Interview by Meera Menon

After graduating cum laude with a degree in biochemistry from Harvard University, writer/director Georgia Lee [left] worked for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company before enrolling in summer courses at NYU and finding her true passion in filmmaking. Since then, she has directed numerous short films. Her short film “Educated,” a surrealistic portrait of the academic and social pressures of adolescence, garnered numerous accolades, including Best Short Film at the Durango Film Festival. Her debut feature, “Red Doors,” won the Best Narrative Feature Award at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, the Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting at the 2005 CineVegas Film Festival, and both the Audience Award for First Narrative Feature and the Grand Jury Award for Screenwriting at the 2005 Outfest Film Festival. “Red Doors” chronicles the life of the Wong family, living in the suburbs of New York. We are witness to a suicidal father, an overachieving eldest daughter, a middle daughter coming to terms with her sexuality, and a rebellious youngest daughter in the throws of a strange and dark first love. Weaving in old footage of the director’s own home videos, “Red Doors” is a funny, dark, and moving portrait of a Chinese-American family’s attempt to grow and understand each other. EGO recently sat down with Georgia Lee to discuss “Red Doors,” and filmmaking.

I saw Red Doors as a film about identity through family and history.
I think Red Doors is first and foremost a story about family and its coming of age story. It’s an ensemble cast, and each of the characters has his or her kind of trajectory and growth in narrative. You kind of see it as a holistic entity. And it’s very much for me a story about the children and when children grow up, the emotional distance between parents and children. Each of them has his or her own exploration and search for, I would say, identity or true self i.e. a combination of gender, sexuality, culture, cultural identity, and even professional and personal identity.

I think what was interesting about Julia [the middle child] is that there was no battle with she felt with Mia, she didn’t question it, she just went right into it.
Yeah, I thought with her character, I didn’t want to focus so much on the navel gazing of “I’m gay, oh my god, what am I going to do?” There are a lot of marginalized people in a community, and one has to represent them first and foremost as human beings; whether you’re gay or straight or transgender, or you’re bicurious, or you’re black brown, or yellow, you go through the same things that every human goes through. Which is the complications of falling in love, you know, differences between your parents, differences between your siblings, you know, those type of complex choices.

"Georgia Lee's RED DOORS is reminiscent of early Ang Lee: Tensions in a Chinese-American family are explored in full ... Lee's sensitive drama demonstrates a directorial talent worth following." -Time Out New York

I liked the fact that they were Asian American was very much a backdrop to a more specific story.
I find the idea that there is this one beautiful, perfect image of Asian Americans a stereotype. I think the best thing to do is to just tell stories about real people, full blooded and fully fleshed out characters. And when mainstream America sees these people going through issues that they can relate to and that resonate with them, and that the characters just happen to have faces of a different color, I actually think that is more humanizing and rings true for the community. You and I don’t walk down the street, “oh my god, it sucks to be Asian American.” [LAUGHS]. And of course, being Asian or having certain sexual preference affects you completely. But I think it’s much more organic than articulating it and talking about it every day.

But that’s exactly what it is as an issue. It’s more of a dialogue and not something that can be shown. And in film, you want to show, you don’t want to sit there ...
Exactly. You want people to feel, you want to people to say, “oh I understand what that person’s going through.” I think that the most you can accomplish in film is to present characters that are going through situations that someone else can empathize with. My concern as a person who creates things is that you don’t want to hit people over the head. You want to try and hit people on a more visceral level.

When you’re writing, do you draw from your own experience to reach that visceral level, since that’s the most honest place you could probably draw from?
I think a lot of art is personal. I started writing the script really, in my mind, consciously thinking that it’s about the children growing up, and losing touch with their parents. And the weird thing is that while I was talking to the actors, on set, and the father and the mother characters were asking me about the motivations, I slowly begin to realize the film is also the parents’ story. It kind of developed on its own.

But yeah, it is. I’d say almost all of my work has been inspired loosely by either my own experience or a friend’s experience.

I guess that’s the thing about film - you write it being something very specific but once you factor in performance and the visual interpretation, it becomes something completely different.
You hope to be as specific with the world and the story and the writing and the characters, and hopefully by being specific, you’re able to create a universal feeling about it. I was gonna say that about the personal filmmaking thing, I think film is just an expensive form of therapy. [LAUGHS]

You’re working out your issues. “Educated” was definitely about me working out the issues. At that point I was still working out McKinsey, and I felt like that it was just a continuation of my whole trap, my privilege, my academic social professional prison. And I felt trapped. By my parents, by my social upbringing and what not. I feel like “Educated” was a form of my anger being worked out on film. And “Red Doors,” in a way, is like that too. You know, Samantha’s character is very much based on my own life. And I think it was a lot of my family’s story being worked out. You know, I should probably just get a therapist. They’re cheaper. [LAUGHS]

"heartwarming comedy...unique and yet universal story" - New York Times

Was film always the medium you wanted to work in creatively? Why film?
Well, I never thought I could pursue the arts seriously as a career. I think, being from an Asian American background, I thought I was going to be a doctor or a scientist. And then I thought I was being a big rebel by going to work for McKinsey. [LAUGHS] So I worked for McKinsey for a while, but I just always loved, I always loved dance.

My parents and my friends’ parents definitely encouraged us to be involved in the arts. Playing musical instruments, performance, painting, whatever. Yet they never wanted us to pursue it seriously as a career. And it’s this strange thing where you’re making a child express all these wonderful things that they’re passionate about, but don’t expect that he or she might want to do it full time. I always loved watching films. My mother always brought home musicals and cartoons. But I never connected them to the idea that I would do it professionally.

While at McKinsey, after graduating from Harvard, I started taking classes at NYU, just the summer crash courses, and that’s when I realized I really loved film. I feel like film is one of those mediums that incorporates everything. It’s literature, it’s fashion, it’s music, it’s photography, it’s poetry, it’s everything! At least for me, when it works, it’s magical. And I also think it’s one of the art forms that’s mass consumed. So if you actually want to have some kind of audience or impact, it’s probably the one that makes the most sense.

Are there any other filmmakers that you admire? The “influence” question is always hard, that’s so subliminal…but are there?
Yeah. It’s subliminal. Obviously, Martin Scorsese, a mentor of mine, is also a huge influence on me. I love surrealists. And so I think Bunuel is one of my favorites. I’d say along those lines David Lynch as well.

"This is a hilariously funny and unbelievably revealing film about an Asian family living in the U.S. and dealing with the colliding worlds of their traditional heritage and their current reality" - Wall Street Journal

I thought “Educated” was very David Lynch.
That’s what a lot of people say! I have to say “Diagnosis,” which is my latest short has a very Lynchian feel. “Mullholland Drive” is one of my favorite films of the past couple of years. And then, “Blue Velvet,” forget about it. So good. And I feel Bunuel, I guess he’s one of the grandfathers of surrealist cinema. And then also, I know everybody says this, but truly he’s a genius- Stanley Kubrick. Every genre he did, he reinvented that genre. He’s so facile, he can move from horror, to period, to sci-fi: he’s amazing.

Is there anybody that influences you visually? Even in literature, narrative voices?
Well, I like Borges. And I like visual influences ... I really like this guy who did a film called “Tale of Two Sisters.” It’s a Korean director, and he’s relatively new, but I just love the look. It’s stunning. Other filmmakers that I really like would include Wong Kar Wai.

Some of the most exciting filmmaking is coming out of Asia right now. Korea, Japan, and China have a thriving film community. Taiwan too. By the way, I just saw “Oldboy” for the first time.

I’ve never seen it.
It’s interesting. Basically it takes the psychological mystery thriller genre to the n’th degree, to the logical, illogical extreme. I’m not sure if I’d ever watch it again because it’s very disturbing. Even a lot of Japanese cinema that I kind of like, such as Takeshi Miike, in terms of sumptuous visuals, is very disturbing. Wong Kar Wai I like. Yimou’s visuals are amazing. I think “Hero” is gorgeous. Really visually beautiful. I do love David Lynch’s visuals. I mean, it’s all kind of tied together. Bunuel, Lynch. That’s something you realize about art and film, I think, that there is some kind of core hard-wired sensibility in you. And it’s just about finding it.

The funny thing about “Red Doors” is that it was a personal story of mine that I had to tell, but it’s very different than the short films I’ve made. My short films are much more surrealistic and fantastical, whereas “Red Doors” is a more straightforward, naturalistic story. I think in the future I’ll return to surrealistic stuff.

"Well-told and charming, debuting writer-helmer Georgia Lee's comedy-drama 'RED DOORS' is big on heart but never sappy. Without overdoing the quirk factor or the melodrama, Lee shows a sure feel for family dynamics, and her light touch brings out the best in the ensemble's lovely, understated performances." The Hollywood Reporter

In “Red Doors” there were definitely moments that visuals totally informed the story.
Yeah, really I have to give credit, that’s what I learned from spending time with Scorcese. Every shot he makes, he’s trying to make it interesting. Obviously, first you are just trying to communicate information but I think you can also sneak something about the psychological undercurrents of what’s going on in there. And that’s great. Either in the coloring or the lighting, the positioning and the composition.

Did you do it in digital?
We did it on Super 16.

Cause it is just so vibrant.
Thanks. I love shooting on film. Digital video makes things a lot easier, but you still don’t get the look of film. You don’t get to play with the lenses and the depth of field as much. So I really like film.

Oh, and the home videos. I’ve always been interested in home videos as a historical document and as a source of immediate understanding of oneself.
One thing we haven’t touched on, which is something I’m fascinated by, is this whole idea of memory and identity. How much of how we define ourselves, our self and identity, is really just our memories? That’s a topic that I want to explore more directly in my next film. I was loosely starting to get at it in “Red Doors” and the home videos. This family has a collected memory, which is their home videos. And to some extent, it’s been abandoned, or forgotten or neglected. So Ed, the father, who has lost a sense of purpose, starts to go back in time, to revisit the memories.

How much of memory is objective and how much of it is subjective? How much of that subjective memory becomes the real history? These are interesting questions to consider and answer.

Georgia Lee's RED DOORS makes its U.S theatrical debut May 12, 2006.

Images Courtesy Georgia Lee