Last nite I was feeling a bit nostalgic and decided to pull some photos from my time spent in Thailand whilst making Journey From the Fall. Some of my previous posts about the film felt a little too “promo”-y and stiff, so I’ve decided to change it up a bit here. I hope to continue posting about the film in the coming weeks until ALL OF YOU HAVE SEEN IT. Seriously, it’s that important to me.

Now, all of these photos were pulled from a digital video camera, so they aren’t of the best quality and wouldn’t really qualify as “snapshots ” of my time there. I also took a Holga with a Polaroid-back with me, and I may post some of those another time. Brace yourself, none of these photos have ever seen the light of day.

Here’s a pic of Nguyen Thai Nguyen (American name equivalent would be “Smith John Smith”) on set the day we shot the fall of Saigon scene. Nguyen plays the older verson Lai in the film. On most days I would have been stuck in my hotel room either sleeping or digitizing footage, but since I this would an eventful day on set, I decided to double my work the next day and shoot some footage. Nguyen wasn’t in any of the shots, so he was standing around in the crowd watching the organized chaos. I like this pic because a girl on set decided to touch his nose for no apparent reason.

Nguyen was pretty quiet when he first came to the hotel and since his scenes didn’t shoot till later, we got to hang out during the day. Most of what we did was drink soy milk and talk about his life in San Jose and school. Sometimes I would show him some of the footage and set pictures (I was also in charge of downloading set photos) and that was really fun too. He later became quite the talker and ladies’ man on set.

Here are two photos taken in Van Number One, which kinda became my regular transportation van. Driver Number 1, I never learned his Thai name, was one of the nicest guys I ever met in my life. Rumor had it that he was the best transportation guy in Thailand and was the go-to guy for celebrities, politicians etc. On our last day in Bangkok he was telling our transport manager that he was very busy earlier that day drving around a big time sports guy. We asked who and he handed us V.I.P. Pass that read “Roger Federer.”

When we first started riding with him I didn’t pay much attention to these drawings but after noticing that he kept his van impeccably clean all of the time (compared to other drivers) we asked him why he allowed someone to vandalize his ride. He couldn’t answer in English, so he pulled out a cd from his glove compartment and handed it to us. It was a Linkin Park cd. Chester or one of the other guys must have tagged it.

Driver Number 1 had a running joke with me in that everytime he saw me he’d just come up to me and start rubbing my shoulders. You see, a week or two into the telecine I had an unexpected delay with a session, and instead of staying at the post facility and trying to watch Thai TV, I asked one of the drivers to take me to a LEGITIMATE massage parlor. He did the exact opposite, but I ended up getting a LEGITIMATE massage anyway at the expense of becoming the butt of joke amongst the drivers. I’ll spare you the details of the overly excited parlor manager, the fishbowl of women, etc.

This photo was taken at our hotel in Chantaburi, a country-side province that luckily had a Walmart-like supermarket. As the 2nd Asst. editor, I worked mostly nights and would often venture downstairs with my producer’s iPod and and a soy milk to get some fresh(er) air. The iPod was on loan to our room, as the producer never had time to listen to it anyway, and luckily it was more or less a clone of the director’s iPod. The iPod had a lot a lot of Britpop on it, and since I didn’t have a computer or iPod, it was quite the blessing.

One night while I was sleepwalking, I decided to let the desk girl listen to a few songs, as she was always very nice to me and she had an uncanny resemblance to a college friend of mine. I can’t remember if this photo was taken while she was listening to “Chickfactor” by Belle and Sebastian or “In My Place” by Coldplay, two songs which she liked.

Me, after a hard day’s work. I must have been complaining or falling asleep while the person operating the camera was interviewing me about the glamour of being a 2nd Asst. Editor. The shirt I’m wearing is an Akira shirt that I bought the weekend before at a stall that sold a lot of cool Anime t-shirts. In retrospect, the shirt was a bit small for me. Funny thing was my friends in college used to call me Tetsuo just because I was Asian and it was their only Asian reference aside from Bruce Lee. Fuckers

That’s it for now, maybe some more tomorrow . . . depending on how I feel.