Center for Asian American Media
Production Notes
In February 2007, Wayne Wang returned to San Francisco after shooting “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” a film based upon a short story by Yiyun Li about a father and daughter who’ve become familiar strangers as a consequence of the censorship of Maoist China. As Wang considered subsequent projects, he was hearing accounts of more current casualties of this legacy of suppression—a young adult population in China illiterate to its own history, twenty-year-olds who know nothing of the man who tried to stop a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He remembered another story by Yiyun, “The Princess of Nebraska,” in which a young Chinese woman named Sasha walks the streets of Chicago while debating whether to abort the baby she’s carrying. Wang was compelled by the story’s potential to provide one very personal perspective on an increasingly world-relevant question: Who is the young generation of the new China?
Adapting the short story
He initiated discussions with first-time screenwriter Michael Ray about a treatment that would modernize Sasha from a child of the Cultural Revolution to an offspring of the new capitalist China, transplant her to the Chinese way station of San Francisco, and manifest the extensive backstory in Yiyun’s original narrative with new characters in the adaptation’s present. The fundamental aesthetic of the film would be that of a modernist documentary, employing the technology of the young—cell phones and digital video—to depict them. In many ways, this project would represent a return to Wang’s seminal feature film, “Chan Is Missing,” made in 1982 for a budget of $20,000 and answering another question of cultural identity.
Wang turned to Donald Young, Director of Programs at the San Francisco–based Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), to assemble a small production crew of young local filmmakers and to instill in them a spirit of experimentation, resourcefulness, and flexibility that would reflect the themes of the film. Young drew from the temporary staff of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, forming whole departments in a matter of hours. A few months prior, CAAM Executive Director Stephen Gong had introduced Wang to Richard Wong, whose recent directorial debut with the micro-budget indie musical “Colma: The Musical” had earned him a Someone to Watch Award nomination through the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards. Wang invited Wong, also a talented director of photography, to shoot and ultimately to co-direct the film. With the principals in place, Entertainment FARM was brave enough to invest the necessary financing to support the production and final delivery of this creatively risky project.
Finding Sasha
To further ensure the film’s authenticity, Wang decided to cast in its most important roles nonprofessional actors who shared similarities of experience with the characters they were to portray. Casting agents Heidi Levitt and Sarah Kliban posted calls in both English and Chinese to talent agencies, newspapers, and Internet classifieds, seeking a young Chinese woman recently immigrated to the United States to play Sasha. Hundreds of interested actors applied, yet none was quite right. Less than two weeks before the first scheduled day of shooting, as Wang was dining in a favorite local restaurant one of the waitresses suggested he audition a high school girl named Ling Li.
Wang met Li over tea the following weekend and immediately perceived her potential for the role. Like Sasha, Li was a person in flux: at eighteen, no longer a child however not yet an adult; unaware of China’s even recent past but hyper-engaged in Western celebrity culture, admiring Paris Hilton for her ostensibly intrepid disregard for convention. And dangling from Li’s cell phone were the elaborate trinkets Wang and Michael had imagined when conceiving of the fashion typical of the character. Many of the other Chinese actors—Wolf and Gene, among them—were later cast from Li’s acquaintances.
Shooting the film
Wang wished to shoot the film in real locations around the city, relying on primarily natural lighting, wireless microphones, and a portable, unobtrusive camera. Wong suggested the Panasonic AGX-200 with a P2 memory card for high-quality digital images that could be downloaded into Final Cut Pro and edited relatively immediately, allowing them a quickly comprehensive understanding of what they were capturing as they set plans for the subsequent shoot. This process would allow Wang tremendous flexibility to adapt the narrative to chance discovery, the innate talents of his instinctual cast, and the unforeseen challenges of an independent production.
Preproduction required only three weeks; the film was shot in eighteen days—and in sequence, whenever possible, to aid the understandings of the inexperienced cast. The first day of production, however, captured the film’s final scenes. Wang and Ray had decided to set the story’s culmination against the backdrop of one of San Francisco’s uniquely chaotic public happenings. The annual St. Stupid’s Day Parade, conducted each April Fool’s Day, provided the ideal opportunity; and that shoot set the tone for those to follow. While the crew anticipated a two-hour procession through the city’s North Beach neighborhood, adjacent to Chinatown, the revelers passed in only fifteen minutes; Wang, Wong, and Li reacted quickly, improvising most of the scene and rapidly documenting everything necessary.
A great space for creativity and spontaneity
Richard Wong’s talent and familiarity with San Francisco brought a distinct aesthetic to the look of “The Princess of Nebraska.” His close collaboration with Wang gave the film a very immediate modern sense of mystery. Each scene’s success relied critically on Wong’s efficiency of preparation and resourcefulness. He and his assistant cameraman would set up in less than thirty minutes and produce imagery of a quality belonging to much more elaborate productions. His rapidly assembled cardboard light-box survived the entire three-week shoot.
Part of a generation raised on reality television, instant messaging, and YouTube, Sasha and her contemporaries are perpetual chroniclers of their own experience, dispatching video diaries and text messages to friends on the other side of the world just as readily as speaking to those physically present. Wang, Wong and Ray intended to document that hyper-linked socialization by inter-cutting the digital video with footage Sasha shoots on her cell phone and text messages she sends to her former lover in Beijing, varying the film’s aesthetics of communication.
The centerpieces of the film are the performances of the nonprofessional actors, anchored by the riveting Ling Li. The story requires her to compel sympathy from the audience despite some rather despicable actions, and her abilities to ground that conflicted relationship are undeniable. She fulfilled Wang’s ultimate hopes when he cast her in the role, incrementally imbuing the character with her own experience and personality. The diary from which she reads in the hotel is her own inspiration—one she began writing as Sasha soon after meeting Wang, to assist her understanding of the character. Wang spied the diary on set one day and immediately incorporated it into one of the film’s apex moments.
With “The Princess of Nebraska,” Wayne Wang aspires to answer a new question of identity—Who is the young generation of the new China? —by speaking in their parlance and through their technology, by configuring production practices that permit him the greatest flexibility to authentically document a personality unmoored to history and in constant flux.
