jumping back into blogspot to catalog things i make and imagine and dream about

i've been in a whirlwind directing my first music video since luc was a baby - it's for a wonderful kpop band. feeling vulnerable feeling fresh, gotta push it forward  

i'm back from a wonderful trip to vietnam, drifting across saigon, reuniting with old friends (hi chuong, toshi) and meeting some great new ones. the filmmaking world in saigon is warm, embracing this lost soul with beers, hugs, and deep fried frogs.

i'm touched by the kindness of the creative souls here, i'm touched by my cousins who insist on taking me out to dinner and to lunch and to coffee and to dinner and to lunch and to coffee day after day, for the long stories a celebrity tells me, for the comic book recommendations, and, most of all, the chance for luc to meet his ancestors.

thank you vietnam, for being my home after i've been gone for so long

it's my show, i hear, i got your back

just have to find a way to rise up to this moment

had brunch with p the dp. very insightful and inspiring. our career struggles we're all young and we're always just the beginning.

thai omelette and comic book. "the sculptor" by mccloud. always wanted to read this.

c drives all the way to meet me at a korean coffee shop. we talk about casting. i'm worried about one of my actors. she gives good advice. i wish i got her advice sooner. i keep things in too often.

m calls me while i'm watching game of thrones.

i call her right back... i go outside for some privacy. walk around in my socks through the wet crass and concrete. a helicopter flies across the night sky, documenaing a car chase. she gets super deep... we talk about spirituality and life and children and "nana." i'm lucky to work with such giving artists

when i was lost i listened to "a tribe called quest" and felt found

rest in power to phife dawg

woke up late this afternoon, around 1:30 pm. my brother woke me up. i asked what time it was and he joked that it was 8 am. been up all night making weird SFX graphics and patterns for a new film, KTC.

groggy, i check my phone. i have a text from SG, my colorist for IDB. he wants me to come by Warner Bros to look at the film. we have a big meeting on monday and i should get ready for it.

RL also texted me this morning about a bachelor party. i don't text back yet. schedule is changing so fast, not sure if i can go yet.

on the drive to burbank, i think about asian american cinema, how i haven't done much as a filmmaker yet in terms of representing exploring asian american life or issues...  i'm disappointed in myself. this filmmaking life... it's a process, i tell myself ... and i'll get there.

watching IDB in the color labs of WB... i have a chance to not think and just watch images. it's relaxing. some scenes that i was worried about turned out fine. i think that we can do something special here.

f e-mails me two crazy scripts. one about a pop star, another about a fighter. both sound amazing.

on the drive away from WB, i decide i should blog again.

i haven't blogged in a while... maybe i can get back into this game somehow

i'm writing from my mother's house in torrance, california, it's lunar new year, and we just spent the night eating thit kho and playing poker.

i asked my mom what my real vietnamese name was today and she told me i didn't have one. she said that my dad believed a bad name would bring bad luck and he was afraid of picking the wrong one for me. so i asked my mom over lunch if she would give me a full vietnamese name and she got excited and started brainstorming ideas. "truong hoang buu" was the one she settled on.

ps my default vietnamese name before this was "vinh," based on a poem my great grandfather wrote a while back (each male descendant is named after the next word in the poem.) my mom felt my brother was more like a vinh so she wanted to give that to him instead.

pps kinda cool my mom chose "buu." "bruce" is the name my dad gave me, "booce" is what my brother used to call me as a kid, and now finally i have "buu." b

had a dream last night where i adopted Bea, one of the orphans i met in Chiang Mai this summer. she didn't like living in NY at first so i rented a motorcycle and took her out into the country side. we parked our bike on a dirt road and i carried her down a hill all the way to the ocean. it was the first time she's ever seen the Atlantic.

i woke up feeling sad that she wasn't there. i don't think i'll ever forget her.

today, drifting from spike's office of tisch, to a surprise chris rock lecture in 1027, meeting up with hye mee to talk about our agnes b commercial edit, rushing to bill reilly's memorial (heartbreaking and inspiring), walking in the rain under umbrellas to a beer and burger spot with film friends, to riding the A train to james' book release party in chinatown, to a subway car ride home to wish jean good night

an epic day, i think, i couldn't believe it.

dark, unsettling, beautiful story of revenge and redemption. gorgeous movie ... it left me at a loss, feeling somehow both at peace and haunted at the same time.

j and i watched this film tonight on netflix streaming while eating grimaldi's pizza.

geoff mcfetridge's "does"

i love his work - it reminds me of my youth...

"What we think or what we believe is,

in the end of little consequence.

The only thing of consequence

is what we do"

John Ruskin

can i just say:

white chocolate. paper boy. girl exterminator. hell-barrel, snowflake, mexican jumping bean (even though this name is racist), dirty sausage, string bean, cable guy, boom gangster, peanut butter and jelly, and bruceberry had an awesome time, playing man-games, running around empty swimming pools, and, oh, making a movie.

best weekend in a long time.

thank you so so so so much. you are amazing.

A propos de ma rencontre avec la fille cent pour cent parfaite

Par une belle matinée d'avril, j'ai croisé la fille cent pour cent parfaite dans une ruelle passante du quartier de Harajuku. A franchement parler, elle n'étais pas si jolie que ça. Elle n'attirait pas spécialement l'attention. Elle n'était pas habillée à la dernière mode. Sur la nuque, ses cheveux étaient encore tous froissés par le sommeil, et elle n'était même pas dans sa prime jeunesse. Elle devait avoir pas loin de trente ans...Et pourtant, cinquante mètres avant de la croiser je savais déjà. Je savais qu'elle était la fille cent pour cent parfaite pour moi...
D'accord, chacun son type de fille. Certains aiment les filles aux chevilles fines, d'autres les filles aux grands yeux, d'autres n'aiment que celles qui ont de jolies mains, d'autres encore, pour je ne sais quelle raison, celles qui mangent très lentement.Moi aussi, naturellement, j'ai des préférences. Au restaurant par exemple, il m'arrive d'être fasciné par la forme du nez d'une fille assise à la table voisine.
Seulement personne ne peut ranger la fille cent pour cent parfaite dans une catégorie...
J'ai dit à quelqu'un:
_Hier j'ai croisé la fille cent pour cent parfaite .
_ Pfff, dis donc. Elle était belle?
_ Euh, pas tellement.
_ C'était ton genre alors?
_ Je n'arrive pas à me souvenir. Je ne me rappelle pas la forme de ses yeux, ni si elle avait des gros ou des petits seins, je ne me rappelle rien.
_ Bizarre dis donc.
_ Bizarre, hein?
_ Et alors? a dit mon interlocuteur d'un air las.Tu as fait quelque chose, tu lui as parlé, tu l'as suivie?
_ Non, je l'ai juste croisée...
Elle marchait d'est en ouest, et moi d'ouest en est. C'était un agréable matin d'avril.
J'aurais aimé discuter avec elle, ne serait-ce qu'une demi-heure. Je lui aurais posé des questions sur elle, je lui aurais parlé de moi. Et puis surtout j'aurais aimé lui parler des aléas du destins qui nous avait conduit à nous croiser dans une ruelle de Harajuku par un beau matin d'avril 1981...
Après avoir bavardé un moment, nous aurions déjeuné ensemble, puis nous serions allés voir un film de Woody Allen, ensuite nous aurions bu quelques cocktails au bar d'un hôtel. Avec un peu de chance, j'aurais peut-être même couché avec elle...
Nous n'étions plus séparés que par une quinzaine de mètres...
Nous nous sommes croisés à la hauteur d'un magasin de fleurs. J'ai senti une petite masse d'air tiède effleurer ma peau. L'asphalte du trottoir était fraîchement aspergé d'eau, il y avait un parfum de roses. Impossible de lui adresser la parole. Elle portait un pull blanc et tenait dans la main gauche une enveloppe blanche pas encore timbrée.Elle avait écrit une lettre à quelqu'un. Comme elle avait l'air terriblement ensommeillé, je me suis dit quelle avait peut-être passé la nuit à l'écrire, cette lettre. Peut-être que cette enveloppe contenait tous ses secrets.
Je me suis retourné au bout de quelques pas, elle avait déjà disparu dans la foule.

"our defects usually spring, for the most part, from the same sources as our good points."

- longinus, on the sublime, 1st century ad

david zwirner, circus or caribbean orange

Just some book notes:

Walter Benjamin, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (thanks Cyrus for letting me borrow the book!), discusses the connection between architecture and film. He suggests that the two disciplines are tactile arts. Architecture and film communicate primarily through the tactile realm in contrast to the pure visuality of painting. Benjamin’s idea suggests that, although the situation of watching a film turns us into a bodyless observer, the illusory cinematic space gives us back our body… both architecture and cinema have a hands on approach to discovering space, just as we rely on all our available senses to navigate through a physical space, a film is not just watched with our eyes, we feel it with all our muscles and bones and everything inside us…

Ok, like, duh.

because, why not?

i love reading john maeda's blog, it's so refreshing. i found this short advice in his archives today, he brought it up in the context of branding vs quality but it can be applied to all aspects of life as well...


Do both. has been a recurring theme in my life just as much as Nike's Do it. Do I do X or Y? Both are extremely hard tasks. You would think that a good mentor would steer you in an efficient manner by telling you which to attack first. Turns out that all of my mentors (at least the ones I would respect) would damn me with the simple recommendation to Do both. Sure does solve a lot of problems. Kind of kills your personal life though ...

follow all things you love. this week i officially have two jobs: one as an interior designer, the other as a film editor.

photo by lili nguyen

Drove around Los Angeles this weekend with my brother, there was dust on the windshield and I asked “what’s that” and my brother said “it’s ash, don’t you read the news?” I took out my new (old) Leica and snapped some photographs of the fog around my home. If only it were possible to make a movie like that, I thought, the way we sometimes just open our eyes. Just looking, not trying to prove anything…

let me answer that with a quote by bob dylan, i was so much older then, i'm younger than that now!

(copy and pasted from j's blog, but i'd just like to remind myself!)

things to do:

- draw a book-labyrinth that is the identical backwards and forwards, except mirrored in some manner

- create a website featuring photos of people on the street, kind of like those street photo blogs, but accompanied by a short interview: what is their favorite memory and favorite scene from a movie

- host a silent film party where everyone converses (silently) with captions that are written as they proceed, possibly to the tune of a pipe organ

- draw a history map, only places and events, between two people

- make a short film about a boy who perpetually wears a helmet

- illustrate a short story or poem written by or for a young child

- make a poster where the past and the future collide spectacularly (details to be worked out later)

- make a short film based on clips taken from footage of friends shot without them knowing, and afterwards, cut in a ridiculous way

- make a stop motion animation with voice-acting done by friends who've unwittingly been recorded in everyday conversation

- ask someone to describe the basic elements of their dream home and then create it in AutoCAD, render it in a 3D rendering program of choice, and present it to them in the manner of a real architectural pitch to a client

- make a three-part book where flipping the pages separately creates multiple landscape-scenario permutations

david adjaye


Maybe a movie is a room with light, but no view, light not as a bulb, but as a form, a physical plane. It’s like what Walter Murch, editor of films by Francis Ford Coppola, said: the last thing to include in a scene that requires blue lighting is a blue light.