Three former Tritons and current filmmakers discuss their success in the industry
The San Diego Asian Film Festival hosts a great many interesting and powerful films from directors across the world — Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, even Iran. But sometimes it hosts films from much closer to home: Nearly a decade ago, San Diego-based Wong Fu Productions premiered their first feature film at this very festival. An online video production company, Wong Fu has produced dozens of videos and even a couple of feature films through the partnership of three men: Wesley Chan, Ted Fu and Philip Wang. The studio started right here at UCSD when the trio met as undergraduates during a video production class. Years later, and with many successful projects under their belt, the trio came back to campus for the San Diego Asian Film Festival. We sat down with them and asked them a few questions.
Guardian: You three have very much operated outside of the traditional, stereotypical norm of Hollywood and American filmmaking in general. Do you all feel that this was just a method of operating that worked for your situation, or is this the beginning of a new standard in filmmaking?
Ted Fu: I think filmmaking is about pushing the envelope, finding new ways to describe something, finding different ways to tell a story. Filmmaking, for the most part, runs parallel with technology and innovation. YouTube, or online streaming, is one of those innovations that caught on; it works well and is accessible to millions of people and, for the most part, free.
Philip Wang: I think at the beginning we really had no idea what online video was; we just knew that it was the only way we could get our work out there. Technically, we started making videos before YouTube was even around. We had our own website, and we bought bandwidth, and we uploaded our stuff to a server, and people had to download it. When YouTube came along we just thought: “Oh wow, free bandwidth.” And then it just so happened that community was forming, and people were finding us primarily through YouTube first. And now, it’s grown to be like the norm for consuming media throughout someone’s day, and I think that’s why it’s become this new direction of where filmmaking and creating content is going. We were just early adopters out of necessity; now we kind of see that, yes, this is the future.
Wesley Chan: I think … a new standard was developing, and that’s why streaming video was just beginning to get really big and popular. And also, the technology like smaller cameras, affordable cameras, equipment that was leveling the playing field for a lot of student filmmakers, amateur filmmakers … was becoming available to everyone.
G: In the past, you had some trouble with the idea that a film starring a male Asian lead wouldn’t be profitable. Have you run into this attitude elsewhere? How do you respond to people that hold that attitude?
PW: I think an Asian male lead now can be much more accepted than it was even three to four years ago. If you just look at media now and what’s on TV and the number of Asian roles and how Asians are portrayed, [it] is much more positive than it was. There’s a lot more opportunities — because we kind of say “being Asian is kind of cool now,” and that hasn’t been a concept that we haven’t heard in a while.
WC: In terms of mainstream Hollywood, there’s still a long ways to go for any Asian — the work is tough out there in the mainstream. But technology has created niche markets, and it’s allowed people to find what they want to support, and it’s allowed the creators to find an audience. So now we have an audience that’s very open to us and wants us to have Asian leads, and so now we can say, “Yeah, we’re going to make a movie that has that, and we don’t have to abide by the rules of mainstream necessarily” like we did with “Sleep Shift,” when someone else was producing it. Now we’re going to produce it ourselves; we’re going to make those decisions — and I think this is the beginning of a future of that happening more often — as more filmmakers and more creative people are going into places of power, we can basically call the shots that we want.
PW: We try to diversify the stories that we have, and […] we want to work with people that have a similar attitude as us [who] just want to tell a good story and be colorblind to the characters.
G: You’ve returned to UCSD for a homecoming during this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival. Your first major, feature-length film debuted here seven years ago. That’s almost a decade. Would your younger selves at that festival have believed you if you told them where you’d be now?
TF: My younger self would quickly move on to more important questions after he realized that I’m from the future: He’ll probably ask me what stocks to invest in and if I remember any lottery numbers. Come to think of it, I think I’m going to try to memorize at least one jackpot number in the event this happens one day.
PW: It’s been a long time since our first submission to the SDAFF, and it played a huge part in our development, and it was a huge stepping-stone for us. I think if my younger self [was] to hear where we are now, it’d just be like, “Good job, you’ve kept it going, and you’ve grown.”
WC: Yeah, we’ve never been comfortable with where we are. Even now, wherever we’re at, whatever “success” we’ve achieved, we’re still not comfortable, and we want to move forward. So hopefully there’s a seven-years-older version of us that’s asking, “Are you proud of where we took you guys in seven years?” and hopefully we can be proud of them, too. But I think it’s awesome that we get to come back to really the place where it all began, and I remember going to that first festival and sitting at that table and watching the awards being given out and thinking “wow” — it’s pretty crazy, for sure.
PW: It’s been a very long and exciting journey, and we’re happy that we’ve had our supporters and our fans — to even say that we have fans is still weird to me now — but to say that we were on this journey with them is something that I’m really happy about.
