Nostalgia in New Hollywood
Peter Chan recaptures intimacy in ‘Love Letter’
by Mariko Thompson

One might suspect from his film titles that Peter Ho-Sun Chan, a 36-year-old director from Hong Kong, is an die-hard romantic. A year ago, he grabbed top awards in Hong Kong and the interest of Hollywood with Comrades: Almost a Love Story. Now, for his American debut, he turns to one of the oldest forms of courtship in The Love Letter.

Set for release Friday, The Love Letter is a light yet wistful film about a sleepy New England town that’s jolted by an ardent, anonymous love letter. The cast includes Kate Capshaw as Helen, a bookstore owner who shuns emotional entanglements; Tom Selleck as George, a firefighter who has carried a torch for Helen since high school; and Ellen DeGeneres as Janet, a wisecracking bookstore manager and Helen’s best friend.

To call Chan a romantic is both accurate and misleading. What fascinates him is not what draws two people together, but what keeps them apart. The real story lies in missed opportunities, words left unsaid.

“The fact that people keep missing each other is a recurrent theme in my work,” Chan says. “It’s the unspoken part of relationships. People keep their feelings inside themselves, and that brings about misunderstandings.”

In an age of cell phones, e-mail and other high-tech gizmos, the film uses as its catalyst the power of the pen. Compared to the e-mail-savvy romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail, a movie about a love letter might seem anachronistic. Chan says the effect is one of timelessness.

“How many letters do we receive a year, let alone love letters?” Chan asks. “To get a letter written in ink is something that doesn’t exist. We wanted to bring a sense of nostalgia ... The score, the town, the people give you the feeling of a world too good to be true, a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Set in the fictional town of Loblolly by the Sea, Helen is the first to discover the errant letter. A single mother who dismisses opera as “too emotional,” Helen’s fear of intimacy leads her to split hairs with longtime friend George over whether they’d ever gone out on an official date. But under the letter’s spell, Helen begins to perceive the world through a starry-eyed lens.

In the waning days of summer, she finds herself being wooed by two men—George, about to be divorced, and Johnny, a college student who works in the bookstore. Johnny (Tom Everett Scott) is unflinchingly honest and pursues life with the joy of discovery rather than the fear of failure. George, by contrast, realizes he has spent too many years as a spectator, watching windows of opportunity open and close.

As a boy growing up Chinese in Bangkok, Chan knew he wanted to direct films just like his father. Although he never achieved great success, Chan’s father had a respectable career in the Hong Kong film industry. He has watched his son’s ascent with pride.

“Everything I do, he feels like it’s his,” Chan says. “We’re very close.”

Chan attended UCLA briefly in the early 1980s, but returned to Hong Kong in 1983 to work as an assistant director. The Hong Kong film industry was a booming, vibrant place for aspiring directors like Chan. In 1990, Chan directed his first film, Alan and Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye, and soon afterward, his films began racking up awards at Hong Kong and international film festivals.

Comrades: Almost a Love Story turned out to be his breakthrough film—the one that would convince Dreamworks producers to bring him on board for The Love Letter, adapted from a novel by Cathleen Schine.

Chan says hiring him to direct The Love Letter was an aggressive move for a studio.

“The movie is about a small town in New England. English isn’t my first language, and we’re hiring crews mostly from the New York and Boston area,” Chan says. “Here I am, heading the crew—I’m Chinese, not American, and I’ve never been to New England or a town like Rockport. That’s a pretty bold decision. A Hong Kong film would never hire an American to direct it.”

Despite the obstacles Chan faced, The Love Letter captures the intimacies and idiosyncrasies of a small American town. The relaxed atmosphere of the shoot, done in Rockport, Mass., contributed to the on-screen chemistry, says Chan, who likened the experience to his early directing days in Hong Kong. For The Love Letter, the actors and the crew rented houses on the water rather than staying in hotels. Going to work was more like going to summer camp.

“That seldom happens,” Chan says. “The sense of intimacy was even lacking in my later Hong Kong movies—I actually recaptured it coming to the States, which is weird, considering all the things you hear about Hollywood where everything is in excess. To be able to do that my first time out is a blessing.”