The Sympathizer: Director Park Chan-wook and the Cast on Episode 1’s Dramatic Ending
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The post The Sympathizer: Director Park Chan-wook and the Cast on Episode 1’s Dramatic Ending appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Sympathizer Episode 1, “Death Wish.”]
Fleeing a country consumed by turmoil has rarely felt as raw and immediate as it does at the end of the first episode of The Sympathizer. And according to acclaimed director Park Chan-wook, that was the goal.
“The escape from Saigon is compressing all of these images and auditory elements that I was inspired by, when reading the original novel,” the acclaimed director, via an interpreter, recently told journalists during a roundtable interview. “This sequence as a whole has many elements, both visually and auditorily, whether it be helicopter sound, propeller sound, people screaming — in other words, it’s chaos itself. And if you have to define this entire show in one word, I think it would be ‘chaos.'”
The new HBO drama, based on the novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, is focused on a double agent known only as The Captain (Hoa Xuande), who finds himself working for both sides of the conflict known to Americans as the Vietnam War and to the Vietnamese as the American War.
In Episode 1, “Death Wish,” the series depicts how turmoil reigned in Saigon during the days before the official recapturing of the city in 1975 — turmoil that comes to a climax as late one night, The Captain, along with dozens of others, have to literally sprint down a runway in order to make it onto a plane departing for America.
Director Park said, “Even when I read the original novel, even though it was just text, I felt like I was seeing these fireworks exploding against the night sky, which led to these flares, rockets, motor strikes — a whole series of images, and also the explosion and flames and the gunfire that results from those images. In addition, I was imagining also the whistling sound, the very uncomfortable sound that might sound like air ripping the air when the rocket flies. So those were auditory and also visual images that came to my mind.”
Amongst the others attempting to escape is The Captain’s childhood best friend Bon, played by Fred Nguyen Khan, along with his family, leading to the episode’s haunting cliffhanger. It’s an especially big moment for The Captain, as Park explained: “He’s at the moment where he needs to make a choice of whether to abandon his friend in order to escape himself. And speaking of escape, going to America, for him, is not something that he wanted to do — he’s on the brink of this moment of dilemma, where he needs to make a decision at this very moment.”
The Sympathizer (HBO)
For Khan, “That was a beast of a scene to shoot, because I remember reading the script and so much happens in that scene.” At that point, he’d wondered just how long it would take to film it: The answer ended up being four back-to-back night shoots, during a record-breaking heat wave in Thailand.
“We were still kind of jet-lagged,” Khan said. “The one good thing that I can say about this whole scene is that we shot everything in order — because if I had shot all the stuff at the end to get it over with, I wouldn’t have had the energy to do all the stuff before, because it’s so draining. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, we’re just going to do one thing at a time. One day at a time, one night at a time.'”
Khan added that “a lot of the ensemble was a part of that scene, and we were all just so tired, but we’re all running literally for our lives, basically. I’m carrying my wife and it was just such a physical thing.”
Coming from a stunts background, that was actually an advantage for Khan: “The physical part of it was actually my comfort zone, compared to the moment where I’m just emotional. But when we reached that point, it was easy to get the emotion because we had gotten so close as a cast. And the only challenging thing was having to redo it over and over again, which was very tiring.”
Added Park, “The most important thing is the characters within this chaos that is happening around them. The confusion, urgency, and desperation — and the loss resulting from death of their family members, all of those emotions.”
That’s the touch that had an impact on cast members like Phanxine, who plays The Major, another refugee from Vietnam. “It’s kept like a personal story — it’s not just people running, it’s also related to the characters, and we invest our emotions with those characters, so we feel for them,” he said.
Phanxine, like many of the other younger cast members, was particularly moved to be part of a scene that captured a pivotal moment in Vietnamese history: While he was born after the war, he said “I listened to my mother’s story, and she told me this was exactly how it happened.”
Duy Nguyen, who plays The Captain’s other best friend Man, said that “the energy on set that day was palpable. We all had a big cry afterwards. It’s how close the story is to some of the cast members, you know? That’s the thing that they went through.”
Khan agreed, adding that, “For some of the older cast members… it was very cathartic for them. It was cool to see them actually talk about it a little bit.”
Kieu Chinh, who plays the mother of Phanxine’s character, was one of them. “There are so many scenes where I just relive my own life,” she said. “The people running around, pushing each other to get on the plane, to leave the country. Calling to each other, ‘Yeah. Come on, come on,’ And running.” Kieu Chinh praised the production team for how it came together so that “the audience would feel it themselves — that was how it happened. Exactly how it looked.”
New episodes of The Sympathizer debut Sundays on HBO and Max.
The Sympathizer: Director Park Chan-wook and the Cast on Episode 1’s Dramatic Ending
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