Kong: Skull Island’s director hunted down some mobsters who almost killed him
One year after wrapping up his first big box office hit, Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts likely didn’t expect to find himself embroiled in the kind of bizarre, violent drama you’d expect to see in a gritty action movie. But, according to a new, must-read profile from GQ, that’s exactly the kind of life the 33-year-old director was forced into after surviving a vicious attack in a Vietnamese nightclub and launching his own international manhunt to find his assailants.
The incredibly wild but nonetheless real story goes like this: While shooting Skull Island on location, Vogt-Roberts fell in love with Vietnam. After the movie wrapped, he found himself drawn back to the country, both because of his affection for the culture and the particularly rough and draining experience he’d had in Los Angeles promoting the film. When the Vietnamese government offered him a job as tourism ambassador, he gladly accepted and began spending his nights dining on cheap street food and hanging out in ex-pat bars taking selfies with locals. He was a bit of a celebrity and life was good. Until one night, when things came crashing down in a rowdy nightclub called XOXO:
Here’s what Vogt-Roberts remembers from the night of September 9: It was past midnight, and he had the best table in the club, in front of the DJ booth. He leaned back on his couch with his friends, including stuntman Ilram Choi (Kong’s fight choreographer and Andrew Garfield’s double in two Spider-Man movies) and Vietnamese-American filmmakers Timothy Linh Bui and Danny Do. They looked out at the crowd. At a slightly less good table behind them were approximately ten buff dudes with high-and-tight haircuts and gold chains. Do leaned over to Choi and pointed backward. “See those guys? They’re the real deal.”
Otherwise, it was a normal scene at XOXO. Green lasers bounced off the white funky balls. Lil Jon rattled the subwoofers. Vogt-Roberts’s crew shared champagne and tropical fruit. A man in a hat and a man with a beard harassed two women at Vogt-Roberts’s table, groping them and asking them to leave Vogt-Roberts and join them, but the women shooed them away.