It's Designed to Break Your Heart (Feature) More Work to be Done, Says AAJA (in National News) Peoples' Victory Celebration (in Bay Area News) Get Ready for Cyberwars (in Business) Ironman (in Sports) Fade to Black With Auteur Wayne Wang (in A&E) It Takes Courage in This Business (in Opinion)

Fade to Black With Auteur Wayne Wang

Wayne Wang

Edited By Lia Chang

Asian Cinevision served up this year’s crop of Asian and Asian American films at the 24th Asian American International Film Festival at Florence Gould Hall in New York, July 19 - 28. Over the course of the 10-day festival, Asian Cinevision paid homage to veteran filmmaker Wayne Wang in honor of the 20th anniversary of Chan Is Missing — the first feature-length film with an Asian American cast produced and directed by Asian Americans — and Wang’s contributions to the independent film industry with selected screenings of his films and panel discussions.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Wayne Wang came to the United States at the age of 17 to study painting, filmmaking and TV production at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Calif. In 1981, Wang made an indelible mark and helped usher in the modern era of American independent filmmaking with Chan Is Missing. His exploration of the Chinese experience in America continued with Dim Sum, A Little Bit of Heart and Eat A Bowl Of Tea. Wang’s filmography includes the commercially successful The Joy Luck Club, and his indie offerings — Smoke, Blue in the Face, Anywhere But Here, Chinese Box and his latest, Center of the World, shot on digital video.

Inspired by filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, the themes of Wang’s films have focused on a sense of community, identity crisis, loss, family, and mother-daughter relationships. In a candid and revealing interview at the 24th Annual Asian American International Film Festival, with New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, this self-professed bad boy revisited his Chan Is Missing days, discussed the technical aspects of working with digital video and riffed on his 20-year career as an auteur.

EM: How important is family to you?

WW: Very important. I come from a family that’s very disjointed. I have a very difficult relationship with my own parents. I have a brother who is schizophrenic. We have a lot of relatives where nobody really talks to each other. Ozu never had a father, so all of his films have a very powerful and kind father. In a way, I’m trying to find my family in the films.

EM: How did you prepare to make Chan Is Missing?

WW: I graduated from film school, went back to Hong Kong and worked on a popular soap opera. I tried to change it by introducing hand held cameras. They hated it. The ratings dropped and I was fired after three months. I came back to the U.S. To support myself, I went into Chinatown to teach immigrants English and how to adjust to America over a four or five-year period. During that time I took a lot of notes about Chinatown and people like Chan Hung and the cab driver. And the film came very organically out of that. It’s a very provocative title, isn’t it? Especially in the context of Charlie Chan. I’m thinking about doing Chan Is Missing II. Maybe I’ll call it C.I.M. II — 20 Years Later.

EM: I felt that Chan Is Missing was idiosyncratic and universal. It was an experience specific to you that makes sense to everybody. Were you surprised that audiences took to it that way too?

WW: I was really surprised. When I made Chan, I thought, I’m just going to make an interesting movie. I don’t care if it’s going to get shown anywhere. I figured that the New Directors festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was a very specialized festival audience. Then New Yorker Films picked it up; they showed it at the Cinema Studios. Lines were three times around the block. That was a huge surprise.

EM: Did you sit with any of the audiences?

WW: I went into one of the shows and sat in the audience. People were laughing. That’s when I realized I wanted to make movies that would either make people laugh, make people cry, or make people scared. And have them be inside the movie. When I was a kid, my dad took me to the movies a lot, and I really like the moment where the lights go out. In Asia, the lights really go completely out, pitch black. You really get inside this fantasy. And then this projector comes on, the light hits the screen and I still remember that feeling. I think sitting in Chan Is Missing with that audience brought back some of that feeling. Some of my films do that too. It’s a very tough thing to balance, to be an artist and do what you want to do and yet at the same time tap into an audience’s sensibility. When we made Chan Is Missing, we were really crazy. We owed labs a lot of money. We just did it.

EM: It is a movie that you made because you wanted to make it. That’s where great films come from. It seems like you’ve got to get in bed with the studios to some extent to get movies made today.

WW: There’s a side of me that says I have to do that otherwise it is really hard. Center of the World is a way to get out of that. After Anywhere But Here, I wanted to say no lawyers, no executives, nobody telling me what I could or could not do. Just give me some DV cameras, a little bit of money, I’m just going to go out and shoot something.

EM: How did you decide on the rough look for Center of the World?

WW: Center of the World was a relationship between two people, which in the beginning was very formal because they hardly know each other. Slowly, through the three days and three nights, it disintegrates. I always start with the one line description of the film’s through-line and use that to determine the visual aspects of it. Since we were shooting in digital video, we started with the digital camera that is closest to film-digital beta, on dollies, shot in a very formal way. By the end of the first night when she starts the strip, and the first sex scene with him, things were beginning to get hot. We switched to hand held with these bigger cameras and went a little rougher. The second day, we went to the mini consumer DV cameras and just said forget the controlled look; let’s really break loose, even if something is out of focus and bleached out. We broke it up that way. The third night, when the relationship got really intense and finally got very cold, so to speak, we switched completely to a no color digital grain.

EM: Is it hard to get movies made when you talk about stories with an Asian context and Asian characters?

WW: Absolutely. I thought Joy Luck Club broke open the fact that Asian movies could do business. I went back to the studios with material that had Asian subject matter and they would not respond. The Joy Luck Club was so difficult to make. It was a difficult script to adapt. Nobody would finance the script. Amy Tan and Ron Bass wrote it completely on spec, on their own time. We went to many different studios — nobody would do it. Finally Disney said if you could do it for ten million dollars, we’ll let you do it. We were so desperate. And now, if you take an Asian project (unless it’s Crouching Tiger with a lot of action), it is almost impossible. I optioned Chang Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and he adapted a beautiful and powerful screenplay. We’ve been trying to get that movie made for the last 3 or 4 years.

EM: I would figure that between Joy Luck and the fact that you have had a 20 year career, that that has broken down some of the resistance.

WW: I’m trying to find out how much resistance there is. After The Joy Luck Club, I’ve been out of the Hollywood loop for almost five years. Now I’m trying to get back into the loop, I’m kind of curious what they think of me. And whether they would let me do a movie that’s not, so-called, my kind of movie. I’m interested in doing this chase movie with Ice Cube and Johnny Knoxville, which literally begins with a chase from page one.

EM: Is it harder to raise money in the independent world than it used to be?

WW: Yes and no. Some ground has been broken. If you are a starting a filmmaker and you had a good script, with DVD, there are many different companies that would finance something under a million dollars. In that sense, it is really easy; it’s not like in the Chan days.

EM: How often do you get to go back and look at your movies?

WW: I have a hard time looking at most of my movies because I’ve sort of outgrown them. Dim Sum is one that stays with me, because it’s very personal and it’s very simple. The bad boy side is very intrigued by Chan Is Missing and Life Is Cheap… because those films are so out there.

When I made Chan Is Missing, I didn’t go in with a political agenda. I was trying to paint a very complicated picture of a community. My own criticism of Asian Americans is that we’re still too stuck with our own history and writing some kind of political justice. That’s our problem. I would say lighten up. And make some interesting movies. I have always thought — why make the Japanese Internment? I would make it a comedy, but still keep the pain in it.

EM: You tend to be attracted to writers. What makes that important to you?

WW: I really appreciate writers and what they can do. Especially after working with Amy Tan and Paul Auster. My advice to young starting directors: There are many interesting Asian American books out there now — tap into that. It’s an easier place to start. Something that you’d identify with that you feel like you can sink your teeth into.

For your personal projects, write a good script, adapt a book and just go out and do it, even if you don’t eat anymore. When we made our first film, we would do anything. We would probably rob a bank to make a movie.

And these days you have no excuse at all. [With] Final Cut Pro on your computer, you can cut your own damn movie. The movie camera we used on Center of the World cost $1500 dollars. You can buy it at Good Guys. The tape is $10 for an hour. There is no excuse.

The thing that really saves me is that I know I can make a movie with very little money. I can control every bit of it like a painter, because I have my own camera. I could cut it in my own home. I can make ten movies about the same stories, like Ozu, over and over again.

Photos by Lia Chang. Lia Chang is an actor, a photographer and an award-winning journalist. E-mail: lia@liachanggallery.net.

Elvis Mitchell (left) asks the hard questions while Wang smoothly retaliates with story after story.