OWL AND THE SPARROW
             Director Stephane Gauger Interviewed

To those just discovering the Vietnamese/American feature-length narrative OWL AND THE SPARROW, it may seem disconcerting at first to learn that the director/screenwriter is at first glance a tall, seemingly non-Asian alpha-male. That would not be the first mistaken assumption people will make about Stephane Gauger, the talented creator of this charming award-winning effort. Gauger, a Eurasian who is considered a member of the growing Southern California confederation of Vietnamese American filmmakers including Ham Tran (THE ANNIVERSARY; JOURNEY FROM THE FALL), Charlie Nguyen (THE REBEL), Minh-Nguyen Vo (BUFFALO BOY), Victor Vu (FIRST MORNING; SPIRITS), and the brothers Bui, Tony and Tim (THREE SEASONS; GREEN DRAGON), first came to notice through his first film SEABIRDS, an austere, brilliant short that was featured at VC FILMFEST 1999. Since then, Stephane has become a fixture among the local "Viet Kieu" filmmaking community; his credits as a lighting supervisor and cameraman has graced the credit rolls of numerous local and international film productions.          This brief interview finds Stephane just back from Vietnam, where he has been involved in pre-production on a new feature. But for the present is the local premiere of OWL AND THE SPARROW, which Visual Communications and the APA First Weekend Club will co-present as part of the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival on June 23 and 26. Since its world premiere screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in late January, the film – a drama that observes the lives of three distinct individuals, all seemingly without families, on the streets of modern-day Ho Chi Minh City – has picked up considerable critical and popular attention, including the grand Jury Award for best Feature at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. A much-coveted distribution deal guaranteeing that OWL will reach an even larger audience can’t be far behind. VC: First things first, Stephane: what have you been doing with yourself in the years since we showed SEABIRDS at VC FILMFEST 1999? It seems that you've been doing a lot of below-the-line work for other directors. Did you learn much further about the filmmaking process from observing how others did it? SG: In 2000, I had a completed screenplay called THE SNOW MAIDEN that I wanted to do as my first feature. It was about a triangle of people in the sex traffiking ring in LA's Russian community. I tried for a few years to get it financed, but it was a dark story, and for an unknown director like myself, the project just died. So I payed the bills by doing lighting and camera on a whole bunch of stuff, learning new directing techniques from good directors, but also working on crap reality tv sometimes for a paycheck. VC: Can you tell us a little about how OWL AND THE SPARROW came about? SG: I had been playing around with the digital medium on short projects. I thought I could shoot something in Vietnam pretty cheaply using digital cameras. I thought I could just have a film character -- driven and keep a couple cameras loose, French "new wave" style...nothing fancy. VC: The story is undeniably set within a large, impersonal urban metropolis -- if that is what we are to expect of modern-day Ho Chi Minh City -- yet the story is quite an intimate and ultimately warm-spirited one. What challenges did you face in the course of fleshing out your characters? It definitely seemed that you were influenced by scenarists such as Dang Nhat Minh (SEASON OF GUAVAS, NOSTALGIA FOR COUNTRYLAND) and even your contemporary Tony Bui (THREE SEASONS). The characters just came naturally to me. I like themes of dislocation in the big city, and you see some of that in Saigon. I haven't seen any of Dang Nhat Minh's films, even though I'll get around to it. As far as THREE SEASONS, I'm a fan of the film, but it's a little different from mine in the way that Tony's film is more steeped in metaphors and more of a fairy-tale. I wanted OWL AND THE SPARROW to be grungier, more feverish. But I think they're both sweet films in different ways. VC: Because of her work in the recent JOURNEY FROM THE FALL, Cat Ly is known to many cineastes in the Vietnamese American community; but can you tell us about Le The Lu and Pham Thi Han, who played the zookeeper and the 10 year-old runaway, respectively? Their performances were quite luminous and charming. SG: Le The Lu is a serious actor, so he's careful with which projects he takes on. He's a quiet actor, and that what I needed for his character. As far as Han, she's so adorable and a major talent. I try to spend time with her whenever I go back to Saigon. She likes bowling, even though she's so small, half the time the ball ends up in the gutter. VC: What challenges did you, an Amerasian guy, encounter during the principal photography in Vietnam? Of, was everything pretty hunky-dory? SG: I look a lot more white and I'm super freakin' tall compared to everyone else, so most people on the streets just assume I'm some European who's been living in VN a long time cause my Vietnamese is quite fluent. VC: While you were shooting in Vietnam, I understand you were conscripted to perform on-camera as a French imperialist official in another Vietnamese/American production shooting at the same time as OWL AND THE SPARROW. Can you tell us about that? SG: I shot OWL AND THE SPARROW right after I worked on THE REBEL for four long months. Charlie (Nguyen, the director of THE REBEL) knew I was coming into town to do lighting on his film. He tapped me to play [the character of] DeRue because he knew I spoke fluent French, and he didn't know if he could cast a decent French actor in Saigon. I thought why not, and hey, the production saves money that way. VC: What is the distinction between realizing your own feature-length production, and acting in someone else's movie with a story and aesthetic completely different from that of your own? SG: You just come in and play the part. Charlie let me write some of the scenes and let me flesh out my character a little, so that's he's not just colonial scum, but he's colonial scum who just wants to go home to France. He misses wine and cheese, the finer things... VC: I was really impressed with your collaborations with past VC FILMFEST filmmakers including Timothy Linh Bui, Ham Tran, and others during the making of OWL AND THE SPARROW -- but then, we shouldn't be surprised. We here at Visual Communications have been observing a growing community of Vietnamese American filmmakers through our screening activities for the past fifteen years or so. How important is it for you to be part of this developing "Viet Kieu" community of filmmakers? SG: It's a banner year for Vietnamese filmmakers, and there's a new crop of productions this year and next year. There's definitely a wave. I just like good movies, so if they happen to be from Vietnamese filmmakers, it just makes me prouder. VC: As your film continues to go out on the film festival circuit, I'm sure you must have been confronted with the age-old question of "choices" versus "opportunities." Specifically, the question of whether to screen OWL AND THE SPARROW at ethnic-specific film festivals as opposed to mainstream festivals that impose "premiere" policies on filmmakers. What's your feeling around that; and is it possible for filmmakers such as yourself to have it both ways, as it were? SG: Ultimately, the film that you make becomes a product, meaning that it's great to show it to every audience, but in the case of OWL AND THE SPARROW, it's such a small intimate film that we need all the help we can get with distribution, and if that means playing mainstream festivals that garner more attention, it serves the film. It would be a shame if a good film just languishes as a "cine orphan" without a home. VC: Finally, I know that you're already working on a new production. What sort of stories can we expect from you in the near future? SG: I just got back from Vietnam where I'm starting a doc on the National Symphony there in an exchange with the Norweigian conservatory. I'm doing this doc to showcase the talent of Vietnamese classical musicians. But I'm brewing up my next narrative to be shot in Saigon as well. Same themes of love and loneliness, but with a new crop of characters. It'll be bigger, incorporating the symphony world and soccer madness. I went to a soccer match there recently and there was definitely some hooliganisms. Soccer madness is definitely universal. But again, I try to make my stories universal. For more information on the L.A. Film Festival screenings of OWL AND THE SPARROW, click here. To learn more about the film, visit the OWL AND THE SPARROW website.