Platform

Daniel Wu

By Jennifer Young

Last year, when Daniel Wu came back to his native Bay Area with his directorial debut, "The Heavenly Kings," which screened at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, SF360.org contributor Jennifer Young reminded us of the joke that had been circulating online—that a Chinese law exists requiring Daniel Wu to be featured in every Hong Kong film. Still one of Hong Kong’s most prolific actors, Wu is visiting the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival this week with Alexi Tan’s "Blood Brothers." Young got a chance to visit again with the actor when the film screened at the Castro this past Friday.

SF360.org: What’s it like being part of an Asian American film festival?

Daniel Wu: It’s great. I’m really proud to be part of it because it’s a community. It really is a community. And it’s great to see the variety of films this year. We’ve gone beyond talking and complaining about Asian American issues and being a minority to just telling great stories. That’s exciting to me.

SF360.org: What was it like working with this all-star cast?

Wu: Awesome. I basically did the movie because of the rest of the cast. We’re all good friends but we’d never worked together before. Usually, since the three of us are around the same age, we would be probably like if Chang Chen doesn’t do this movie then Daniel Wu or Liu Ye will do it— we would never be cast in the same movie. So when this project came up and Alexi told me he wanted this cast I called up Chang Chen and asked, ‘are you doing it?’ And he goes, ‘are you gonna do it?’ And I said, ‘I’ll do it if you do it.’ And the same thing with Liu Ye. And the same thing with Shu Qi. Shu Qi I’ve worked with many times before and she’s a great actress that I love working with. It was really about the team. And of course about John Woo being the seminal director that he is and wanting to come back to Asia with his first project after spending all that time in Hollywood.

SF360.org: Last year you brought your directorial debut "The Heavenly Kings" to the SF International Film Festival. Any plans in the works for another directorial effort?

Wu: I wrote a script last year but I didn’t like it so I put it away. I’m working on a second script right now which I hope will be my second film but it’s not fully developed yet. Because I don’t have to worry about directing as my income I’m not in any rush. Hopefully within the next two or three years I’ll have my second film out. And maybe it will play here!

SF360.org: What’s going on with the indie music networking scene you helped instigate as a antidote to your mock boy band?

Wu: We’ve basically created a community for people in any independent creative field. So it can be music, filmmaking, acting, whatever. Creating a space for them to exist and show their stuff. And then maybe creating opportunities for them to get work and do stuff together. It’s really great because we’ve had a real cross-pollination of people. Artists who would never have met before meet online and do stuff together and that’s really what we wanted to do. In some ways it’s like MySpace but much more specific for the creative community. Hong Kong really doesn’t have that community, I mean there are all these creative people but they’re doing their own thing. So AliveNotDead.com gives them the opportunity to put all that together. Originally it was just going to be Hong Kong-focused but a lot of people from the states are getting on. Then we got Jet Li and the ‘Better Luck Tomorrow’ guys like Justin Lin on there and we thought okay let’s spread this thing wider, as wide as we can.

Taro Goto [Festival Assistant Director, post-screening]: The city of Shanghai is just as much a character in the film as anyone else. Tell us what Shanghai means to you and whether the story was actually shot in Shanghai?

Wu: Yeah we shot it all in Shanghai. A lot of it was in the old Shanghai film studios where films from the ’20s and ’30s were being made pre-communist era. It has a lot of historical significance. Like the main street set we used which is where ‘Lust, Caution’ also filmed. Shanghai has an important meaning to me because I know a lot about that era in Shanghai from my family. But it’s also interesting because it reflects on what is happening in Shanghai right now going back to it’s decadent era. A lot of changes are happening; a lot of foreign influences. And it’s changing very fast, just like it was in the ’20s and ’30s. It’s almost as if it’s picking up at the point where it stopped developing in 1949. It really is like one of the main characters in the film. You get to see that sort of East-meets-West culture that was happening in Shanghai at that time. I remember my dad telling me about when he was little he got his first pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses! We’re talking about late 1930s that this is happening. You know you get a Qipao made out of western cloth from England. There was a lot of intermixing going on at that time which is now happening again.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, bay area, castro theatre, center for asian american media, critics, cult cinema, film festivals

03.15.2008