Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee are two Asian directors I'm really fond of.
Both Peter Chan and Wong Kar Wai are directors that I respect very much.
I'm a huge Wong Kar-Wai fan.
I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.
Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.
Some of my favorite all-time movies - Wong Kar-wai is just amazing. In the Mood for Love is probably my favorite film ever. Those lyrical montages are so stunning.
Wong Kar Wai is a very intense character, very personable, and I believe in general he does not like and he would not want his actors to show their true looks and their true personality on screen.
I want to challenge myself to see where my limit is and experiment with a lot of different films. A lot of artists from Asia focus too much on their Asian background. I don't want to let go of my background, but to be a success in the U.S., which is my goal, I realize I need to surround myself with American filmmakers and producers.
The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'
While it is increasingly possible for filmmakers to find an audience on their own (something that is particularly popular amongst documentary filmmakers) I'm still a believer in the "specialist". By this I mean, I back myself as a filmmaker, but I leave the marketing and distribution of my films to the experts.
Even before the economic crisis in Greece there was no structure for making films - no proper industry, and the structure didn't help filmmakers at all. So filmmakers had to help each other, and make very, very low-budget films. Now with the crisis, things got a bit worse, but filmmakers are still going to be making films. It didn't change that much.
Does people not asking me about Asian American literature mean they don't see it as its own literary tradition? I certainly believe in it as its own literary tradition, because your race plays a great factor in how you are seen by the world, and how you see the world; the fact that I'm an Asian American isn't incidental to who I am as a writer. Where it becomes difficult is defining what, if anything identifiable at all, makes an Asian American book an Asian American book, other than the fact of its creator being Asian. And I'd argue that there is nothing identifiable beyond that.
I really dislike the fact that Asian males are constantly emasculated, whether it's American TV or films. You see it all the time, and it's so weird that they don't see sexuality in Asian men.
I wish people wouldn't just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add raceto it, and it became, 'Well, she's too Asian', or, ‘She's too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It's a very strange place to be. You're not Asian enough and then you're not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.
I always believe that Kar-Wai has a complete script: he just doesn't show it to us. He wants us to experience and explore the character. He gives you a lot of space, and you know every time will be a very long journey. You just live in the character, and that's very different from other directors.
We cannot educate white women and take them by the hand. Most of us are willing to help but we can't do the white woman's homework for her. That's an energy drain. More times than she cares to remember, Nellie Wong, Asian American feminist writer, has been called by white women wanting a list of Asian American women who can give readings or workshops. We are in danger of being reduced to purveyors of resource lists.