EXTRA! EXTRA! I WENT TO VIETNAM

A photo taken from Alison Vasan's blog photo journal.

I never thought that I would dress up like a soldier in Vietnam, but that's what I did. Last Thursday started Singapore's Labor Day holiday. My flatmate and I searched for the cheapest possible place to visit. We ended up heading to the country of Vietnam.

Everything about the trip was an adventure. We stayed at the sixth floor of an old hotel with a tiny-but-towering spiral staircase, met interesting backpackers from Australia and Europe, and bought small flasks of snake wine and other exotic souvenirs to take back to the states. Even simple things like crossing the street became an adventure. You don't look both ways before you cross the street in Vietnam. You rely on miraculous, divine intervention to part the never ending stream of Red Yamahas as you step with blind faith onto the pavement.

Yet by far the most incredible thing that happened to us was a product of pure serendipity. On Thursday, our first day in Saigon, we met a man named Leonardo Lanfranconi, a.k.a. "Dragons Lee."

The business card of "Lion Dragons Lee."

He pulled up to us on the curb and asked, "Hey, you want to be in a movie?" in a high pitched Italian accent.

My flatmate and I anxiously said yes, and we agreed to meet the guy the next day at a little cafe down the street called 171; in Vietnam many shops are just named with numbers.

When we arrived at the cafe, we met the four other guys who were going to be extras and we found out that we would have non-speaking parts as America soldiers.Those were all of the details that we were given. A couple of the guys in the group seemed mildly disappointed that it wasn't going to be some raunchy movie, but it was the world's biggest relief for me. We were also told that we would be back in Saigon by evening.

We rode a bus and a van for about an hour and a half and on a ferry through the Mekong Delta until we finally stopped at a fairly nice hotel. At this point, I was convinced that our buddy "Dragons" had roped us into some kind of a scam. He told us that we would have to stay the night and that production was behind schedule.

I went up to my room a little frustrated and tucked away a few of the things that I brought with me. It wasn't until about an hour and a half later that we got on another van and met the movie director, Chris McIntyre, that my frustration was finally lifted.

He told us that the movie's title was 21 & Wake Up, a movie that draws parallels between the consequences of pulling out of Vietnam and withdrawing from Iraq. Our job as extras was to check the paperwork of the villagers. He told us that during the Vietnam war there was a program to register everyone in the nation; and if the people did not have the correct paperwork it was assumed that they were members of the Viet Cong.

Here I am in my costume.

By the time we actually got our costumes and places, it was already after dark in the little village of Ben Tre. I was soldier number six, and we had to do our short scene about ten times until the director finally got the right take out of the principal actors. A Vietnamese guy who was fighting for the Americans and I had to pull two old men and a woman holding a baby out of their little hut. We yelled at them and scolded them for not having their paperwork. During several takes the baby cried, but by the end of it the baby was tired and sleeping. Later on I got to be in a short scene where we shut the door of a truck full of prisoners.

The three starring actors: Alison Vasan, Amy Acker, and Todd Cahoon.

I was impressed at how kind and humble all of the professional Hollywood actors and studio personnel were to us lowly extras. We had conversations with the three main actors about their other projects and we all traded e-mail and blog addresses. The Vietnamese casting director was a nice gal named Kim Nguyen and the second assistant director was a BYU and USC graduate. He put me to shame as he fluently spoke three languages and impressed me with some of his stories of moving around as the son of a retired CIA agent.

During the filming process, I also became of aware of the intensely quick and knee-jerk decisions that go into Hollywood movie production. During college my professors loved to pick apart the subtle prejudices and deconstruct the hidden societal messages that manifest themselves in films. After the first take the second assistant director told me that I wasn't being aggressive enough, I obliged and changed my style a little. However, doing this was totally stupid and created drama and victimization when it wouldn't otherwise be necessary. In the film, I was interrogating two unarmed old men, a woman, and a baby. None of them spoke English. Moreover, since the prop department ran out of plastic M-16s, I wasn't even armed. If the old men had gotten angry and decided to fight or pull out a gun, there wouldn't have been much I could do. I guess I don't know much about being in the military, but I think if I had really been in that circumstance, I would have tried to stick with my armed buddies or taken my chances being as kind and congenial as possible. But I suppose you're living in a fantasy if you think movies are supposed to be realistic.

However, I am grateful for the experience. To me it seems like the ultimate tourist activity. When I arrived in Vietnam, I thought that I would be spending Friday looking at historical places surrounding Vietnam War events, not reenacting them. I am glad to have been given a rare glimpse into the film making process. If given the chance, I will definitely work as an extra again.