In His Second Feature, Viet Max Leans on Hip-Hop Roots, Unconventional Style

Viet Max is a man of many talents. At 37, the Hanoi native has managed to parlay his eclectic skill set into a breakdancing career, a street fashion brand and, more recently, work as a feature film director.

These ventures all converge on a sunny afternoon earlier this week, as Viet Max sits outside his clothing shop, PUSW, hours before the premier of his latest movie, Sut, explaining how his hip-hop days wound up playing a crucial role in the casting of the fast-paced film, which dives into the world of Vietnamese street soccer.

Video via BHD.

“It’s hard to me for when I’m casting,” Viet Max tells Saigoneer. “We need a man that looks like a player, and he needs to [be] good at acting and good at football. That’s the reason I cannot pick some popular actor because now a lot of movies, they try to get a hot girl or hot boy to sell the tickets. I don’t have anyone like that…if you pick the wrong person, [the film] will go down.”

As a result, Sut's main character, Cuong (Ha Hien), and his nemesis, Hoang Phi (Tung Min), are both portrayed by actors with b-boy roots. For Viet Max, stepping outside the world of Vietnamese stardom yielded several advantages: not only were his lead actors convincingly fit and a little rough around the edges but neither had had professional training, leaving more room for a genuine performance, the director says.

To fans of Viet Max, these unconventional casting choices come as no surprise. Since the release of last year’s Yeu, his first feature film, which depicts a lesbian relationship – not the kind of story you normally see in Vietnamese films – the director has earned a reputation for taking on the unexpected.

That said, his sophomore effort, Sut, is a world apart from Yêu in both content and style. The director likens his first feature to something soft, “like a cat,” he says, while Sut is a much grittier film. Still, in a growing industry where few production houses are willing to take on an unconventional project, Viet Max’s second feature was a gamble for Early Risers, which produced the movie.

“Nobody [wanted to] do it, because they felt like OK, if you want to do a comedy, a thriller, selling a ticket is easy,” he explains. “But I don’t want to do it so that’s the reason I said to my producer if I cannot do [Sut] I don’t want to do the next movie.”

Eventually, the film company came around to the idea, and within a year, Viet Max managed to take his second feature from idea to a fully realized film on a shoestring budget.

“[Sut] talks about young people who want to keep their passion,” he says. “That’s the reason all of my movies kind of try to make something new, something different. Most of the movies in Vietnam right now talk about drama or comedy or thriller so a sport movie is very hard. It’s a hard subject to do.”

This weekend, as Sut opens in theaters across the country, the filmmaker is hoping to once again “add more color” to the Vietnamese film industry. Viet Max’s path to directing may have been unorthodox – the b-boy-turned-filmmaker is a self-taught director who never attended film school – but his take on movies might be just what the local film industry needs.

“It’s the same subject so [there’s] nothing new, nothing special,” he says. “[Film companies are] afraid to lose money, they’re afraid to make something new. That’s the reason I want to change that because OK, maybe my movie is not good, I’m not sure about that – [whether] the movie is good or not is about the audience – but I’m sure that when I make something different, some people will think about that and they will try to make something more different.”