Christopher Radcliff’s short film We Were the Scenery is both tiny and epic in scale, telling the story of two Vietnamese war refugees, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, parents of the film’s producer and writer Cathy Linh Che, who, after escaping to The Philippines, were drafted in as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
The flight from their war-ravaged homeland was tortuous – 8 days and nights on a boat across the violent South China Sea – but when they encountered a Filipino naval vessel, they were treated well and given delicious food to eat, and housed in a civilised refugee camp.
Ok, so they weren’t given much of a choice about appearing in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was scheduled to shoot in the Philippines, but nor was there any among the Vietnamese refugees who weren’t totally up for it. Everybody was paid a daily rate of 80 pesos, even small children and babies, and from their earnings the parents purchased a tael of gold (50 grams) and a radio cassette player, we are told.
The couple later emigrated to the US, and the story of their involvement in Apocalypse Now became part of their family mythology. But all with a modicum of perspective applied. “Their VHS copy of the film sits on the shelf next to all their home video tapes,” says the director of Che’s parents now. “It’s something that they use as a sort of tool for reminiscing in the same way that they do their home videos.”
Yet their recollections of the experience within the documentary are instructive, at times hilarious. “We were the scenery,” says Hoa Thi Le, mother of producer Cathy. “It wasn’t as if we were doing it for real,” even if their presence determined that the film’s scenes were more “authentic.”
The couple knew many of the folk we see on screen in Apocalypse Now, such as the young woman (Vân) who, in the film, throws a bomb into the US helicopter. For the scene of the infamous airborne napalm attack, the production used ground-based explosives in plastic tunes. Coppola himself would, on set, eat a mango like an apple, without peeling the skin, something that father Hue Nguyen found a little coarse. “We’re civilized,” he maintains. If he were to meet Coppola now, he would say, “I know something special about you. I remember that you eat mangoes with the skin on.”
What’s more, the only part of the film which was any good, they reckon, was the “action-packed” sequence that they are in. “The rest of the film is very average, just a bunch of talking,” says the father.
When director Christopher Radcliff heard about Cathy Linh Che’s parents and their involvement on such a landmark movie, he knew their story had to be told on celluloid.
“Coming from a film background, I had, and continue to have, a certain respect and reverence for the film Apocalypse Now, and the lore around the production of it,” he tells BDE. “It’s such a kind of totemic production, with so much history, and it really looms very large in our film culture, not even just in America, but globally.”
“As soon as Cathy told me about her parents and their experience on the film, I was like, you have to make a movie about that, just because it’s such a cinema-driven story. The [parents] inadvertently occupy such a unique and valuable position in cinema history, so to me that just sort of called out to be told cinematically.”
For Cathy Linh Che, a poet by profession, this was her first attempt at film production and writing. It was a successful debut, as it turns out, as the film picked up a shedload of awards at the dozens of fests it has screened at, including the Short Film Jury Prize: Nonfiction at Sundance 2025. Che’s ‘Becoming Ghost’ is a book of poems that details her parents’ story, with one poem in particular, A Golden Shovel, reflecting on the famous line from Apocalypse Now, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’
Che is also the Executive Director of the literary non-profit organisation Kundiman, dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature. “I learned that running a small literary non-profit is a lot like making a short film,” she says. “You have to fundraise, you have to work with a team of people, sometimes you have to delegate tasks and figure out schedules and figure out meeting times,” she says. “So all of those aspects were really easy and seamless.”
She adds that the triumvirate of her, director/editor Radcliff and the film’s other producer Jess X. Snow (also cinematographer), made for an excellent team. “We are really good friends and so we know how to work with one another.”
A potential problem was the transportation of the “precious” Super-8 film across numerous borders, and making sure that it wasn’t put through any checkpoint X-ray scanners that would wipe the footage. “I guess these are the technical filmmaking challenges that all films probably face to some degree,” she shrugs off the hardship. Another small hurdle was when her father got cold feet about his participation in the film, “so that took a little convincing from my mother,” says Che. As for the snippets of Apocalypse Now we see in the film, these are covered by fair use.
Director Radcliff underlines that the short form is perfect for the story that he and Che are telling. “I’m a firm believer in economy when it comes to cinematic storytelling, and having a story be only as long as it needs to be, and I found that the short form was really ideal for this slice of Cathy’s parents’ lives,” he says.
“What’s exciting about it [the short] is that it inherently gives you the opportunity to actually dive deeper into one thing… It sounds counterintuitive but because of the focus that a short film requires, you often get a solid chunk of time to really examine closely a small topic and to investigate it [more so] than in a feature where you’re telling a much larger story, or have to support a much larger narrative framework,” Radcliff signs off.
