The Financial Times | Viet Thanh Nguyen on adapting ‘The Sympathizer’ for TV

The novelist discusses working with South Korean director Park Chan-wook to reimagine his book ‘The Sympathizer’ as an HBO series for The Financial Times

The Sympathizer, directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Robert Downey Jr and Sandra Oh, is one of the top-watched show on HBO right now. But before it was a television series, it was a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Both the book and the series tell the story of the Captain, a communist mole in South Vietnam who comes to the US as a refugee as the Vietnam war is ending. On today’s episode, Lilah talks to Viet about the themes of The Sympathizer, and what it was like to help reimagine his book for a TV series.

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Viet Thanh Nguyen on adapting ‘The Sympathizer’ for TV’

Lilah Raptopoulos: This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

When the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel The Sympathizer, was published in 2015, it was an explosive hit. The novel was a quick bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which is rare for a debut novel. It was a book of the year almost everywhere, and Viet went from a little-known professor at the University of Southern California to a public figure. That meant that Viet’s criticism of American culture became really public, too. The Sympathizer is a spy story and an immigrant story. It follows its main character from Vietnam to the US at the end of the Vietnam war, and like Viet, his protagonist is very wary of how the war is misunderstood in America. This spring, The Sympathizer has gotten an even bigger audience because it was recently released as an HBO mini-series directed by the Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. And all of these comes just a few months after Viet published his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, which is about his own experience growing up in America as a refugee. Viet is with us today speaking from his home in Pasadena, California. Viet, hi. I’m so happy to have you on the show.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Hi, Lilah. Great to be back here with you.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Great to have you. I will start by telling listeners that you and I have met before. We met a few months ago at a restaurant near your home because I was writing a feature about you for Lunch with the FT, one of the FT’s famous weekly traditions. It’s nice to see you again. I think when it came out, you were offended that I wrote that you were wearing a dad sweater.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Yes, that was pretty offensive, actually. And, the other footnote to this is I saw my friend in London and he showed me his hard copy of the interview with Financial Times, and he said, wow, you chose a really cheap restaurant to have lunch in. Apparently, I could have splurged and I had no idea.

Lilah Raptopoulos: This is true. You could have ordered the best wine on the menu. We talked that day mostly about your memoir, which balanced telling your story with kind of critiquing and making fun of the typical American immigrant memoir. I’m curious, though, how you’ve been since The Sympathizer has come out. It was released in April in the US. That will be released later this month in the UK. Right now it’s one of the most-watched shows on HBO. How’s it been?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: It’s been unreal, obviously. I never, ever would have imagined that one of my books would be adapted into a television series, much less one that costs as much as this one, with some of the talent that is involved with it, from the director Park Chan-wook to stars like Robert Downey Jr and Sandra Oh, but also Vietnamese stars that are famous among Vietnamese people like Kieu Chinh and Ky Duyen. These people are legendary in the Vietnamese community. So, it has been an amazing experience. And, I’m just trying to enjoy the ride at this moment.

Lilah Raptopoulos: I can imagine. You’re doing a lot of press for the show, and it’s clear that you were at least somewhat involved in the making of the show. How involved were you and over how long?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I’m an executive producer, which can be many different things, but in my case, what it meant was that I was very involved in getting the show made in the first place, because we started having conversations about adapting this into a TV series in 2016. So that’s, this has been eight years of work just to get the thing made, but really about five years or so, many meetings and conversations and lining up the right collaborators before we could assemble the full package that allowed HBO to find and greenlight this project.

Lilah Raptopoulos: And then once it was greenlit and funded, were you involved with the writers or with the showrunners?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I was involved with Don McKellar, the head writer, in breaking down the novel into the seven-episode format that we have. So I was trying to figure out, you know, what’s a narrative arc, what kind of elements will be shifted and rearranged? And, you know, Don did a great job of assembling a writer’s room that was actually very diverse. That was really important as well. And it’s not just the diversity in front of the camera that matters, but the diversity behind the camera as well.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Cool. You were also in the TV show. Very well.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Wow! You saw. Yes, I was, I had . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos: I know that guy.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Yeah, I had a cameo for, I think, half a second, maybe a whole second. But I assume that I was gonna get a cameo, and I said I want to be blown up. But the director Park Chan-wook, in his wisdom, thought I would be better suited as a photographer in a restaurant scene. And so in that . . . That I think makes sense. I’m the one behind the camera framing the shot. And so he’s being very generous in that regard in terms of helping to suggest that my vision and my framing still matters.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Yeah. I am going to try to sort of set up the rest of our conversation, to give a quick overview of the plot of The Sympathizer for listeners who haven’t read it or watched the series yet, please correct me or add as you see fit. OK, so the novel starts in South Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam war. It is narrated by a man named the Captain, who is an assistant to a top South Vietnamese general. And you quickly learn that he’s a spy. He’s a sympathiser for the communist North Vietnam who just won the war. So the war ends, and then he travels with the South Vietnamese general to the US, becomes a refugee in America, and then continues to be a double agent there. For part of the story, he’s working for the CIA. For part, he’s helping to make a movie about the Vietnam war by an American director. What else would you add?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I would add that, you know, it’s certainly a spy story. That was the hook on which the entire novel and the TV series has been built. And the reason why I chose a spy story is because it’s obviously gonna be a lot of thrills and action and so on. But good spy stories, I think, also include politics and history. And so you get a lot of that going on in both the novel and the TV series. And then finally I added my own twists in there. There’s a refugee narrative, as you mentioned, but then there’s also a lot of satire. It’s actually, I think, fairly funny now.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Very funny.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: OK, good. Very funny. Those are your words. Because even though some of the history is obviously very, very troubling in terms of war and its outcome and all the terrible things you would expect, there is a whole tradition of writing about war that captures the absurdities and hypocrisies that inevitably happen during a war. And so there’s a lot of dark comedy going on in both the book and the adaptation. Lilah Raptopoulos Yeah. We should also say maybe that this protagonist is kind of a man of two faces, too. You say that about him. He’s half-French. He studied in the US, he sort of has a perfect English accent and a perfect Vietnamese accent. So he’s kind of between these worlds. So in some ways it lets him play and point out some of the binaries.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Absolutely. It was very important to design his character in that way. So he would naturally be subjected to all of these differing expectations from all these different sides. He’s a dramatisation, I think, of a dilemma that’s not unusual in a lot of people who are mixed-race, feel cut between sides. A lot of people who are immigrants and refugees are feeling themselves to be both insiders and outsiders wherever they happen to be. But I wanted to merge those experiences with the narrative of a spy because spies are also people who are inside and outside at the same time, who are always constructing narratives about themselves that may not be totally true, who are insinuating themselves into situations where they’re trying to take advantage of other people. And so that seemed to me to be a natural blending to bring together the spy story and the immigrant, refugee, mixed-race person story.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Right, right.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So most of the action in the story takes place in the US by like around, I think, chapter four or so in the novel. By like episode two we’re in America. And there are a lot of scenes that play with the ways that Americans are mistaught history. I was wondering if I could play an example for you that we could talk through. It’s the scene where the Captain has just gotten to America. He’s at a university and he’s talking to a student journalist who’s this sort of white, awkward, hippie-looking guy. Yeah, let’s play it. The journalist talks first.

[THE SYMPATHIZER CLIP PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos: So my first question here is the scene is in the novel but the dialogue isn’t, right? What do you think of this scene?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Oh, I think it’s a very funny scene. I mean, we can’t see the actor’s face. Hoa Xuande, he’s Vietnamese-Australian. This is his first super major role. And, you know, this is a seven-hour TV series. He’s in it for almost every scene, and you can just even hear his voice, how he’s, you know, performing this role is very funny and multidimensional. But when the screenwriters are adapting the novel into the scripts and everything, they’re converting the very literary language of the novel into a dialogue. Sometimes that is different from what’s happening in the novel. And sometimes, of course, it’s simply the case that, you know, people don’t talk the way that they do in my novel. The novel is a confession. He’s under high duress as he’s writing. It’s an intensely literary language for reasons that will become obvious to the reader by the end. But in translating this story into a TV series, the writers and the directors have to depict people as they would interact in reality. So that’s our challenge. And so there are some beautiful lines that get lost in the adaptation but then there’s beauty in some of the dialogue that the writers were able to come up with themselves.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Another thing that it does that, of course, doesn’t have to be done in a novel is cast. And one of the casting choices it made was to have most of the white men characters in the novel be played by just one actor, Robert Downey Jr, who does an incredible job with a number of outfits and I think prosthetics. Viet Thanh Nguyen He looks like he’s having a lot of fun, right? Lilah Raptopoulos Especially with the professor character, which I don’t want to ruin for listeners but they should watch. Can you talk a little bit about that? What did you think of that choice? Viet Thanh Nguyen I was there when Park Chan-wook came up with the idea, or at least told me about it. He came to my house, we were discussing my novel and the adaptation, and it was very clear that Park Chan-wook read the novel very, very closely because he had all kinds of suggestions about things I could have done better. (Laughter) He’s a storyteller in and of himself, but I think he’s also as a obviously as a director, trying to imagine what these characters look like and so on. And it was this idea that maybe one actor could play all the major white guys, white-guy characters in the book. And I think partly it’s, you know, pragmatic because if we did that maybe we would land up a major A-list actor, which is exactly what happened. But number two, that again, it would be a spectacle that would be compelling to watch for the audience. And then finally, you know, in Park Chan-wook’s vision, as you said before, these are all faces. These white guys are all faces of American power but realised in very specific ways. So there’s a congressman, there is a movie director, there’s a professor of oriental studies, and there’s a CIA agent. And if you read the novel, in fact, all these characters are treated very one-dimensionally for the most part. And that’s because, again, the novel is not meant to be realistic. It’s a confession. It’s a satire. So the idea of deploying flat characters, as EM Forster calls them, is perfectly viable. Not everybody has to be three-dimensional and complex. And of course, this is because what I wanted to do was to satirise American power through these archetypes of American power. And I think Park Chan-wook saw that right away. And so all of these guys, as again, being aspects of the American global hegemon. Lilah Raptopoulos Yeah. I found that even when there were places that the show didn’t stick to the novel, it still captured a spirit like that was kind of that sort of sardonic spirit of the novel, that funny cultural critique of America. I mean, it translated that really well to the screen. When I heard that it was gonna become a TV show, I couldn’t really envision what it would look like. And then I saw it and I thought, oh, yeah, that really works. And I’m curious how that happened. Did you spend time working that out? Yeah.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: If you’ve read the novel, it’s a novel that’s entirely a confession. So you’re living purely within the Captain with a spy’s head as he’s telling this confession to an audience that is basically his interrogators in a communist re-education camp. That’s just very difficult to adapt as you implied, because the power of the novel, besides its plot, is coming from the intensity of the language of our narrator, the spy. So it was crucial to find a director whose visual style would be the corollary or the equivalent.

And if you’ve ever seen the movies of Park Chan-wook from Old Boy to The Handmaiden, for example, these are movies that are very lush visually. He’s really got a lot of tricks up his sleeve. And then he also has a sensibility that I think matches mine. So, for example, recently he said in an interview when he was making one of his movies called Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance — which is a very violent and bloody movie — he was giggling the entire time. That’s the guy for me, because when I wrote The Sympathizer, which also includes, besides a comedy, some pretty violent things, I also was giggling the entire time because despite the content, my role as an artist is to try to figure out how to make these things entertaining for readers. There’s a lot of fun involved in that, even as we’re dealing with, again, some difficult subjects. And so that was the most crucial part, I think, was finding a director with the same kind of artistic sensibility, but also the visual flair to figure out how to do the equivalent on the screen. And then Park Chan-wook is a master at what he does. So then he also assembles the right talent. It’s like playing in multiple dimensions, from narrative to sound to the visual, to who he’s gonna cast, to the script, to the multiple languages that are being deployed. It’s really, really amazing.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[TECH TONIC PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

I would love to chat through the meta-conversation that this series is having about Hollywood. I know you like meta, but this is like meta on steroids. As part of the plot, these characters are actually on set during the making of another film about the Vietnam war called The Hamlet, and I find it just very fascinating. When you wrote The Sympathizer, it was kind of a critique of how American culture has presented this very distorted cultural memory of the Vietnam war, and how films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now, even when they’re anti-war movies, are still movies that have racist depictions of Vietnamese people. They still glorify war. So you wrote this novel that criticises Hollywood, that then gets made into a series by Hollywood where they’re shooting a Hollywood movie and, yeah. How do you feel about it?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Dizzy. Very dizzy. You know, there was a moment when I went on the set where they were actually shooting The Hamlet. Right. And so there is a whole TV crew shooting the characters of The Hamlet, which is a movie crew. Right. And that movie crew is shooting the scene inside with additional actors. There’s all these layers. And even the crew of our TV series was getting a little bit confused as to who was the crew of reality and the crew inside the movie, but the shooting, it was so funny. And so my take on this is that, yes, I feel that I am caught up in my own situation that I’m criticising here. I’m criticising Hollywood in the novel, and then here I’m turning to Hollywood in order to adapt the novel into a TV series. Well, we live in an imperfect world. And, the fact of the matter is that Hollywood is enormously important in terms of propagating American ideas and feelings and stories all over the world as a form of soft power that we should take very seriously. I mean, it is entertainment, but it’s also entertainment that has political impact in terms of shaping global perceptions of the United States, but also global perceptions of the people that the United States interacts with. So these Vietnam war movies that the Americans created have, ironically, been telling the story of the Vietnam war movie from an American point of view, even though the Americans lost the war. You really have to go to Vietnam in order to see Vietnamese perspectives on this war for the most part.

Lilah Raptopoulos: I am thinking of this conversation that we had when we were at lunch in Pasadena, and there wasn’t space for it in the piece, but you talked about how if we look at western art there’s like a range from most radical and least impactful, which is like the poet, to least radical and most impactful, which is Hollywood. Can you explain that briefly and then . . . I have a question.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Sure. I mean, like, you know that like, who cares about poetry now, right? Who cares? Well, the people who care are poets and the people who love poetry, and that’s not an extremely large audience, but it’s a significant audience. But the point of the matter, the fact of the matter is, all you need to write poetry is your pen and your paper and your life. So that allows the poet to take enormous risks and enormous chances. A Hollywood production cost tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. And when you have that much money invested, a lot of people care. And when a lot of people care, it’s very hard to make significantly radical moves because there’s so many people looking over your shoulder, so many people worried about the costs and the losses, all these kind of stuff. So that’s why I think Hollywood and the equivalent are oftentimes the least responsive to political issues and cultural changes. There’s actually much more of the rearguard than the avant-garde. Now, that being said, of course, there are poets who are very conservative and of course, are filmmakers who are very radical. And with this TV series, what we’re hoping to do is at least introduce some elements of that radicalism into the Hollywood process.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Yeah, yeah. You know, Viet, when we were talking in Pasadena, you said that writing The Sympathizer was pure ecstasy because writing a novel for the first time felt like playing. That, you know, no one was expecting anything from you. It was a very private thing that you were doing, and it was a real joy. I’d love to hear you reflect on what it’s been like now, that kind of the opposite of private has happened to that. Like this famous director, these famous actors have made this thing. I guess my question on it is, how does that impact what you do next?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Well, it’s funny, I think that I, when I was writing the novel, like, you know, like Park Chan-wook, I was giggling and having fun. And when the novel became successful, I felt like I got away with something like, did you all realise I was just like having fun? And I’m trying to be subversive and all this, and now you’re gonna give it prizes and to pay attention to it to such a degree that now we have a TV series, you know, like, I got away with something here.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Like you all know I’m insulting you, right?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Right. It’s harder to get away with something when the whole people are looking at you and like, OK, what are you going to do now? And but the other dimension of it is that now, you know, The Sympathizer is meant to be a trilogy, so there’s already a sequel that’s been written, and who knows . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos: The Committed.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Yeah, The Committed. Who knows if Hollywood will ever make it? But the point is, now we have a TV series. And unfortunately or fortunately, now I also am thinking inevitably of the TV series as I set about to write the third and final novel.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Interesting.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: That was not something I ever anticipated that I’d have to, like, deal with this thought in my mind of the spectacle of the TV series and the changes that were made to it. Not that the third novel has to incorporate the changes of the TV series, but the fact is that all these creative talents have been involved, they’ve contributed their own ideas, and some of those ideas were really, really good that did not involve me. And that will, I think, have some impact, inevitably on how I can see that third and final novel. But, you know, ultimately, in the end, what I’ve tried to do throughout my life since the success of the novel has been to try to remember why I wrote the novel in the first place. And why I wrote the novel in the first place was not simply because I wanted to have my revenge on Hollywood and that kind of thing, but that I wanted to have fun. I wanted to be totally free. I wanted to to write something just for myself, out of the conviction that I’m not alone, that this internal vision that I have is possibly one that is shared by others. And because I was true to that, now we have all of these things like the TV series. So as I write today, I always try to keep that spirit in mind that I shouldn’t be worried about what other people think or I shouldn’t be worried now that more people are aware of my work because of a TV series, when I should be focusing on is still that original spirit of doing exactly what I want, pursuing my own vision, because that’s what all of us should be doing. That ultimately is, I think, what brings joy.

Lilah Raptopoulos: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s a useful reminder for us too, Viet. Thank you so much for this conversation. We appreciate you being on the show.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Thanks, Lilah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos: That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I put a link to everything mentioned today, including my lunch with Viet in the show notes. Every link that brings you to the FT gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes are ways to stay in touch with me and with the show on email and on Instagram. Also, if you liked the show, we would be so grateful if you shared it with any of your friends that you think might like it too.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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