June 11, 2008 Rebel Without A Pause (part two) : Showdown In Saigon

June 11, 2008

‘REBEL’ WITHOUT A PAUSE (part two) : Showdown in Saigon.

On the second day of my Saigon sojourn, producer Jimmy Pham picks me up at the Sheraton. We drive to the studio where I’m to supervise Rebel leading lady Veronica Ngo’s recording session. As I mentioned in my previous blog, as the film’s three leads speak English, we’ve asked them to record their own voices for the dub track.

The film’s star, Johnny Nguyen, is also on hand to lend an eye, and more importantly an ear. English is Veronica’s third language, after Vietnamese and (get this!) Norwegian, but she’s determined to rise to the challenge of performing in it.

Besides being an accomplished actress, Ngo Than Van or NTV (as she’s known) is a major hip-hop idol in Vietnam. (She seems keen to keep the two careers separate, though, and steadfastly refused to discuss her music when we interviewed her about The Rebel.)

We were talking about her English name, and I quipped that, if she was Veronica, Johnny could be Archie and I’d be Jughead (and, realized to my great sadness, that I was the only one in the room old enough to remember Archie Comics…).

When Johnny first wrote the story for The Rebel, he had no way of knowing if he could fine a Vietnamese actress capable of pulling off the kind of martial arts and stunt sequences he had devised for her character. As a former Miss Vietnam, Veronica was already an established celebrity nationwide, but proved herself more than willing to submit to a martial arts boot camp to prepare for the role of ‘Thuy’.

I remember the first time I watched the film, I figured that Johnny and Dustin would be handling the action, and that the girl in the purple ao dai dress at the start of the movie would just be the damsel in distress. Not so…

The Rebel gives Veronica a real star-making scene in the sequence where her character escapes from a French colonial jail. Her proposed stunt double for the film had actually quit because she found the work too physically demanding, so Ngo was on her own. Despite her relative inexperience as an actress, Veronica manages to balance the ferocity and femininity of the character throughout.

As if the part wasn’t already demanding enough, Veronica broke her foot in a freak on-set accident. After surviving fights, flips and high falls, the camera fell on her while she was resting! Rather than delay production, she insisted on working with the crew to devise a number of methods of disguising her injury while she continued shooting. (You can see some of these in an entertaining segment of the film’s ‘making of’ docu.) By the time they came to shoot the film’s final fight sequence, Ngo was sufficiently recovered to perform the necessary techniques, but often in great pain. (It’s to her credit that, rather than reveling in her own tenacity, Veronica was really reluctant for us to reveal her injury to the world!

As we start our studio session with Veronica, I’m very impressed with her work ethic as we dub her role for the film. She has a very definite point of view about every line in every scene. Beyond the simple task of pronouncing the dialogue, she was determined to nail the performance. When we change some lines to clarify the translation, Veronica engages in some feisty exchanges with Johnny and me over the implication of specific words in the revised scrīpt. I soon realize that you have to bring your best game when you work with this girl. To her credit, she never ‘pulls a diva’, and will do more and different takes when I insist on them.

For one scene, Veronica has to deliver a long monologue describing the tragic history of her family. When you hear that section of the track, I hope you’ll find it as touching as I did when I listened to her record it.

In between recording chunks of dialogue, Veronica shows me images from her latest MTV. It had a gothic cyberpunk feel, and her own look is so hot, there’s steam coming out of her iPhone.

After we wrap Veronica’s dialogue, I suggest that we re-record some of Johnny’s lines (recorded before I arrived in Vietnam). It’s always a challenge to make performances ‘match’ when you’re recording a dub track, as the performers tend to record their lines in isolation. As Johnny had been first to record, he didn’t have an English version of Veronica’s lines to react to.

Afterwards, Johnny drives us to dinner, and I badger Veronica into playing me some of her music on the car’s sound system. The beat-backed Viet hip hop (vip hop?) is as in my face as I would expect, knowing Van as I now do.