Exclusive: Trailblazing Filmmaker Christine Choy on Processes and Beginnings

Having grown up in multiple East Asian countries before immigrating to the United States, Christine Choy ultimately would become one of the most iconic filmmakers of her generation. Choy is known for her documentaries, and she was a co-director for Who Killed Vincent Chin?, which would receive an Oscar nomination. Her documentaries, which encompass ethnographic looks into Asian diaspora communities in the United States and their unique struggles, as well as beyond those communities to other ethnic and racial groups, have served as a form of political activism due to the awareness it has brought for the issues and people depicted. Now a professor of film at NYU, Choy’s legacy runs deeps into the upcoming generations of filmmakers.

MovieWeb sat down with the iconic director to discuss her career and work.

Searching for a Role Model

MovieWeb: How did you get your start as a filmmaker?

Christine Choy: The reason I became a documentary filmmaker was because no one was doing it. I was trained as an architect, worked at an architecture company, and it was great for my parents to tell their friends and relatives, “My daughter is an architect.” At the time there were so few Asian filmmakers — literally none — and I always try to do the research. I was not the first one, but there was an Asian filmmaker in the 1920s, in Hollywood, doing silent films. Then there were actresses like Anna May Wong. So number one: there were no role models. Two: at that time, it was so much more cumbersome to be a filmmaker. Everyone smoked cigarettes, women were used as props.

Fortunately, I joined an organization called Newsreel. They were founded by a bunch of radicals who were against the Vietnam War, pro-Civil Rights Movement, and they had facilities. They were beginning to document the Civil Rights Movement in the south. They were all white guys, but when I was at Columbia, the head of Students for Non-Violence came to where I was living and said I drew well. I said, “I want to be a filmmaker,” and he told me to check out Newsreel and gave me the address. I had to do political education, did that, and then there was a prisoner uprising in upstate New York. The film got lost, but it was interesting because at that time nobody was making films like that.

MovieWeb: How have things have changed across decades?

Christine Choy: The whole landscape in terms of filmmaking changes so much. Everything is done so quickly now because of digital technology. When I started, we shot with film, and the only things I see were the dollar signs [it cost to reshoot]. So every single shot had to be perfect. I was able to manage 1:3; shoot three times. Now it’s one to a hundred. Hundreds of hours of materials, then you don’t know how to structure it. It was a whole different kind of thinking process aesthetically and content-wise. When shooting film, you couldn’t see what you shot. Now you can see instantly and playback, erase the footage.

MovieWeb: You previously trained as an architect before heading into the film industry. How has your previous background influenced your work?

Christine Choy: I started learning how to shoot and make films, which I have to give credit to my training as an architect. We were trained in mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, composition, and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was very European-driven, like Frank Lloyd Wright, and there were no women. This [training] gives you some kind of skills, that women can understand, with complicated technology. Not just the men can handle it, and I gained the confidence to learn how to shoot, record, and edit.

Related: 5 Asian Directors Whose Movies You Should Be Watching

Emotion and Film

MovieWeb: What originally drew you to film as a medium?

Christine Choy: I wanted to be an actress. There were no role models. There was a period of time when I lived in South Korea, and Korea is divided in half. But then, we had 40,000 American troops stationed in Korea. There was no war, and they had nothing else to do, so a lot of American movies came to Korea to entertain them. I was not able to go to Korean school, so I went to a school called Overseas Chinese High School. We were allowed to go to see movies because our uniforms were different than Korean students’ uniforms. After school, where the school was located there were nothing but tea rooms, billiard rooms, and movie theaters, so I went to the movies.

Korea itself always produced a lot of films, very tragic films. People loved it, came out sobbing and talking about it. That was an early impression about films, how nice it was to see it on the screen. Then I came to the United States, where there were no Asian actresses. In China, where I grew up, we didn’t have a female role except one: Mulan. Later on, the role models I admired were women writers influenced by French and Russian literature. Then, in America, I was immediately attracted to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. There were no women architects, no women filmmakers. You had to create your own role models; the absence of a role model ironically gave me a different kind of imagination.

MovieWeb: When you first entered this industry, there were so many barriers to entry and representation was scarce. What kept you going, chasing the story, creating content?

Christine Choy: What’s funny is the camera is huge, and I am very thin. In early times, when you shot video, you need a piece of white paper. When you go out in the morning, you forget to bring a piece of white paper, so I decided to wear a white t-shirt. One day I asked a camera person do you want my front or my back, and he said, “What’s the difference?” It was because I am flat-chested. I thought it was funny, I didn’t think of it as offensive. How do you use the offensive way and empower yourself? That’s what I began to see. How do you literally change something that was very offensive and make it into a situation where you put the speaker on the spot. Humor is extremely important. But to have it, you need to be able to laugh at yourself.

When he said that, and I laughed, it really helped me to navigate emotions not from a place of anger. I always said you cannot structure film with logic. Film is emotion. Emotion is universal. When you are able to articulate emotion, it is so universal. This is not in a textbook. How you grab this universal feeling with any subject, and you can share it with different people and nationalities, that is what I am trying to communicate with my films. Once you are able to catch emotion in a film, the logic comes through.