Based on a true story, The Accidental Getaway Driver follows the story of a Vietnamese driver, Long, when he becomes the unwilling getaway driver to three escaped convicts from Orange County jail. Tensions continue to rise when the four are forced to hide out in a motel and their pasts are slowly revealed.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview, Dustin Nguyen, who played Tây, one of the convicts, revealed what interested him most about the project.

“The story itself is quite compelling, being a real story, but the heart of the story about loneliness and the need for belonging and a search for what is home, resonated with me very strongly when I read the original story that broke in GQ Magazine and I could relate to a lot of those themes,” Nguyen said. “And more importantly, after 30 some years of working in the business, this is the first Vietnamese American project that I’m involved with that I felt really reflects the contemporary Vietnamese. Most of the time, I think up to now, when you hear Vietnam, war is what follows. And a lot of those movies have been made, some are wonderful and some are terrible and I wanted to see something about being Vietnamese American these days. The themes are very universal, they are not exotic themes and that’s what really compelled me to do this project.”

Nguyen continued to talk about his most memorable moment from shooting.

“I have to say it was the last day of shooting because I wasn’t sure if I was going to see these people again because you just don’t know,” he explained. “And with a film like this you don’t know where it’s going to end up, if it ends up anywhere at all. So it was very bittersweet and I could feel in front and behind the camera, mostly Vietnamese, all the love we had going through the journey of making it and that was the most meaningful for me I think of my entire career.”

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