How 'Da 5 Bloods' Re-Created Saigon

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How Da5Bloods re-created Saigon for the screen

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"He needed to be in the United States for much of the preparation, so I essentially did all the prep work," says Thomas of their collaboration on the Netflix title, filmed in Vietnam and Thailand, which follows four Black Vietnam vets who return to Saigon decades after the war."I scouted and chose all the locations and designed the film and was communicating with [Lee] through the phone or through virtual [meetings].

The film is set in the present day but also includes key flashbacks."Most of the flashbacks took place in the jungle, so obviously a jungle's not going to change as much as interiors would," says Thomas."But there was one particular jungle [near Chiang Mai in Thailand] where we were shooting two sequences.

"The challenge was to make that landscape look very different for the crash sequence, so we brought in more plants and more palm trees and [involved] local villagers to completely re-landscape the sequence to make it look like a more densely packed jungle," he recounts, adding that for the contemporary scenes"we removed all those trees and let the natural landscape speak for itself.

The ruins in the film's climactic jungle sequence are based on My Son, a collection of ancient Hindu Temples in Vietnam."We built the entire ruins in a section of jungle in a suburb of Chiang Mai City," Thomas says. The rest of the contemporary scenes were photographed in and around Chiang Mai as well as select locations in Vietnam, including scenes set on a river and in Ho Chi Minh City's Apocalypse Now Bar, named after Francis Ford Coppola's film.

Thomas, who remembers when he was the only Black production designer in the business, also serves as chair of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Education and Outreach Committee, doing his part to increase diversity in the industry."One of the things that we are doing is not just reaching out to universities, but we're also reaching out to communities around the country — Black communities, brown communities, Native [American] communities," he explains.

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