Inside:

Distribution on the edge:

Canadian cinema carves an ‘erotic weirdness’ niche – p. B3

Canadian screenwriting:

‘A low-percentage proposition’ – p. B4

Shorts getting longer shrift:

Garnering more slots and more money – p. B20

Film diaries:

Production chronicles from conception to completion – begin p. B7

Features:

The Hanging Garden – p. B7

Shopping for Fangs – p. B11

Gerrie & Louise – p. B14

Pitch – p. B17

Hayseed – p. B19

Shorts:

Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight – p. B22

Permission – p. B24

Linear Dreams – p. B26

Codirectors: Quentin Lee, Justin Lin * Producer: Quentin Lee * Writer: Justin Lin * Cameraman: Lisa Wiegand * Diary by: Teressa Iezzi

Manipulating boundaries, tackling sexual and cultural identities and creating a new post-modern picture of young Asian North Americans. Not a task for the meek but a natural undertaking for a Hong Kong-born, Montreal-raised, Yale English and ucla film school grad and a Taiwanese partner, brought up in Orange County steeped in suburbia, sports and Eagle Scouts.

Shopping for Fangs is the collaborative effort of Canadian Quentin Lee and codirector/writer Justin Lin, who met in film school at ucla, where they are now both finishing their master’s degrees in film.

1988 to 1993: After leaving Montreal, Lee attends Berkeley in California and completes a series of video shorts including, in his senior year, To Ride a Cow about a gay, bi and straight love triangle. With this project, Lee achieves two filmmaker’s milestones: getting awards – it won Best Student Video at the New England Film Festival and the Best Video Award at the Hong Kong Independent Video Competition – and getting banned – the video was ixnayed on its way to the Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (‘because of a bit of frontal nudity,’ says Lee).

Lee had nurtured a film fascination since childhood when, equipped with a Super 8 and fake blood, he produced his own horror films, his genre of choice.

After Berkeley, he went to Yale for a master’s in English, ‘specializing in post-structuralist theory and feminist criticism.’

In fall 1993, Lee enters ucla film school and meets Lin. The two collaborate on a short called Fall 1990, which wins ucla’s Spotlight Award.

Summer 1995: Lee begins work on Shopping for Fangs, a ‘GenerAsian-x’ satiric thriller which draws in two stories of 20-somethings struggling with their identities and the cultural and sexual watermarks of urban life in the ’90s. Lin and Lee each write one of the intertwining stories, which will take about eight months.

‘We came up with the idea of interweaving stories,’ says Lin. ‘We knew they would differ in style but that they also had to come together.

Lin’s tale revolves around Phil, a lonely guy who begins to exhibit the follicular characteristics of the mythical werewolf, and Katherine, an isolated housewife being pursued by her doppelganger in the form of a waitress sporting a blond wig and dark glasses.

Lee says he was aiming to surmount cultural boundaries and create a post-modern Asian reality that broke through the generation-gap/immigrant-oriented framework of films like Joy Luck Club and even Double Happiness. ‘We were trying to articulate a post-modern Asian identity, but also deal more broadly with Generation x and how our identities are all mixed up.’

‘In our culture now we tend to think of people as having fixed identities,’ says Lee. ‘We tried to use the myths in the film to make these identities fluid again and make us question what we’re really about.’

Lee and Lin decide to codirect the film, with Lee also acting as producer.

Lee establishes de/center communications to produce the film.

October 1995: Lee’s first feature, Flow, a compilation of several of his short films from ucla, plays at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Lee meets and becomes friends with Camelia Frieberg, producer of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, who with Canadian video artist Richard Fung recommends Lee’s project for a Canada Council grant.

Summer 1996: Fangs receives the grant, which accounts for about 30% of the film’s mid-six-figure budget.

Lee pieces together the rest of the film’s financing from personal and family connections in Hong Kong, Canada and the u.s. Friends and associates sign on to the project as cast and crew, all of them on a deferred payment basis. ‘Everyone worked basically for nothing, and mostly were in it for the sake of the project,’ says Lee.

ucla classmate Lisa Wiegand is dop and Berkeley alum Deeya Loram art directs, with Radmar Jao, who costarred in Paramount’s The Phantom as Phil, and Jeanne Chin, who has Beverly Hills 90210 to her credit, playing Katherine.

Lee says true to the film’s treatment of identity, casting was not race-specific and represented a pan-Asian assembly of Chinese, Filipino, Korean and Vietnamese actors.

July 1996: Lee and Lin begin shooting Fangs in l.a. and the San Gabriel Valley area of California. Lee’s original location of choice had been Vancouver due to the heavy Asian influence in the city, but more favorable connections in l.a. and a potential actra roadblock due to the nonunion (read free) nature of his cast and crew, the production moved south.

Lee says the San Gabriel Valley represented an Asian-American suburb, a reinterpretation of Asian communities like Richmond, b.c. and Markham, Ont., complete with the huge Chinese strip malls specific to the area.

Violating the rules of low-budget independent filmmaking, the shoot is a location extravaganza, with ‘studio’ work done out of Lee’s apartment. All locations, including a supermarket, a theater and a restaurant called the Go-Go Cafe, which hosted the shoot for four days, are secured within the constraints of the film’s budget, i.e., largely free of charge.

It was a quintessential independent experience, says Lee – permits optional and ‘totally guerrilla.’ Twenty-one days are allotted for the shoot, including a day for reshoot, which is used when the lab wrecks a whole day’s worth of film.

August 1996: Lee and Lin tag team the editing job, renting an Avid and splitting 12-hour day and night shifts. ‘We basically edited the film in four weeks,’ says Lin. ‘It was very much a challenge, but your adrenaline is pumping for those two months you’re in production and post.’

March 1997: Fangs has its world premiere at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

Summer 1997: Lee remakes his de/center production company into Margin Films, a distribution company focusing primarily on nontraditional independent Asian/American films. Lee is working toward an end-of-year release for Bugis Street, a Singapore film about a young girl growing up in a transvestite/transsexual brothel, and Four Faces of Eve, a Hong Kong experimental feminist film.

Lee begins work on his next project, The Secret Diary of Boys, about two Asian-Canadian boys in their last year of high school, which he is aiming to produce with Telefilm Canada support and a Canadian distributor.

September 1997: Shopping For Fangs plays at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film is being handled by two u.s. producer’s reps and Lee is looking at distribution possibilities at tiff.