exclaim magazine : wayne wang on pamelyn

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Wayne Wang

By Allan Tong

It’s hard enough getting one film to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), but Wayne Wang succeeded with two. The Hollywood auteur, if that isn’t a contradiction, unveiled and , two low-budget character studies. The godfather of Asian-American cinema, Wang has walked both sides of the filmmaking fence: making Hollywood fare such as and , and alternating with his indie films such as these two. Wang also appeared in a fine documentary,

that unspooled at the festival. During TIFF, Wang sat down with Exclaim! to talk about his new films, Asians in Hollywood, and Chinese youth culture.

I think it's gotten worse. There are more jobs for people, more roles and more executives, but then you look at a film like , which is back to the days of Fu Manchu.

Yeah. You look at

— it was pretty strange that it was all Chinese [actors] playing Japanese as geishas, which is very specific — and trying to speak English through all of it. If you look at all the so-called good roles, there's still basically Gong Li — who is in the more classic mode — then Zhang Ziyi who is the fast kung-fu woman. It's still stereotypical. There are many opportunities, but I don't think much has changed. You try to do a more realistic down-to-earth film about Asians and it's pretty much impossible.

Hollywood Chinese,

I don't know if they would really help. One out of ten would really have the passion and commitment to make something really interesting, but most of the other ones have to do what the studio wants them to do. If you look at even co-productions with China it's so difficult with their censorship, so that doesn't help. I don't know. I wonder if a film like today would get made or not.

This day and age is different. The business [Hollywood] aims at pretty big-budget, action, special-effects films. The smaller, so-called character-driven are not that easy to make. People tend not to make a film for $10 million or less anymore, because advertising is so expensive now. It takes $20-, $30-million to put a film out there. Who would push an all-Asian cast film? Maybe I'm too cynical, but my instincts tell me that's where things are at.

The Princess of Nebraska

The U.S. doesn't have a distributor yet and we're still working on that. There's some interest and we are figuring out what is the best way to approach it.

I did this other film called , which was written by Yiyun Li in a collection of short stories, and the other short story I liked from the book was . So when I finished

I felt like I wanted to do something a little freer and delve with a younger, brasher, more recent generation of people from China. In

there is the old father in his 60s, and a doctor in her 40s. I'm intrigued by the young women from China who are 18, 19 or in their 20s. I've been meeting lots of them and finding them quite different from even my own perceptions of what Chinese women are.

In attitudes, there is some similarity, but the difference basically is during the Cultural Revolution [when] a lot of things just got destroyed. These kids grow up with very little roots — cultural, moral, religious or spiritual. They're pretty much into making money and consumerism, which isn't that different from our generation here. In the movie she says, “I love Paris Hilton.” That's the model that they have, but they're even more cut off in my mind. That's why I find them really interesting. And they're really aggressively searching for Western culture and Western men and, like I said, consumerism. Labels are really big with them.

The film focuses on her 24 hours in San Francisco and trying to find something to hang on to emotionally.

She's a newcomer. She speaks English really well. Her own character is in some ways similar to the character I'm looking for. In that sense she was almost a perfect fit.

I found her on YouTube. Somebody said to me you should check this girl out. There were a bunch of clips on her and in one she was letting loose in a really free way. I wanted somebody very different from Ling Li, somebody more Americanized, and Pamelyn fit the bill. In a way she reminded me of Maggie Cheung with whom I've worked with in .

It is. We had a scrīpt, but we didn't always follow it to a tee. We wanted to be freer and go from the gut.

It was shot in HD on a smaller camera, the Panasonic. It's very painterly, different from my other film, which was more classic and traditional.

Absolutely, we were moving around a lot. We never put it on a tripod. We handheld it and moved it so we could be more with the actors.

Like the short story, I didn't want to say that she definitely had an abortion or didn't. I wanted to the audience to go what the character had gone through and make their own decision about what she might or might not do. In a way what you don't want is a clear answer. It's an emotional journey for her.

At the same time you have a lot of female executives who go cuckoo over Chow Yun-Fat or Ken Nakamura, who find them really sexy, or Jet Li for that matter. I find it works both ways. There is a little more of a tendency in the white executives to say, “Oh, Zhang Ziyi is so sexy! We should use her.” But I've always heard female executives go, “Oh, Chow Yun-Fat is so sexy we should cast him.” Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie probably go through the same kind of stereotype too — they're being slotted into something very narrow. Myself included: after the

I was the “women's director” or Asian-related subjects. So it's hard to get out of that box. Every time they [Hollywood] tend to box you in. After I became the romantic comedy guy.

I have to keep moving between a lot of different things. If I don't I easily fall into one trap. I really have to consciously push myself to go from one to the other.

Which is good. It's important to me. So the next may be Asian porn. (laughs)

Joy Luck Club

That movie isn't about the males. What I portrayed was pretty truthful for the men. They're not stereotypes. In that sense I don't apologize for it.