Cinevue

Cinevue: Tell me about your short film ROBOT GIRL (2002)…

It was really experimental. It was about a girl feeling a bit numb, and she felt so numb that she thought she was a robot. Like an actual robot. And in the last scene, she pops out wires—a stop-action shot of wires. It was kind of fun…I learned how to do stop action. Have you ever seen TETSUO, THE IRON MAN?

CineVue: No—wasn’t it scary? (laughs)

Well, but it has a lot of stop action shots in it.

CineVue: No, I love stop-motion.

So we have wires come out of her at the end, and it begs the question as to whether she’s really a robot or not. ROBOT GIRL went to a few festivals. It didn’t have the impact that SURPLUS (2000) or TIE A YELLOW RIBBON has had.

CineVue: And SURPLUS was the first…

SURPLUS was the first short film…

CineVue: And what prompted you to get into filmmaking? Are you a lover of film, and you wanted to…? How did you feel that it would express—

I was in Paris, living in Paris, working as a journalist. And I loved watching film, and Paris is the city of film. There’s a cinema theater every block you walk on. So I went to a lot of cinema and learned a lot about films in Paris by watching it. And then I was thinking, gosh, I love journalism, it’s a good field—you know, it’s a solid field, and thank God I’ve had journalism. Because otherwise, a lot of filmmakers and artists, they work in cafés … and are doing whatever they can to pay the bills. But I was lucky enough to get into journalism, where I have a trade. … So my income, it wasn’t as drastic as people working in cafés and so far I’ve been very thankful that I’ve been able to pay my bills through journalism.

So I was working in Paris, and was going to all these films, and now I really would like to make a film. How am I going to do that? And I was thinking, “God, I cannot go through another year of school,” because I already have two Master’s degrees.

CineVue: Oh, you do? What are they?

I have a master’s degree in international relations, and another master’s in labor economics. Anyway, so then I was like, “How am I going to learn how to do this?” So I decided just to move to New York. By that time I had been living a long time in Europe, and I was missing the States a little bit. So I moved to New York, and just started from the ground up. I worked for other people for free. I didn’t care if I was paid or not. I was passionate about it. And so I carefully observed how everything worked on a shoot, and then I met some people and through those connections—one young girl, even younger than me, told me we should work on a film.

I had only about $5000. And she said, “Oh yeah, we can make a film for $5000 production.” But I wanted to shoot on film, I wanted to shoot on 16—you know, 16mm film. And they go, “We can do it.” Now that I think about it, no one in her right mind would have said that. We were both naive. We shot it and everyone worked for free: all the actors, all the crew. The only thing that we paid for was all the equipment, the food, the transportation—all that cost. Then SURPLUS did so well at the [San Francisco International] Asian American Film Festival, and even at some of the bigger festivals like Raindance in London, and it showed at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival, and [it even] showed in Seoul, Korea at an art gallery. It’s being distributed by the Center for Asian American Media. I’m trying to see if I can get it distributed by television at some point, even though its been seven years. But I’m hoping to show SURPLUS somewhere, because I think it still has some … timelessness about it, right?

CineVue: Definitely, and it has very strong impact. Was that a film that you had wanted to make? From the outset was there a film in mind that you had envisioned creating?

I didn’t have any training, so I didn’t know how to write a script. It was really funny, before I left [Europe for the United States] I went to visit a friend in Norway, and I had these visions in my head. And I wrote SURPLUS in two or three days, in Norway. It was a short story though—it wasn’t a script. It was a short story of barely any dialogue. So I’m sure a lot of people who have seen a lot of traditional scripts saw my script saying, “What the hell is this?” But there was hardly any dialog, so it was all action. So we shot it in my weird format and it was fine, you know? Now that I’ve done TIE A YELLOW RIBBON…now I know what the proper structure is, and how all scenes are supposed to be done. It was only after. I’m still learning too; filmmaking is a constant learning process.

CineVue: What was surprising about SURPLUS—I mean it was a pleasant surprise—was the amount of compassion that you,that the film, shows for the father who abandons the daughter. Is that something that you had to work through yourself, this arrival to compassion?

If you noticed, in TIE A YELLOW RIBBON all characters are portrayed, I believe, compassionately. Because I believe human beings are both good and bad. You know, they do bad things, but that doesn’t necessarily make them evil people. The older I get, the more I see that it’s through ignorance—not knowing what to do—that people do what they do. They can’t see any other avenue, any other choice.…If I have time to develop all the characters, I’m always going to give the bad and the good of a person. Just like in TIE A YELLOW RIBBON, all the characters do some really bad things, but then you’re sympathizing with them too. You empathize with them. Bea constantly calls Sandy names, but then you care about Bea when she gets into trouble. I think human beings are fallible; we are not perfect. I like to portray all of my characters with that dimension.

CineVue: TIE A YELLOW RIBBON, if I’m recalling correctly, was prompted by your discovery of the statistic that Asian American women aged 15–24 have the highest rates of suicide for that age group.

I was already writing some short visionary kinds of things, very little dialog, very visual scenes, and short stories about the Asian American—young Asian American woman—stuff, which I’ve never really seen on the screen, or television, or anywhere. And so then I came upon that statistic—I was just doing some research—and I said, “Wow.” Then I talked to a lot of people like me, and we are all different, and [yet] there was some common thread, a common theme that I couldn’t ignore. So I wondered if we had some sort of common psyche in experiencing things here in the United States. When I was growing up, at least—I think maybe things have changed nowadays, there are role models like Michelle Kwan and Lucy Liu and [Sandra Oh]—all images were of white women or African American women, and there was nothing there for us to aspire to, other than that we looked wrong [or] different. I also grew up in a small town, where there were a lot of racist comments constantly, every day. So that really made me depressed, for a long time, and I think I was probably part of that statistic, that between the ages of 15–24 we have one of the highest rates of depression in the country.

I can’t speak for every Asian American woman, but I know that, talking to people who have grown up in the heartland—not in L.A. or New York—it was a very isolating…you felt disconnected from the community and from society. And I just wanted to explore our place in American society. What are we? I mean, this is why I reference [the song] “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”…I try to reference a lot of the Americana, you know, tying the yellow ribbon and the Andrew Wyeth painting (Christina’s World), which is the epitome of Americana. Where do we fit in all that?

CineVue: Do you have any insights into or theories on what causes depression in Asian American women? You mentioned racism—

I definitely do not want to speak for (everyone)—I would assume family pressure, societal pressure…we are the model minority, you know, to be perfect. I know that I’ve been criticized in my film for portraying two of the characters very stereotypically but that was my point.

CineVue: Which characters? (SPOILER ALERT)

Beatrice and Sandy. But that was my purpose, which was to explore stereotypes of Asian American women. Bea is the perfect “A” student—[her] family wants her to be a doctor. That seems to be a common thread that I hear a lot from Asian American women: Oh yeah, my mom wants me to be a lawyer or a doctor. And then Sandy is the meek Asian character. You know, the model minority, Beatrice—she dies. … And so I’m hoping that people don’t take it just as, Oh, those characters are so stereotypical, but I’m hoping that other people might see that that was the purpose of those characters [and] recognize the stereotype [as deliberate]. (END SPOILER ALERT)

CineVue: How did you come through your own depression? What is your own path—is filmmaking part of it, as a creative catharsis?

I think maturity. It’s a definite bonus…more than filmmaking. To tell you the truth, filmmaking will cause more problems…it is a very hard, hard, hard field to go into. And if I [wanted a creative catharsis] I should have chosen painting or something; not something that requires 200 people to work with you. So I wouldn’t say filmmaking is catharsis. I would say it’s just [about] lightening life. Sometimes you just have to tell yourself, “Okay, I am blue today because I worked a lot. It’s not because of any other reason in my life to be sad about.”

So when I was young, obviously the racism was really depressing me. You know, racism in my community was—at one point I couldn’t bear it, I was always hanging my head or something. I was the only Asian in town. I think just getting out of that community helped me, to see that there was something else, an alternative life. I also come from a very dysfunctional family, so the combination of my dysfunctional family and my community being the way it was, it was very stifling and depressing. So I got out of it. I left my hometown. I haven’t gone back since. …

CineVue: So, what’s next?

Well, I’m developing some ideas with somebody, and I’m hopefully going to be writing and finishing the script this year. And if everything falls into place, get the financing and shoot next year. But you never know how things turn out. Life is a constant surprise.

CineVue: Is your next film also going to deal with these issues of adoption, or Asian American women?

The producer that I’m working with, she doesn’t want me to do that because she wants me to expand to something else. But I do have a project that I think could be absolutely great, and it is another aspect of the adoption phenomenon. SURPLUS isn’t really about adoption, it’s about child abandonment. And it’s sort of like a stairway: connected or tied together loosely. TIE A YELLOW RIBBON obviously has a Korean adoptee lead character. This other project I would love to do, but people are constantly counseling me to do another, very, very different, more commercial project. But you know, again, if someone tells me, here, I can make $10 million to work another Korean adoption story, I would do it! (Laughs) I think it would be fascinating. I have a really good idea for one. And it’s nothing connected with any traditional mother, or birth mother/family search. My films are always a little bit psychological, and a little edgier than most mainstream films, I think.

Rebecca Klassen is an editor of Hyphen magazine. During her senior year of high school, she was the only Asian American in a couple of fur trade rendezvous historical reenactments in Minnesota—she pretended to be French Canadian.