We caught up with the brilliant and insightful HOANG LE a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

HOANG, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

I believe being happy is a conscious choice, because there will always be reasons for one person to be unhappy about. A happy artist, I have not met so many, to be honest, most are kinda cynical. Artists by nature are pretty moody and easily wounded by life but I don’t believe a happy artist can produce great work.

A regular job is a wonderful thing, it’s stable, predictable, less headache so I do miss it sometimes.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an independent guerrilla filmmaker based in Los Angeles and I have just made my debut feature film “JOHN”. It’s a social commentary film about the lives of the sex workers residing in Hollywood, all shot with one Iphone. The film has done well in Europe and Australia and just has its premiere in Los Angeles at the REGAL theater in February 2024.

What sets me apart from my colleagues is my unorthodox approach of film-making, I broke lots of rules, I filmed without permits and I love to create controversial artworks. I am currently working on three projects for documentaries: one is about sloth bear attack in India, another one about street kids in Asia, and another covering the lives of regular family in Russia during the current climate.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I don’t think of failures as a bad term, I call them “setback”, and if you want to achieve significant progress, setback is expected, you must learn from them and try a different approach to avoid that setback and repeat. In my journey of writing and film making, there were lots and lots of “setback”, but the mentality makes all the difference, mind over matter. Above all, a desire to improve things, to make my film better, to twist the art form, is a very powerful motivation. I have hundreds of rejection emails, I got my fair share of “nay-sayers”, I had my moments of self-doubt, but those moments evaporates quickly. Having friends helps, to keep you sane and accountable and I appreciate all my friends and supporters for tolerating me all these time, I can be insufferable sometimes.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Directors and writers, they are control freaks. They have God complex. They love to control people, and the environment they living in, for better or worse. People like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, those great people changed the world, directors/writers wish they COULD BE THOSE PEOPLE, but they couldn’t, they are not good enough, so they settle and go back to their tiny little artistic world and rule them, sometime with an iron fist. That don’t mean they are not good people, I am just saying, that’s their nature. They’re tyrants.

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• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/le_han_000/