wild violet | mythic mist - interview with greg pak by alyce wilson

Greg Pak is an award-winning writer and director whose feature film, Robot Stories, starring Tamlyn Tomita and Sab Shimono, played in 75 festivals, won 35 awards, screened theatrically across the country, and is now available on DVD. He has also directed multiple short films, some of which can be viewed at AtomFilms.com. This interview was conducted while he was a guest at the annual science fiction convention Philcon.

What got you started in film?

I grew up loving movies. I grew up writing short stories, actually, and drawing cartoons and doing theater when I was in high school, doing black and white photography in high school. And it seemed like all of these things put together kind of become filmmaking. You know, it's all visual storytelling of some kind or another. But I never had the chance to do anything related to film directly, throughout college, throughout high school or college. I kept trying to get into a film class when I was in college. It was only open to the art majors. I actually majored in political science in college.

But throughout college I was drawing cartoons and doing photography and all, writing short stories still and also doing improv comedy. And I watched millions of movies through college. There were all these great film societies in college.

But somehow, that whole part of my life I relegated in my head to the extracurricular work. And I kind of didn't let myself think of it as real work. I ended up going back home to Texas, and I worked in politics for a year. I worked on Ann Richards' campaign when she was running for governor years ago.

And then after that I went to England on a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, study history, ostensibly so that I could become a better politician. That was my thinking, that I needed this background in history in order to work better in politics. But while I was there, for the first time, I had a chance to get involved with a film group, a student filmmaking group. And as soon as I started doing it, it was like, "This is it. This is what I need to be doing." I finally had a chance to do it, and it satisfied me on every level I needed to be satisfied on. It challenged me on every level.

I mean, when I was in politics it definitely felt like I was fighting the good fight, but there was part of me, there was like muscles I wasn't flexing. There were things that I needed to be doing that I wasn't doing.

Two of your earliest short films, Ode to Margaret Cho and Mr. Lee, are rooted in your experiences growing up Korean-American and using humor to get at the issues. How do you see the role of filmmakers in our society when it comes to social issues?

It's interesting, because the motivations for me to be involved with politics, some of those motivations are the same motivations that compelled me to be involved in filmmaking. I feel like there are points of view that should get out there because it will help people live together better. But at the same time, I'm not that interested in making message movies. Nine times out of ten people go to movies to be taken to a different world, to be entertained. And a sort of didactic message movie, that's the last thing people want to go see. So the trick is to tell movies which tell stories which are compelling emotionally and viscerally exciting but then that also have another level to them, another layer to them.

And Robot Stories does that.

Yes. Robot Stories is definitely — it's like there's this kind of combination. I think about genre a lot, because I love genre in filmmaking. Robot Stories is a science fiction movie, essentially. A different kind of science fiction from the kind of science fiction that the average person thinks about when they think about science fiction. For better or worse, when they think science fiction in the movies, people think about things blowing up. They think about action adventure. And I'm a sucker for those kinds of movies. I grew up with those movies; I love them.

But I also grew up reading Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut, for that matter and classic science fiction, in which things didn't have to blow up. Essentially, it's stories about people, about human experience.

But essentially, it's still a genre picture. And I think genre is just a lot of fun. And that's one of the reasons why people go to the movies, because they want to go into that different world that genre provides. I like exploring that world. I like doing that as a filmmaker and as an audience goer. And I think genre becomes really colorful when you can combine it, then, with something else.

Margaret Cho, who's also Korean-American, says when she was growing up, she dreamed that one day she could be an extra on M*A*S*H. Did you grow up with the same idea about limits for Asians in Hollywood?

I remember when I was 17 or 18 I saw Hollywood Shuffle, which was Robert Townsend's movie, basically a series of sketches held together by the story of a black actor who's trying to make it in Hollywood, but everywhere he goes the only kind of offer he's given is these incredibly stereotyped and embarrassing roles. And it really resonated with me as an Asian-American person, because it's the same thing. At the time, he was making up movies for black people. There was, like, the slave role or the blaxploitation role.

In the same kind of way for Asian Americans, there's like two or three roles that just keep coming up. For women, it's like the prostitute or the whore of some kind, dragon lady, or the geisha girl. It's basically either the sexual predator or the sexual object. And then it's the Kung Fu guy or the scientist or the evil Yakuza leader or something like that. There's a handful of stereotypical roles that Asians can get. Or the weird pervert of some kind, which is another variation of the Japanese businessman. But all of them are skewed in a way that's negative in some way or another.

The Kung Fu thing is similar to the blaxploitation thing in that those are heroes. But at the same time it's like that's the only sort of way that you can see these characters. And that's just so tedious. There are stories all the time about filmmakers who have a script with Asian-American characters in it or actors who are going up for a role, and it may be something that has nothing at all to do with Kung Fu. But the question always comes up, "So you throw a little Kung Fu in there for us or something?"

And so yes, that kind of desire to create compelling images of people, where you're not necessarily feeding the same old stereotypes.

I don't really care about this notion people talk about, like, positive role models and positive depictions. I don't care about that. Because if your only goal is to provide positive depictions of people of a certain ethnicity, you're going to make boring pictures. It's the same problem you get into if you're going to make a message picture, because great drama isn't built from well-behaved people. Heroes become heroes because of the problems they overcome, not because they're necessarily perfect to begin with. It's the flawed heroes that are sometimes the most compelling.

So I'm not necessarily one of these people who are like, "Oh, we need more positive images." I think we just need more images, period. More multi-dimensional characters. Because right now, in the mainstream roles it's all these one-dimensional characters. So it's just a matter of getting multiple images out there.