VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS presents
An Interview with Georgia Lee
By Diana Lin

Can’t get enough of RED DOORS? In an interview with VC, director Georgia Lee gives an in-depth account of the exhausting but ultimately rewarding process by which RED DOORS was created. Find out about Georgia’s evolution from Harvard biochem major to corporate consultant to up-and-coming filmmaker and how the movie reflects her own soul-searching. The award-winning feature, which has won the Best Narrative Feature award at the Tribeca Film Festival and Best Ensemble at CineVegas, will screen again on July 15 as a part of OutFest. VC and OutFest will be presenters.     From your biography, it indicates that you graduated from Harvard with a biochem degree. How did this lead to your current career movie making, and where did you learn the ins and outs of directing?   I have always been a science geek and originally wanted to become a molecular biologist/chemist like my father. I pretty much spent my summers working in research labs and reading back issues of NATURE. But at Harvard, I started to fall in love with film. I began to select courses revolving around literature, art, and cinema. However, I think that because of my cultural and social background, I never seriously considered pursuing a career in the arts. My parents were already mortified when I decided not to apply to medical school and go into management consulting instead. Back then, I thought I was quite the rebel to blaze a non-science trail into the business world! While I was working for McKinsey & Company in New York, I used my free time to explore the thriving indie film scene in the city. I finally got up the courage to take a summer crash class in film at NYU. I have said this many times before, but that course really changed my life. I was a ravenous, starved kid in a candy shop. I was introduced to film theory, to a camera, to celluloid (I remember catching my breath when I actually held my FIRST ever developed film rolls!), to lighting theory, to editing, etc etc. I would stay in the Steenbeck edit suites until early mornings, hunched over splicing and taping. I felt that some dormant part of my brain had been suddenly awakened. I was fortunate that my first short film from that NYU class was seen by Martin Scorsese who then graciously took me under his wing on the set of GANGS OF NEW YORK. I learned so much from watching first-hand how such a master of the craft creates films. He encouraged me to continue to make shorts, saying that the best way to develop and hone your craft is to keep on working and creating. I continued to make shorts on the side and get involved in the New York film scene while trying to manage a full time business career at McKinsey. I actually remember the first film festival I was ever invited to attend. Mike Kang (who recently made a very special film called THE MOTEL and who at the time was the short film programmer) selected THE BIG DISH to be part of New York’s Asian American Film Festival. I was so terribly excited. It was the first time that something I made would be seen by an audience! I think that I will always be grateful to Mike for taking a chance on me and for having such good taste! About a year and a half ago, I finally realized that I could not take the next step and make a feature film unless I devoted myself fully to the effort. I dropped out of Harvard Business School (where I had enrolled at the insistence of my parents) and moved to my actor/producer friend Mia Riverton’s kitchen in LA and wrote RED DOORS. I had met Mia in college and along with Jane Chen (another college buddy), the three of us banded together to make our first feature film!   What has your experience travelling the film festival circuit been like?   We have just started our festival tour. I couldn’t have asked for a better kick-off than to premiere RED DOORS at the Tribeca Film Festival. It is Jane’s and my home town, and the film’s story is set in New York. And of course we were thrilled to walk away with the jury prize for Best Narrative Feature in our competition! We then showed the film as the Closing Night presentation for the VC FILMFEST. It was the first time we had a predominantly Asian audience. I would say that one of the most rewarding things about the filmmaking process is to experience an audience watching the film - to know that they are feeling the humor, pathos, confusion, emotion, etc. that the characters on screen are going through. All of our audiences have warmly embraced the film but I would say that the VC audience was one of the most enthusiastic. We just returned from a whirlwind trip to the CineVegas Film Festival, where we were thrilled to receive the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Acting (one of only two juried awards for the entire festival of over 60 films). Our next showing will be at OutFest in Los Angeles on July 15. So it has been an amazing kickoff and I’m very excited to take the film around the fest circuit and share it with the world.     Is Red Doors your first feature? What was it like moving from shorts to feature-length films?   Yes, RED DOORS is my first full-length feature. I would say that the best approximation of the jump from shorts to a feature would be going from elementary school directly to college! Shorts definitely gave me a firm foundation in storytelling, cinematography, working with actors, editing, etc. But the expansion in both scale and scope that a feature film demands is quite overwhelming to the point where it’s almost its own beast. From a creative standpoint, I would say the writing and editing processes are probably the most different. Telling a good story in five to ten minutes is a very different thing than doing so in two hours. I often feel that the short is a different format altogether (related but still distinct) than the feature—like poems are related to but different than novels. And I know this sounds funny, but I now realize that I have to physically be in shape to make a feature whereas it didn’t matter at all on a short! The prolonged schedule of a feature (shooting for about a month and prepping for a few months prior to production, etc.) demands a lot of emotional and physical stamina. There’s so much to learn and keep track of in directing a feature that I definitely advise filmmakers to make as many shorts as they can before they launch into their first full-length movie. I learned so much from my shorts and RED DOORS benefited in some way from each and every short I have ever made.   You’ve said that Red Doors is loosely based on your own experiences. Did some parts of the movie ring especially true to you when you wrote the scenes?   RED DOORS is a very personal story that is loosely inspired from people in my life (friends, family, family friends, colleagues, etc.). Samantha Wong is probably the character whose personality and storyline most closely resemble anyone’s in real life, as her story to find her true self loosely mirrors my own personal and professional soul-searching. I do have two younger sisters as well. However, the younger sisters in the film are much more obliquely inspired by a number of other people in my life rather than by my real-life sisters (although the youngest character Katie Wong is played by my actual baby sister Kathy Shao-Lin Lee). Like Ed Wong, my own father is very interested in philosophy and Buddhism. However, my own father has not yet retired and is emotionally more in touch than our film’s hero (and he’s never run off to a monastery!). I think that it’s safe to say that some dimension of all the film’s characters are inspired by people in my real life but there is no direct one-to-one mapping. I suppose the parts of the film that resonate with me most are the home videos. We actually used real videos from my childhood and interwove them into the fictional narrative of the Wongs. Since the emotional core of the film is inspired by real life, watching the home videos in that context is often very overwhelming for me.       Out of curiosity, why didn’t you cast any APA males as the romantic counterparts?   I had originally offered two of the three male romantic roles to two APA male actors who are good friends of mine. Both are very talented and were perfect for the characters. They both had accepted the roles and were very excited to be part of the project. However, before shooting each one had to drop out at the last minute, forcing us to recast at the eleventh hour. They each had to drop out for separate and very different reasons and regretted being unable to participate in the film. In our ensuing casting calls, I cast the best actors that I saw for the parts (note: no APA males came to these auditions). I feel that it is very important for me to emphasize that the original casting decision was not made because my friends were APA males but because they were talented actors that were right for those specific parts. These two individuals were cast because of their innate skills and fit for the roles which were written color-blind and based on character rather than racial background.  I have been hesitant to tell people about the casting process for obvious reasons. First of all, I wanted to protect the privacy of the process and those involved. The two APA male actors are both well-known names in our community and had their own private reasons for not being able to take part in the film. They were both very excited to be involved in the project and had extenuating circumstances that could not be resolved in time for our shoot. I felt that the responsible thing to do was to respect their privacy. In addition, I also wanted to protect the actors that did end up playing the roles in the film (APA or not APA). I did not want them to feel in any way that they were a scrappy second choice. We went through a full (albeit rushed) re-casting process with my casting director and found two equally talented and wonderful actors who ended up doing a brilliant job in the film. I think that some believe that any artist or public figure from a traditionally marginalized group somehow bears the added responsibility of “representing” the community. I personally feel that it would be at best misguided and at worst, reductive to try and present some uniform positive “image” to mainstream media. That act in and of itself perpetuates the idea that people can be stereotyped. I think the most powerful thing an artist can do is to try and present characters and situations that are as complex and real as possible. If audiences can relate to the faces they see on screen as human beings, first and foremost (whether those faces are black, white, yellow, or brown and whether they are straight, gay, lesbian, transsexual, or bi-curious), we will have taken a step in the right direction of human understanding.

Director Lee talks about film in a post-screening Q&A session. Photo by: Apollo Victoria                                         Second daughter Julie (Elaine Kao) and her love interest Mia Scarlett (Mia Riverton) lean in for a kiss.