The Dallas-born filmmaker grew up in Arlington and Grand Prairie and later attended the University of North Texas. As a kid, he was into theater and performed at Fort Worth\u2019s Casa Ma\u00f1ana Theatre and Arlington\u2019s Creative Arts Theatre and School.<\/p>\n
Hames transitioned behind the camera as he grew older and founded Austin-based Alpheus Media<\/a> in 1999. Much of his career has been in the documentary space, including his new film \u201cHome from the Vietnam War.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cHaunted by nightmares, a decorated U.S. veteran returns to Vietnam with a friend who fled the war as a child. Fifty-seven years later, they journey to one of the war\u2019s bloodiest battle sites, confronting the soldiers they once fought and long-buried memories in a powerful search for healing and reconciliation,\u201d the film\u2019s logline reads.<\/p>\n \ud83c\udfac In case you missed it: <\/p>\n \u201cHome from the Vietnam War\u201d is screening at the Lone Star Film Festival<\/a> next month.<\/p>\n Ahead of its Nov. 7 premiere, Hames spoke to the Star-Telegram about making the film and where his love for historical stories comes from. He also shares insights about growing up in North Texas and screening the film at the Fort Worth festival.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n Star-Telegram: I was looking at your Instagram and saw in your bio<\/a> that you say you\u2019re a \u201cfilmmaker obsessed with making history personal.\u201d Where does that come from?<\/p>\n Mat Hames: I\u2019ve had a lot of opportunity to travel the world. The kind of documentary filmmaking that I do has opened up these opportunities and stories to tell that I never would have imagined when I was a kid growing up in Dallas-Fort Worth. The very first big documentary project that I was able to work on was a film that was just getting started, and I kind of joined in as an editor, it was about the Belgian resistance in World War II. I was able to end up becoming the director of that film [\u201dLast Best Hope\u201d]. The film took me to Europe, and I was able to meet members of the Belgian resistance. Then we were able to get that film screened in front of the Prince of Belgium at the time, Prince Philippe. He was so moved by the story that we told of the Belgian resistance that he recommended myself and the other producers for knighthood.<\/p>\n Ever since I did that film and was able to talk to these older people that had experienced so much during World War II, I just got really bitten by the history bug. A lot of documentary filmmakers deal with history and telling stories with talking heads, like interviewing people about what happened in the past, interviewing historical experts, and I love those. I personally like to find people that have lived through history and take them back to the site of where that history happened, and have them experience the present moment and stay with them as they kind of go back and forth between the past and the present. This is in the DNA of all of my documentaries, including \u201cHome from the Vietnam War,\u201d which is going to be at the Lone Star Film Festival.<\/p>\n S-T: I read that you met Lee Alley, one of the subjects of the film, by chance at a Wyoming PBS event. When did you decide that there might be something there with him as far as making a documentary on his Vietnam experience?<\/p>\n MH: I had just done this project about PTSD and military members, people who had been in combat, for Wyoming PBS for a mental health show. I was in that headspace of thinking about veterans and PTSD, which they used to call it shell shock, and then before that they didn\u2019t really call it anything. But I was sort of thinking about that a lot. [I was also] thinking back to \u201cLast Best Hope,\u201d really wanting to make another historical documentary that took place during a war. I\u2019m really interested in the Cold War. I\u2019m really interested in the whole period of the 1960s and \u201870s and \u201880s. I wanted to do a project based in that time period because I hadn\u2019t done that before, so right at this perfect kind of like timing happened where Lee Alley was asked by PBS to introduce the episode that I was screening in front of veterans. I think Lee made an offhanded joke that some producer a long time ago had promised to take him back to Vietnam.<\/p>\n Really the idea began with him planting the seed, and then there happened to be someone there that was able to say they could help with a grant to fund it. There also happened to be someone from PBS there. It was just being in the right place at the right time, lightning in a bottle and all that kind of stuff. That\u2019s usually what happens with my projects, I sort of go from one story to another and once I go into a story, there are all these tentacles that lead me to thinking about other topics that are kind of relevant to that. I sort of develop stories over time. But because when he made that joke, I had already been thinking I really want to do a Cold War story, so I just jumped in and said, \u201cMe, I\u2019ll go. I\u2019ll do it.\u201d<\/p>\n S-T: Lee and John Nguyen, the other main subject of the film, both feel natural on camera. Did you have to give them much direction when it came to being on camera?<\/p>\n MH: I\u2019m glad it felt natural to you. I think that they both are very natural in front of the camera. They are very unpretentious, down to earth people. Both of them have these incredible stories to tell, and I think my job was fairly easy as a director. I just had to get them to tell their stories and figure out the right way to direct the film. There have been a lot of Vietnam War documentaries made about a single United States soldier and them reliving their memories. Lee had recently met John, who was a Vietnamese refugee in 1975, and they had become friends. Lee suggested that we talk to John about possibly having a role in the film because John had been coming to these reunions that Lee and his wife Ellen put on.<\/p>\n I immediately envisioned it as we could sort of have almost like a buddy road movie where the two of them go together into Vietnam, and each of them have their own stories. Then it became really difficult to sort of thread their stories together because they were overlapping at the time, but John is a lot younger than Lee, so he had a very different experience. I think that both Lee and John are just great in telling their own stories, so I don\u2019t really feel like I had to do a whole lot.<\/p>\n S-T: I\u2019m glad you brought up Lee and John\u2019s age difference because I think there\u2019s an interesting generational component to the film. They both have vivid memories of being in Vietnam at that time, but then you have this younger Vietnamese film crew that is coming to grips with what\u2019s in their history books and what happened in real-life.<\/p>\n MH: They have different history books too. Their version of the war is very different, as well. I think when I was trying to imagine what we would do when we went over to Vietnam, I hoped that we could find some locals that remembered the battle. Maybe some local villagers or some people that lived in the city or the town nearby the battle that we could speak to that would have been very young and would have remembered the sounds of the explosions and things like that. I began working with a Vietnamese crew and really a producer named Mr. Nguy\u1ec5n Anh T\u00fa over there.<\/p>\n I was hoping we would find some people that remembered the battle like some eyewitnesses, but I had no idea that Mr. T\u00fa would be able to find the members of the battalion that actually fought Lee in those exact battles. Mr. T\u00fa was able to do that by taking several scouting trips to go out into the Mekong Delta. He\u2019s based in Ho Chi Minh City, so it\u2019s a long trip. They had one scout trip where they went out and looked for the locations, and it was kind of a failure because the after-action reports are written by the U.S. military, giving names to things and places and rivers and highways that were American names in the \u201860s. There are places on the map called like the \u201cSea of Reeds,\u201d then there\u2019s like \u201cHighway Four\u201d and all these things had been renamed after the war, including the precinct or the county that the battle was fought in.<\/p>\n We had a lot of Zoom calls where we were looking at old maps and Google Maps, trying to figure out where it might have been. Eventually after another trip into the Mekong Delta, they were able to find this monument, which we confirmed was the date of the battle. We confirmed that this was the Vietnamese version of the same battle. From finding the monument, they found a woman who was a caretaker of the monument. That\u2019s her full-time job is to basically keep the monument clean. She was married to a man whose father was in the battalion. I had no idea how that would go when I introduced Lee and John to this battalion that Lee had fought, and it was actually kind of dicey.<\/p>\n S-T: The film has a lot of raw emotion from Lee and John. I\u2019m curious what\u2019s that like for you behind the scenes and how you balance that while still doing your job?<\/p>\n MH: I have a lot of emotions when making documentaries and I\u2019m also a lot of times jet-lagged, which enhances your emotional state. Because a lot of my documentaries, I travel, and this one was no exception. I went to Southeast Asia, it was hot and uncomfortable and there\u2019s a lot of chaos going on. And I\u2019m just hoping and praying that I don\u2019t miss anything. I don\u2019t miss a moment that I\u2019m going to regret not having. But yeah, it was incredibly emotional for me to the moment that the bus pulled up, I was expecting to maybe at that point get three to five or six veterans from the Vietnamese side. I had no idea that it was going to be as many as it was. I also had no idea how they were going to react to each other.<\/p>\n Lee has a lot of very tough memories from that night and from the whole time he was there. John, of course, he has his own concerns and anxieties, having left the country and his family being hunted down as he was leaving. Lee also, he\u2019s got memories of the battle and the way that he thought it went. Then we had a translator there. We\u2019re in front of this monument. The Vietnamese are sort of using the monument to tell their side of the story. Lee has his own side, so I didn\u2019t know how it was going to go, and I was very nervous.<\/p>\n S-T: I think there\u2019s even a moment there where Lee says, \u201cOh, ****.\u201d<\/p>\n MH: He does. Yeah, we\u2019re having to remove that for the PBS broadcast [laughs]. You mentioned that, and it\u2019s on my mind because I was just making a note about that this morning. But it was just very real and very raw.<\/p>\n S-T: You have North Texas ties, this film is playing the Lone Star Film Festival. What does that mean to you?<\/p>\n MH: Yeah, I mean it\u2019s funny in a way because I\u2019m still doing what I loved doing at Casa Ma\u00f1ana and CATS as a kid in Fort Worth and Arlington, which is being able to tell stories for an audience. I mean, I love immersing myself in these worlds that I know very little about. Getting to know these amazing people that live through history and in memory. And trying to draw out universal human stories with them.<\/p>\n I think that the history and memory bug, I was bitten by that when I was very young in Dallas-Fort Worth doing theater. I always loved doing the older plays or plays set in the past, like I did \u201cMary Poppins\u201d at Casa Ma\u00f1ana. I just like living in the past in a way, I think it\u2019s a lot more interesting in some ways than the present. It\u2019s really going to be great playing the Lone Star Film Festival, just a short walk away from the stage at Casa Ma\u00f1ana, where I was last seen as Michael Banks in \u201cMary Poppins.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHome from the Vietnam War\u201d premieres Nov. 7 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.<\/p>\n Related Stories from Fort Worth Star-Telegram<\/p>\n \u201cHome from the Vietnam War\u201d director Mat Hames. Courtesy of Alpheus Media <\/p>\n
\u201cHome from the Vietnam War\u201d poster. Courtesy of Alpheus Media <\/p>\n
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Lee Alley (blue shirt) meets Vietnamese soldiers in \u201cHome from the Vietnam War.\u201d Courtesy of Alpheus Media <\/p>\n
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