Director Tran Anh Hung will make a film about cuisine as a gift to Vietnam?

The film The Pot-Au-Feu by director Tran Anh Hung is set in the late 1880s in France, interwoven with a love story with cuisine . Returning to Vietnam after receiving the Best Director award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, the director of the film The Scent of Green Papaya shared with host Nguyen Khac Ngan Vi and listeners of the podcast program Story VI .

Mom's kitchen is an inspiration…

Talking about his films, director Tran Anh Hung does not hesitate to share the inspiration that brought him to the top of his career, which is his mother's kitchen. According to the director of the film Vertical Summer , his mother's kitchen is a place where there are women, girls of his age, so even though his mother scolded and chased him out, it is still a very interesting and attractive place for him. "That kitchen is not like the kitchens I saw in Europe, it has light from the embers and familiar scents, I can feel comfortable and squat on the ground. That is a very nice place. In that kitchen, Hung has enjoyed the ability of aesthetics, in his mother's kitchen there are the colors of vegetables, shrimp, raw fish, on the other side of the garden is a guava tree, the aroma of ripe guava permeates the kitchen... And so his mother's kitchen created a very strong emotion for him," he recalls.

Mom's Kitchen is the inspiration for director Tran Anh Hung to reach higher levels in his career.

Also at Story VI , director Tran Anh Hung revealed that he knows how to cook. At the same time, the male director also pointed out the difference between the Scent of Green Papaya, Vertical Summer and his latest film . Specifically, in the two previous films, the kitchen corner featured many images of women, while The Pot-Au-Feu featured men. "In France, most men are chefs and it has unintentionally become a tradition without even realizing it," he said.

"Europeans think Tran Anh Hung is a woman"

Talking about The Scent of Green Papaya , the film that was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, the male director said that this is the film he wanted to tell about the fate of women of many ages during that period. Besides, he also said that the male characters in the film were all judged as bad. "Hung could have also made a film at the end of the 19th century with a female character fighting against all the negative, oppressive things, but there were too many people who did and they found it interesting. Therefore, I chose to show those characters and the reality of life at that time, they lived and also had joy, also had sadness", he shared.

When commented on in the movie Cyclo , Tony Leung appeared with very few lines but there was a development of the male actor in terms of character; while the women in Tran Anh Hung's movie had a level of stagnation from the beginning to the end of the movie, it seemed like they did not change at all, he said: "Maybe my understanding of women is only like that, so I only put it into the movie to that extent. When making the movie Cyclo , this is a movie I made for men, not about women. At the Cannes Film Festival, there was a very funny story, Europeans did not know Tran Anh Hung was a man, they thought he was a woman . When they first met the journalists, they were surprised that Hung was a man, not a woman. People watching that movie also thought it was made by a woman".

Director Tran Anh Hung is misunderstood about his gender

Talking about borrowing scripts from literature, the male director of the film Cyclo affirmed that this does not eliminate his authorship because literary materials are different from cinematic materials. "I borrow the plot, borrow the emotions that I get from that novel and transfer it to another material, which is something that cinema does not have. It can come from anywhere, it is just a subject that when making a film, we have to pay attention to the specialized materials of cinema," he said.

Before the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, the film Cyclo was considered the most successful in terms of reputation when he wrote the script himself. The male director said: "Before making the film Cyclo , I returned to Vietnam to choose the scene for The Scent of Green Papaya and when I saw Vietnam like that, I was moved and it naturally gave me the energy to write something that could bring to the audience the emotions I received from Vietnam", he said. In addition, he also went to see paintings, listened to music, read books and there were books containing great challenges that urged the director to make a film. For him, this is something an artist should do.

Director Tran Anh Hung did not reveal his upcoming project because he was afraid that it would not work out. However, as soon as the conversation began, he revealed that he would soon make a film for Vietnam with a culinary theme after The Pot-Au-Feu . "For Hung, just a thinly sliced ​​piece of pork belly and dipped in delicious fish sauce, that is the most wonderful taste, it lies deep in the Vietnamese people," he confided.

Source link: https://thanhnien.vn/dao-dien-tran-anh-hung-se-lam-mot-bo-phim-ve-am-thuc-tang-viet-nam-185230805102210865.htm