21 Jump Street Page - Dustin Nguyen - Article 2

"The books When Heaven and Earth Changed Places ... and Child of War, Woman of Peace told the story of a Vietnamese woman's life during and after that conflict in Vietnam and the U.S. Stone explained how he was drawn to them for several reasons: 'Buddhist spirituality, reverence for ancestors, and respect for the land were three of the strongest elements of Le Ly's story that attracted my interest.... I was eager to explore them dramatically and visually.

'I also wanted Heaven and Earth to respond to, in part, the blind militarism and mindless revisionism of the Vietnam War as typified by a certain odious brand of thinking that has snaked its way into our culture over the past decade or so, in which the conflict is refought in comic book style with a brand-new ending ... we win! Within the moronic context of these ideas, hundreds of nameless, faceless Vietnamese are casually shot, stabbed, and blown to smithereens, utterly without the benefit of human consideration. Entire villages are triumphantly laid to waste, with not one microsecond of thought or care given to those inside the little bamboo hamlets. Who were they?

There were names and faces and histories attached to those bodies littering one end of Vietnam to the other between 1963 and 1975. Heaven and Earth is the story of just one family.'

Stone apparently worked on the script for over a year, condensing and broadening the story in several ways. Le Ly's husband, for example, Steve Butler, is a composite character of four American men who impacted on her life in Vietnam and the U.S."

--Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Oliver Stone (New York: Continuum, 1995).

"I have described the style of Heaven and Earth as meditative, like a Buddhist psalm, like a flower. Le Ly was called 'my little mudflower' something fragile that blows with the wind and yet it's strong. It comes from the earth. The pacing is classical, I think: Asiatic, stately, slow. You have to establish a kinship with land, sky, and ancestry because that's what she keeps returning to....

We thought that Vietnam should go from one extreme to the other, that it be very beautiful and then very polluted and ugly, which it became. We changed colors from greens and yellows to more icy blues. Also splotches of stabbing light, more darkness. When she came back, that village was a dump; the fields were gone. You can imagine the amount of organization that had to go into restructuring the landscape. But at the end we deliberately repeated several of the opening shots to suggest a cycle: life is a turning wheel. I would relate her experience to a roulette wheel--she went through every phase. Nothing changes in Asia, especially in these areas.

And after thinking about it, we felt the same way about America: that it should start off on a high note, almost supersaturated colors, a sense of strong plastic, and then it would turn icier. We start with the clean, neat lines of a Fifties ranch] house, and towards the end you notice the walls are green. So let's say from beautiful to ugly would be the motif for both acts. Originally it was scripted as America intercut with Vietnam."

"The Camera for Me Is an Actor" interview in Film Comment (Jan-Feb 1994)

Director: Oliver Stone
Producers: Oliver Stone, Arnon Milchan, Robert Kline, A. Kitman Ho
Screenplay: Oliver Stone (from two books by Le Ly Haislip)
Photography: Robert Richardson
Production Design: Victor Kempster
Editing: David Brenner, Sally Menke
Music: Kitaro
Hiep Thi Le: Le Ly
Joan Chen: Mama
Haing S. Ngor: Papa
Dustin Nguyen: Sau
Tommy Lee Jones: Steve Butler
Debbie Reynolds: Eugenia
Conchata Ferrell: Bernice
Color 140 min.