FOFIF INTERVIEW
ALICE WU

Writer/Director of Saving Face & The Half Of It

The Half Of It is available via Netflix on May 1st

Virtual watch party with director, cast, and The Future of Film is Female on Friday, May 1 (5pm PST/7pm EST). Join the conversation on Twitter, #TheHalfofIt #GoldOpen

INTRODUCTION

My meeting filmmaker Alice Wu was certainly fortuitous. Last April, I reached out to her over Twitter about a Pride screening we were organizing of her first film, Saving Face, at Nitehawk Cinema. It’s not always the most reliable way to connect with somebody you don’t know but she quickly wrote back saying she was actually in New York finishing shooting her sophomore feature...nearly fifteen years later. So Alice was gracious enough to come to Nitehawk for a talk after Saving Face while immersed in her new film; it was the most wonderful conversation (you can listen to it here). Of course, she was completing production on The Half Of It which is now, one year later, about to see the world. The film (about a jock, a nerd, and a popular girl is a small town who wind up changing each other’s lives) was supposed to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and we had big plans to bring it to Nitehawk and then to our MoMA series but then, you know, the world changed. 

Personally, I think that the films Alice makes are extremely special and needed in a world to remind us that acceptance, family, and love are universally important regardless of where you came from or who you love. Because of that, I’m really thankful that The Future of Film is Female is able to support The Half Of It in any and every way possible. It’s filmmakers like Alice whom we need to keep making stories come alive.

I’m grateful that Alice was able to chat with me two weeks ago while self-isolating in San Francisco. The interview below became a fluid conversation and I’ve tried to edit and structure it as such (and BEWARE, THERE MAY BE SPOILERS). It’s important to note that The Half Of It will be streaming on Netflix, May 1st. For this film, Alice said the partnership with Netflix was a wonderful experience and that the platform allows a film like this to reach a wider audience, perhaps ones from the small town similar to that one where the story takes place. The script was completed before Netflix came on board and the film was due to have a theatrical release. It will...one day. - Caryn Coleman, The Future of Film is Female.

THE CONVERSATION BEGINS…

Ever since Alice Wu’s debut film, Saving Face, came out in 2005 we’ve been eagerly awaiting what came next. Alice and I discussed the process of getting to the point of writing again and how she was working towards acceptance by setting it in “Trump” country...

I left the industry ten years ago. I never expected to but I thought I moved on to a different phase of my life. Then three years ago I finally came back and wrote something for hire and I suddenly I was like, “I should write my second film.” At the point I started to write it, I didn’t think that it was going to get made. I mean, you kind of secretly hope it will but I think I always started from that place like, I don’t know what this will be. Plus, at the time I was writing it Hollywood hadn’t discovered diversity yet [to entice people]; you know there were whispers of it but it wasn’t this big thing.

My films always have these very commercial hooks. For Saving Face it was “what happens when your mom gets pregnant and moves in with you and you have to marry her off.” Let’s make a big Hollywood movie out of that! And The Half of It has another commercial hook  because you could see a scenario where it would be set in a big white high school in Orange County or New Jersey like, being a Bring It On or Clueless kind of a thing. That would be a great movie, there’s nothing wrong with that, but for whatever reason, I tend to write things that are character based. I really love to show characters. I don’t even mean just the Chinese characters, I even mean the character of Paul (this white guy jock) because I don't want this to be like “and here’s your teen white boy teen star.” I’m trying to write a very specific sort of character. 

Given that and that I started to write this after Trump had been elected, I was in this state (as I think a lot of people were) where I knew that our country was not beyond sexism, racism, or homophobia. I obviously knew that. But I had just assumed that most people think those things are wrong. I hadn’t recognized that, oh actually that isn’t a given. It made me wonder. As someone who does believe that fundamentally we’re all much more similar than we are different and that basically, most people are born good and most of us, fundamentally, if we have the resources, will choose to do the right thing. And if that’s true, then I’m wrestling with this thing so “are these people [Trump voters] bad?” Am I suggesting that a whole bunch of Americans in the country are bad?” So I decided I should set this in “Trump country”. I don’t say Trump in the story but this was my way to understand. It’s funny because since then people have come up to me and said that this was exactly like the town they grew up in.

My big hope really was people would feel the textures and it just makes the story on one hand, more grounded, and on the other hand, more universal. And that it would help me have a little more empathy. 

There’s a use of language threaded throughout The Half Of It as each character struggles to communicate as they’re acutely aware of their desire and feeling to be heard. It’s all an act towards connection! We talked about the texting, timelessness, and the beautiful moment between Paul and Ellie’s father where everything was understood even if it wasn’t in the same language...

There is a lot of complex threading going on and I’ll be honest that when I was writing it, I don’t think my brain was thinking, “how will I thread these things?” I think my brain was thinking of being very character based. I have two touchstones that I always end up telling my creative team: 1) Authenticity. I really want our main characters to feel real. Especially in a film like this, I didn’t want to cast any of the name actors for the kids. I wanted them to feel like real high school kids. 2) Timelessness. I don’t like to lean into the trend of the moment because once you do, you date your film. And I think it’s part of the reason why you can watch Saving Face today and it still feels relevant. If that payphone wasn’t in there you would think that’s happening right now. Similarly I tried really hard for The Half of It. In the beginning, there are hints of technology (like “Hushmo”) but I tried to minimize and, as much as possible, to not show the screen. Occasionally it made sense to show a screen on a phone, but otherwise I preferred having subtitles pop up and disappear so it becomes an experience. You see these kids are communicating (on the phone) but, pretty quickly, I want to move to the whole thing of letters. It’s just so old fashioned. 

What’s great is that you start off with these three characters [Ellie, Paul, Aster] who will end up connecting in different ways. Ellie and Paul will end up connecting emotionally. Ellie and Aster connect at first in this very sort of intellectual and emotional way. Through the letters they are able to talk to each other but then my thought was that we’d move from there. There’s a brief moment they text each other but then the usage of words hops to the mural. The way it’s written you just hear the V.O. [during the mural scene] but what I wanted to do was graffiti on the wall because it kind of hops it up to another level. 

Now we’re going from written words, briefly some texting, and then BOOM it goes to writing on/physical spray-painting on the wall which I thought was another interesting way to visually heighten those words. Then it moves until they finally actually speak with each other. But I don’t think I was thinking about it until after I wrote the script and then my director brain clicked in and I looked at it with “this is what I have, how can I tighten it?” and one of the first things I did was look at that mural scene and know that they are not going to be texting or writing letters to each other. This is going to not be that back and forth. It’s going to be more fun if it’s a back and forth that we literally see appearing like animation on a wall.

Meanwhile, there’s Paul who’s bad at verbal communication but who, interestingly enough, ends up being the most emotionally intelligent character in this movie. The Half of It is about the most unlikely people somehow end up coming together and changing each other’s lives. There’s zero chance in Ellie’s head that this guy is going to affect her life but he ends up having a profound effect on her. And I think that in a lot of ways he’s almost like a surrogate parent to her at times because her own dad, who very much loves her but he’s grieving and isn’t able to step up in certain ways and Paul ends up filling some of that void. I really want to show how Paul and the dad end up developing this very sweet relationship. And what’s sweet about this scene in the kitchen is that it’s two men who both feel like they cannot communicate well; the dad feels like his english is terrible, he suffers self-esteem from that because there’s also deeper emotional things going on, and Paul just feels like he’s bad with words. Both of them feel like they don’t know how to communicate and yet, in that moment, they communicate EVERYTHING. It doesn’t matter that Paul doesn’t understand Mandarin, what I get out of that is you see Paul understands emotionally what the dad is saying. It shows that he has the patience to know he doesn’t know what’s being said, but he’s giving this man space to say it. For me, there’s something so beautiful about that and I think it gives the dad enough confidence to say that thing in English that he then says. And I think that’s also what gives Paul the fuel to stand up in the church. That’s the way that I see all of that happening. 

Apparently connecting with actors Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, and Alexxis Lemire (who are PERFECT in this film) was a long journey to find the right fit. 

I’m laughing because if you asked both sets of my casting directors they would say, well I will say, “I’m a bitch to cast for because I’m so specific about what I want and I’m like, ok great...can we see more people?” I probably read 500-600 people for each of those roles. I was watching links and watching links going nope, nope, nope. I saw so many teen actors for the role of Paul or of Astor. They’re not “known” stars for Ellie. Aster is very specific - it has to be a U.S. born LatinX woman (not the sexy LatinX stereotype). 

Leah [Lewis] is so different from the actual character of Ellie. Her initial instincts and how she read were wildly off from what the role would be but Leah is so interesting to watch - some people the camera just loves them and I remember being like, this girl has IT! She’s grown up a much more extroverted person and watching her strip and having to pull away things that I think for her have always been wonderful qualities that work well for her in her life. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she’s smart, and this is horrible of me but I said to her, “we’re basically going to peel away all those layers because the character of Ellie is a girl who hates attention because attention is never, ever good. I’m going to ask you to go to this place.” It’s a very vulnerable place because she’s probably spent years building up all these other things to not have to reveal that. But she was willing to go there.

For Paul, I just didn’t want him feeling like a joke. I need us to be like when we first see this guy - who is this? - and then over time we start to be like “ok” and then we start to love him. That’s the trajectory and what Danile Diemerdid so well. He was wonderful to work with. 

Again, I read every Latina actor star you can imagine and with Alexis, she’s very natural and I needed an actor who is not someone you look at and go “aha, she’s the super hot” - that’s not the story. You want that one girl who quietly stands out because the rest of the town is so horrible (like high school) and you’re a little bit like “what is that girl thinking?” and it’s hard to do. It's an unsung role and people won’t realize that what Alexis is doing is not easy to do at all; and that is to come across in an understated way as natural. There’s this sense of deep emotion and she does it really beautifully. And it makes you like Ellie and Paul more because you respect her; you want the object of their affection to be worthy. 

Alice’s films are complex. The Half Of It is a coming-of-age/romantic comedy but it’s also a much deeper exploration into the lives of others; into immigration, sexuality, and identity. Because high school is a painful memory for many of us, like Ellie, we talked about why it was the perfect setting for this story and how love can make us a foolish teen. 

I do think we all tend to regress to being teenagers when it comes to love. I don’t care if you’re 80 years old and in a nursing home, if you have to figure out how to ask somebody out you’re going to feel like you’re 15. So part of what I love about that period of time and environment is that, even to the most jaded and cynical person, there’s something deep inside they’re protecting and that is an age when we don’t know yet how to protect ourselves from those feelings; so those feelings just take us by storm. And I like to have my work have some basis in reality. I want it to be believable so we can get to that rush of a feeling in such a pure unfiltered way. 

With both of my films, I have the tendency to quietly subvert genres a little bit - like it seems like it’s going to be a romantic comedy but part way through things start to twist a bit. For The Half of It, it ends up being that it doesn’t matter if anyone gets the girl. It really ends up being about these three characters who, because of their collision, each end up learning something about themselves and that ends up being the piece that allows them to move forward in their life in a way that I think is far more hopeful for all three of them. 

So, if that’s the case, then where can you set something? Because the story becomes more interesting if it’s somebody you don’t expect, like it’s the last…person who you’d expect to change your life. So it’s far more interesting if Paul and Ellie affect each other than if Paul and her dad affect each other. It’s this weird, seemingly dumb jock ends up changing her life. I think our own world (especially in this country) seems to track us as we get older to a narrower and narrower band of people that we can be friends with. If you go college, that sort of narrows down the people, and then which college and what you did after? Once you get to college you don’t have as much access to different communities and I’m not sure why that happens. If I wanted to set something in high school in a tiny geographical area where all sorts of different worlds could exist that usually don’t collide. Aster is in her world of popular kids. Paul is in his world of the jocks. Ellie is in her own tiny world of one that occasionally has her English teacher and then her dad. But somehow those worlds collide and I think that the setting of high school makes it easier to do that and to tell that story.