How a real life jailbreak inspired the movie "The accidental staway driver"

When Three detainees broke out from Orange County Prison in January 2016 and escaped the days of days after kidnapping a Vietnamese-American vesselfollowed the director single J. Lee The sensational story Like everyone else in California.

Where were menTwo of them Vietnamese-American, one of the Iranian descendants, all face charges of attempted murder and more?

And what is from long taxi driverA refugee from the Vietnam War, who offered travelers in his old sedan Honda through advertisements in newspapers in Vietnamese?

Lee, who at that time directed mostly advertisements and musical videos, followed the story until a week later, when the men were recaptured, and the driver released.

A few years later, Lee had forgotten especially in those days. Then, research on a potential project sent him back and forth from his house in Los Angeles to Little Saigon in Westminster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dmttypmps

“I would go down and notice life in different areas,” says Lee, whose family left Hong Kong for the United Kingdom, where he was born and grew. “I came across Chez Rose Cafe and I was attracted by all the elder men who played Chinese chess and gathered there. I would just sit there and take a frozen tea and I would watch. “

Eventually, says Lee, one of the men invited him to his table. Years later, these disparate things – a desperate jailbreak and the society of the Old Immigrant cafe – melts with the “accidental escape driver”, Lee’s feature film. Its distribution includes Actor Dustin Nguyen As an escape who approaches the driver, played by the French-Ivetnamese actor, Hiep Tranghia.

The film, which opens in theaters on Friday, February 28, obtained Lee The Regying Award for American dramatic films at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023.

“We started to have these beautiful daily conversations,” he says about the men he met at Chez Rose. “They reminded me so much by my relatives, my elders, this fragmentation of who I am or who I perceive. As life changes around them, they are forgotten by the next generations.

“But they have all these stories in them, that if you do not ask, you do not receive,” says Lee, describing how he grew up close to one of the elderly in the cafe.

Somewhere there, Lee was sent a Article 2017 from GQ magazine who told the story Week Ma Long as Captive of the escapers before one, Bac Duongfrightened for Ma’s safety, which he became protective, decided to run away from escape colleagues Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan tieuIt turns into it and releases Ma.

“On the surface, when the media reported it at that time, it sounds like a former war prisoner is kidnapped by three armed fugitives,” says Lee. “And you lean forward and you think, what is this story?

“But below it is a story so tender and fragile,” he says about the depths revealed in the GQ story of the writer Paul Kix. “Of the loss of the house, in a place or in a person.

“That told me deeply,” Lee continues. “I saw this opportunity to tell a story emanating from the inside, rather than in the external search. To contribute to the complex identity of American Vietnamese stories that were modeled in a certain way. ”

Here, he believed, it was an opportunity to tell a more human and poetic and tender story. A meditation on loneliness and movement into the world.

“A story that focuses on someone who reminded me so much by the person I met two years before playing Chinese chess,” says Lee. “The struggles of how people have the form to become the person they are. And what does the redemption look like?

“What does the focus of a drama of crime look around on four people who feel it is worth love? What is that trip? “

“Serendipity of fiction”

The “accidental getaway driver” is inspired by Jailbreak and the week in which Escapes was on LAM cu Mas Ma. Although Lee, who co-inscribed the scenario with Christopher Chen, observes some details have changed in adapting the fact of fiction, from the heavy facts established in the police reports and in the judicial documents to an occasionally imagined cinematic reality.

Long Ma’s name is kept – it was participating in the project – but the name of the escape has been changed. Bac Duong in real life was renamed Tây Duong and depicted by Nguyen, who, as a young actor, found his fame in the late 1980s playing in Megahit “21 Jump Street.“

The film also combines the shaded realism of the story of the crime with striking passages similar to the dream, which paints the memories of his long life in his life before this moment.

“I think people often forget that where you talk about stories about immigrants or stories about refugees, you are introduced for a certain part of their lives with less than what they had before,” says Lee about the decision to interfere with Visual images of the past mentioned by Ma throughout the film.

“Forget about the beautiful life he would have had before,” he says. “It is not a decision (to run away from the homeland) that was under their control. And the privileges and wealth and symphonies and depth of their life experiences have extinguished until they get here. “

Lee says he did not meet the real life MA until he and Chen finished the scenario, which includes imagined memories like Ma as a boy who gathers banana leaves for his grandmother or, later, sitting on a field with smoke , while he was during the distance flames consume his house.

“The memories and childhood and his past, these are a part of part of my family story and parts of stories I noticed in Little Saigon,” says Lee. “I wanted to think, what is the earliest memory of the last time he felt purely innocent before life came in the way? That came with one of the fever dreams. “

Monday later, when he met Ma for the first time, he told me that, in fact, when he was a boy, his mother sent him to live with his grandmother.

“There was the serendity of the fiction,” says Lee. “It happened purely through evocation.”

Captivating presence

It’s hard to take your eyes off Nguyen as Tây and Hiep Tranghia, for the two men to interact on a journey that takes them from little Saigon Orange County to San Jose and back.

As confidence and friendship grow between them, a type of father-son connection appears, an element taken directly from Ma’s story from his story in the GQ story, which made the critical roles critical for the success of the film.

“Dustin is a pioneer in the American Asian communities in the Pacific Pacific, but also in the Western film and television,” says Lee about the actor who, after fled from Vietnam in 1975, after Saigon’s fall. followed with his family from Garden Grove. “Dustin was one of the first people we got to play something that could be so personal potential.”

After connecting to lunch, Nguyen told Lee that he would play Tây, a character who, like Nguyen, lived in Vietnam as a boy before he was dislocated in time and space in the United States.

“He said, it was the first Hollywood role that this staff would play as a Vietnamez-American character,” says Lee.

“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 in which it was and his presence was captivating.”

A story from within

The car in which Ma and The Escapes Travel is the most used setting for the film, and in the direction of Lee, with close -ups or only his eyes in the rear -view mirror, it is evocative.

But the film also does a great job to capture the goals and feelings of Little Saigon, a community that the director and producers have worked hard to bring in the project, spending a lot of time before the room ever rolls .

“It comes from a reliable and sincerity element that this is a story that wants to be told from the inside,” says Lee about the disclosure he and the producers Andy Scygie, Brendan Boyea and Joseph Hiếu have done the residents and leaders of the little Saigon . “There were a lot of conversations about what we would like to do about the intention, how I would like to fit the place and observations of life.

“As in the case of any enclave, it has its own heartbeat, it has its own conversation,” he says. “So I think that once a few people who trusted they started opening their doors, more did it and you start to feel that it has become a movie that is involved in the community. And that was a beautiful experience. “

Behind the room, the production has also embraced the Vietnamese-American experience, also says Lee, from the translation of the scenario to the crew members to the companies that the distribution and the crew used on and outside the set.

“There is this deeply personal connection in a tangible form or another that I think is the power of cinema,” he says. “You can feel this and from here comes the truth.”

After his debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, “The Blind Etaway Driver” was displayed at the Viet Film Festival and sold two projections at Frida Cinematography in Santa Ana. It will open in the AMC theaters in Orange County and there may be another projection at Frida with a Q-and-a-this, says Lee.

As for Ma, whose story is the heart of the film, he saw the movie, and Lee thinks he likes it.

“In fact, I’m not sure what was his reaction,” says Lee. “He is from that generation, like my relatives, who probably feel very much inside and will simply not say so much.”

Originally published: February 25, 2025 at 11:40 am PST