There’s another side to every war. Satire, War & Hollywood - Co-creator DON McKELLAR on The Sympathizer

FILM & TV - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding?

Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner.

He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook.

DON McKELLAR

I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had.

Right from the beginning, in talking with Chan-wook, we wanted this sort of multiplicity of narrative voices and devices. In a way, it's about how the story, in this case of the Vietnam War, has been told, what the expected story is, at least, for American viewers, which they may mainly know through the movies and through visual representations. And it's how our lead character, The Captain, who is writing the story, who has divided loyalties. How can we capture the contradictions within that story? And we tried to make that complexity part of the actual fabric of the show.

Doubling is kind of a big theme, and maybe it always is in spy literature, but maybe I think that that's why Viet chose to write a spy novel in a way and play with those sort of tropes because it's central and I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. I mean, that's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying to Americans, at least put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Casting of The Captain was essential to communicate this complexity. He has to have this personal charm and all this emotional depth. How do you decide to cast Hoa Xuande?

McKELLAR

Casting of The Captain (Hoa Xuande) was very hard because it's really all from his perspective. The whole thing is on his shoulders. He's in almost every scene. And when he isn't, it's from his point of view, so he's a spy, you know, so he's got to be able to have that poker face. He's got to be able...it can't be on the surface. He's got to have a certain amount of control. So we had to have someone who was very emotional, but at the same time had a lot of control, who was very agile in a way, like the narrative of the book is, who is able to quickly change modes and at the same time sort of evoke the protagonists of American 70s action films, except from a Vietnamese side. We always thought we wanted to find a Vietnamese Steve McQueen, that was sort of our sort of goal. So we auditioned all around the world. We auditioned everywhere. We auditioned Hoa many, many times. We put him through hell. We kept him waiting for months and months. He seemed to have that movie star quality but also intelligence and humor. He's a very funny guy, and that helped too.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's a subtle humor that plays in the eyes and all these little gestures. And the key comic figure are the four characters Robert Downey Jr. plays, which are a kind of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

McKELLAR

That was Park Chan-wook's idea early on. In the book, there are these sorts of male-white figures of the American establishment. They're all differentiated in the book, but he had the idea. What if we have one actor playing all the parts kind of like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and immediately we thought that's a great idea. We brought it to Viet. We were afraid of what he would think, but he said the same thing. That's fantastic. It really evokes what I was trying to do with the book. And, of course, it's kind of a reverse racist joke about, oh, all white men look the same. But we also thought it had bigger thematic consequences. It's a way of saying, without articulating it or getting didactic, that all these pillars of the American establishment are connected and feed themselves, and there's something similar about them all.

Robert Downey Jr.'s characters represent academia, intelligence in the military, entertainment, and politics. Even if they have opposing political ideas on the surface, there's something at the root that is working together. It's a kind of deep-state metaphor and - I don't want to give away the ending of the series - but it comes together in a way that feeds into The Captain's character, too.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about future, arts, and education, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

McKELLAR

What saved me as a young person, I think, was how I connected with the arts. And I was exposed to this sort of world of possibility. What I hope for children is sort of courageous curiosity. I feel that they have to pursue their creative impulses, and I hope that art can inspire them to do that. That's what I always do. When I'm creating work, I always want it to be inspiring in a way. Not inspiring like a Hallmark movie, you know, like not happy, not necessarily, but provocative in a way that inspires thought, inspires creativity. So when I see young people, what I always try and encourage in them is sort of courage. Courage at facing the world, not being afraid of the world, and being. And I think that art can provide that, can bolster that courage.

Photos courtesy of HBO
Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar
Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO
Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Katie Foster and Donna Sanders. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
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