Down in the Delta:

The Making of “Buffalo Boy”

When Minh Nguyen-Vo returned to Vietnam to shoot “Buffalo Boy” in 2003, he didn’t count on the parallels the film has to the archetypical American story ≠- the western.

The story’s point of view centers on a young Vietnamese man’s coming of age in the rural south’s flood season. The location is about as far away as from the arid open spaces of the American West as it can be.

Instead, Nguyen-Vo found his film has a lot in common with Howard Hawks’s 1948 classic “Red River” in many ways.

“One of the producers described it as åa western on water,’” Nguyen-Vo said. “And he may be right. My film has the same mythic structure of the western ≠- conflict over land, property, family and a man proving himself.”

Kim, the film’s protagonist, must herd his family’s water buffalo to safer pastures during the Mekong River’s annual flooding. Along the way, he joins a cattle drive, faces rustlers and must confront a dark family secret.

Instead of longhorns, “Buffalo Boy” features the ubiquitous water buffalo, an indispensable tool to survival in Vietnam’s rural Mekong Delta.

“Water buffalo were critical to the peasants to aid in farming,” Nguyen-Vo said. “They had to be cared for and moved to dry areas to graze during the annual Mekong River floods.”

Since nothing could substitute for the flood season of Mekong’s delta, Nguyen-Vo and the production decided to shoot near the Vietnamese and Cambodian border after the flood waters had inundated the rich bottomland.

“I wasn’t sure it would work and we needed the magic of that landscape,” he said. “I grew up not far from where we shot, but due to the war had never ventured there.”

Fortunately, with no money for computer graphics and a local lake being a poor substitute, the rainy season cooperated and makes a dramatic location for “Buffalo Boy.”

“We were also in a part of Vietnam that tourists rarely visit,” he said. “It was a four and half hour boat ride back to our hotel each night.”

An additional challenge was locating dry land to place generators and equipment. One day’s shoot required stringing several hundred feet of electrical cable after the generator was placed on a small spit of land. The crew gingerly supported the cables to keep them out the water.

Wild weather also changed shooting plans.

“When a storm would come up, we’d swing the camera toward it and make the most of it,” Nguyen-Vo said. “I then had to get the actors to change their mindset from the scene they thought they would be in.”

Nguyen-Vo also cast locals in the film and many had no acting experience or a small amount of theater training.

One group with experience was the Khmer herders who tended to the water buffalo, which can weigh more than two tons.

“The herders were critical to our success in a number of scenes,” Nguyen-Vo said. “Though water buffalo are usually docile, sometimes they have a mind of their own and are nearly impossible to direct.”

-- Glen Golightly

 

For more information visit http://www.angelsgateart.org/buffaloboy/index.html

or for interview opportunities with Minh Nguyen-Vo, contact:

Nathan Birnbaum or Marshall Astor

Angels Gate Cultural Center

3601 S. Gaffey St.

San Pedro, Calif. 90731

310.519.0936|| www.angelsgateart.org || info@angelsgateart.org