Wayne Wang: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Well, I wasn’t conscious in that sense. But I was conscious in a maybe overall sense of being a minimalist, or being more indirect. Maybe the framing was sometimes influenced by Ozu, a little bit. In that, he has dinner scenes, and usually shot, again, without a lot of close ups, by letting the scene play out. And also in Ozu films, it’s always about the change that’s going on within the family, because of the world. A lot of his films were made after the war. Japan was changing. The (sense of) family was changing. The two generations were changing. I was very conscious of that in my film too.

Well, my family was originally from China and Hong Kong. I went to school there, for almost 10, 12 years before they moved over. So by the time they moved over, like in the movie, I was a different person, speaking a different language. So I changed. I’m no longer the good Chinese son, who says yes, I respect you and do whatever you want. So, like in “Tokyo Story”, the kids are not so good to their parents (laughs). They’re too busy having their own lives. So I’m probably more that.

Well, I said, you can tell a really good story, so keep telling a good story. And I said, don’t rely on descriptions that much, because, in a script, it narratively tells something in a description. So you have to show what characters do. And I say don’t rely on dialogue as much. Because you have to use visually what happens. Sometimes, silence can be more powerful. So I said, work towards silence between people, rather than dialogue between people. So those are some of the things that we kind of talked about. And we consciously didn’t want her to write a polished screenplay. Because polished screenplays would then be very predictable. I like the idea of working with a novelist who don’t have that much experience in screenplays, because they will come up with something different. Like Paul Auster, he will find his own way of telling a story. I wanted to preserve that.

Well, it’s not fragments. It’s still telling a story. But it’s not so much, in a Hollywood script, it’s by page 25, it’s the end of act one, and you establish a conflict. And page 30, you start to resolve, the character starts to resolve that conflict. And by the end of the second act, there is a big disaster, the big conflict that is created, and then the third act… Those are classic scriptwriting formulas. So if you fall into that… It’s not that it’s bad. It’s very powerful. But if you fall into that, it becomes a little predictable. So in a sense, I wanted to have a conflict. I wanted to have the mystery. But not fall into these dramatic clichés. So that’s what I was encouraging her to do.

Well, she kept on saying, let me read some screenplays, good screenplays. I was saying, no, I don’t know what you should read. I may have given her two or three, so called screenplays. But I don’t know how helpful they were. One of the things I said, I gave her a software called final draft, which is basically a software that organizes a script for you. No matter what you do, it’s a script. So it’s no longer just writing narrative. Because it formats everything. That, I think is very useful because it’s all technical. I think also, we talked about things that I like, what I wanted to stress more. The one big change that I made, which is, I didn’t end the story with the Madame that he meets in the park bench. I ended up with the father and daughter. I wanted to have a lover who is also not American, so she came up with this Russian idea. I don’t remember in the short story whether if the Madame was Iranian or not. I think that was also made up. I encouraged her to make an American world that was more multi-cultured. So I talked about that. What I liked and what I didn’t like. And she just went off and wrote.

We went through three or four drafts. I think the first draft was kind of very long, a lot of dialogue, and was kind of not well organized, so to speak, not as streamlined as it should be. So we just did editing, focused on some things more. And we went from there. When I started shooting, I also then worked instinctively. I followed a lot of the script but also changed it everyday. In the script, it’s kind of like a balance, a story told from both the daughter’s and father’s point of view. But when I started filming, I liked the father character a lot. And I found that if he was sort of trying to find out more about her, it would be a better mystery. And I started taking a lot of her scenes away. There used to be a lot more about her and the Russian lover. I shot them but in the editing room I almost took them all away. Now there’s one scene left. There used to be four or five at least.

Yes. What is a good story? That is a good question. I think a good story must have conflict. I remember, somebody told me once. A character has to say, what do I want? And what’s stopping me from getting it. I think that’s the beginning of a good story. And then, it comes to conflict. And then, the other thing that is important is mystery. What do you not know, and what do you want to find out. In this case, the father doesn’t know what’s going on with her life, so he’s trying to find out. It’s like a detective in a way, without being a detective. I think the conflict and the mystery, the two things, are for me, what makes a good story. And obviously, wonderful characters, not so predictable characters, things that happen to them that are also interesting but not so common. Those are all good stories. I think something that’s based on real life is also important. If it’s too fantastical, then it becomes something else, which is fine, like comic strips and manga are great, because they’re just pure fantasies. But I work, kind of in character driven stories, so the reality of it is important to me.