Raised in multiple East Asian countries before immigrating to the United States, Christine Choy would eventually become one of the most iconic filmmakers of her generation. Choy is known for her documentaries, and she co-directed Who killed Vincent Chin??, who would receive an Oscar nomination. Her documentaries, which include ethnographic looks at Asian diaspora communities in the United States and their unique struggles, as well as outside those communities for other ethnic and racial groups, have served as a form of political activism because of the awareness it has brought to the problems. and depicted persons. Now a professor of film at NYU, Choy’s legacy will permeate generations of filmmakers to come.
MovieWeb sat down with the iconic director to discuss her career and work.
Looking for a role model
MovieWeb: How did you get started as a filmmaker?
Christine Choy: The reason I became a documentary filmmaker was because nobody did it. I trained as an architect, worked at an architectural firm, and it was wonderful for my parents to tell their friends and relatives, “My daughter is an architect.” At that time there were so few Asian filmmakers – literally none – and I always try to do the research. I wasn’t the first, but there was an Asian filmmaker in the 1920s, in Hollywood, who made silent films. Then there were actresses like Anna May Wong. So number one: there were no role models. Two: in those days 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 opposed the Vietnam War, pro-Civil Rights Movement, and they had facilities. They began to document the civil rights movement in the south. They were all white guys, but when I was in Columbia, the head of Students for Nonviolence came over to where I lived and said I drew well. I said, “I want to be a filmmaker,” and he told me to go to Newsreel and give me the address. I had to get political education, I did, and then there was a prisoner uprising in upstate New York. The film was lost, but it was interesting because no one was making such films at the time.
MovieWeb: How have things changed over the decades?
Christine Choy: The whole landscape of filmmaking is changing so much. Everything is moving so fast with digital technology. When I started, we were shooting film, and all I saw were the dollar signs [it cost to reshoot]. So every shot had to be perfect. I could handle 1:3; shoot three times. Now it’s one in a hundred. Hundreds of hours of material, then you don’t know how to structure it. It was a very different kind of thought process, aesthetically and substantively. When filming, you couldn’t see what you were shooting. Now you can directly see and play, erase the images.
MovieWeb: You were previously trained as an architect before entering the film industry. How has your previous background influenced your work?
Christine Choy: I started learning to shoot and make films, which I owe to my training as an architect. We are trained in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, composition and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was very European driven, like Frank Lloyd Wright, and there were no women. This one [training] gives you a kind of skills that women can understand, with intricate technology. Not only the men can handle it, and I gained the confidence to learn how to shoot, record and edit.
Emotion and movie
MovieWeb: What originally attracted you to film as a medium?
Christine Choy: I wanted to be an actress. There were no role models. There was a time when I lived in South Korea, and Korea was split in two. But then we had 40,000 American troops stationed in Korea. There was no war and they had nothing else to do, so many American movies came to Korea to entertain them. I couldn’t go to Korean school, so I went to a school called Overseas Chinese High School. We were allowed to go to the cinema because our uniforms were different from the uniforms of Korean students. After school, where the school was located, there were only tea rooms, billiard rooms and cinemas, so I went to the cinema.
Korea itself has always made a lot of movies, very tragic movies. People loved it, came out sobbing and talking about it. That was an early impression about movies, how nice it was to see it on 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 single female role, except for one: Mulan. Later, the role models I admired were female writers who were influenced by French and Russian literature. Then, in America, I was immediately drawn to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. There were no female architects, no female 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 got into this industry, there were so many barriers to entry and representation was scarce. What kept you going, chasing the story, creating content?
Christine Choy: The funny thing is that the camera is huge, and I’m very thin. Back in the day, when you were making video, you needed 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 cameraman if you want my front or my back, and he said, “What’s the difference?” It was because I have a flat chest. I thought it was funny, I didn’t find it offensive. How do you use the offensive way and empower yourself? That’s what I started to see. How do you literally change something that was very hurtful and turn it into a situation where you put the speaker on the spot. Humor is extremely important. But to have it, you have to be able to laugh at yourself.
When he said that, and I laughed, it really helped me navigate through emotions, not from a place of anger. I’ve always said you can’t structure film with logic. Movie is emotion. Emotion is universal. If you can articulate emotion, it’s so universal. This is not in a textbook. How you grab this universal feeling in any subject, and you can share it with different people and nationalities, that’s what I try to convey with my films. Once you can capture emotion in a movie, the logic comes through.