Rinzler also screened documentaries shot during the American involvement in Vietnam, and also footage of contemporary life there. The cinematographer found archival still photographs to be especially helpful, and she often talked to Bui about her own work in photography, a passionate artistic endeavor which has informed her work with moving images. "Once I was in Vietnam, Mitch Epstein's book of photographs shot in Hanoi was very useful," Rinzler explains. "The text he wrote to accompany the images was exactly what I encountered when I was in Ho Chi Minh City. [His book details] the new modernization and culture that's been caused by the Western culture clashing and washing over Vietnam's old, Eastern ways. His photographs reflected that trend and made me aware of it, and I certainly encountered that [cultural shift] in full force."
Indeed, the merging of Eastern and Western cultures in the country had a profound effect on the filmmakers' visual approach to Three Seasons. "The constant change was very symbolic," says Bui. "There was a home across from my apartment that had been around for decades, and it had chipped paint and a corroded building structure. As Lisa, my assistant director and I were storyboarding and talking about how to convey the sense of change in Vietnam, this building was slowly being reconstructed right in front of our eyes. It was not being rebuilt with any clear plan, which is what happens in most of Vietnam. As we were storyboarding, we would open our window, and on every new day something else was happening to this building. First, they repainted everything in a very bright color, because if somebody has money, they feel they have to just paint and repaint everything. Then one door would change, even though nothing to the left or right of the building was changing. On every block, one or two homes were being rebuilt, and every street was undergoing a trans-formation. One side of the street would have cement, and the other wouldn't; lightposts would go up in one area, but down the street there wouldn't be any.
"On the first day of production, we shot the cyclo driver coming home from work," he continues. "We shot in one direction where there was red dirt. The city governor waited for us to turn the camera 180 degrees to shoot the other angle, and then they came in and changed the entire block we had just shot. They literally poured cement and put in new fences as we were shooting. When I was there in 1992, a lot of the old French architecture was still around, but now it's practically all gone. Saigon is continuing to develop and remodel, develop and remodel. So much beautiful architecture is being torn down for these very quick, cheaply constructed buildings that are economically effective, but not as visually stunning. Saigon is really trying to modernize into this efficient, quick, simple city."
Working closely with her director, Rinzler created a visual scenario for each section of the film, and met the tremendous challenges that come with working on location in Vietnam. "The Dry Season was warm in color, a tonality which is always a hard thing to achieve," she explains. "It's easy to fall into an overly romantic effect, which wasn't what interested us. We wanted a dusty, golden feeling. The Dry Season took place predominately on a moving cyclo, but in Vietnam there's no such thing as a Shotmaker truck. Instead, we used a Jeep with bad shocks — or seemingly no shocks at all — as a camera car. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City can be potholed and bumpy. A cyclo is approximately 8' long, and the camera lens on our Jeep was approximately 12' from the actors. As a result, we were forced to use a 75mm or 100mm lens for close-ups — lenses that are, quite frankly, too long for unsteady moving-vehicle shots with dialogue. Bumpy footage would have distracted from the story, so we brought in Will Arnot on Steadicam to minimize the bumpiness of the roads. Another time, we used the Steadicam to create a makeshift crane, since the only one available to us was ancient, unsafe, and too heavy to move onto location. We created a rig which allowed the operator to simply walk down a ladder, creating a cranelike effect.
"The Wet Season mostly took place at night, and we made rain throughout, working with rather antiquated rain towers. A special effects expert came in from Los Angeles and trained the Vietnamese in the placement and operation of the nozzles. There was a learning curve involved, and a certain beauty in the collaboration of skills and countries. The Vietnamese and the American crews enjoyed one another.
"The Growth Season was lush and springlike, it was about rebirth," she continues. "Working on a temple in the middle of a lake involved serious lighting limitations, due to the distance of the land banks to the temple and the smallness of the units and rigging possibilities.
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© 1999 ASC