“That was one of the challenges, how to approximate the voice,” he says. “Viet said right from the beginning that the voice was the reason for the success of the book. He’s a bit of a wreck on tour, he’s a bit unreliable, and we wanted to evoke that.”
They decided to make the story “come out through interrogation” because that means “it’s, by nature, very unreliable, just like tortured victims’ confessions are unusable in a court of law.”
Making this series an allegory to film was also an early idea of theirs. It’s why they did the fun editing of the HBO logo that plays at the top of each episode and why you’ll see the Captain’s narration interrupt, rewind, and retell scenes throughout.
“The book loves film. People know the Vietnam War, think they know it through their images on film and American film, more than any other war in a way, and the book is about that, too, and how we have our preconceptions based on movies,” McKellar explains. “And it’s one of the Captain’s loves. It’s one of the reasons he’s split. He’s a communist, but he has a deep embrace of American popular culture.”
“So we thought that as a narrative device, as a storytelling device, we like the idea of an old steam back,” McKellar continues. “He’s shaping it like a movie. He’s editing, he’s rewinding. And it just reminds us that it’s one version of this story, one subjective version.”
The Sympathizer, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO