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Joanne Takahashi as Emiko Takashi and Montana Tsai as Annie Takashi in The Shangri-La Cafe. Photos courtesy of www.lilymariye.com.

From the Director’s Chair

“ER’s” Japanese American actress diagnoses her own condition

By Lynn Elber
The Associated Press

After years of playing a nurse on ER, Lily Mariye diagnosed her own surprising condition: She’d developed an itch to direct as well as act.

The desire to go behind the camera hit her in 1998 after Mariye saw a fellow cast member scrutinizing a director at work on the NBC medical drama.

“I said ‘I want to do that. Since I’m sitting around anyway, I might as well be learning something’,” Mariye, who has appeared as nurse Lily Jarvik since the show’s 1994 debut, recalled.

Four years later, she’s the proud writer-director of The Shangri-la Cafe, a short film based in part on her Japanese American family’s life in Las Vegas in the late 1950s.

Mariye made the jump to directing through the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Directing Workshop for Women, founded in 1974 to bring more women into the mostly male ranks of film and TV directors. Alumnae include Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God), Victoria Hochberg (Sex and the City) and poet Maya Angelou (Down in the Delta).

Lily Mariye, from hit television series ER is now also directing her own films.

Mariye had the kind of experience that AFI envisions, said Joe Petricca, vice dean of the AFI Conservatory, which includes the women’s workshop.

“Shangri-la Cafe has been a very successful film for the program. It was shown and won awards at many festivals, and was screened on public television [on KCET, Los Angeles],” Petricca said.

The outcome is more than Mariye expected. With a 20-page script and letters of recommendation in hand, the actress (who also trained as a singer and dancer) applied for one of the eight spots AFI intends for women already in “media arts.”

That represents a wide range of possibilities, Petricca said, including producers, choreographers, photographers or even “someone who runs a nonprofit arts organization in New Hampshire.”

Among the seven others who were selected with Mariye in 1999 from about 200 applicants was, by coincidence, fellow ER nurse Yvette Freeman. The AFI program for Mariye’s group began with a three-week seminar, traditionally held in spring.

“If you don’t know anything about filmmaking, it’s not enough training to make a short film,” she cautioned. “In my year we had a couple of film editors, writers, actors and a script supervisor. Everybody had different perspectives on the filmmaking process. None of us had directed before but we weren’t complete tyros.”

Mariye’s story was about an Asian Pacific American family facing pervasive racism and forced, in turn, to discriminate against blacks, still subject to segregation in Las Vegas in the late 1950s.

Initially Mariye harbored doubts about her ability to direct. “But once I got on the set and started my first shot, all my nervousness disappeared. ... I had gone through the movie with the D.P. [director of photography] and my first A.D. [assistant director] and knew where I wanted to shoot and how.

“Then it was just fun. It was exhilarating,” said Mariye, who made her movie a family affair — husband Boney James, a jazz musician, contributed to the soundtrack. As with the current workshop, the films were required to wrap by September. Then came the big moment, the premiere, without klieg lights but with ample tension.

“It was like a theater opening night, nerve-racking,” Mariye said. “The director usually stands in the back of the room, pacing, while everybody watches the film. ... It seemed more intimately soul-bearing than even acting.”

The film was well-reviewed and an award-winner at the Brussels Independent Film Festival and Nashville Independent Film Festival, among others. Mariye is seeking financing to make a theatrical version out of an expanded script.

In the meantime, she’s back for the ninth season of ER. Mariye good-naturedly acknowledges the work can be cut-and-dried: “‘BP — blood pressure — 80 over 60’ is a popular line,” she said with a laugh.

But it’s all part of the creative process, with her work as an actress made more enjoyable by her greater understanding of filmmaking, Mariye said. Besides, she and Freeman don’t check their new skills at the emergency room door.

“We play a game where we stand there and say, ‘All right, how do you think [the director’s] going to shoot this?’ We figure out how we would shoot it and then wait and see what the director does to see if we were right.

“Our directors will catch us and say, ‘Oh, great, two more directors. So, am I doing it right?’ ”