The Opposite of Fate (20 page)

Fall 1990: Contract trouble. After six months of negotiating, we found it did not guarantee us the creative control we required, so we walked away from the Carolco deal. Meanwhile, Oliver and Janet continued to help us look for financing elsewhere. They agreed to serve as godfather and godmother, as we sought out the best resources for making the film.

January 1991: New plan of action. After the Carolco deal
fell through, Ron believed the only chance we would have for creative control was by developing the screenplay “on spec.” Ron, Wayne, and I spent three days outlining the script in a narrative format that could be plugged into the grammar of a screenplay.

August–November 1991: Progress sure and steady. Ron and I completed the first draft of the screenplay.

March 1992: Met with Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Kathryn Galan and Henry Huang of Disney and its Hollywood Pictures (Galan was then a Hollywood Pictures vice-president, Huang a Hollywood Pictures creative executive). Katzenberg had read the script, and after an informal discussion, we had a handshake deal. He gave us what we wanted—creative control—and he expressed enormous respect for Wayne as a filmmaker. We would be able to make our movie like an independent production, and we’d be supported by Hollywood Pictures, headed by Ricardo Mestres.

Later, in
Premiere
magazine, I read about the “control-freakism” that reportedly runs rampant at Disney. Naturally, I wondered what would happen in our association with Disney.

October 1992: Filming begun.

February 1993: China filming begun.

March 1993: Principal photography completed.

April 1993: Saw the first rough cut.

I Take a Meeting

I can safely say that no one I met in Hollywood resembled my imaginings of a high-powered Hollywood type, with the possible exception of Oliver Stone, who happens to look exactly like
Oliver Stone. I pictured women who wore a lot of makeup, tanned men who smoked cigars. Most of the film people I met were shockingly young and obsessively healthy, at least compared with writers I know. They sipped water, not bourbon. They didn’t smoke. They wore jeans or leggings, baseball caps and running shoes. They drove Ford Broncos. Of course, I didn’t realize until later: That
was
the Hollywood type.

The one Hollywoodish trait I noticed with great delight among some producers I met during the early days of book-option talk was their easy mention of Bob, Jane, Steven, and Francis, as if I too were on a first-name basis with Redford, Fonda, Spielberg, and Coppola.

Another surprise: There was never an organized agenda to meetings. People talked in broad, imprecise terms. I thought it was code for something else, shorthand for all kinds of criteria. But now that I’ve been in the business for a while, I realize that people leave the precision points to the lawyers.

I always felt people treated me with respect, with such enormous respect, in fact, that I felt like a fraud. Much to my surprise, given the horror stories I’d heard, no one ever discouraged me from being part of the filmmaking process. They wanted me to be involved as much as possible. I was told I would be a producer, along with Wayne, Ron, and later Patrick Markey, who came in during pre-production. But why was I a producer? The reasons: I had selected the director and the screenwriter, we had developed the script on spec, we asked for and obtained creative control. And so I often felt enormously guilty, especially during production, when I was at home writing fiction and not sitting (or freezing) on the set with everyone else.

I still find it odd to see my credits on the screen as
screenwriter
and
producer. When I started this process, I didn’t know what any of the terms meant: spec, development, turnaround, green-light, above the line, below the line, scale, production, post, bond company, principal photography, second unit—let alone the credits, which I used to ignore at the end of movies: first AD, gaffer, best boy, PA, and so on.

The only part of moviemaking that I dislike is the business side. And there is a lot of business. I’ve tried to stay away from business as much as possible; the person who handled the business details was Patrick Markey, bless his heart. I thought he had the worst job as producer—talking to people about money and contracts and the like. Yet he never tired of it and, amazingly, never lost his sense of diplomacy.

Seminar in Screenwriting

The day the bombs fell on Baghdad in 1991, Ron, Wayne, and I started to outline our screenplay. Our meetings were intense, extremely organized, filled with humor and mutual respect. We had a few minor differences in work styles. Ron liked to get up at two-thirty every morning and start writing; he ate only one meal a day, dinner. Wayne and I were more leisurely, preferring to start at eight or eight-thirty, and for some reason, gosh darn it, we needed lunch, which we often ate during our meetings. Ron worked with yellow pads and a box of a hundred sharpened pencils. I worked with a laptop and a portable printer. Wayne thought aloud.

We discussed the major elements of the movie, the emotional moments, as well as our view on the use of voice-over, subtitles, flashbacks, and other techniques. We then started to outline the
entire movie, scene by scene. Ron had allocated the number of pages for each scene. Three for the opening party. Four and a half for the revelation of the letter from June’s Chinese half sisters in Golden Gate Park. And so forth.

I didn’t have a lot to contribute in those early days, since I barely even recognized the terms being bandied about. So I volunteered to be the chief scribe, taking notes on my laptop. Ron and Wayne worried that I was denigrating myself, and I told them I had no problems whatsoever with self-esteem. I knew when to shut up, until I had something to say, but when I got up to speed, they would definitely know it. For now, I was happy to be the screenwriting student, soaking up as much as I could. I asked a lot of questions. How does this scene make a transition into the next? What should we feel at the end of this scene?

After three days, we had sixty single-spaced pages of notes, a narrative form of the script. I volunteered to do the first draft. Ron would then revise it, and thus I would be able to learn from my mistakes. And then we would revise each other, making sure we agreed on every single word, especially in dialogue. The process of collaboration turned out to be, much to my relief, more like a relay race than a three-legged one. It fit my work style perfectly—to be engaged in intense creative discussions first, then allowed to go off and write by myself. Between drafts, Ron and I would meet with Wayne to get his take on how the script was going. It was important that the three of us be in alignment at every step. We were on the phone with one another almost daily.

Our collaboration was so thorough that by the time we saw screenings of the movie, we often could not remember who had written what. There’s one line audiences seem to love, when the character Rose says to her mother, “I like being tragic, Ma—I
learned it from you.” Ron and I argue over who wrote that line. He says I did. I say he did.

I can’t remember any major disagreements. Certainly we had “discussions,” and when we didn’t reach an immediate consensus, both Ron and Wayne would start pacing like stereotypical expectant dads. The project itself was always paramount, and each of us was willing to find a solution that satisfied everyone.

And so our “disagreements” went like this: Ron would say, “I’m concerned.” Or Wayne would say, “I’m worried.” Or I would say, “I’m confused.” We would discuss the difficulty, separating out the strands of what was both important and problematic. And in this logical way, we’d get rid of problems, without sacrificing what was essential.

I would characterize Ron, the former lawyer, as our chief negotiator in most cases. If I said something like, “I’m worried about this line, it just seems wrong,” he would reply, “Tell me exactly what bothers you about it.” I’d start off nebulous, because I didn’t know what to say specifically: “It just doesn’t seem like something a Chinese mother would say.” Ron would probe further: “Is it the words or the thought or the emotion?” Back and forth we would go, until we had saved the baby, thrown out the bathwater, and added a nice warm towel.

I Learn to Argue

We handled our differences this way throughout the project—screenplay development, casting, filming, editing. While we shared equal creative control, each of us took on a specific role as arbiter. In general (but not always), I was the arbiter of character questions—that is, whether a scene seemed true to the heart and
soul of what I felt about the characters as I knew them. Ron’s hobbyhorse was overall structure and emotional truth—namely, did the particular “beats” of the scenes lead to what we had intended? Was each emotional moment truly earned, or did it get shorthanded and appear contrived? Wayne, we realized, had to be the final arbiter on everything, because he was, after all, the director, and had to feel that everything was as he wanted to see it on screen.

Only once did I not get what I wanted. It was a late afternoon and we were all a bit punchy with fatigue and the natural high of knowing we were lines from having the script we all wanted. Ron and Wayne decided we needed a new scene, a sex scene between a young woman in the 1940s and the man she has fallen in love with. To me, the idea of a sex scene was an automatic red flag for exploitation and gratuitous thrills. Ron and Wayne asserted the importance of showing how quickly and thoroughly the character lost herself to this playboy. I countered that they wanted the requisite sex scene because they were boys. They retorted that I was nervous about seeing a sex scene with a character who emotionally represented my mother.

Our discussion degenerated from there:

“Just how do you see this sex scene happening?” I asked.

“They’re at the back of the nightclub stage,” Ron said.

“Onstage? In public?”

“No, no, it’s after hours. And Ying Ying is leaning back as the playboy starts to kiss her tenderly, then more passionately—”

“They’re
standing?
”

“Right, standing up. And then the bad man starts to brutally make love to her—”

“Standing
up?
”

“Right.”

“I see. . . . Does he make love to her from the front or the rear? You see, I have to know these things, because it makes a difference whether we get a PG rating or an R.”

“From the front, of course.”

After Wayne added a few more details having to do with silhouettes and voice-over, he said, “All right, we agree, then—now let’s write the scene.”

I stood up and said: “You two want to do that scene, you write the scene. How long does it take you guys to do sex? Five minutes? Great, I’m going out now for the postcoital cigarette.” And when I shut the door behind me, I could hear them howling in the room. Anyway, that was the best time I had not writing something. And now that the scene is on the screen, I’m rather fond of it.

The Asian Question

From the beginning, I had a fair amount of cynicism about the possibilities of turning a book about Asian-Americans into a movie. I knew there would be no big-name stars, no male lead, no car chase or trains being blown up. I tried to figure in my head what a movie could do to distort the story into something commercial and tailored to a mass audience. Turn it into an interracial love story? An internal dialogue ran through my head in which a high-powered producer told us, “Loved the book, loved the script. Only one thing I’d change: Make the mothers and daughters Russian.”

Fortunately, nothing even close to that happened. Or at least we never met anyone who suggested such a thing. But I do think we understood the doubts about this movie without having to speak about them. How would a movie about eight non-Caucasian women play in Peoria, or particularly in Los Angeles suburbs, where focus groups were organized.

I discovered that there were a fair number of Asian-American directors on the scene. Most of them were making independent films that were shown in small art houses, if at all. They couldn’t obtain the financing to do anything commercial. And we knew that if a studio sank money into a film about Asian-Americans and didn’t earn it back at the box office, this might cast a pall on the future of other films about Asian-Americans. So, yes, I was aware that Hollywood might look at
The Joy Luck Club
as a proving ground.

That’s a terrible burden, especially when you’re just trying to create your own vision and not necessarily right past wrongs, or set the record straight on the history of China, or break down cultural barriers, or open film job markets for other Asian-Americans, or put every single stereotype to rest once and for all. If we had set out to do all those things, we would have been looking over our shoulders all the time, running scared, and would have been unable to make a movie that was personal and intimate, that had more to do with universal emotions than specific cultural concerns. Certainly, the movie’s context is Chinese-American. But the subtext, or the heart of the book, involves emotions we all have.

Our abiding thought was this: If we could make a movie that seemed honest and true, a movie about real people who happened to be Chinese-American, we would have a better shot at
making a movie that people would want to see, that they would be moved by, that would get them talking to their friends and so give the movie legs. It might thus bring in enough receipts to change Hollywood’s mind that movies about Asian-Americans can’t be successful. Maybe, just maybe, many negative assumptions about Asian-Americans on the big screen might be rethought.

I’m encouraged by the reactions to the movie among test audiences. By far, the predominant response is to the universal aspects of the movie, the heart of mother-daughter relations. This seems to leave people feeling that Asian-Americans are not so different—not so “inscrutable” or “mysterious.” One blond young man in a focus group commented, “I never had sisters, but after seeing this movie, I feel I have four of them.”