James Nguyen: The Rise of the Asian-American Hitchcock
Variety Magazine, October 9th 2015
Guest post by
@MNM041 with assistance from
@Plateosaurus
James Nguyen is an unlikely success story in the entertainment industry. Just before the Fall of Saigon, his family fled to America when he was only ten years old. Struggling to adapt to the new environment, Nguyen turned to entertainment to cope, and developed a love of filmmaking at a young age, watching all of the films made by director Alfred Hitchcock.
"I always had to watch those movies in secret because to my parents, they were the kinds of movies even the smartest kids shouldn't be watching." Nguyen humorously recalled when we sat down for an interview with him, "Stuff like
The Birds and
Psycho weren't what they wanted young James to be watching, but those films really did shape me, what I wanted to do with my life and the kinds of movies I wanted to make."
Despite having made up his mind on going into filmmaking, Nguyen first found work as a software salesman in Silicon Valley. "I didn't really like working as a salesman." Nguyen candidly admitted, "It's not that I would ever shame anyone in the career, but I just felt stifled working in a corporate environment. My English also wasn't great, at that point which I'm not proud to admit, but that's the truth."
However, it provided his first filmmaking experience: He had a role in a software commercial. It wasn’t much by his admittance - a simple role that wasn’t especially challenging despite his poor English, but it was Nguyen's first experience working on a set in any capacity. Nguyen would eventually find a bigger opportunity to work in the film industry when he came across a casting call for new actors for the 1997 Mike Myers/Dana Carvey feature
Who is Alan Smithee?[1]
"I'm not an actor, I've never really wanted to act, and I don't think I'm particularly good at acting, but I knew that I wanted to be in the film industry, so I figured it was something I could use to get my foot in the door in a way that I likely wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. This is why if you saw that movie, you might vaguely remember me as a catering staff member who later became the movie’s cameraman.”
During production on
Who Is Alan Smithee? Nguyen befriended several of his co-stars, most notably the actors playing the documentary crew such as Greg Sestero[2] and Jennifer Renton. "Nobody really cared that I was a non-actor that was still struggling with his English, and since a lot of the people in that movie, at least the non-cameos, were all people trying to break into the industry or break back into the industry in some cases, it was easy to sort of bond with them. I mentioned to Heather [O'Rourke] that I wanted to get into filmmaking and she lent me a copy of a book on filmmaking that she felt was really helpful. Then when filming wrapped up, another good Samaritan, in this case, my buddy Tommy [Wiseau], ended up helping me get the money I needed for English classes."
While far from a full semester at film school, Nguyen made the most of the help he was given. "I think I probably got more use out of that book Heather lent me than most of her classmates did." Nguyen humorously recalled before showing us that same worn-out book, a copy of
Making Movies by legendary director Sidney Lumet, alongside a picture of the two of them at the Sundance Film Festival[3].
In 1999, Nguyen started finding more work in commercials, this time behind the camera. He joined up with the advertising firm Clay, and through them wound up directing a series of commercials for the fast food chain Jack In The Box, including one commercial where Nguyen himself played the company's mascot due to the actor they had hired getting sick the day of shooting. Another set was for a campaign by the California Wine Board that aped classy Golden Age Hollywood, in which Nguyen fittingly gave himself a Hitchcock-style cameo in it.
In 2005, James Nguyen self-financed his debut film
Cash Out, a $10,000 microbudget crime thriller that centers around small-time thief Anthony Bates (Justin Kunkle)[4] who steals from his employers and immediately goes on the run to avoid getting wacked by the Mafia. By Nguyen's admission, the film does take a few cues from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, most notably with the plot suddenly switching gears halfway through and a deranged killer being at the center of that shift.
Nguyen ended up screening the film at the Sundance Film Festival that year, and word of mouth about the film quickly spread afterward, with James Nguyen quickly making rounds on entertainment news shows thanks to its story and Knukle’s performance.
His follow-up came in 2007 after meeting someone with leporiphobia, the fear of rabbits. Wondering if he could make such a phobia seem understandable to most people, as well as make his own
The Birds, he created The Man with the Rabbits, a supernatural thriller about businesswoman Lydia Tandy (Jenn Gotzon)[5] who keeps running into a strange man who always appears surrounded by rabbits, who may be tied to her past actions. The film budget was significantly larger than
Cash Out at around $7 million and thus Nguyen could spend more on the production including CG. While The Birds was naturally Nguyen's main influence for the project, actor Kyle Vogt[6] who played the titular man has said that he and director Nguyen also took inspiration from 1971's
Willard.
"I just remember sitting there with that one cocaine white rabbit that kept climbing onto my shoulder and I just couldn't help but think of Willard so I kind of played my character to deliberately be reminiscent of Bruce Davison in that movie. It got to the point where James, Jenn [Gotzon] and I all started calling that one rabbit Ben."
Speaking of the film, production was a bit fraught, not the least because of the issues of wrangling lots of rabbits. Dummies that would stand in for CG models and puppets getting humped and ripped up, hands and faces bitten and scratched, females turning out not to have been spayed and having surprise births, and even an incident where the set had to be evacuated because not all of the rabbits had been tested for rabies.
The Man With The Rabbits would also be screened at the Sundance Film Festival, and while well received, it also has a reputation as one of Nguyen's weirder movies, including the surreal ending in which we don’t know whether the businesswoman survived or not though it was far from the end of things for him. In terms of box office, the film made a modest profit in theaters and while it wasn’t the biggest success, it was good enough to bolster Nguyen’s career[7]. While the film was being shown at Sundance, Nguyen would reconnect with Tommy Wiseau, now a successful producer in his own right with 2003’s
The Room under his belt.
“Tommy and I, we just kinda clicked with each other. It wasn’t like we were best friends or anything, but we were both these guys who just… no one would expect to find success in Hollywood, and I think we understood each other in that way.” As a result, Wiseau has become one of the most consistent producers Nguyen has worked with.
One of the first films created through this collaboration came the year after, Nguyen was tapped to direct the 2009 adaptation of
Tiger Boy[8], a 2005 thriller novel by
Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan about a Chinese-American teenager named Scott Kao (Brandon Soo Hoo) whose mother was killed in a citywide riot in Los Angeles years ago, and blaming the African-American community for starting it so he decides to don a tiger mask and knives to take revenge becoming the eponymous character.
"I'd actually never heard of the book before the producers brought me on board, but I quickly read through it and I was blown away by it." Nguyen recalled, "I lived in Los Angeles when Lamar Jackson was attacked and the LA Riots broke out, and everything about Tiger Boy just captured the mood of that time."
Tiger Boy also had the distinction of being the most controversial movie that Nguyen ever directed, thanks to its graphic depictions of violence and its subject matter being seen as exploitative by some. “I got harassed online and on the street, accused of being anti-Black or supporting violence against black people, but the reality is that the movie was about a traumatized kid who was taking out his anger on people who aren't related to his trauma, and don't deserve what he inflicts on them. Scott is a tragic character, because he is essentially perpetuating the same cycle of violence that killed his mom to begin with.” Fellow director Rusty Cundieff[10] also came to Nguyen's defense, telling Entertainment Tonight, "James isn't anti-black just because he's written a character that is."
Nevertheless,
Tiger Boy would be far from the last film that Nguyen made, despite the controversy. As a matter of fact, Tiger Boy was more successful than
The Man With the Rabbits thanks to a decent word-of-mouth response from moviegoers for its acting (especially Hoo’s performance), cinematography, Nguyen’s direction, and themes. As such, the film made more money in theaters than his previous feature grossing $67 million on a budget of $10 million.
Tiger Boy also brought greater attention to Tan’s novel and made Nguyen into a rising star in Hollywood.
Looking back on the film’s release, Nguyen does not regret adapting Tan’s novel to the big screen and has plans to direct more features down the line.
“If
The Man With the Rabbits was my breakthrough hit then Tiger Boy was the next step for me,” says Nguyen, who later added that, “It was also the first time where I really considered how big a deal movies like that were to Asian Americans. Suddenly being seen as a big deal by other Asians who wanted to break into Hollywood was actually pretty overwhelming for me at first but it's part of the reason why I felt this need to give back to the community.” Indeed, not long after the release of
Tiger Boy, Nguyen established a film school scholarship with the Los Angeles Film School. “The irony wasn't exactly lost on me, but with how my work has opened opportunities for me in Hollywood, I felt it would be short sighted of me to not help other people like me find their opportunities.”
Nguyen has also famously applied that philosophy to how he casts his movies, often scouting for unknown talent to lead his movies, also believing that it, in his own words, “lets the content of the movie speak for itself. It's not that I'm against casting established names mind you, I've worked with plenty of established names, but I also feel that getting unknowns helps give something more real than, say, getting someone with a very recognizable face like Reese Witherspoon or Denzel Washington.”
Indeed, studios attempted to pressure Nguyen into casting actors Bradley Cooper and Rashida Jones for his 2010 film
Birdemic, a pandemic film which focused on a CDC Doctor and a journalist trying to alert the public of a strain of common avian flu that proves highly-transmissible and deadly to humans, and while that film did feature bigger names like Ken Jeong and Jamie Lee Curtis, the two main characters were still eventually given to unknowns Alan Bagh (who played CDC Dr. James McKenna) and Whitney Moore (who played Washington Post reporter Grace Fremont)[11].
Not this in the slightest.
Birdemic was another big success for James Nguyen, but it would also end up being the last film Nguyen made with Wiseau Productions prior to Tommy Wiseau’s arrest for embezzlement and money laundering.
“He was really disappointed when he learned about all of that,” Nguyen's daughter, Jennimai [12], told reporters in 2012, “Just finding out that someone who had helped him early on in his career turning out to have done as much underhanded stuff was demoralizing for him.”
Around that same time, Nguyen had signed a deal with Triad for three movies, selling scripts he had actually finished prior to
Cash Out’s release. The first of these would be released the following year. Knock ‘Em Dead, which is about a group of touring comedians who slowly realize that a string of murders has been following them from gig to gig, meaning that the killer could be one of them. While
Knock ‘Em Dead was considered one of Nguyen's weaker films, it was still praised for its witty dialogue, it's realistic depictions of comedians touring, as well as for it's performances with Thuan Luu[12] and Moriah Brown putting in believable performances as the leads, while Kevin Heffernan puts in a performance as the film’s antagonist that is disturbing and funny in equal measures.
The year after that, Nguyen also directed the smart slasher
True Story, about a group of filmmakers making a horror film based on a tragic event that took place a few years prior, much to the anger of the people who suffered through it. This film is often compared to the infamous Troma movie,
A Triumphant Tragedy, though True Story takes itself much more seriously than that film. Jordan Lawson and Mathew Patrick[13] led this film as slimy producer Barry Rusk (Lawson) and desperate for cash sound guy Tom Elster (Patrick), who end up trapped as several members of the local community decide to shut down production in a very permanent manner.
Nguyen described
True Story as an “exploration of exploitation”, examining how Hollywood will attempt to turn the suffering of real people into entertainment. “I've worked with some executives who truly only saw dollar signs, even when it comes to tragedies.”
Currently, Nguyen's most recent film is
Wonderland, which released last year and starred Nguyen’s friends Greg Sestero and Jennifer Renton as two parents trying to keep distract their kids from their impending divorce by taking them to a theme park the father vaguely remembers going to in his youth, only to discover terrible secrets within the park. Since the release of that film, Nguyen has announced he's taking a small from filmmaking, aside from taking part in an upcoming documentary about the Vietnam War, which also features actress Thuy Trang, another Vietnamese immigrant.
That said, Nguyen has been clear this hiatus will be brief. “I love making movies. I'm never gonna stop making movies, but occasionally, a man does need to step back from his work to avoid getting burnt out. Rest assured though, I'll be back.”
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[1] We've discussed this movie before in a prior guest post, but James Nguyen wasn't the only one who got a better career thanks to this movie.
[2] If you’re wondering what Sestero was up to, he still appeared in TTL’s The Room though not as the analogue to Mark but instead Denny thanks to Wiseau getting him a fairly prominent role as producer. Since Who is Alan Smithee? was a success and so is this film, Sestero is much more prominent as an actor and appears in a number of films or TV shows over the years.
[3] Let’s just say that O’Rourke will work alongside Nguyen for some of her projects alongside Wiseau.
[4] Justin Knukle played one of the main characters in James Nguyen's actual debut film Julie and Jack. And yes, the name of his character is a Shout-Out to both Anthony Perkins and his character Norman Bates.
[5] Jenn Gotzon was the other lead of Nguyen’s Julie and Jack. Like Knukle, she gets to star in a different film that isn’t as widely panned as Julie and Jack. As with Anthony Bates, her character’s name is also a reference to Lydia Brenner and her actress Jessica Tandy from The Birds. She also gets a decent career boost from her role.
[6] Kyle Vogt played Peter the psychologist in OTL’s The Room. Since the film ended up with a different cast, Vogt ended up starring in The Man with the Rabbits and is praised for his performance as the titular character allowing him to solidify his reputation as a character actor.
[7] To put it simply, Nguyen will be much more successful as a filmmaker with some notable flicks under his belt.
[8] As you can imagine, Tiger Boy is an original to TTL novel that becomes rather famous and controversial for its themes and characters. It will be seen as a quintessential Asian-American novel and Nguyen’s greatest film.
[9] Recall that Tales from the Hood was directed by Spike Lee instead of Cundieff since it became a Tales from the Crypt feature. Because of this, Cundieff doesn’t work on that film but does work on its sequel instead as a director for one of its stories.
[10] Yes, the leads of OTL’s Birdemic: Shock And Terror. Keeping with the naming gag, Bagh’s character gets his name from Jimmy Stewart and his character in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Moore's character comes from Grace Kelly and her character in Rear Window.
[11] Actual name of Nguyen's daughter.
[12] Thuan Luu is once again a star of one of the Birdemic movies, this time one of the actors in the second.
[13] While not someone Nguyen worked with, Lawson is also most known for a so-bad-it's-good movie, The Amazing Bulk. Meanwhile MatPat’s presence here is based on the fact that he had ambitions to be an actor in OTL.