For many American viewers, I think the Vietnam War films they might already be familiar with are fiction films made in the fifteen years after the fall of Saigon. How would you characterize the perspective of those films? How do they remember the war?
Because America’s position in the conflict changed dramatically, you can see that play out in changes in filmmaking over time. You get a film like The Green Berets in 1968 with John Wayne, and it’s a classic American rah-rah kind of storytelling. And then there’s no American films about the war until 1974 with Hearts and Minds, and then post-’75 you have Coming Home and The Deer Hunter—but what a drastic shift, right? America’s relationship to war fundamentally changed during the Vietnam War. Films started to come out that reflected the trauma of everything that happened in years prior. Much of the conflict of those films was internal. The characters dealt with inner turmoil and pain. They were about characters in conflict with themselves because they were reflecting what was going on in America at the time. Whereas, in contrast, most of the conflict in Vietnamese cinema at the time was external. There was no question about why they were there, what they were fighting for and against. It was about fighting the opposing colonial forces, the Americans or the French.
By the eighties in the U.S., a lot of information started to surface through books and investigative journalism. Casualties of War (1989) was about a well-known case of one of these horrific rape crimes that happened during the war. These events were happening in a much higher number than what was revealed during that period. Reports would come out and documents would be unclassified, and you would get more films that would start to question America's involvement. So it became less about just the internal trauma, and started to become about questioning the system, questioning the political and military structure. Then you get conflicts between the soldiers like in Platoon and Full Metal Jacket questioning that entire boot camp: what it means to create a killing soldier.
The Vietnam War is often remembered in the U.S. as something that played out on television. Moving images of the war saturated the home front in a way that wasn’t true of any previous one. How do you think that affected filmmaking about the war?
The changes in camera technology and unprecedented access to the battlefields made coverage of the war more immediate and more intimate. For the first time, Americans were seeing graphic violence up close over dinner. That exposure led to American war films that had the same sense of urgency, intimacy, and grittiness. And that close proximity changed the tone of the storytelling. The war was no longer grand or mythic. It was immediate, chaotic, raw, and destructive.