Fringe Benefits

Here's an excellent interview from SCMP's Vivian Chen, and hope you guys can come check out the movie. Karin, Archie and I will be at both screenings. Buy tickets on-line:

http://www.thegrandcinema.com.hk/movie_content.aspx?visMovie=678

South China Morning Post

November 22, 2009 Sunday

Fringe benefits;

Director Quentin Lee tells Vivian Chen how his sense of being on the margins has driven his film career

BYLINE: Vivian Chen

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 08

LENGTH: 970 words

Quentin Lee can still remember the conversation he had with a friend, actor Karin Anna Cheung, one night in 2006 in their favourite bar in Los Angeles. In a boozy haze, the pair shared stories about crazy dates they had heard of: quick sex in toilets, sado-masochistic games, the bore who became a stalker after a night of sex.

"I found those stories pretty amusing and that's when we felt inspired," says the Hong Kong-born Canadian filmmaker. "I've always wanted to do an empowering drama about an Asian-American woman, and also the friendship between a fag hag and a gay man ... Neither has been really explored in mainstream films."

Three years on, Lee, 38, has come up with The People I've Slept With, a comedy revolving around Angela (played by Cheung), a promiscuous Asian-American woman who goes on a journey to discover the father of the baby she's carrying.

"Sex comedies have always been a more male-oriented genre, but this film is a reverse of those guy-gets-chicks flicks," Lee says. "Finally it's the chick who's getting all the guys."

In the film, the attractive, independent Angela keeps track of her sex life by making baseball cards out of photographs of the men she's slept with.

While The People I've Slept With has several risqu?scenes, Lee says his film - which closes the Hong Kong Asian Independent Film Festival next weekend - is more than just a candid showcase of sexuality.

"The film is about finding self-acceptance - mostly for Angela, but also the others," he says. "It's her coming to terms with who she really is, and being comfortable with it."

She's not the only character at a crossroads in her life. Angela's 30-year-old gay best friend, Gabriel (played by Wilson Cruz), has never been in love and is too scared to admit he has finally met The One, and then finds himself struggling with whether he should try win his estranged partner back; Jefferson (CSI's Archie Kao), one of the possible fathers of Angela's child, is a charming man whose conservative family pressured him not to marry the woman he really loves.

"We want to speak to people who've been trying to find out where they need to fit in, and that it's okay to be who you are," Lee says.

He has already addressed how social conventions marginalise those who don't conform to mainstream values in his previous films, the most obvious example being 2004's Ethan Mao, in which a teenager is kicked out of his home for being gay and ends up working as a street hustler to survive. And even when his characters are at peace with those around them, they're inevitably also confused about their place in the world; in 2002's Drift, for instance, a promising screenwriter and an aspiring novelist set out to find a place in society where they can find emotional moorings, relationships they can revel in.

"My life is about looking for connections whether with a lover, a partner, family or society," Lee says. "Even now I'm still not sure where I fit. My personal quest has sort of translated into all my work."

His sense of rootlessness may stem from the way he constantly finds himself at odds with his surroundings. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Lee moved to Montreal when he was 16. He went to study English literature at Berkeley and Yale before finally moving to Los Angeles, where he completed a master's degree in film directing at UCLA. Today, he lives in a Korean neighbourhood in the city.

"Having lived there for a while, I started to understand what things are like in America - I was being put into a minority whether I liked it or not," he says. "I started making films about Asian and gay characters because if I don't create images that I can relate to, nobody's going to do it for me."

It was thrillers, however, that first piqued his interest in film. He remembers watching dark, scary films on TV when he was six, and he grew up "fascinated by horror and dead people". Lee eventually made his first film with his father's Super-8 camera - a supernatural slasher named The Road, about two children attacked by demons.

It was another short film that first got him noticed. To Ride a Cow, a piece he made after graduating from Berkeley in 1992, won him first prize at the Hong Kong Independent Film and Video Awards. Revolving around a couple who get together when the bisexual lover they inadvertently share goes away for a weekend, the film also screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival that year.

Lee made his feature-film debut in 1996 with Flow, which combined all the shorts he'd made to support the story of a 22-year-old gay Chinese filmmaker's reflections about his work and his love life.

The People I've Slept With is a departure of sorts for Lee, his first foray into lighter, humorous fare. And the transition is hardly a smooth one, he says.

"I've always been more of a suspense drama type," he says. "So my filming has usually been well-planned. But this time around, I chose to shoot a lot. I let the actors feel comfortable and have fun in the scenes, and that's how you get some of the crazy takes on film."

Things got so mad that even his friend Cheung couldn't handle it. A planned three-hour shoot for the opening scene - a montage of Angela having sex with different men in various positions - took almost a day.

"At one point Karin became really sensitive about it and said she didn't want to do it any more," Lee says. "And so I did a scene with her."

That scene involved a naked Lee crawling on his knees as Cheung walked him around like a dog.

"It makes it much more comfortable to work with me, knowing I'm not going to do something exploitative - things that I wouldn't do myself. Well, I guess it was kind of shocking for the crew to watch their director go crazy."

The People I've Slept With is screening on Nov 28 (7.50pm) and Nov 29 (7.10pm) at the Grand Cinema at Elements mall