Director Wang talks to ScreenDaily about working with Takeshi Kitano.
Us-based director Wayne Wang, known for films such as The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Maid In Manhattan, wrapped his shoot with iconic Japanese actor Beat Takeshi, a.k.a. Takeshi Kitano, for suspense mystery While The Women Are Sleeping in Tokyo on Saturday (July 11).
Kitano, the award-winning actor/director of films such as Zatoichi, Beyond Outrage and Hana-bi, uses the name Beat Takeshi when he works as an actor or performer.
Based on Javier Marias’ short story of the same title published in The New Yorker, While The Women Are Sleeping debuted in early form at Busan’s 2013 Asian Project Market.
Shot mostly in Izu, the film is about Sahara (Kitano), a mysterious older man who is at a resort with his young girlfriend. It is told from the point of view of Kenji, a writer who is also visiting the resort for a week with...
Us-based director Wayne Wang, known for films such as The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Maid In Manhattan, wrapped his shoot with iconic Japanese actor Beat Takeshi, a.k.a. Takeshi Kitano, for suspense mystery While The Women Are Sleeping in Tokyo on Saturday (July 11).
Kitano, the award-winning actor/director of films such as Zatoichi, Beyond Outrage and Hana-bi, uses the name Beat Takeshi when he works as an actor or performer.
Based on Javier Marias’ short story of the same title published in The New Yorker, While The Women Are Sleeping debuted in early form at Busan’s 2013 Asian Project Market.
Shot mostly in Izu, the film is about Sahara (Kitano), a mysterious older man who is at a resort with his young girlfriend. It is told from the point of view of Kenji, a writer who is also visiting the resort for a week with...
- 7/13/2015
- by hjnoh2007@gmail.com (Jean Noh)
- ScreenDaily
These days, Wayne Wang works in two different modes as a filmmaker and they rarely intersect. The Wang responsible for sizable operations like "Maid in Manhattan" and "Because of Winn-Dixie" has little in common with the Wang behind comparably microbudget productions like "The Princess of Nebraska" (which premiered on YouTube) and his latest work, "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," another under-the-radar release (albeit through Fox Searchlight, which is putting ...
- 7/15/2011
- Indiewire
Though his career’s wandered down plenty of other interesting (Smoke) and less interesting (Because Of Winn-Dixie) paths, director Wayne Wang will always best be known as the premier chronicler of the lives of Chinese-Americans and Chinese in America on screen, from his influential debut Chan Is Missing to The Joy Luck Club. It’s a subject he’s returned to recently with 2007’s digitally shot double feature A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers and The Princess Of Nebraska, and in Snow Flower And The Secret Fan, he takes a step further, setting the film entirely in China. Adapted ...
- 7/14/2011
- avclub.com
Scream 4
Opens: April 15th 2011
Cast: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Mary McDonnell, Emma Roberts Director: Wes Craven
Summary: Sidney Prescott, now the author of a self-help book, returns home to Woodsboro on the last stop of her book tour. There she reconnects with family and friends, but it also brings about the return of Ghostface which puts the whole town in danger.
Analysis: Back in late 1996 when I first began covering film news, "Scream" was released and became more than just a sleeper hit. After years of genre movies being relegated to direct-to-video status, this comedic slasher spawned the biggest surge in the horror film genre since "Halloween" almost two decades before. Its post-modern stylings and witty self-aware dialogue went on to be a big influence on films and television in general.
Yet the "Scream" series itself never could quite capture that glory again. By the time the...
Opens: April 15th 2011
Cast: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Mary McDonnell, Emma Roberts Director: Wes Craven
Summary: Sidney Prescott, now the author of a self-help book, returns home to Woodsboro on the last stop of her book tour. There she reconnects with family and friends, but it also brings about the return of Ghostface which puts the whole town in danger.
Analysis: Back in late 1996 when I first began covering film news, "Scream" was released and became more than just a sleeper hit. After years of genre movies being relegated to direct-to-video status, this comedic slasher spawned the biggest surge in the horror film genre since "Halloween" almost two decades before. Its post-modern stylings and witty self-aware dialogue went on to be a big influence on films and television in general.
Yet the "Scream" series itself never could quite capture that glory again. By the time the...
- 3/8/2011
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
DVD Playhouse—June 2009
By
Allen Gardner
The International (Sony) An Interpol agent (Clive Owen) joins forces with a Manhattan D.A. (Naomi Watts) to bring down an arms dealing ring and a corrupt global banking cartel that’s funding them. Superlative thriller was oddly ignored by critics and audiences alike, but expertly blends intelligence (courtesy screenwriter Eric Warren Singer’s masterfully-crafted script) and full-throttle action (director Tom Tykwer stages one of the great film shoot-outs in New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum), making this dynamite thriller reminiscent of the best work from masters such as John Frankenheimer and Robert Aldrich. Armin Mueller-Stahl is wonderful as a world-weary covert op. Bonuses: Extended scene; Featurettes; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
The Jack Lemmon Film Collection(Sony) Five films from the two-time Oscar winning actor, focusing on his early career: Phfft! is a zippy comedy from 1954, one of Lemmon’s earliest films, in which...
By
Allen Gardner
The International (Sony) An Interpol agent (Clive Owen) joins forces with a Manhattan D.A. (Naomi Watts) to bring down an arms dealing ring and a corrupt global banking cartel that’s funding them. Superlative thriller was oddly ignored by critics and audiences alike, but expertly blends intelligence (courtesy screenwriter Eric Warren Singer’s masterfully-crafted script) and full-throttle action (director Tom Tykwer stages one of the great film shoot-outs in New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum), making this dynamite thriller reminiscent of the best work from masters such as John Frankenheimer and Robert Aldrich. Armin Mueller-Stahl is wonderful as a world-weary covert op. Bonuses: Extended scene; Featurettes; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
The Jack Lemmon Film Collection(Sony) Five films from the two-time Oscar winning actor, focusing on his early career: Phfft! is a zippy comedy from 1954, one of Lemmon’s earliest films, in which...
- 6/3/2009
- by The Hollywood Interview.com
- The Hollywood Interview
Director Wayne Wang is getting with the Web 2.0 times and will be releasing his upcoming film The Princess Of Nebraska fully on YouTube on October 17th. Based on the the short story by Yiyun Li, the film centers on a pregnant Chinese girl's life in the U.S and covers the larger theme of family and Chinese identity in the modern world, which he's been exploring for the last six films. As for why he's doing this, Wang had this to say: "'The Princess of Nebraska' is about a young woman from...
- 9/12/2008
- by Omar Aviles
- JoBlo.com
Wayne Wang's new film "The Princess of Nebraska," from Magnolia Pictures, will make its world premiere on YouTube on Oct. 17. It will be released for free on the recently launched YouTube Screening Room, a channel dedicated to premium film content.
Magnolia is releasing another new film of Wang's, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," theatrically on Sept. 19. But it opted to release his companion film, "Nebraska," online as part of a larger distribution plan for the two films.
"Nebraska" and "Prayers" are both adapted from a collection of short stories by Yiyun Li. They mark the seventh and eighth of Wang's Asian-themed films that explore the bonds of family and Chinese identity in the modern world.
"The Princess of Nebraska" is about a young woman from China who tries to locate her identity through different kinds of new media," Wang said. "The piece was shot with this kind of...
Magnolia is releasing another new film of Wang's, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," theatrically on Sept. 19. But it opted to release his companion film, "Nebraska," online as part of a larger distribution plan for the two films.
"Nebraska" and "Prayers" are both adapted from a collection of short stories by Yiyun Li. They mark the seventh and eighth of Wang's Asian-themed films that explore the bonds of family and Chinese identity in the modern world.
"The Princess of Nebraska" is about a young woman from China who tries to locate her identity through different kinds of new media," Wang said. "The piece was shot with this kind of...
- 9/11/2008
- by By Gregg Kilday
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Toronto International Film Festival
TORONTO -- Like his new A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska centers on a Chinese character recently arrived on American soil. This time, it's a very young woman carrying a baby she isn't ready for.
Princess doesn't dovetail with Prayers the way Wang's pair of 1995 releases, Smoke and Blue in the Face, did, even though they share some general cultural ingredients. If each of these new titles appeals to a limited audience, the number of viewers who will appreciate both is smaller still. In the case of Princess, the tight narrative focus it shares with Prayers is colored by a bleaker outlook and edgier visual style, placing it squarely in the art house arena.
Sasha, a fairly unsympathetic girl, is from Beijing by way of Omaha. She has flown to San Francisco to meet a Westerner, Boshen, who isn't her child's father but is involved in some way we don't initially understand. We're not even certain what it is he's about to help her do -- Arrange an abortion? Make plans to sell the child or find adoptive parents? -- but we know they aren't especially fond of each other.
Boshen is more solicitous, though, than she is of him. He invites her to a dinner party, where Sasha alienates a bunch of upper-class Chinese-Americans and rifles through their purses when nobody's looking. (Later, she'll casually steal a family's shopping bag in a mall food court.) Bored, she sets out on her own to Chinatown, where an ugly night awaits.
Shot in a much more seat-of-the-pants style than Prayers, the film is as casual about framing as Sasha is about manners. Its colors tend toward the lurid or fluorescent, and its perspective sometimes shifts so that we see action through the viewfinder of Sasha's cell-phone camera. The style suits her night-time adventure, as she meets the tough-girl "X," who may be a prostitute and is definitely unsavory, and proceeds to get drunk in places she has no business being.
The source of Sasha's problems is revealed much as the troubles are in Prayers -- at the end of some fruitless wandering, to be followed by an ambiguous resolution. Here, the outlook is bleaker, stranding the expectant mother in the center of a very empty frame. Moving on, we're told in the film, is a very American idea -- viewers are left to guess whether Sasha can put anything behind her or will be carrying her mistakes for a very long time.
THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA
No Distributor
California Asian American Media
Credits:
Director: Wayne Wang
Co-director: Richard Wong
Writer: Michael Ray
Based on the short story by Yiyun Li
Producers: Yukie Kito, Donald Young
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Stephen Gong
Director of photography: Richard Wong
Production designer: Amy Chan
Music: Kent Sparling
Editor: Deirdre Slevin
Cast:
Sasha: Ling Li
Boshen: Brian Danforth
X: Pamelyn Chee
Running time -- 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
TORONTO -- Like his new A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska centers on a Chinese character recently arrived on American soil. This time, it's a very young woman carrying a baby she isn't ready for.
Princess doesn't dovetail with Prayers the way Wang's pair of 1995 releases, Smoke and Blue in the Face, did, even though they share some general cultural ingredients. If each of these new titles appeals to a limited audience, the number of viewers who will appreciate both is smaller still. In the case of Princess, the tight narrative focus it shares with Prayers is colored by a bleaker outlook and edgier visual style, placing it squarely in the art house arena.
Sasha, a fairly unsympathetic girl, is from Beijing by way of Omaha. She has flown to San Francisco to meet a Westerner, Boshen, who isn't her child's father but is involved in some way we don't initially understand. We're not even certain what it is he's about to help her do -- Arrange an abortion? Make plans to sell the child or find adoptive parents? -- but we know they aren't especially fond of each other.
Boshen is more solicitous, though, than she is of him. He invites her to a dinner party, where Sasha alienates a bunch of upper-class Chinese-Americans and rifles through their purses when nobody's looking. (Later, she'll casually steal a family's shopping bag in a mall food court.) Bored, she sets out on her own to Chinatown, where an ugly night awaits.
Shot in a much more seat-of-the-pants style than Prayers, the film is as casual about framing as Sasha is about manners. Its colors tend toward the lurid or fluorescent, and its perspective sometimes shifts so that we see action through the viewfinder of Sasha's cell-phone camera. The style suits her night-time adventure, as she meets the tough-girl "X," who may be a prostitute and is definitely unsavory, and proceeds to get drunk in places she has no business being.
The source of Sasha's problems is revealed much as the troubles are in Prayers -- at the end of some fruitless wandering, to be followed by an ambiguous resolution. Here, the outlook is bleaker, stranding the expectant mother in the center of a very empty frame. Moving on, we're told in the film, is a very American idea -- viewers are left to guess whether Sasha can put anything behind her or will be carrying her mistakes for a very long time.
THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA
No Distributor
California Asian American Media
Credits:
Director: Wayne Wang
Co-director: Richard Wong
Writer: Michael Ray
Based on the short story by Yiyun Li
Producers: Yukie Kito, Donald Young
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Stephen Gong
Director of photography: Richard Wong
Production designer: Amy Chan
Music: Kent Sparling
Editor: Deirdre Slevin
Cast:
Sasha: Ling Li
Boshen: Brian Danforth
X: Pamelyn Chee
Running time -- 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/17/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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