Bui brought the screenplay to every studio in Los Angeles. He encountered great enthusiasm, but not for the movie he was determined to make. "It was tough," Bui admits. "Every person who read it loved the script and thought it would make a great film, but they wanted to make Three Seasons in English, with as many American actors as possible. They also wanted me to change the story and make it more about Vietnam's past. Although everyone was interested and wanted to meet with me right away, I kept hearing things like 'We need changes, we can't do it the way you wrote it,' or 'What else are you working on?'"
Nevertheless, Bui held to his decision to make a Vietnamese film with regional actors, in his native language and on location. He found kindred spirits in producers Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, who had founded the New York-based Open City Films, a production company dedicated to the discovery and advancement of groundbreaking independent visions in film. Then, October Films signed on as the distributor. Both companies were willing to risk financing and distributing a foreign film with virtually no commercial prospects, which also suffered from Vietnam's negative association with war. Bui recalls, "We were actually getting mail from people like the Argentinean Film Board to shoot it all in Argentina. Why? Because they have jungles and they automatically thought we were making a war film. We got that constantly once we said we wanted to film in Vietnam. Everybody automatically thought it had to be a war film, which made me drive even harder to make this film in the way that I did."
When Bui recognized that the film community in New York understood his intentions, he decided that an East Coast-based cinematographer should photograph Three Seasons. "I think I met every single cinematographer in New York," Bui remembers. "Lisa Rinzler was the first person I met, and she left a strong impression on me. I then met at least 20 other cinematographers in the course of two weeks, but my mind always went back to her. I started comparing people to her without even realizing I was doing it, and I kept recalling things she had said."
Bui also admired Rinzler's work on Menace II Society and Dead Presidents (see AC Sept. 1995), which has earned the respect of many other young independent filmmakers as well. After attending NYU's undergraduate film school, the cinematographer began her career as an assistant to Nancy Schreiber, ASC on documentaries, and to Fred Murphy, ASC on feature films. This combined education in fiction and nonfiction shaped Rinzler's cinematic style on documentaries such as Hookers, Prostitutes, Pimps and Their Johns, No Sense of Crime, and the features True Love and Trees Lounge.
Rinzler's work is immediate, but it also offers expressive photographic impressions. "She's such a poet in who she is," Bui explains. "Lisa has a lot of integrity. I wrote Three Seasons for a very important reason: to bring these stories to life, and to bring a humanity to the screen. I needed someone who understood that. I needed a human heart, and Lisa brought an amazing compassion to her understanding of the characters and their stories. I thought, `Wow, if I team up with someone who has that sort of inner spirit, we'll really be able to do the right thing for this film."
In her work, Rinzler fully enters the worlds of the films she photographs. She immersed herself in urban African-American culture for Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, and in the Italian-American experience for True Love. For Three Seasons, she stepped into an Asian society with her eyes and heart wide open. "I hit the ground running," Rinzler says. "I got off the plane in Vietnam, spent 10 minutes in the hotel and then went right to the production office. Ho Chi Minh City is very intense. It's just non-stop; New York City is rural by comparison! The density of the population alone is shocking. It's very hard to just physically cross the street. People get around by a combination of mopeds, bicycles and cyclos, so you literally have to wade into this sea of intense humanity and just have faith that you're going to make it to the other side. People eat squatting on the curbs with mopeds and exhaust rushing by. There was a clash of the old and the new. There were altars everywhere, but inside you'd find packs of Marlboro cigarettes or 100 percent synthetic, polyester-pink fabrics."
During prep, Rinzler and Bui screened Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, and Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia, all of which offer the kind of rich and poignant imagery that they felt would suit the lyric nature of the Three Seasons screenplay. In formulating a visual way to capture Vietnam's intense climate, they looked at Do the Right Thing and A Dry White Season, both of which deal effectively with the element of heat. "We watched films for both their pros and cons," Bui explains. "We didn't want to use filters to make everything look hot."
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© 1999 ASC