Joan Chen - actress and director - Interview

Interview, August, 2000 by Franz Lidz

WHETHER IT'S CHINA OR HOLLYWOOD, THIS ACTRESS/DIRECTOR TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

She broke into film at the age of fifteen after being discovered on a Shanghai rifle range by the wife of Mao Tse Tung. Within four years, she had been dubbed the "young Elizabeth Taylor" of Chinese cinema. At twenty she left for New York to study filmmaking. At twenty-four she was rediscovered by mogul Dino De Laurentiis while crossing a studio parking lot.

Joan Chen then built a substantial Hollywood acting career, establishing herself in the West as the opium-inhaling Empress of China in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), a mill owner in David Lynch's offbeat TV series, Twin Peaks (1990), and a Vietnamese peasant in Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth (1993). Last year, Chen directed her first feature, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, about the brutal send-down system of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which the government attempted to homogenize society by exiling educated citizens to the rural provinces to perform manual labor.

Chen cowrote the screenplay, put together $1 million--much of it her own--and, after the script was rejected by China's film bureau in Beijing, got a cast and crew and shot the film on the run in the western provinces. As a result, the film has been banned from China and Chen has been barred from working there.

This month, Chen makes her American directorial debut with Autumn in New York, a lighthearted, $50-million weepie starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder. Now thirtynine, Chen lives in San Francisco with her husband, cardiologist Peter Hui, and her infant daughter, Angela Frances.

FRANZ LIDZ: What's the deal now with you and the Chinese government?

JOAN CHEN: It's sort of unresolved. I heard rumors that if I don't resolve it, they might bar me from going in at all, but I don't believe that. FL: The Chinese government was uncomfortable with the sexuality and the pessimistic tone of your script for Xiu Xiu.

What kind of cuts were they demanding?

JC: I don't really remember, but I just knew it would not have been worth making the movie.

FL: Is it true that in China the only way you're allowed to discuss the present is sort of obliquely, in terms of the past?

JC: I don't know whether that's the only way, but a lot of people do that. The rules are vague. The trick is for the artist to overcome the obstacles. Sometimes this makes for better movies.

FL: Your early training was in propagandist theater. Was it the kind of drama that celebrated heroic factory workers?

JC: Heroism, idealism, honor, all of the things I still want to celebrate. There is a certain grandeur to it, and heroism is glorious.

FL: One of the things that strikes me about recent Chinese cinema is its brutality and cruelty. The most jarring scene in Xiu Xiu comes when the innocent young girl has an abortion at a backwater hospital and is raped by another patient.

JC: Transcendence comes only after you can no longer endure suffering.

FL: After rolling down the slope of degradation, the girl more or less asks to be killed. You see that as her only way out?

JC: That's her only beautiful way out.

FL: She could have gone back to her hometown and been an outcast.

JC: But there wouldn't be this moment of turning from caterpillar into butterfly.

FL: Growing up in Shanghai, did you live in fear of being "sent down?"

JC: Not just fear. It was fear and fascination.

FL: What did you think happened to those people?

JC: Some of them disappeared and only stories came back. A few of them did come back and had changed. In this very short time, they became old.

FL: Were you the only child in your family?

JC: No, I have an older brother.

FL: Was he affected by the system?

JC: We both were. If you didn't graduate high school, they couldn't send you down. So he left at a very young age to become a professional rower, and I left to become a professional actor.

FL: Your parents were both sent down, and you stayed in Shanghai.

JC: When my mother came back, I had a whole mouth full of rotten teeth, just from sucking on candy and not brushing.

FL: When you came to America in 1981, did you expect more opportunities to act?

JC: No, I didn't even want to act when I came here. I wanted to get an education.

FL: What changed your mind?

JC: First, money. A one-day gig would pay more than a few nights of waiting on tables.

FL: In one of your first auditions here, you were told you didn't look Chinese enough.

JC: Somehow my clothing, my makeup, the way I looked wasn't their image of a Chinese woman.

FL: Meeting producer Dino De Laurentiis was a lucky break for you. Where did he spot you?

JC: Coming out of an audition at which I'd been told I didn't look Hawaiian enough.

FL: What was his come-on line?

JC: "Do you know that Lana Turner was discovered in a drugstore?" I thought he was just a dirty old man.

FL: In the mid-'90s, you appeared in films with Steven Seagal and Sylvester Stallone.

JC: That was what propelled me to directing--doing these totally meaningless characters in meaningless films.

FL: Which directors were the most fun to work with?