Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994 TAG: 9312300165
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MAL VINCENT LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
With one, Le Ly Hayslip, he bonded. With the other, Hiep Thi Le, he struggled.
With both, the controversial "bad boy" of Hollywood has made an epic new movie that, for the first time, will examine the Vietnam War from a woman's point of view. More specifically, it will bring home to America those heretofore nameless faces that, 20 years ago, flashed across our TV screens as no more than blurred enemies or victims. "I viewed this as a chance to get outside my own experience," the two-time Oscar-winning director said.
The new movie is "Heaven and Earth," and it is big in every sense of the word. Two years in production, it has a budget rumored to stretch up to $40 million. It has more than 100 actors and more than 1,000 extras in a saga that stretches through the war and back to America.
For Stone it is a return to familiar territory but with a decidedly new viewpoint. He won an Oscar for directing both his previous Vietnam films, "Platoon" in 1986 and "Born on the Fourth of July" in 1989. Most of the women in his films, though, have been either mere sex objects or, at best, distant and undeveloped characters. Now, the former Vietnamese infantryman wants to return to 'Nam, but this time to tell the story from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese peasant woman.
Helping him every step of the way is the woman who lived the story, Le Ly Hayslip. "I had her as a living biographer standing with me on the set every day," he said. "Some people were apprehensive of her. She's a 4-foot ball of fire. She's considered to be bossy. She took on Tommy Lee Jones, who played her husband. She took on me. She took on everyone in a concern for her story to be told."
At ther age of 12, Hayslip saw United States helicopters strike her village and burn the thatched house that had been her home. By the time she was 16, she had served as a spy for the Vietcong, been tortured and arrested by Republican police, sentenced to death and raped by the Vietcong. By the time she was 19, she had worked as a prostitute in Saigon and had married an American GI 40 years older than she.
Arriving in the United States in 1970, she suffered bigotry from her American neighbors. She watched her marriage fall apart as her husband suffered the after effects of the war. She wrote two books about her experiences, "When Heaven and Earth Changed Places" (1989) and "Child of War, Woman of Peace" (1993).
It was these books that attracted Oliver Stone, 47, and prompted him to go to Warner Bros. studio with the idea for the third in what has become his Vietnam trilogy. "They were very supportive, but they questioned why I wanted to do it," the director said in an interview several days ago in New York. "I put pressure on myself. I felt I was really taking a chance, but I had to get out there and make this one. Conceivably, no American would want to see this movie."
Stone, though, has never been one to dodge controversy. His last movie, "JFK," started a national furor two years ago with its questioning of the official version on the Kennedy assassination. Now, he has made a movie in which America's conduct of the Vietnam War is called into question.
"No, I'm not obsessed with Vietnam," he said as he settled back on a sofa at the Regency Hotel. The gapped-tooth look gives him a slightly goofy look that is countered by the sheer seriousness and intensity of his demeanor.
"I think, though, that it's impossible for us to escape the effects of this war. It applies to all this century and will to the next century as long as America continues to intervene in other cultures when we don't understand the people. I went to the war when I was 20 years old, and I served, but I viewed it then as an imperialist venture. I haven't changed my mind. It has taken me 20 years to understand something of those people and their respect for the land. We tried to take them off their land, and that's the main reason we couldn't win."
The success or failure of "Heaven and Earth" which is set to open locally on Jan. 7, which is scheduled to open in Roanoke this month, rests almost entirely on the tiny shoulders of his 23-year-old leading lady, a California college student who has never acted before. Stone saw 16,000 Viet Kieu (former Vietnamese nationals) before he chose Hiep Thi Le for the all-important role. She is required to age more than 30 years on-screen and appear in almost every scene of the film.
"I always can use the excuse that I never acted before," Thi Le herself giggled as she was introduced. "Oliver pushed me all the time. To me, I never understood the Vietnam War. I was never trained to think, so I never thought. I never, never thought I would be in this movie, or any movie."
The tiny leading lady is nonetheless a likely candidate to get an Oscar nomination in the "best actress" category this year. As Le Ly, she has become the Scarlet O'Hara of Saigon, going through at least as many wartime adjustments as Scarlet could ever have conceived.
"I went to the auditions with some college friends of mine just because everyone else was going," she laughed. "I knew who Oliver Stone was, but I wasn't really thrilled to meet him or anything. It was eight months before I learned that I had the part. I had no idea. They kept calling me back."
Stone said that he knew from the first moment he talked with her that she was the one. "Hiep Thi was so spontaneous and so natural that she became the leader among all the candidates, right from the first."
Hiep Thi feels that it was Stone who drove her every step of the way through the challenging film. "Oliver speaks very softly but he pushes every moment," she said. "It was difficult for me because he kept saying `stay in character.' Le Ly and I are very different persons. Le Ly is a very sad person. I am a very happy person. I got tired of being sad all the time."
In many ways the film's subject and its leading actress are an echo of each other, however. Several of Hiep Thi Le's relatives are buried in a cemetery just 30 miles from the village of Ky La where the story opens, and where Le Ly Hayslip was born.
Born in Danang, in central Vietnam, the new star has lived a dramatic story of survival all her own. Her father, a fisherman, left Vietnam in 1978. A year later, she, at the age of 9, and her little sister, age 7, were put on a small boat packed with 63 other refugees. "My mother put us on the boat and told us she would catch up with us later, at the far sea. The far sea is what we call the place where the boats wait to pick us up. They are disguised as fishing boats. But my mother didn't make it. My sister and I lived for a month on the boat before it finally landed, safely, in Hong Kong. We didn't know our last name. We didn't know where we were from. We were shuttled from refugee camp to refugee camp. But it wasn't all that tragic. It wasn't as traumatic as it sounds."
Merely by chance, Hiep Thi Le spotted her father sweeping an alley outside a chain link fence at a camp. "A minute later and I might never have seen him again," she said. "It was meant to be." With her father and sister, she reached the United States on Sept. 24, 1979. Her mother finally made the trip in 1981. The seven children and their parents now live in San Pablo, Calif.
"When I got to America, I could not believe it. The thing that most amazed me was the supermarket - the grocery store. I could not believe that all those lights were burning late into the night and inside there was so much food layed out - and no one to have to bargain with. I thought the food was all free. There was no one there to talk to about price - just one person up front."
A physiology major at the University of California, Hiep Thi Le plans to get her undergraduate degree this year, and considers it far more important than an Oscar. "I am a struggling student, that's all," she said. "It has been my long time dream to study medicine and to be a doctor. I will go for that next. I have applied to 32 medical schools."
As for the filming, she said "Tears came to my eyes during a number of scenes. It was as if I had been there before, although I never suffered the way Le Ly did. I don't feel I did her story justice, but I did the best I could."
Le Ty Hayslip, the subject of the film, is 44 and has an older, less mischievous and decidedly more cynical look at her survival. "I am not political. I do not want to get involved. I only ask that I be given a chance to be a human being."
She said that she worried about her story being told on film until she met Oliver North. "Once I met him, I knew that he would be careful with what he did."
Her life has been one of contrasts. "As a child I had a water buffalo as a pet. I had a duck and a pig. Then war came into my life and it has never left. The aftermath is still there. Now I have three sons, and I hope they never have to go."
American movie audiences will not get the expected relief when her character gets to the United States in the movie. She says in real life, it was worse than depicted in the movie. "My husband brought me to San Diego and he wanted me to be a Baptist. I was a Buddhist. I did not understand. Then people said to me `Why don't you get back on the boat and go back where you came from?' They said the `dumb gooks' had killed their boys. I thought, `What about all the Vietnamese dead?' There were 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam and 3 million Vietnamese - and none of them should have died."
by CNB