On the 40th anniversary of his breakthrough drama, ‘Chan Is Missing,’ the auteur says a new generation of Asian American filmmakers must make more challenging work.
The Asian American filmmaker Wayne Wang in Berkeley, Calif., March 26, 2022. Sitting in a booth in a dive bar in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the same one where he shot scenes for his 1985 gem, “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart,” Wayne Wang was still frustrated.
One would be hard-pressed to find any filmmaker who not only daringly chronicled Chinese life in a time when it was unthinkable in American cinema but also parlayed all that into one of the more eclectic careers in Hollywood, that includes two entries on the National Film Registry. There are the Hong Kong films and the New York films ; the near career-ending erotic picture ; the pure Hollywood period ; and the return to his culturally specific indie roots .
A: I didn’t think like that. I just wanted to make an interesting, complex film. More what the Chinese and the Chinese American community is, which includes the new immigrants. It was more that than identity. Because mainstream America had no idea who we were.And yet the film is adamant about not trying to offer a neat depiction of who or what the community is. It feels unencumbered by the idea of making a political statement.
A: Absolutely. People were calling from Hollywood, and I knew I had to grab that energy pretty quickly. And that energy wasn’t so much “Chinese American films are really going to do well for us.” But that was also when I said, between “Chan,” “Dim Sum,” “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” “Joy Luck Club,” I’ve got to do something else. Otherwise I’m going to get locked into this one box. I’d been working on a script with Paul Auster, “Smoke.
I really respect [Hurt], but he’s a nut case in some ways. Throughout the first half of the shoot, we got to be pretty good friends. Then we had three days off, and he came back and had a football helmet on. I went to put my hands on his shoulders, and he said, “What are you doing? Are you trying to push me down the stairs?” So he turned like that. And the football helmet, he said, “I need to protect myself today; you’re going to hit me.
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