Da 5 Bloods is the story of four Vietnam veterans who have returned to the country to recover a stash of buried gold and the memory of their fifth buddy. With lead roles taken by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr and Norm Lewis, it was originally written as a multi-racial piece to be directed by Oliver Stone, but was converted by Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott to become an account of the black GI experience.
While Stanley Kubrick famously shot his Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket in East London, there was never any doubt that Lee would be heading east. ‘It was where we needed to be,’ he told one interviewer. ‘This could not be real on some Hollywood backlot. We had to go to the jungle.’ Filming in Vietnam, however, is still difficult – cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel mentioned in an interview with Variety that ‘we had to go through a lot of political channels’ – so little of what we see is there. Instead, the director had to content himself with a few key scenes in Ho Chi Minh City. One of these is the reunion-night drinking session of the four leads (pictured further below), filmed in a bar called Apocalypse Now that’s themed directly around Francis Ford Coppola’s movie. Decorated with the film-poster image of a helicopter flying into the sunset, it’s a neat encapsulation of the exploitation on both sides of the conflict.
