by Ivan Small
Navigating a New Film Aesthetic
Bao Tranchi has been an innovative designer in Hollywood and the emergent Vietnamese film industry for a number of years, including designing costumes for films such as "Journey from the Fall." Most recently she collaborated with Dustin Nguyen for his new directorial debut film "Once Upon a Time in Vietnam" (Lua Phat). Drawing on historical, fantasy, and science fiction elements, Bao Tranchi had to work closely with local designers in Vietnam to come up with a creative array of costumes with no period genre precedent. Bao Tranchi speaks about the excitement and challenges of the work.
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How did you get involved in costume design and what aspects of the work excite you the most? | ∧ |
I got involved in costume design over 14 years ago. I had just graduated Otis College of Art & Design with a major in Fashion. While we were in school, we had a design mentor who owned a store on Sunset Plaza in Los Angeles. Arianne Phillips¹ walked into his store, saw my fashion illustrations, and then called me up and hired me on the spot to work with her on the original concept designs for "Queen of the Damned" starring the late Aaliyah. From there, I got into the Costume Designer's Guild and went on to work with Arianne on the first "Charlie's Angels" with Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz, Hedwig & the Angry Inch, and the Madonna "Drowned World Tour". ¹Arianne Phillips is a major costume designer & stylist. Her movies include: 3:10 to Yuma, W.E. Walk the Line, A Single Man, One Hour Photo, Girl, Interrupted, The Crow as well as being Madonna's Stylist
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"Once Upon a Time in Vietnam" is considered to be the first martial arts - fantasy film produced in Vietnam. What exactly does this genre mean and how do you anticipate Vietnamese audiences responding to the visual and technical effects and themes in the film? | ∧ |
"Once Upon a Time in Vietnam" (Lua Phat) is the first martial arts fantasy Vietnamese film that takes us on a journey into a world never before seen before. I always knew I had to costume design this movie from the moment that Dustin gave me the script for it 6 years ago because it was such a unique world that we were creating. Most Vietnamese films are either period pieces or modern day contemporary. It is cheaper economically to buy ready-made clothes and financially less risky to draw upon clothes that people have already seen and recognize. Nobody does a movie out here of a time period that people have never seen before. It takes a Bold Heart of Passion and Vision to make a movie that suspends time and place, pulls you into its imaginary settings, and makes you believe in it. When I first started designing for the movie, director Dustin Nguyen loved the feelings evoked from Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" and Wong Kar-Wai's "Ashes of Time"...while making sure to maintain a Vietnamese feeling injected with Steampunk aesthethic pops. This is one of my most favorite thrills of designing: the challenge of mixing and marrying different times and moods to create something truly unique and individual for the fantasy movie landscape which we are bringing to life. This was not to be a literal period piece. This was to be our own time and landscape of Lua Phat. I anticipate Vietnamese audiences will appreciate the beauty that we have created, but the true uniqueness of Lua Phat actually reaches and touches a larger audience in the world. We never intended this to just be a local movie for the Vietnamese audience. We are drawing upon inspirations that the Vietnamese have never even heard or known of. I'm proud to say that a week after the premiere of Lua Phat, our movie has been sold for distribution to over twenty countries throughout the world, including in North America with Lionsgate² so we are really excited for not just Vietnam but the World to see Lua Phat. ²As of 2012, Lionsgate is the most commercially successful independent film & tv distribution company in North America and the seventh most profitable movie studio.
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Tell us about your experience designing and producing the costumes for "Once Upon a Time in Vietnam". What were your design inspirations and who did you work with locally to produce them? | ∧ |
Costume Designing for Lua Phat was honestly one of the most difficult yet creatively rewarding three months of prep in my life. This is a movie where everything had to be custom made as we were creating a new fantasy world. None of these clothes existed. Despite the quantity and difficulty of the costumes, this was the smallest costume budget I'd ever had to work with for a film of this size and ambition. And this is Vietnam. The film industry is still young. There is no Stan Winston Studios to come make custom armor for our superhero monks. There are no ready-made sources for making things. It was all about finding people who could do a craft and pushing and guiding them to take their talent to create the costume that I needed. It was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. For example, the metal pieces of the armor were pounded out by two different bronze sculptors based upon patterns and precise drawings of engravings that I had given them. Then, I still had to turn those metal pieces into a working piece of armor overlaid over handpainted, aged leather held together into a garment with buckles and grommets and more leather. I did all the detailed hand work in house. All the elbow and knee armor pieces were hand plaster casted and then we used that to create silicon and composite versions of the bronze armor. Everything was painstakingly laborious. I don't think the producers out here in Vietnam were used to how in depth I am when I design and create so their budget for my team was incredibly small for the scale in which the costumes had to be made. I was allowed/budgeted only ONE in-house seamstress who doubled as patternmaker. For the first month and a half, I was only allowed only one assistant. By the time we started shooting in November until wrap, my entire team consisted of just myself, my seamstress and three assistants overseeing the production, make, dressing and care of over a thousand costumes. I outsourced overflow of my designs to freelance patternmakers and sewers. |
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What elements in the film sets and costume designs are particularly Vietnamese - that might differentiate them from other films in a similar genre? | ∧ |
It was extremely important to me that the costumes for Lua Phat paid homage to the land in which we were filming: Vietnam. Yes, the original inspirations were classic westerns such as Sergio Leone's "Once upon a Time in the West" and Steampunk, so how do you make sure to infuse Vietnam into it? For one, in studying the western frontier time period and steampunk, it was easy to see that they both happened during the Victorian era. The Victorian era is very well known for its collars, which are actually Asian based. The Vietnamese ao dai collar is completely dead on with Victorian collars. I took classic western styles and would change necklines and add binding to further feel Vietnamese. I was also adamant about using all Vietnamese fabrics and materials. And it had to be fabrics and materials that would have been available to our actual townspeople characters. It could not be 2013 fabrics made in Vietnam. It had to be fabrics bought today that would have been made by the people of our scripted world and time period. I also took existing indigenous Vietnamese plants, flowers, bark and wood to make new cloth that was distinctly Vietnamese. For me, the armor of our superheroes could only be made from bronze - in homage to the Steampunk era and Vietnamese history. Obviously, bronze is the metal of choice for all things Steampunk. In researching Vietnamese history, Vietnam went through an illustrious bronze era. To this day, Vietnamese Bronze is a prized artform. You take all your inspirations and research and marry them all into something new and unique. Lua Phat was not to be a classic "period" piece movie, it was to be its own period piece. All I wanted when designing and making the costumes was that when you see all the costumes play out on screen together, the world is without question a Lua Phat world, standing uniquely on its own. |
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More and more Vietnamese Americans in the film industry are finding Vietnam an attractive place for filming, production, design, and audience. Beyond favorable cost incentives, what are the factors driving this trend in your opinion, and how do you see this shaping the future of Vietnamese as well as Asian American film making? | ∧ |
I find Vietnam to be the Wild West right now for the film industry. Everybody wants to come here to make a movie. You can have the opportunity to make a movie on a scale that you wouldn't be able to in the States. You have a country filled with built in sets and landscapes, and of course, the labor and cost is infinitely less than making a movie in America. It is a great place to make a movie that can create your identity as to who you are as a director. I see Vietnam as an exciting new place that offers the opportunity for young Vietnamese Americans to come and make their mark and find a piece of themselves as well. |