Why director Tony Bui is telling the story of the Vietnam war’s ‘napalm girl’ (2024)

Tony Bui has gone the extra mile to bring you this interview. Caught in one of China’s recent biblical rainstorms, the film director, writer and producer found himself lost in an unfamiliar, chaotic Beijing.

“It’s my first time here,” he says via Zoom, almost two hours after our scheduled appointment, “and unfortunately I don’t speak the language. I was stuck: I took the wrong bus, got off the bus, I was soaked – my shoes, socks, everything.

“I tried to grab a cab; couldn’t get one, couldn’t call a ride: Didi, the service in Beijing, is not that efficient. And in the storm no car would come anyway. So I asked a shopkeeper, who directed me to the subway. But the subway was crazy-packed because everyone was trying to take it. So I couldn’t even get in …”

Persistence eventually paid off for the unnecessarily apologetic Bui, who from a dry hotel room describes his recent, happier appearance at the Asia Society, in Hong Kong, where he moderated a talk that included fellow filmmaker Derek Tsang Kwok-cheung.

“We had a huge crowd and they showed my film. Full house, beautiful venue,” he says.

As we speak, Bui is concluding a series of visits to regional cities, including Hong Kong, organised by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at New York’s Columbia University, where he is artist in residence.

The film in question is Three Seasons (1999), which Bui, 50, born in Ho Chi Minh City, which he still calls Saigon, describes as an appraisal of “the Westernisation of Vietnam once America and Vietnam had renewed their ties”. Set in the late 1990s and starring Harvey Keitel, it was his feature-film debut and received the Grand Jury Prize, Audience Award and Best Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival. In the quarter of a century since, he says, his hometown has radically changed again.

“Without doubt,” he says. “Saigon today is unrecognisable, even from 10 years ago. It’s a completely different city. My film has all those huge billboards [on the Saigon River], Maxell, Coca-Cola, all that stuff. That’s the backdrop. Now there are billboards everywhere, huge hotels. But it’s not just the West now: you have influences from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China.”

Bui’s tour had begun in what was North Vietnam.

“I started in Hanoi, with three of its top filmmakers,” he says, “then went to Saigon and hosted a talk with five more. But then from Saigon I went to New York, because Three Seasons was to be shown at the Lincoln Center. So I flew back there, played my film, then flew to Singapore to continue the tour, talking with filmmakers Anthony Chen, Nicole Midori Woodford and Jeremy Chua. And from Singapore, I moderated the talk in Hong Kong.”

Bui is thrilled at the re-emergence of Three Seasons in a new format – not least because it almost didn’t happen. “It’s great that there’s renewed interest in the film, which was recently restored to [high-definition] 4K. It looks amazing.

“Sundance had its 40th anniversary in January this year – and Three Seasons was chosen as part of its celebratory showcase. It was a huge honour. But I didn’t have a digital version, it only existed on celluloid. So frantically, I had to find a way to restore it,” he says. “I hadn’t seen it for 15 years and didn’t know where the negative was. We called the lab – and they’d lost it. After about six weeks it was located, we found the sound element and got it done one week before Sundance started.”

Although he grew up, from the age of two, in Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, California, his homeland dominates much of Bui’s work. His first film, the successful 1995 short, Yellow Lotus, shot in Vietnam, was the precursor to Three Seasons. By 2001 and the feature film Green Dragon, written by Bui and directed by his older brother, Timothy Linh Bui, he was working with Forest Whitaker and Patrick Swayze.

“Green Dragon is loosely based on our family going to America through the Vietnamese refugee camps,” he says. “We were airlifted out during the fall of Saigon. We were in Guam for a few days, then ended up at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. We were definitely fortunate.”

And it is to Vietnam that Bui has turned again for his forthcoming, potentially shocking, next project, based on the horrifying, 1972 war photograph referred to as “napalm girl”.

“Everyone knows the picture,” says Bui, “but when I met Nick Ut, the photographer, I asked him what happened that day from his perspective. He started telling me the story and I realised there was an incredible movie there.

“Getting the rights from him was the catalyst. Then I contacted Kim Phuc, the little girl in the photo and she loved the idea of what I was trying to do.

“My film covers the 24 hours after the photo was taken – it’s a surprise, something no one knows about. The photo is the hook, but the film is actually about something much more.”