Quentin Lee on "Ethan Mao"
06.17 - Posted by Editor
Interview by Joan Huang
Quentin Lee's latest feature film, ETHAN MAO, opens Friday, June 17 at the Imaginasian in New York City. The film premiered at the AFI Film Fest in November 2004 and has since been making the festival rounds around the world. The new drama-thriller is about a dysfunctional family held hostage in its own home by the teenage son who was kicked out for being gay. AAF caught up with Quentin who has been traveling with the film's limited theatrical runs in Hong Kong, San Francisco and in the next few months New York, Taipei and Los Angeles.
ETHAN MAO made its NY premiere at the New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival on June 4 and then opens in NYC on June 17 at the Imaginasian. It'll also open August 12 in Los Angeles at a Laemmle's theater. Check out the website to see if its playing near you and look for it on DVD in the fall of 2005. ethanmao.com
Q: What inspired you to do ETHAN MAO?
A: Because of a small argument with my stepmom, my little sister ended up leaving home and got into some trouble on her own. That incident has left a emotional mark with me ever since. In my imagination, she was kicked out of the house. I have always loved the teen rebel genre, and had always wanted to make a teen rebel film. Inspired by my little sister's experience, I put myself in her shoes and wondered what would have happened if I had been a teenager and gay and if my parents hadn't been accepting and kicked me out of the house. That was pretty much the starting point of "Ethan Mao."
Then, I had always wanted to make a suspense thriller, especially a domestic suspense thriller where a family was taken hostage. So I came up with the rest of "Ethan Mao" where Ethan ended up going home to get back some of his belongings and accidentally bumped into his family who were supposed to be away... and everything (of course) went wrong.
"Ethan Mao" became a coming-of-age story of a (gay Asian) teenager and a suspense thriller with a satiric edge of black comedy. I wanted it to be both edgy and humanistic, hence a very ambitious adventure from the start.
Q: Can you talk about how long the whole process was for you- from initial idea, to pre-production, to production to post?
A: I wrote the draft in 2 weeks while waiting for "Campus Ghost Story" to get made. Then there was at least six months that I hadn't gone back to touch the script. When I realized that "Campus" was not moving as fast as I wanted and I was itching to make a film, I pulled "Ethan" out of my hard drive, did a few drafts of rewriting and started looking for financing.
I was lucky enough to get "Ethan" finance pretty quickly from one investor because the budget was so small. I then got my producer Stanley Yung, a fellow UCLA grad, involved in helping me to produce the project. Together, we got the production rolling, prepped for 4 weeks and shot for 3 weeks. Post took another few months.
Q: Why did you choose to use both film and DV?
Coming from an experimental video background when I started out, I have always loved mixed media. One of my early film shorts at UCLA "Matricide" mixes Hi8 video, 16MM color and B&W film. In "Ethan," I wanted to create a stylistic dichotomy between his street/outside world and his home life.
I wanted his life outside on the street to be immediate, frenetic but also warm and intimate, so I chose to use digital video to shoot those footages which made up about 1/3 of the film. On the other hand, I wanted his life inside the house, which was pretty much the thriller part and 2/3 of the film, to have a very filmic, constructed and Greek Tragedy sensibility, so I decided to shoot it on 35MM film.
Because of this concept, we ended up being able to save on the budget too... a sort of perfect synthesis between style, content and economy.
Q: This is your first film exploring the relationships of an entire family instead of a film exploring only relationships between lovers and friends. What was it like working with different age ranges of actors as well as responses from your own family about the film?
Yeah, I guess looking back at my past works, the parents have been deliberately missing. I have been more into the kids' stories and shied away from the typical intergenerational drama of immigrants' parents and children. I have often found those Asian American dramas to be uninteresting albeit real.
The exciting thing about "Ethan Mao" is that I get to portray a wacky and dysfunctional family with funky and crazy characters like the dad who's emotionally numb yet violent and the stepmom, not unlike my mom and stepmom, is a glamorous, crazy, comical yet tragic character.
When I initially screened it in Hong Kong for some industry people and my mom, she cried all through out the movie. When she came out of the screening room, still sobbing, she patted me on the shoulder and said it was my best film and she really liked it. I was flabbergasted and impressed.
My mom was an extremely difficult person to please and she totally didn't get "Shopping for Fangs." I was happy that "Ethan Mao" touched her. My dad has always been supportive. He saw "Drift" at the theaters in Vancouver and said he really liked it. He also thought "Ethan Mao" was his favorite so far.
It's funny that I've been quite immune to outside critics because I have been "criticized" since the first short I made when I was 21. Then coming to my own family, I have always been sensitive about my parents looking at my works. I've come a long way with "Ethan Mao," which was a bit of a metaphor for slowly coming to terms with my own parents.
Q: The film has premiered in Hong Kong already and will premiere in Taiwan. How do Asian audiences respond differently than American audiences?
I'm really happy that Asian audiences really dig the movie. It's really been hard for Asian American movies to crossover to Asia (or outside the U.S.) because Asians have always found Asian American stuff to be a bit trite or too specifically Asian American. Because I'm an Asian immigrant, I sort of understand both sides (Asians in Asia and Asian Americans) and I experiment with pleasuring and annoying both audiences.
Q: Was there anything you learned from your shooting your past films that you used while making this film that you can share with other filmmakers?
Be financially frugal but artistically passionate and experimental. Ultimately, film is a business and really is about producing the best product from the lowest (or reasonable) budget so as to maximize profit and minimize risk. At the same time, film is also an ultimate expression of art. The challenge is how to do both: have the cake and eat it too.
Q: Where does the film go next? Will people be able to find it on DVD?
The film is still going to various film festivals and will be out on video/DVD from TLA Releasing in the fall. But before that, we're taking it out ourselves in the theatrical markets of San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
Q: What is next for you?
Who knows... hopefully "Campus Ghost Story" and for sure a horror or a thriller. Horror thriller is a genre that I grew up with and have always been passionate about.
