When three inmates broke out of the Orange County Jail in January 2016 and evaded capture for days after kidnapping a Vietnamese-American cabbie, director Sing J. Lee followed the sensational story like everyone else in California.
Where were the men, two of them Vietnamese-American, one of Iranian descent, all of them facing charges of attempted murder and more?
And what of taxi driver Long Ma, a refugee from the Vietnam War who offered rides in his old Honda sedan through ads in Vietnamese-language newspapers?
Lee, who at the time had mostly directed commercials and music videos, followed the story until a week or so later when the men were recaptured, and the driver freed.
Several years later, Lee had mostly forgotten those days. Then research on a potential project sent him driving back and forth from his Los Angeles home to Little Saigon in Westminster.
“I would drive down and observe life in the different areas,” says Lee, whose family left Hong Kong for the United Kingdom, where he was born and raised. “I came across Chez Rose Cafe and I was drawn by all the elderly men that were playing Chinese chess and congregating there. I would just sit there and get an iced tea and watch them.”
Eventually, Lee says, one of the men invited him to his table. Years later, these disparate things – a desperate jailbreak and the cafe society of old immigrants – would meld into “The Accidental Getaway Driver,” Lee’s feature film debut. Its cast includes actor Dustin Nguyen as the escapee who grows close to the driver, played by French-Vietnamese actor Hiep Tran Nghia.
The film, which opens in theaters on Friday, Feb. 28, earned Lee the directing award for U.S. dramatic films at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
“We started having these beautiful daily conversations,” he says of the men he met at Chez Rose. “They reminded me so much of my relatives, my elders, this fragmentation of who they are or who they perceive to be. As life changes around them, they’re forgotten even by the next generations.
“But they have all these stories within them, that if you don’t ask, you don’t get,” Lee says, describing how he grew particularly close with one of the old men at the cafe.
Somewhere in there, Lee was sent a 2017 article from GQ magazine that told the story of Long Ma’s week as a captive of the escapees before one, Bac Duong, fearful for the safety of Ma, of whom he’d grown protective, decided to flee fellow escapees Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu, turn himself in, and set Ma free.
“On the surface, when the media reported it at the time, it sounded like an elderly former prisoner of war is abducted by three armed fugitives,” Lee says. “And you lean forward, and you think, what is this story?
“But beneath it is such a tender and fragile story of belonging,” he says of the depths revealed in writer Paul Kix’s GQ story. “Of a loss of home, in a place or in a person.
“That deeply spoke to me,” Lee continues. “I saw this opportunity to tell a story emanating from within rather than the outside looking in. To contribute to the complex identity of the Vietnamese American stories that in America have been shaped a certain way.”
Here, he thought, was an opportunity to tell a more human and poetic and tender story. A meditation on loneliness and displacement in the world.
“A story that focuses on somebody that reminded me so much of the person that I met two years before playing Chinese chess,” Lee says. “The struggles of how people are shaped to become the person that they are. And what does redemption look like?
“What does centering a crime drama around four people who feel like they’re deserving of love look like? What’s that journey?”
‘The serendipity of fiction’
“The Accidental Getaway Driver” is inspired by the jailbreak and the week the escapees were on the lam with Long Ma. Although Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher Chen, notes some details changed in the adaptation of fact to fiction, from the hard facts laid down in police reports and court documents to an occasionally imagined cinematic reality.
Long Ma’s name is retained – he was a participant in the project – but the names of the escapees were changed. The real-life Bac Duong was renamed Tây Duong and portrayed by Nguyen, who, as a young actor, found fame in the late ’80s starring in the megahit “21 Jump Street.”
The film also blends the shadowy realism of the crime story with striking dream-like passages that paint the memories within Long Ma of his life before this moment.
“I think people often forget that where you talk about immigrant stories or refugee stories, a lot of time you’re introduced to somebody in a certain part of their life with less than what they had before,” Lee says of the decision to intersperse visual images of Ma’s remembered past throughout the film.
“You forget the beautiful life they may have had before,” he says. “It’s not a decision [to flee their homeland] that was in their control. And the privileges and the richness and the symphonies and depth of their life experiences have faded by the time they get here.”
Lee says he did not meet the real-life Ma until after he and Chen finished the screenplay, which includes such imagined memories as Ma as a boy gathering banana leaves for his grandmother or, later, standing in a smoke-blanketed field while in the distance flames consume his home.
“The memories and his childhood and past, these are concoctions of part of my family story and parts of stories I’ve observed in Little Saigon,” Lee says. “I wanted to think about, what’s his earliest memory of the last time he felt purely innocent before life got in the way? That came up with one of the fever dreams.”
Months later, when he met Ma for the first time, Ma told him that, in fact, when he was a boy his mother had sent him to live with his grandmother.
“There was the serendipity of fiction,” Lee says. “It happened purely by evocation.”
Captivating presence
It’s hard to take your eyes off Nguyen as Tây and Hiep Tran Nghia as Ma as the two men interact on a journey that takes them from Little Saigon in Orange County to San Jose and back.
As trust and friendship grow between them, a father-son kind of bond emerges, an element taken directly from Ma’s telling of his story in the GQ story, which made casting the roles critical to the success of the film.
“Dustin is a pioneer in Asian American Pacific Islander communities, but also in Western film and television,” Lee says of the actor who, after fleeing Vietnam in 1975 after the fall of Saigon, eventually settled with his family in Garden Grove. “Dustin was one of the first people that we reached out to about playing something that could be potentially so personal.”
After connecting over lunch, Nguyen told Lee that he would play Tây, a character who like Nguyen, had lived in Vietnam as a boy before finding himself dislocated in time and space in the United States.
“He was saying, it was the first Hollywood role he’d be playing this personal as a Vietnamese-American character,” Lee says.
“Someone like Hiep, it was a difficult search to find someone of that age,” he continues. “We had to look beyond America, and then we saw a short film that he was in and his presence was captivating.”
A story from the inside
The car in which Ma and the escapees travel is the single most-used setting for the film, and in Lee’s direction, with tight closeups of faces or just Ma’s eyes in the rearview mirror, it’s evocatively shot.
But the movie also does a terrific job of capturing the sights and feelings of Little Saigon, a community that the director and producers worked hard to bring into the project by spending much time there before the camera ever rolled.
“It comes from an element of trust and sincerity that this is a story that wants to be told from the inside,” Lee says of the outreach he and producers Andy Sorgie, Brendan Boyea and Joseph Hiếu made to Little Saigon residents and leaders. “There were a lot of conversations about what we would like to do, and the intention, how I’d like to frame the place and the observations of life.
“As with any enclave, it has its own heartbeat, it has its own conversation,” he says. “So I think once a few people who were trusted started to open their doors, more did, and you start to feel that this became a film that is involved with the community. And that was a beautiful experience.”
Behind the camera, the production also embraced the Vietnamese-American experience, too, Lee says, from the translation of the script to the members of the crew to the businesses the cast and crew used on and off the set.
“There is this deeply personal connection in one tangible form or another that I believe is the power of cinema, too,” he says. “You can feel that, and that’s where the truth comes from.”
After its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, “The Accidental Getaway Driver” was shown at the Viet Film Festival and sold out two screenings at the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana. It will open in AMC theaters in Orange County and there might be another screening at the Frida with a Q-and-A after it, Lee says.
As for Ma, whose story is the heart of the film, he has seen the movie, and Lee thinks he liked it.
“I’m actually not sure what his reaction was,” Lee says. “He’s of that generation, just like my relatives, who, they probably feel a lot inside, and they just won’t say so much.”