'Saving Face' director Alice Wu looks back on her 2004 queer romantic comedy
"Honestly, who in the hell thought that movie would get made," director Alice Wu says of writing the script for Saving Face, her feature film directorial debut.
The 2004 queer romantic comedy was years ahead of its time — a story of a young Asian American woman struggling to come out to her mom, just as her mom starts to rediscover love herself — and took five years to make because Wu had to, well, learn how to make a movie.
"The five years was not because of the industry," she tells EW while reflecting on the lesbian rom-com. "The five years is because I knew jack s---. I had no idea what I was doing. It's not like I was submitting my script. I had no one to submit to. I was just learning what it took. I didn't go to film school — I was working on grad student shorts for free and training as an editor."
Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Michelle Krusiec and Lynn Chen in 'Saving Face'
Saving Face was Wu's first film and starred a relatively unknown cast (Michelle Krusiec, a newcomer at the time, was the lead). It was also bilingual, featuring both Chinese and English dialogue, a feat that — even by today's standards — is rare. The film received mainly positive reviews (EW critic Owen Gleiberman called it "a pleasant if sketchy Chinese-American family drama").
Wu never set out to make movies, but after Saving Face's release, she was only getting hired to work on other rom-com scripts. She tells EW "no one was paying" for the type of films she wanted to make. "I'm being bluntly honest," she says, "it was not like financiers were lining up to make my story. They were definitely more like, 'Can you do this thing with a known star? Maybe you can pitch for that.'
"So I left the industry. I just thought, 'Well, I guess that was fun. I made that movie.' I'm fundamentally very practical. I'm an immigrant. I'm the child of immigrants and so I very much wanted to get myself... I was in a pretty decent financial place, but I wanted to make sure I was as much as one can be, sort of impenetrable."
Stefanie Keenan/Getty 'Saving Face' director Alice Wu
Returning to the biz in 2020 with her Netflix film The Half of It, Wu says she has felt a change in the types of stories that are getting made. "I do think things are different," she says. "I think if nothing else, there are more executives and producers who are people of color. I think there are also just more voices in general."
She continues, "It seems to me, I'll just speak for Asian Americans, but it does feel like as immigrants, there's more of a second and a third generation now. Whereas I felt like, okay, I was born here, but I spoke Mandarin. It's my first language. That was a different time. I think the more you start having Asian Americans going into the liberal arts or into storytelling, I feel as though there's a greater number of storytellers. So that alone, even if the distribution is the same — which I do think it's different — but even if the distribution's the same, I think you just have more people dying to say something."
Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Michelle Krusiec and Joan Chen in 'Saving Face'
In the nearly 20 years since Saving Face first premiered, it has earned a sort of cult following after landing on the Los Angeles Times list of the 20 best Asian American films of the past 20 years in 2019. And it continues to serve as a milestone for many queer women, particularly Asian American women, who long sought to see themselves represented.
"I was at the yearly Asian Queer Women's Banquet and these two raffle ticket holders came up to me and asked, 'What's your name?' I was like, 'Alice,'" she recalls with a smile. "They're like, 'Are you Alice Wu?' I was like, 'Yes.' I swear I'm not using hyperbole when I say they both squealed. They're like 19 years old and said, 'Oh, my God, you have no idea how much your movies mean to me' and they went on and on and I was like, oh, my God! These people were like 1 when Saving Face came out! My friends were laughing so hard because they are not impressed with me, legitimately should not be. I just live a fairly normal, quiet life, but every now and then that happens."
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