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Harvey Keitel stars as James Hager, the lead character in Sunnyvale filmmaker Tony Bui's first feature length film, 'Three Seasons.'
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In the Director's Studio
Tony Bui talks about 'Three Seasons'--and his early years in Sunnyvale
Story by Kelly Wilkinson
On a rainy night a few weeks ago, Tony Bui drove around his old Sunnyvale haunts, marveling at how small everything now seemed. The schools, the parks, the neighborhood houses and the size of the city blocks, it appeared, had all shrunk.
One might assume that the reason for Bui's shift in perspective is a newly inflated ego: At 26, Bui's first feature-length film, Three Seasons, captured three of the most prestigious awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival--the top cinematography award for a drama and both the grand jury and audience awards for best dramatic film.
But this guess would be wrong. Instead, Bui's new view of Sunnyvale seems to come from the simple and universal fact that hometowns usually feel smaller the further away you go.
Bui moved to Sunnyvale from Vietnam with his family when he was 2 years old, and spent nearly 20 years trying to avoid his Vietnamese background.
"We wanted to fit in," Bui said, "and we were embarrassed by our heritage. My brother, sister and I looked different and kept pretending that we weren't Vietnamese. But I think the fact that I kept pushing [my heritage] away was part of the reason that I returned to it."
Bui returned to Vietnam when he was 19 for two weeks to visit his grandparents. He despised it.
"I hated the heat, the dust, the humidity. I hated it all," Bui says. "But then I remember flying back into SFO and being completely overwhelmed and completely depressed and not knowing why and having this sense of longing and not understanding why. But what I did know is that I had to go back."
Bui did go back for three and a half months during his next school break, and then again for even longer, and again and again until he was spending several months each year in Vietnam. During this time, Bui made a decision that would strongly shape his life: He was going to pursue a film career. That decision surprised him as much as it surprised his parents.
"Growing up here in Silicon Valley, I expected to go into some field in science or computers, but I never thought about going into film," he says.
His mother recalls her reaction to her son's career choice. "A lot of Asian parents want their children to be doctors or lawyers, which I wanted for Tony," she says. "I worried and prayed a lot and was very surprised at his decision. But I also knew that he loved it from his heart."
Some of that love may have come from his parents opening a video store after the Memorex plant where his father was working shut down. The teenaged Bui suddenly had thousands of movies at his disposal.
"I remember being blown away by some of the movies, and how artistic they were," Bui says, citing movies such as The Last Emperor and Amadeus. "I realized that there was a whole other dimension to this, and that I could make films that were important to me. I was completely affected by the immediacy and rawness of some of them."
After graduating from Fremont High School, Bui went to film school at Loyola Marymount, where he said he was able to surround himself with people who understood his passion.
"I needed to be around people who knew what I was talking about, where I could develop my sensibilities," he says. That development culminated in the film he made for his senior thesis, Yellow Lotus. The movie was shot in Vietnam, and served as Bui's entry into the highly competitive film world.
Bui submitted a working copy of the film to the Telluride Film Festival, and was accepted before he even had a chance to polish his final copy.
"I had to frantically rush to get everything done," he says. "I had to get the editing done and the colors corrected, and I never even saw the final copy until its screening at the festival with 600 other people in the room."
Those 600 people gave his short film a standing ovation and, at 23, Bui garnered enough attention to secure an opportunity to write and direct a feature film with Harvey Keitel as executive producer and actor.
"That started everything," Bui says. "There were a lot of offers to do other films, but I didn't want to become Hollywood. I wanted to stay with my personal voice and decided to write about things that I really cared about."
"I really went at it with the full intention of being a storyteller," Bui says. "I never cared about what the right decisions would be for money or other things. I was living this kind of fairy-tale life where I was getting 20 calls a day, but I never took them too seriously. If I had, it would have been very easy to fall out of love with making films."
Courtesy of October Films
Tony Bui is the first American director to be allowed to shoot a film entirely in Vietnam. 'Three Seasons' won the top cinematography award for a drama and both the grand jury and audience awards for best dramatic film at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Three Seasons emerged from Bui's devotion to telling weighty tales. It tells the story of three working-class people's lives in present-day Vietnam.
As to whether Bui could convincingly tell a story about growing up in Vietnam without experiencing it himself, he asserts that his Sunnyvale childhood helped provide a useful distance to Vietnamese life that encouraged subtle and accurate observation.
"When I was done with the first draft, I brought it back to Vietnam and had people read it to make sure it was truthful and real," he says. "And a lot of the feedback was about how well I had [captured] everything there as someone who hadn't spent my entire life there. I think if I had lived there, I would have become too numb and too close to the subtleties."
Curtis Schneider, Bui's chess coach in seventh and eighth grades at Sunnyvale Junior High, saw Bui March 12 at the San Francisco Asian Film Festival, which opened with Three Seasons. Schneider said Bui is still the essence of his younger self. "He still is quiet and non-boastful and not wanting to talk about himself, so I'm not sure how he's reacting to all the hoopla and clamor," Schneider says. "But I don't think it will go to his head."
Schneider says that Bui had a quiet but visible effect on the other members of the chess team through his ability to "really round them together and bring them all up to his level."
"This guy is not done," Schneider says. "I can't wait to see what else he does because there's still a lot to look forward to from [Bui]. The whole time I was watching the movie, I just kept thinking, 'God! I can't believe he wrote and made this beautiful thing.' "
The success of Three Seasons is expected to continue with its distribution beginning May 6. In the meantime, Bui's mother is worrying a lot less now. "I feel very relieved and proud," she says.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
