Emmy Award-winning director Henry Chan has teamed up with UCLA screenwriting professor Weiko Lin on their first Chinese language feature film. “100 Days” tells the story of a young man who must appease his deceased mother’s spirit by finding love within 100 days after her death. After spending the last year and a half working on the film’s post-production, Chan and Lin will see their film hit the big screen when it premieres at the Hawaii International Film Festival. Chan spoke with Daily Bruin’s Andrea Seikaly in anticipation of the film’s release.
Daily Bruin: How did this project come about between you and Professor Weiko Lin?
Henry Chan: I met Weiko (Lin) about 10 years ago. He’s with the Writers Guild (of America) and I’m with the Directors Guild(of America). … We were at dinner together and we just hit it off. Both Weiko and I are immigrants. We came here rather young. We always wanted to do something in the Chinese language, something about going back to our roots. We talked about it and every time we saw each other we’d kick around different ideas but nothing started to come out. About five years ago, his mother passed away. He was very close to his mother and he went back to Taiwan to the funeral and he found out about this old tradition. When they feel like the spirit of the deceased is not ready to go on to heaven or wherever they go, then the tradition was that the children or whoever is left behind have to do something to appease the spirit.They want to see them settled, see them married and all that stuff. So the tradition was that you have 100 days to do something that will appease that spirit so they can be happy and go on. So he wrote a play using this, and that play was produced in Chicago and also was produced here in L.A. and we thought, “Let’s make a movie (out) of that and would basically be an Asian American film.” But then he went back and taught writing classes in Taipei and he got a couple of good students and said, “Why don’t we do it in the Chinese language in the old country?” He basically got the idea, but both his Chinese and my Chinese are getting really bad because we’ve been here too long. So one of his Chinese students in Taiwan wrote the script. That’s how it began.
DB: This was your first Chinese language feature. What was that part of the experience like?
HC: Well, first of all I have to tell you this funny story. The first day of meetings, there was a table read and the cast and the crew was there. Everyone was ready and I stood up and shared my vision of the film with everyone, speaking in Chinese obviously. In about 10 seconds, maybe 20, I saw these blank faces looking back at me. I realized that my accent, because I’m a Cantonese person and speaking Mandarin is another dialect, my accent was so heavy that they couldn’t understand. I think worst of all was not only the accent, but the reference; the way I use the speech is 30 or 40 years old. Imagine you’re talking to someone who was a hipster in the sixties – the slang and the references are old. My language is a little outdated, but language is a living thing, it’s not a dead thing, and that’s why it keeps changing. That’s the one thing that I learned. And also, language is something you have to live with. But also, when you’re talking to actors or cinematographers, there’s a film language or a stage language that basically we all share. After that it doesn’t matter what it is – Chinese, American or German – they’re the same thing. Film language becomes our common reference, so we all understand.
DB: This film seems to deal directly with the experience that Weiko went through, since the main character returns home after his mother passes away and during the 100 days he tries to reconnect with a young woman from this past. What else can you tell us about the premise of the film?
HC: He’s kind of reluctant, though. When we started writing the story we thought it was rather arrogant for Weiko and I to go back and write a Chinese story because our background is different. We are Chinese, but we are more Chinese American. In certain things, we are probably more American than Chinese, so it would be arrogant for us to go back and tell a Chinese story. So we basically tried to change it or adjust it so it would become an Asian American person who goes back and the perception would be different. We changed it a little bit to adjust it to ourselves, actually. The hero of the story left from very early because he was not happy at home. His father died, and the mother remarried, so he was very resentful and he was having problems with the mother. He was sent away to school in America, so once he gets here he wants to forget everything about Taiwan. You could say they’re estranged – they haven’t talked a lot. Even when he goes back to Taiwan to work, he doesn’t go back to his village and stays in the big city. He basically wants to forget everything about his village and where he comes from. This time, when they say he has 100 days to appease (his) mother’s spirit, he says, “Forget it.” Little does he know the typhoon came and he was stranded. It was during that process that he was forced to face all the old demons he has – his relationship with his mother, his perception of the village and his old girlfriend. And in a way that rediscovery makes him find out that he was really wrong to blame his mother. I think in a lot of ways he rediscovers himself through rediscovering his roots.
DB: The film also has a lot of comedic elements as the character finds out more about himself. Would you say it is a romantic comedy of sorts?
HC: It is kind of a romantic comedy – you can always call it that. But I always believe that real comedy has to have a heart. We laugh because we identify with the protagonist. That has to be something real, something deeper than slipping on a banana peel. That to me is the real humor.
DB: You’ve worked on several high-profile television shows with renowned actors throughout your career. How was this project different from others that you’ve worked on as a director?
HC: I feel like actors are actors. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s A-list or B-list or whatever list you come from. In the end it’s about you as an actor and the role – whether it fits you or you have a problem fitting it. Good actors manage to leave it outside the studio and when they come in they’re just actors.
DB: How is directing a TV episode different from directing a film?
HC: The biggest difference between TV and feature film is TV is basically a writer’s medium. The writers are the ones who create it and most of them are the executive producers, so they control the vision and the tone. As a director for TV, unless I’m the principal director, you’re just a guest. In a feature film, the director usually gets the last call.
DB: What do you hope that people will take away from this movie?
HC: I want any audience to respond to it, but more importantly, Weiko and I are Chinese Americans and I always felt that we have another point of view. There is a mixture that I feel is a little more unique. Hopefully we can share that and let people see a new way of looking at a story or character.