Gran Torino Behind the Scenes: The Hmong Documentary on Blu-Ray June 9!

By Louisa Schein

Did you ever wonder how Bee Vang and Ahney Her landed the lead roles in Gran Torino? Or what life was like for the Hmong actors off set when they were shooting in Detroit?

Did you ever wonder what screenwriter Nick Schenk was thinking about while he was writing the screenplay for the film that eventually catapulted Hmong into the national spotlight? Or Clint Eastwood’s impression of the Hmong he worked with?

On June 9, your wait will be over. Detroit Hmong filmmakers Mark D. Lee and Cedric N. Lee have created a special feature, Gran Torino: Next Door, available only on the Blu-ray disc release. In a distinctly Hmong voice, the short film reveals the backstory of the Hmong in Eastwood’s blockbuster. In it you can see what went into the making of Gran Torino, how the actors felt about it, and you can even glimpse what Bee and Ahney looked like on their audition tapes.

The Filmmaker Next Door

Who is the powerhouse duo that created Gran Torino: Next Door? Director Mark D. Lee has been devoting himself to film since he had a conversion experience in college. The Cleveland-born, Detroit-raised artist loved to draw comic book art when he was small. “I always got in trouble for drawing too much,” he recalls. Meanwhile, as he sailed through school at the top of his class, his physics and math abilities led everyone to believe he would go into engineering. He didn’t object, because he secretly dreamed of becoming an astronaut…

Toward his goal he enrolled in the Air Force ROTC and continued his engineering study at University of Michigan. But a year and half later he picked up a camera and never looked back. He dropped ROTC and switched to a Film and Video Studies major. “I like to test my hands at whatever I think is the ultimate thing,” he says, and film turned out to be that thing. “I’m hoping my parents will get over it one day.”

Mark’s dream has always been to put Hmong on the map in Hollywood by making a big feature about the Secret War. He was never much interested in documentary and he was determined not to do wedding videos for a living. He’d landed over a dozen production jobs in the mainstream film industry before getting hired as staff assistant for Gran Torino. After the first day on set, “It came to me, in the middle of the night. Y’know, I gotta record this.”

Building Team Hmong

Mark phoned his childhood friend, Cedric N. Lee, who he’d grown up with on the streets of Detroit. “You’ve gotta do this with me,” he implored. It wasn’t a hard sell to Cedric, the France-born son of a Hmong father and French mother, who had been interested in filmmaking since the age of twelve. Cedric had always liked to organize things and had both a background as a party promoter and a degree in business administration.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who makes connections and makes things happen,” Cedric recalls. He’d been the one who Malpaso hired to take them all over Detroit looking for props, for Hmong life, for Hmong people to audition. During shooting, he was responsible for getting Hmong cast members where they needed to be – a people wrangler. His work was so valued that he began to be invited to the Malpaso meetings. Eventually, he would be chosen as the trusted assistant who was flown to LA to translate all the Hmong for subtitles. He made the perfect producer.

The two Lees teamed up. At first they planned to create a longer film for Hmong audiences. They did individual interviews with Bee Vang, Ahney Her, the gangbanger actors and “Grandma” Chee Thao. When the group went bowling, partying or to the cast softball party, they were always there with the camera. Twenty hours of footage piled up.

Hollywood Comes Knocking

Then on one of Cedric’s trips to LA he mentioned the project to some of the Gran Torino producers. To his amazement, they asked to see it for the Blu-ray disc release (the conventional DVD was already finished). Euphoric, he and Mark went into high gear. Now they had to think about how to convey something meaningful about Hmong to mainstream audiences. “They gave us a lot of creative freedom,” Cedric recalls.

What they started crafting was a sleek fifteen-minute collage of Hmong stories then and now. They got old war footage from the National Archive. They secured permission to use scenes from Gran Torino. They obtained an official copy of an interview with Eastwood. They included outtake footage and put new subtitles on some of the untranslated Hmong language. And they recruited California filmmakers Abel Vang, Kak Lee and Steve Thao to shoot an original interview with writer Nick Schenk. California composer Ko Lee Chao Yang was employed to create an original score.

The result is a peppy, fast-paced “featurette,” ingeniously edited to combine all these elements. The filmmakers cut together humorous playful scenes with dramatic clips from Gran Torino plus tragic images of the war history, narrated by Elvis Thao and Grandma Chee. Interviews reveal how the actors felt working with Eastwood.

The Future is Hmong-Made Movies

Cedric once told me that he worried throughout the shooting of Gran Torino that Hmong audiences would judge the cultural inaccuracies harshly. He worked hard to educate unhappy Hmong viewers that accuracy wasn’t the only standard, and that the movie never presumed to be a documentary.
 
But what Cedric WAS concerned about was Sue’s line: “The girls go to school and the boys go to jail.” Smoldering after one of the crew asked him, “Is that true?”, he exerted a lot of effort trying to get that line changed. As we know, it remained in the final version. But in the end it is Gran Torino: Next Door, and the visibility of the two Hmong guys who produced it, that is exactly what proves the line untrue.

Having worked as mere staff on big time films, both Cedric and Mark now dream of making their own features. “I’m shooting for the stars,” confesses Cedric. He is planning a drama about the Hmong situation in Thailand. Meanwhile, the day that Warner Brothers signed off on the final version of Gran Torino: Next Door, Mark, footloose and single (he makes a cameo appearance in the final frame of the film), packed his car and drove west into the sunset, heading for the coast to seek his future in his own creative vision.

You can see Gran Torino: Next Door on the Blu-ray disc to be released June 9 and already available for pre-order. Digital Copy and BD-Live are also available.