Sieu Nguyen (Photo: Thu Luong)

Sieu Nguyen, who was born in 1995, was offered admittance to 7 top American universities in 2013. He chose and graduated from Vassar College in New York. In 2015, he was one of 200 delegates to the New York Conference on Asian Studies.

In May 2018, Sieu Nguyen published a book called “Co Don De Truong Thanh” (I Credit The Lonely) sharing his experiences and views of the culture and people of the United States. After internships at Walt Disney, MTV, and Blumhouse, he was hired by the Paramount Network as a junior associate producer-editor. Later he received a work offer from HBO.

“HBO selects trailer makers very strictly. To get my current position at HBO, I went through 9 rounds of interviews with 9 different people. I had my first interview in February 2020, but due to the COVID-19 epidemic, it wasn't until September 2021 that I received an offer from HBO,” Sieu recalled.

“The work is quite demanding and requires a lot of skills: video production and editing skills, communication skill so I can work with Hollywood artists, and background knowledge about entertainment culture, the factor that makes my work contemporary.”

Sieu Nguyen at his HBO office (Photo: Thu Luong)

Sieu Nguyen has worked on many Hollywood movie projects, including “Younger”, “Euphoria”, “The Flight Attendant”, and “The Girls on the Bus”.

In 2022 he made a trailer for the cooking series "Selena + Chef," starring Selena Gomez. Selena’s mansion served as the setting for the video. To make the video more lively and fun, Sieu Nguyen incorporated fun “behind-the-scenes” moments of the Hollywood star and used graphics to vary the video’s look and layout. The clip has attracted more than 9.6 million views on Facebook.

“Making trailers is very interesting. At HBO, I’ve worked with many people in the Hollywood world and learned many things from them. On the ‘Euphoria’ project, I worked with movie star Zendaya, who is quite demanding. On ‘The Idol,’ I worked with Jennie of BLACKPINK. I made a video about how she rehearses dancing, and I greatly admired her hard work and seriousness. I also worked on the movie ‘The Girls on the Bus,’ about Hillary Clinton's 2016 US Presidential campaign. I produced a video called ‘Story Behind The Story’, showing the correspondence between the film and real-life events. I collaborated with New York Times journalist Amy Chozick to get documents and photos of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for that project,” said Sieu.

(Photo: Thu Luong)

Sieu Nguyen says the difficult part of making trailers is that each one undergoes lots of critiques and editing, so the first video produced is seldom the video the viewers see. Viewer reception is the key to a video's success.

Last year, for the HBO series "Perry Mason", Sieu Nguyen was assigned to create three 5- to 6-minute behind-the-scenes videos for 6 consecutive weeks. During that period, he had to stay at the office late every night to get the work done. But he says that when those videos were completed and reached the viewers, he felt his efforts were rewarded.

Sieu Nguyen hopes young people who want to pursue this line of work will be persistent and undeterred by failure. Failure, he says, means gaining new experience.

“It is important that you keep practicing. Practice makes perfect. In the past 7 years I’ve produced and edited 170 videos, for HBO and for Paramount. Each video teaches me a lesson and helps me do the next one better.”