From Computer Science to Film: Alice Wu's Journey to Making 'Saving Face' - Prof. S. R. Ri, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Linguistics

Download From Computer Science to Film: Alice Wu's Journey to Making 'Saving Face' - Prof. S. R. Ri and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Linguistics in PDF only on Docsity! Face Time: San Jose director Alice Wu’s first feature, Saving Face, isn’t big or Greek, but it is one funny film By Richard von Busack Metroactive May 25, 2005 1. Alice Wu was born in Kaiser Hospital in Santa Clara, the daughter of academics who escaped the Cultural Revolution in China. 2. She was always a reader. “Secretly, I always wanted to be a writer, but I never wrote anything for public consumption. I didn’t think anyone would care. I distinctly remember my mom saying to me, ‘Look, you know if you prove a theorem, no one will say you’re wrong, but if you write a book, they could just decide not to buy it.’ Very sage advice from a parent who knew I’d have a student loan to pay off some day. I was good at math and science, so I declared computer science.” 3. Even years after she left the computer world, Wu still calls herself a geek. “With film you have to be a geek, to take care of all the details. Working with film you also have to be able to work with a lot of different people, and that’s something else I learned in high tech.” 4. But despite studying computers, she continued to be a film fan, catching movies in Palo Alto, and writing. 5. “I’d always written short stories for myself,” she recalls. “Not that I took writing classes, because I’d sooner eat glass than show somebody what I wrote. 6. “When I finished grad school, I went to Seattle. I took one of those all-consuming jobs at Microsoft. I had a real good job in multimedia publishing, right on the cusp the Internet boom. At the end of my time there, the company was trying to figure out its strategy with my division. I don’t think we made Bill Gates a dime in the entire time I was there. 7. “There were really about two or three months where no one in my group had anything to do. It was a void. I didn’t want to write a marketing report to my boss on a product I knew would never come out.” 8. At this time, Wu took a writing class and began a novel. Under the advice of the class’s teacher, a film producer, she changed the work into a screenplay. The teacher liked it and urged her to move to Hollywood or New York to get the film made. Since she had enough money saved to live cheap for some time, Wu headed for Brooklyn. 9. “I gave myself five years,” she says. “The first four years, every door slammed in my face, which is expected. Here, my story’s not unique in any way. The first three years I spent learning how to work in the field. The fourth year is when I was talking to producers. And everyone was like, ‘You are never going to get this film made. It’s Chinese, it’s lesbian and it’s half in Mandarin with subtitles. Could you make it Latino? Latino is big. If you’re going to have to be ethnic, make it Latino.’” 1 1 “Face Time: San Jose director Alice Wu’s first feature, ‘Saving Face,’ isn’t big or Greek, but it is one funny film,” By Richard von Busack. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.25.05/wu-0521.html Wu-ing Success: Saving Face Filmmaker Happy to See Love Conquer By Sara Michelle Fetters Moviefreak.com 1. Former Microsoft employee Alice Wu never intended to live in Redmond and work at Microsoft her whole life. Not that she doesn’t love the Pacific Northwest; “It’s so beautiful here,” said Wu. “Every time you come back the sheer beauty of the area just gets to you. It’s inspiring.” No, living in Washington State was never a negative for Alice; it was just that she knew her dreams were going to take her places working as a computer engineer for a software powerhouse never could. 2. Still, finding the funding for a lesbian romantic comedy is hard enough, but making one within the world of New York’s diverse Chinese community had to be next to impossible. “When I left Microsoft I gave myself five years to get this script off the ground,” said Wu. “I’d originally intended [Saving Face] to be a novel but ended up writing it as a screenplay instead. It just seemed so funny, vibrant, so different and alive than anything else I’d seen. So I went to New York and said I’d make this movie in five years or not make it at all.” 3. “It almost didn’t happen. While a lot of people loved the script, it was really hard to get them to want to help get the funding to make it happen. In their eyes there just weren’t a lot of commercial possibilities. [Will Smith’s production partner] Teddy Zee finally helped us get things going. It was his second pass on the project and he was able to help secure us enough to start filming. There was a window for the project and they were willing to roll the dice. We shot the thing over 27 days. No re-shoots, no second chances, things were lined up and we were suddenly off and running. The funniest thing: the five-year deadline I’d set for myself hit the day after the shoot.” 4. Now that it is all over and Saving Face is a success, wasn’t the filmmaker more than a bit worried as to what her own family would think of it all? “It was kind of nerve-wracking to show it to my own mother,” said Wu. “My own coming out experience was very similar in some ways to that depicted in the film, but even though my mom was very quiet on the subject of my being gay, she’s still always been supportive. It might have taken ten years and a bit of estrangement, but we still love one another and even when she was having trouble understanding, mom always only wanted what was best for me. That said, I had to be really clear with her about the subject matter [of the film]. I told her, ‘When this comes out, all your friends will know.’ All she said to me was, ‘This is what I want for you.’ God, that’s love!” 2 2 “Wu-ing Success: Saving Face Filmmaker Happy to See Love Conquer” http://www.moviefreak.com/features/interviews/alicewu.htm