‘Robot Stories’ Comes to Life
February 28, 2003
On Sept. 10, 2001, writer/director Greg Pak stepped onto the New York set of Robot Stories — his debut feature film — for his very first day of shooting. We all know what happened the next day. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, many New York-based film and TV productions shut down, but that wasn’t an option for Greg. He knew he had to keep shooting.
Greg gave the cast and crew the option of dropping out of the project. Although some roles were recast because of scheduling changes caused by Sept. 11, everyone else opted to stay on. The dedication and loyalty he inspires in the people who work with him was clearly evident.
On Sept. 11, actress Tamlyn Tomita (The Joy Luck Club, Picture Bride) was 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, watching the tragedy unfold on television. She was scheduled to leave later that week for New York to play the role of Marcia in Robot Stories. But after the terrorist attacks, she was justifiably concerned about getting on a plane and flying into the city that was Ground Zero.
“Greg asked me if I still wanted to do the film,” Tamlyn says. “I asked, ‘Are you still doing it?’ And he was so enthusiastic and passionate, which put me at ease. I said, ‘As long as you’re OK, I’m in. Absolutely.’ ”
Now, a year-and-a-half later, Robot Stories is finished and currently making the film festival rounds and garnering accolades (it will be featured at this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on March 13).
Robot Stories is a science fiction drama but unlike much of today’s science fiction cinema, which is mostly special effects with minimal narrative and character development, Robot Stories doesn’t insult the intelligence. It is just as concerned with creating genuine emotion as it is with creating a believable “fantasy” world.
If the idea of an APA science fiction film with robots at its core sounds unconventional, Greg Pak’s background is just as unconventional and atypical of what you’d expect from a filmmaker.
He grew up in Texas as a hapa child in a mostly white suburban neighborhood. Although he describes his childhood as “great,” Greg acknowledges that the racial taunts he experienced as a young boy fostered a commitment to racial justice, which led him to major in political science at Yale. After graduation, he returned to his home state to work on Ann Richards’ first gubernatorial campaign. After Richards’ election, Greg went to work in her Office of Education Policy, then ended up at Oxford studying history as a Rhodes Scholar. Although his experiences up to this point might be typical of an overachieving APA kid, there were no obvious signs that Greg would switch careers to become a filmmaker.
“But I was missing something,” he says. “I’d always written fiction, drawn cartoons, taken photos and done some kind of drama. But now, out in the real world, I was doing none of those things, and life was a little empty.”
In order to help fill this void, Greg got involved in a student filmmaking organization while at Oxford and realized that his life’s passion lay in the world of celluloid.
Greg started honing his craft by making short films that brought him acclaim and awards (including the Student Academy Award for his documentary Fighting Grandpa). But he was unable to get his ambitious (i.e. expensive) feature screenplays off the ground and realized he would need to come up with a feature he could make for a low budget.
“Now over the years I’d written a number of short screenplays with kind of a Twilight Zone-ish, Ray Bradbury-esque twist to them,” he says. “I suddenly realized the stories fit together thematically and might work as an anthology picture … and eventually Robot Stories was born.”
One theme that runs throughout all four stories is that of loss. When Sept. 11 happened, Greg was shooting the “Robot Fixer” segment, which deals most directly with this theme of loss. In that story, a mother (Wai Ching Ho) has to come to terms with the death of her son with the help of her daughter (Cindy Cheung). In the wake of the tragedy, the emotions explored in the piece took on an immediacy beyond what was already in the script.
“I was enormously comforted coming to work every day to work on that kind of material,” Greg remembers.
With the threat of war looming and the level of anxiety and uncertainty arguably as high as it was during those days and weeks following Sept. 11, audiences may find themselves reacting to Robot Stories in the same way Greg did while making it. And that kind of comfort is something we could definitely use.
For more information, go to www.robotstories.net.
Philip W. Chung is co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles. His next project is the Asian American horror film Children in the Mirror.
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