Family Man

Director Wayne Wang admits to "a certain affinity for women...and for women's films." And, after 20th Century Fox's Nov. 12 release of his Anywhere But Here, with Oscar-caliber performances from Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman, some critics will surely say he has sealed his fate as a "woman's director."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. In a phone interview from his office in San Francisco, Wang says he has "nothing against" being known for an ability to bring out the best in female actors. It's just that he wouldn't want his directorial career "to be so easily slotted into one category." But then, musing about the movies he's made-or, rather, the kind of movies he likes to make-Wang admits they do put him into a particular slot. "I guess more than anything else, I've been focused on the family. All of the films I've made are, one way or another, about family." With a chuckle, Wang even suggests that his last effort, Chinese Box, filmed in Hong Kong with Jeremy Irons and Gong Li, was essentially about family. "It's a bit of a stretch, but here's a man who is very isolated, and when he finds out he's dying, he tries to find a family in the community."

The Joy Luck Club was all about family, of course. One of Wang's most successful films to date, it was based on the best-selling book by Amy Tan and told of four mothers, all Chinese immigrants to the U.S., whose traditional ways are misunderstood by their thoroughly assimilated American-born daughters. This particular culture clash is something Wayne Wang knows well. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he initially came to this country to study film and painting, his first love, at the California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. After completing a full-length feature, A Man, A Woman, A Killer, as his graduate student project, Wang returned to Hong Kong to become part of a "new wave" of young Chinese directors working primarily in television.

Feeling at a dead end after several years at this, Wang temporarily gave up filmmaking to become a social worker, helping recent immigrants make a new life in San Francisco's Chinatown. Out of this experience he found inspiration for his breakout film, the 1982 micro-budgeted comedy/thriller Chan Is Missing. His next independent feature, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, again focused on the residents of Chinatown (and on a mother and daughter), and it went on to win attention at the Cannes Film Festival as well as a nomination for best foreign film in Britain.

Wang is a decidedly independent independent filmmaker. Although he has become known for mining cinematic riches in both his native Hong Kong and the Chinese communities of San Francisco and New York (where he filmed Eat a Bowl of Tea, starring his wife, Cora Miao), he has also taken several notable forays into territories far from his own ethnic roots. Slamdance, for example, starred Tom Hulce and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in a 1987 film noir thriller set in Los Angeles. Smoke, made in 1995, had Harvey Keitel, William Hurt and Forest Whitaker as denizens of a cigar store in Brooklyn. This was immediately followed by Blue in the Face, a not very successful experiment in improvisation (co-directed with Smoke writer Paul Auster) set in the same cigar store and using some of the same characters.

The Joy Luck Club, released in 1993, was as close as Wang has come to finding a wide audience. But, after completing Chinese Box, that's what he decided to aim for. "I told my agent I wanted to look at something more mainstream. So I got a whole stack of scripts, most of which were not very good." Then he picked up Alvin Sargent's adaptation of Anywhere But Here, and, recalls Wang, "something immediately connected for me. Right away I was on the phone to say I want to do this." Sargent, an Oscar winner for his scripts for Julia and Ordinary People, had worked on the first of several screenplays based on the Mona Simpson novel when it was under development at another studio. After producer Laurence Mark read the book in the mid-1990s, he promptly obtained the film rights, acquired Sargent's script, and brought the package to Fox-where it ultimately went to Wang.

Anywhere But Here, the movie, differs considerably from the book, says the director. First and foremost, the novel has a Rashomon-like framework, with several members of a Wisconsin family recounting their versions of what happened when one of their own, Adele, buys a used Mercedes, leaves her husband and family in Bay City, and takes off with her reluctant teenage daughter, Ann, to pursue her dream of a glamorous life in Beverly Hills.

The movie gives short shrift to the folks back in Bay City (which is why third-billed Bonnie Bedelia ends up in a bit part), in order to steer all attention toward Adele and Ann, and to their difficult, evolving relationship. Only rarely, if ever, has there been seen onscreen a more powerful exploration of the mother/daughter dynamic-the conflicting feelings of love and hate, dependence and independence, embarrassment and pride. "There's always a lot of irony and contradiction in the love between parent and child," Wang says. "You love them and you hate them at the same time. That's what interests me."

There are other ways in which the Wang/Sargent film differs from the Simpson book: It softens the hate, tones down the anger. "In the book," Wang explains, "the mother was horrible-brutal, actually-for she hits Ann on several occasions. But, in the end, she's redeemed by what is clearly her unconditional love for her daughter. That's what we hung onto, that kind of love." Then, too, when Wang and Sargent started working together, "we realized we were a more positive sort of people." So Susan Sarandon's Adele is no longer brutal. In fact, although she remains erratic and irresponsible, she also emerges as an engaging, even funny eccentric. Neverthless, the negative aspect of the character initially gave Sarandon pause, until, says Wang, "she saw it as a way to do something different, something not so serious-she saw she could bring a comic edge to Adele."

While Adele is a reckless dreamer, her daughter Ann is the quiet realist: She sees how ridiculous her mother can be. The gifted, poised-beyond-her-years Natalie Portman was Wang's first and only choice for the role. Having just played Queen Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I, Portman was "delighted to get out of the headgear and makeup to become just an ordinary girl her own age." Fortunately, Wang continues, Sarandon and Portman immediately hit it off, "and they got into their parts very quickly." The script calls for both actresses to display a wide range of emotions, and Wang knew these two were more than capable of doing that. So he decided to give them all the help he could.

"I'm always looking for ways to capture a more truthful performance," says Wang. So, in collaboration with cinematographer Roger Deakins, he decided against using a Steadicam, fearing the man-mounted camera could prove too intrusive to the performers, that it would "break the flow of emotions" between them. Instead, the camera was placed on a remote-controlled dolly, "which allowed us to go with the actors, to give them the freedom to do what they needed to do. Yet, at the same time, the camera captured everything."

Wang made another unusual decision-namely, to shoot Anywhere But Here in Cinemascope, the wide-frame format usually reserved for action films or historical epics. Why use "Scope" on an intmate family drama? "Why not?," asks Wang. "While the film is very realistic, there's something about these two characters that's larger than life. So that's part of it. Also, with Scope, you can actually put the two of them in the same frame-a really nice frame, instead of having to cut from one to the other. This again enhances the quality of the performances-you're not artificially piecing together two separate performances."

A woman's director? Perhaps its more fitting to call Wayne Wang simply an actor's director. If either or both Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman-and the director himself-receive the critical praise and/or nominations they're likely to, Wang may very well find himself in danger of actually being swept away in the powerful currents of Hollywood's mainstream.