Interview: ‘Rebel’ director Charlie Nguyen

One of the hottest Asian action film imports of the year comes surprisingly from Vietnam, a country with no history of exporting mainstream genre films, let alone martial arts movies. Changing that and perhaps a lot more related to Vietnamese cinema is writer-director Charlie Nguyen (pronounced “Win”) and his third feature film THE REBEL, now on DVD from Dragon Dynasty.

Having already directed two non-action feature films for the Vietnamese community on both sides of the Pacific, Charlie teamed up with his brother Johnny Nguyen who took his experience as a martial artist and stuntman working in Hollywood and on Tony Jaa’s THE PROTECTOR to double as star and action director for THE REBEL.

With Charlie working behind-the-scenes, Johnny and his fighting co-stars, Norwegian-Vietnamese model Veronica Ngo and veteran actor Dustin Nguyen (21 JUMP STREET) are poised to lead Vietnam’s film industry onto the international stage with a potent blend of dramatic and martial prowess.

Speaking from his home in Orange County, California, Charlie took time to talk to Kung Fu Cinema by phone in this exclusive interview. Charlie discusses his own background in martial arts, his long collaborative relationship with Johnny, Johnny’s REBEL co-stars, and his own take on the film from a dramatic perspective. First though, I had to ask Charlie about his latest production, MONK ON FIRE, that I first read about in a previous interview with Charlie that was posted on Twitch. If you head over there you’ll find a description of the movie to compliment Charlie’s following comments about what we can expect from the film’s action.

KFC: Back in April I read about a fantasy actioner that you are executive producer on with Dustin directing and Johnny and Veronica starring. I already know a little bit about the plot but can you elaborate on your description of it being a cross between a wuxia film and a Western?

CN: It’s basically a fable story, sort of like a comic book type of genre but it has a Western/cowboy flavor to the structure of the film. Of course, there [are] no guns because this is like 3000 years ago. It’s more like a samurai/wuxia crossover with a Western type of a structure.

KFC: Are you or Johnny going to be incorporating a similar style of martial arts [as found in THE REBEL] or are you going for something new?

CN: We’re going for something a lot more stylized and more flashy. We want to work with the camera a little bit more. We’ll choreograph the action with the camera so that the camera becomes another element that adds to the fight scene versus just photographing the fight. We’re going for something a little new with longer takes as well. We don’t want to cut too much. We want to see the whole fight scene play out in longer takes which means that the camera needs to be at various positions along the fight.

Johnny Nguyen (left) and his brother Charlie work through a fight scene together in THE REBEL.

KFC: Your brother Johnny stated in a recent interview that he learned a family style of martial arts from your father and I wanted to know if you had also gotten into that yourself and if you share a similar interest in martial arts with Johnny even though you’re not an actor or doing this stuff on screen.

CN: I was the older brother so I learned the art first, before Johnny was born even. We practiced, sparred together with [our] grandfather. [The art] is a family tradition and it’s not widely taught. My uncle has a dojo [in Vietnam] where he teaches some of his students. Johnny and me were fanatical about martial arts. We went on to practice one style after another. We got bored pretty quick. When we got down the basics, the foundation, then we’d go, “okay, let’s move on and learn something new.”

KFC: In Hong Kong action filmmaking, an action coordinator like Corey Yuen or Yuen Woo-ping is also the co-director and takes control of shooting during action sequences. How did you and Johnny work together in THE REBEL when it came to shooting the action scenes?

CN: The way we work goes way back to the days when I was in high school and junior high. We used to shoot all these little fight scenes in the back yard and around the house. Back then, I did the story and the camera, and then Johnny would do the lighting and the technical parts. We were growing up doing that, shooting all these little shorts. Then he went off to Hollywood to become a stuntman. So when we teamed up to do THE REBEL obviously Johnny [brought] a whole lot of experience [having worked] with Jackie [Chan], Jet Li and Tony Jaa. We sat down to structure the fights how we structured the story. We said, “okay how are we going to structure the fight scenes, all the action sequences so that they have an arc to them?’ It’s not just, “here we’re going to have a fight scene and here we’re going to have a fight scene.” How are these fight scenes linked together and how will they reveal your characters? So we came up with an overall structure where we start out small and become really big to the dramatic fight scene with Johnny and Dustin at the end.

We came up with a set of moves for each individual, each character so that it reveals who they are and it’s in favor of their body type. Dustin’s movements were more deadly and direct and Johnny would be more comfortable with his kicks.

Johnny would come up with all of the choreography and we would shoot it with a video camera. We’d all watch it and go, “Oh okay. Let’s make this adjustment and that adjustment. The camera should be a little closer, the wires here and here we don’t want to cheat too much.” We wanted to shoot from the front so we had to train the actors. Johnny wanted to do all his own stunts, [and do the same] for Dustin and Veronica too. He wanted to film from the front of the actors and not the back. In most films they [shoot from the back] when they have an actor that can’t fight very well. Then they do a close-up. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to shoot with the wires as little as possible and shoot from the front so you could see the actors perform their own movements. That was the concept going in. I’m just watching the monitor to make sure we’re shooting the same thing we did in rehearsal. Johnny was 80 percent of the fights.

KFC: It’s interesting that you picked three people who all really stand out. I’m going to start with Dustin because he’s going to be familiar with anyone of my generation who grew up watching 21 JUMP STREET. I though it was fascinating that you got this guy. The last thing most of us would have expected is to see Dustin as a badass villain with martial arts skills. Was he your first choice? Did he have to train a lot on his screen fighting or was he able to step in and adapt quickly?

CN: Johnny and Dustin, I believe had been training and practicing together for the movie. So Johnny knew a little about Dustin and his ability to do certain things. He knew his limitations because he trained with Dustin.

We did talk about other actors who worked with Johnny before and some of them were really experts, ones that Johnny was even more comfortable with and could come up with more brutal, extreme things that Johnny can do. Of course, we have to adjust the choreography with the ability of the actor.

For me it’s acting. I told Johnny the martial arts is one thing but the way it’s performed [by] this character, the villain role, is also very important to me and I want somebody who has that range.

KFC: I think Dustin definitely brought that to the role. Previously, you have stated that your “obsession has always been for drama more than any other genre.” One of the things that also intrigued me is that in addition to THE REBEL being an action film that is competitive with ones coming out of Hong Kong and Thailand right now, you have a strong dramatic aspect to the film which is in a lot of ways superior to what we have seen in recent years when you look at the typical martial arts period action film. How did you approach this in order to keep a balance between action and drama? Also, are action films something you want to move beyond and let Johnny take over?

Johnny Nguyen takes the advice of his brother Charlie and moves an opiun den fight with a French officer to the floor in THE REBEL.

CN: On THE REBEL, I had a little bit of a struggle between, what you said, balancing the martial arts with the drama. Deep down inside I wanted THE REBEL to be more drama than action. My instinct just told me that. Then, of course, Johnny would disagree with me. [With Johnny], it has to be a martial arts movie first. I think that’s why THE REBEL became what it is. The martial arts is there but also the dramatics. I wanted it to be really grounded, believable. The story has to drive the movie [and] the action.

The DP (Dominic Pereira) was saying, “I don’t know how this movie is going to work. Here you have a drama and the next day you have martial arts. How’s it going to work?” The genres don’t really mix together but at the time I really didn’t know what to do. The only way we could shoot the film at the time was for me to take the film really seriously, which means I had to calm down the action a lot. Johnny would come up with certain moves that just seemed over the top. I would say, “No, let’s tone this down. Let’s make it more grounded.”

Johnny hates fight scenes that end up on the ground. In the opium den where he’s fighting a French officer. The whole fight was ending up in the air. We stopped filming for half an hour and I’m trying to convince Johnny that I want this fight to end up on the ground. I want these two guys to be on the ground like a real fight.

KFC: The French character was played by an actual MMA fighter, correct?

CN: Yeah.

KFC: Now did that influence your argument or did you initially say this is the direction we need to go?

CN: When we cast him, Johnny and him had a discussion to figure out how to go about the fight between them. They worked out a whole fight scene standing at a certain height. Johnny feels like, when a fight ends up on the ground it’s too boring because you can’t really do much. The actor, his advantage is when he can get somebody on the ground. He’s good on the ground. He’s trained with grappling, all those techniques you see [MMA fighters] do in the cage. I though it would be interesting and more real to see him bring the fight to the ground.

KFC: I think that definitely plays to audiences today who are getting more accustomed to MMA-style fighting.

When I look at THE REBEL, one of the things I see is a Vietnamese FIST OF FURY, Bruce Lee’s 1972 film where the martial arts world becomes center stage for the fight against foreign oppression. This relates to both the physical violence of the period, which is roughly the same in both films and modern world perceptions about Chinese and now Vietnamese. THE REBEL definitely shows a perspective of Vietnam that Westerners have not seen before. Instead of extras in an Oliver Stone war movie we’re seeing Vietnamese heroes and beautiful women who kick butt. What are your thoughts on this and was it part of your agenda to change this perception?

CN: When I watch American films about Vietnam, they always seem odd to me. They seem flat. There’s no third dimension to the characters. They don’t contradict themselves. They’re cartoonish. I wanted to do away with that. That’s why the story and characters, the relationship between the people in this film are really important to me.

The spirit of independence is what really matters throughout history. It’s just one war after the other. The war scenes are not that interesting. It’s the spirit behind it. Our country is a tiny dot compared to China. The country has been conquered by the Chinese for a 1000 years and [the Vietnamese] can still remain independent. I wanted to show the spirit of independence by taking a man who has a Western mind but an Indonesian heart. These two elements are fighting. He’s contradicting himself. That’s really the theme behind the film. He’s seeking harmony from within. When he recognizes that, it’s more like a return to cultural identity which is really similar to FIST OF FURY.

KFC: Exactly, because you’re talking about a guy who is coming back from this other culture to his own and he really doesn’t fit in. It’s fascinating.

You have talked about turning the stars of this film, Johnny, Veronica and Dustin, into icons of Vietnamese cinema. I cannot think of any Vietnamese star that has broken out onto the mainstream international stage. How important do you see this as and what impact do you see it potentially or hopefully having on both Vietnamese cinema and the Vietnamese-American presence in Hollywood?

CN: That hit the right target there. Good question. In order for Vietnamese cinema to take off they have to have the star power which this film has. You have to build around a name because otherwise it’s just too hard to package your film or put a film together on an international level with a decent budget to do a good action film. If you don’t have that star power you don’t have that marketing value. You can inject the greatest actor or the greatest filmmaker and you still can’t market a film. It’s all about the star power. I truly believe that for us to go even further Johnny, Veronica and Dustin need to be icons on the world stage. They already are in Vietnam.

Dustin Nguyen looking cool as the ruthless villain in THE REBEL.

KFC: I look at Johnny and see that he’s got great skills, a lot of charisma. I see the guy being another Tony Jaa, another Jet Li. I look at Veronica. She’s done amazing things in a very short amount of time in terms of the training she had to do for this film. Then you look at Dustin. He’s got the good drama background and yet he can still do the physical action. I know you guys are going to do more projects together. Do you plan to have them do more physical action or will you broaden beyond that?

CN: Well, it’s Hong Kong style that we really want to take to the next level. Johnny and I are working on THE REBEL 2. We hope that we have a chance to shoot THE REBEL 2. I can assure you that the action will be so much better now that we have the experience of making a movie in Vietnam. When we went in shooting THE REBEL we had to face so many obstacles and technical difficulties. Part of that was just trying to make a good movie. We had in mind bigger scenes and even more dangerous stunts that we just couldn’t pull off because of the logistics. If we have the opportunity to do THE REBEL 2 then we’ll definitely take it to the next level.

KFC: Last question. Hong Kong cinema has been in a state of flux in recent years as it struggles to find new markets on the mainland and new sources of revenue. The new hip trend seems to be international crossovers; get some Korean stars mixed in, some foreign investment. Are you guys going to be looking to do that in the future for larger productions? Also, what is the state of the Vietnamese film industry in your view?

CN: The Pan-Asian way is really the way to go for Asian cinema. I think if we stick to just making Vietnamese films we won’t get to a level where we can make international films. It’s not to say that we couldn’t make THE REBEL 2. We’re just going to make it smaller. We always aim for a wider audience.

The main issue that we have now is the authenticity of [our films]. We could have a proposal to have a Chinese actor in there, a Korean actor in there, a Japanese actor but what language are we going to use? Are we going to use English? The authenticity just goes out of the window.

KFC: Mainland China is accustomed to dealing with that problem. If you don’t speak good Mandarin they’ll probably dub you anyway.

CN: Yeah. I know for me and Dustin, when we talk, a lot of our focus is on being authentic.

KFC: Charlie, thank you for speaking to me. It’s been a pleasure to watch THE REBEL and write about it on the site. There are a lot of fans here in the West who absolutely love what you guys are doing and we’re definitely looking forward to a sequel and to see what you do with MONK ON FIRE.

CN: Thank you so much.

Tags: Charlie Nguyen, Features, interview, Johnny Nguyen