Maxine Williamson: You made two feature films-The Finished People (2003) and Footy Legends (2006)-before making Missing Water. What, if anything, did you take from your first two films into this third feature?

Khoa Do: Visually and stylistically, this third one is completely different to anything I have ever done before. I was talking to someone the other day, and they said someone had told them that they didn't expect a film like this to come from me, given the previous two features. I think that going in to Missing Water, the whole concept and the story and what we were doing was completely new in relation to filmmaking. It wasn't like I could have looked at a lot of films and said, ‘yeah, I'm going make it like that'. It very much involved, I suppose, devising our own screen language in relation to how we were going to tell this story.

So, you didn't go in with any preconceived ideas and you made it organically.

Yeah. I certainly had a lot of very strong ideas, but we had a lot of challenges in relation to how to bring the film to life. From the first two films, what I really wanted to do this time was to make a film that was visually amazing in its own right. I suppose from our cinematography to our sound design to the way we have edited the film, my relationship with my crew has been one of ‘let's do something that hasn't been done before', or ‘let's try and push the barriers of this and see what we can achieve'.

In terms of your friends saying they were surprised to see you make this film, I think The Finished People, although it doesn't follow the same form, is similar to Missing Water, certainly in terms of director-actor relationships and your understanding of human nature and your ability to draw out performances.

I think so. In terms of the working methods, absolutely, and in terms of working with the cast. Visually, I think the two films look very different, but I learnt a lot from The Finished People about working with first-time actors.

I read in your press kit that you did a lot of rehearsals, which I can understand would be the case with first-time actors.

Absolutely. A lot of rehearsals and a lot of workshops. I also adapted the script to our cast.

You would work on your feet and alter the script to suit the actor?

Yeah. I would adapt the scripted characters to reflect the major characteristics of our actors. I think every actor brings so much of themselves to every role, and I wanted to bring that into the script as well. So, we would do a lot of workshops, a lot of rehearsals, and we would get to a level where there is incredible trust. From my perspective, I get to know our cast really well throughout the rehearsal process, so I am then able to draw on their very personal experiences in order to find that great performance.

And we will get to the personal a bit later, because this whole process is a very personal one for you, for your family, and for the community. Your film really got to me. I sobbed like a baby. What do you want people like me, who aren't from your community, to feel about this film? In terms of message, what do you want audiences to walk out thinking about when they have seen this film-apart from being deeply moved?

I guess I want the rest of the community to have some empathy for what these refugees have to go through and had to go through, and I suppose it's because I want them to go beyond the headlines and all the labels and get to the humanity and see and understand where they are coming from and the extraordinary challenges they faced to get here.

Although it is a story of mass exodus from 1975 onwards, it still has currency. I guess that is also an important aspect to the message, for people to walk out and think, ‘My god, what would I do with myself, my children, my family if I had to flee Australia?'

It is so true. It happens all around the world, where families have to uproot and leave everything behind and just flee, and they don't know where the end destination is.

So you must have strong feelings when you see news reports of illegal-immigrant boats being captured off the Perth coastline or wherever else. You must have strong feelings about how we treat these people under our current policy in Australia.

Yeah, times certainly have changed incredibly since the 1970s and 1980s, when a lot of families first arrived. A lot of Vietnamese families were put into migrant hostels, and the hostels began to have more and more walls around them, then barbed wire, and now the hostels are detention centres. It's quite fascinating how times have changed in that way.

What propelled you to make such a personal story? It's a brave thing to do to make a story not only for yourself and your family but also for your community. What made you want to do this?

I think the story is the story we needed to see and hear, and I think the statistics speak for themselves. It is quite incredible how many people fled and what happened to them, and yet there are hardly any films that look at this story, and I just felt it was absolutely time that we saw this story on the big screen.

It is astounding that it has taken till 2009 for this story to be told, and how perfect that it has been told by someone in the community.

I think my background and my knowledge of this world have certainly made the experience more meaningful.

How did this project came about?

I wrote a play about a year and a half ago, which was put on in May last year, called Mother Fish. It dealt with a group of people fleeing on a boat from Vietnam. In some ways, I had started working on a film script before the play and then did the play in order to test out the themes. I then went on to make Missing Water. It was fascinating, because in doing the research there were so many stories, and I wanted to find the story that I needed to tell within all those stories, and the play was the perfect avenue for me to really test it. That was the journey of the play, and it was very well received. From there, I felt propelled to turn the story in to a film.

I thought, how can we do this in a way that is deeply personal, through the eyes of the person who is seeing their story? The person I chose was a Vietnamese sewing woman, who has spent many, many years sewing in factories. I thought it would be great to go back and experience this journey through her eyes. The four walls of the factory become the four walls of her mind, and so the entire journey takes place within her mind.

 I think that worked spectacularly, but there will be some people who will say it's not film, its theatre. Has that been said to you, and what's your response to that?

Yeah, I mean some people say that. I guess if you're filming something and you're watching it on film, it's a film. I think ultimately this is a type of film where we are bold, we are courageous, and we go for it, and some people will not go along on the ride with us. We want to make sure that it's an incredible journey for those who do.

Let's talk about the actors. We can say that Missing Water is about Vietnamese boat people and their journey across the water and how terrifying it was and how sad it was to leave their homeland, but what really struck a chord with me was the relationship between the sisters. I thought that was beautifully handled. Could you talk a little bit about your experience with Kathy (young Kim) and Sheena (Hanh) and your experience of working with them?

The relationship between the sisters is the most crucial aspect of the whole film, because it's through the memory of her sister that we go back on this journey. It was really important that these two, Kathy and Sheena, spent a lot of time together before we began filming. Fortunately, the two girls were in the play and became very close friends. In the play, their relationship was a bit more of a mother-daughter relationship, but getting to know the two girls, they relate to each other more like two sisters; in making this film, I really worked a lot on drawing out their real-life relationship to this film. I think that the relationship, the journey these two sisters go on, is extraordinary in terms of what they experience. In some ways, Sheena, the little sister, grows up on this trip, and she looks after her older sister in many ways; she's also the one who doesn't quite make it-and it's sad in that sense-but this journey allows her to fulfill her destiny in some strange way.

It was beautiful to see the shift in caregiver/receiver between those two. And Kathy is born of Vietnamese refugees isn't she?

Yeah, and Uncle (Hieu Phan) is a refugee himself.

Uncle's story is not unique, I guess, when talking to Vietnamese people, but during the Q&A at the Sydney Film Festival I learnt that doing this film was a deeply moving and painful experience for him. You had to engage a psychologist at some stage to assist him with dealing with past emotions raised during filming.

Yeah, it was tough, and I did ask Uncle on several occasions if he was sure he wanted to do this, because I knew how hard it was for him. He had given up smoking for a while, and he unfortunately started smoking again during the process of rehearsals because it was so incredibly challenging for him to go back into this world, but he said to me, ‘Look, Khoa, this is tough for me, but I absolutely have to do this in every way, and no matter what happens I will do this and I need to do this.'

Because he is making it for the people who perished and for the people who survived, it's an important account. Are there many refugee stories that have been archived?

No, not really. They are only really beginning to be archived now. I think there are a few people from Melbourne and Adelaide who are just starting to collect the stories, but unfortunately I think a lot of them may have been lost already. It's just an extraordinary number of stories. There are just a lot of stories you can't watch on screen because they're so traumatising.

The research period must have been quite harrowing for you, reading story after story of deep sadness?

It's incredible. I have a four-centimetre-high stack of stories I was sending around to some of our crew just before we began, and someone rang me and said, ‘Khoa, I can't read this; this is too intense.' At the same time others rang and said, ‘Gosh, I have read two stories and I absolutely have to do this film no matter what.' It's incredible the numbers of stories that people have that are real-life stories.

You had a fantastic DOP, Peter A. Holland. Have you shot on the Red 4K camera before?

No, it was my first time, and after Footy Legends, where I was in the middle of parks with 35mm running and watching footballs bouncing and hoping they'll bounce in the right direction and wasting so much film, I just wished we had this years ago. It's a fantastic camera, and it allowed us, me, to roll on everything. Rolling during the rehearsals, rolling on every take, rolling when talking to our actors, so it was fantastic to shoot it on digital and have such great clarity.

Can you talk about method, so that people can get a sense of this film?

In some ways, Missing Water is set entirely out at sea, in the middle of the ocean, because we are going back to the memories of a Vietnamese refugee in the modern day, but because it is her memory, we see it through the eyes of her work and her mind, and her mind is within a sewing factory. Essentially, the film plays out in a sewing factory, where the four walls of the factory become the four walls of her mind, and the sewing machines, in some way, transform to become this boat out in the open sea. In terms of how its shot, there is a lot of handheld camera movement, which again reflects the nature of being out at sea.

The production design, the slow degradation of the boat is very convincing.

Yeah, as the journey goes on, the boat deteriorates, and so the machines deteriorate and breakdown to a point where boat and machine become one.

As do the actors-the makeup work is exceptional.

I agree. The costumes and the makeup and the whole look and feel of this film takes us back there.

Vico Thai (Chau), he's an interesting actor. He's can give a lot of messages through a few facial expressions.

Vico is a very fascinating actor in that sense, in that you can tell a lot from his eyes and from what he is thinking without him having to say too much.

And his sense of powerlessness was so beautifully portrayed. His belief that he needed to be seen to be doing something and his inability to fix it was wonderfully done.

I'd like to say that since our Sydney Film Festival screenings, I have gone back and done some additional tweaking on the film, so the film that people will be seeing at BIFF will be screening for the first time.

Khoa, could you give the statistics of how many people have fled Vietnam since 1975?

Over 1.5 million fled, and 900,000 made it.

It interested me in your director's statement, and this is something that people wouldn't necessarily know, either, that the Vietnamese aren't necessarily a people who like to travel and don't really want to get out on boats.

No, absolutely not. They are a people who traditionally don't travel far from their land at all, and mythologically they are afraid of the ocean. Throughout many centuries they hadn't fled, until 1975.

And, with such a deep love for their land and country, it would have been such a terrible pull for them to leave.

Oh, incredibly. I think as a group of people, Vietnamese people traditionally stay no matter what, so for them, to actually leave, and in such great numbers, it just goes to show what challenges they were facing.

MISSING WATER plays at 18th St George Bank BIFF on August 1 6.50pm and August 2 at 1.40pm

Official Competition, Sydney Film Festival; Official Competition, 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards