade-long hiatus, Tran returns with two very different projects in quick succession. First out of the post is NorwegianWood, an adaptation of a bestselling novel, while the second is I Come with the Rain, a detective story set primarily in Hong Kong and starring Hollywood actor Josh Hartnett. The former proved a great artistic joy; the latter was a post-production nightmare that involved court proceedings and was later distributed against the director’s wishes. The claim that Haruki Murakami’s novel is unfilmable clearly didn’t put Tran off pursuing the project. The friendly and soft-spoken director explains that he carried a torch for the book since reading it in French translation back in 1994. “It was this idea of first love and also the death of somebody you love. It works in a very deep way and it’s something very deep inside of us. The book brought this out. From that moment I wanted to make the movie. For the longest time I kept saying, ‘I want to make it’, but nobody responded until five years ago.” A major obstacle presented itself before securing a budget and the circus of film production. Murakami had previously rejected all other inquiries regarding Norwegian Wood’s film rights, but listened to Tran and his proposal. “He wanted to read the script and I showed it to him. We communicated in English. I wrote the screenplay in French then translated it into English, then into Japanese for the producer. After reading it, he sent me notes. There
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was a lot. It was like he was looking back on this book he wrote a long time ago and came up with all these ‘ideas’. He offered me a lot and I kept a lot. After that I felt free to do the film.” The director’s intense connection saw issues move beyond merely translating the complex material from page to screen. Capturing the thematic concerns and nuances were equally as important as narrative. “It’s not just about adapting the story, you’ve got to adapt the feelings and the ramifications the book suggests. It’s really personal to me,” Tran says. His approach to filmmaking is based on what he describes as a form of intuition. Tran calls it ‘the music inside me’ – he rarely bothers with rehearsals and never storyboards. It’s a deceptive approach, however, as there’s a precise but aesthetic daring evident in composition, framing and scene structures. One of the chief highlights of Norwegian Wood is a one-take tracking shot following the lead characters pacing up and down in a field of long grass. Rinko Kikuchi’s Naoko here confesses her deepest feelings to Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama). “I always want to find the picture on the set with everybody. We see the location and think about how we can work with it. Step-by-step we find the right frame. The idea with the tracking shot was to do with the confession of Naoko. It’s the moment Watanabe discovers her problems and what she has to say is very violent and tough. I wanted the audience to feel something really physical. That’s why I had them walk fast. It added to the feeling of something very tense.” If Norwegian Wood proved a satisfying achievement for the director, his second feature this year, I Come with the Rain, developed major issues during the editing phase. Tran explains that the film is not truly his own. “Right now I would not advise people to see it,” he confesses. “It’s not my picture. It has wonderful scenes but the movie as a whole is not there. I spent a year at the courts against my producer. It is something really sad for me. Please write this. It was a very
important project and unfortunately it was not the right producer.” The plot revolves around a young policeman (Josh Hartnett) who becomes disturbed after encountering a serial killer who takes Thomas De Quincey’s famous ‘murder as art’ proposition to gruesome lengths. After quitting the force, he becomes a private eye and arrives in Hong Kong to track down the missing son of a pharmaceutical magnate. The serial killer/artist’s macabre and surreal pieces – made from his victims’ bodies – recall Gunther von Hagens’ work, but a British artist provided the major influence. “Francis Bacon was the main inspiration. Once you see those works they are inside you forever.” Such is the feeling against the producers, Tran hasn’t seen the film they’ve surreptitiously marked for release the same month as Norwegian Wood in the UK. It’s as if the pain is too raw. He does hope one day he can regain control of the picture and re-cut it to his own specifications. “Yes, I would like to if it’s possible because I’m sure there’s a very good movie in there. But everything, like the grading, was not well done and the sound, too. If they want to release the DVD, they don’t have the right materials to do it. The mix they have is the mix for the theatre and they’d have to reduce it and stretch it, then you’d lose the power of the music and sound.” After the legal tangles and disappointment of one picture, the sense of accomplishment with Norwegian Wood makes him smile. “It was a really normal process and with a producer who is a producer, you know?” Tran is already plotting his next movie and mulling over three different ideas, one of which could be set in contemporary France. There is, however, hesitance in announcing a definite project. “Each time I’m talking about that kind of thing it becomes something else.” Check out the full interview transcript online in the week of the film’s release.