Yeah. I get that. Yeah. I’m a generation ahead of you. It was my grandparents who ran a restaurant in LA Chinatown. You were kind of my mother’s role. Parents who come to America to make a better life for their children, and in a way, breaking their backs to do that. And it feels like a similar story.
Yeah. And a lot of people see that “Oh, you’re a restaurant owner, you’re an entrepreneur, you should be better off.” But a lot of times, these Chinese restaurants make enough for a regular salary. Meaning, the salary that somebody gets in an office, they’re making that the same salary. Still, they own the restaurant, I guess, but it’s not like that much better because you have a lot of liability, and you have to pay your employees before you pay yourself. What happens when the restaurant is going through a dry period?
Yeah. Absolutely. What about the thriller element of it, then? You’ve got the family element about running the restaurant and struggling economically, but then now you have the thriller element of the mob or mafia-inspired element at that point.
Wong: That also came from my time in LA. And when I met Hisonni, he saw what I was trying to do, and he pretty much amplified all of that because when I was writing it by myself… I’m not a filmmaker. I’m not a director. It was a smaller story, and I wasn’t sure what I could pull off on my own when I met Hisonni, and we were going through the rewrites. He knew what he could do with his experience. So I’m just really, really happy. I always tell Hisonni, act three, moment by moment, was just everything I ever wanted when I first began on this journey.
So speaking of Hisonni, how did the two of you meet then? Was it in LA? How did your two spheres intersect?
Johnson: Well, I built a little bit of a reputation for being a no-budget filmmaker, a guy who can get a film done and get a film done well, with innovative techniques instead of money. And Hedy had been kind of through the wringer, trying to get this great project off the ground and trying to get money to make it. I think she had gotten to the point where she was frustrated. So the gentleman who played her brother in the film, Lynna Yee, played Sarin. He remembered an interaction we had on the phone ten years earlier. We kept in contact, so he was able to see all of my film adventures over the past decade, and he just reached out to Hedy and told her that I was the guy. He thought I was the guy that could make this happen.
“…it was her personality that made me realize the film had legs…”
Hedy invited me out to dinner and told me the premise of the film. And to be honest, it was her personality that made me realize the film had legs because I could put her in the film about eating flapjacks for 90 minutes and it would be interesting because she’s that interesting a person. I think that the thriller elements, the thriller elements came from our experiences, probably in seedier areas.
As for me, I grew up in a rough zip code, 53206, which is in Milwaukee. It’s the area where more black men are incarcerated per capita than any other place in the world. It’s the most segregated city in America. It’s a rough place. And every day, you have a micro version of what happens with Tera. You bump into the wrong guys. You’re wearing the wrong colors. And you have to find, hopefully, a non-violent way of getting out of the situation. But that tenseness seems like it’s ever-present in places that are systemically hit by poverty and segregation. It makes things unpredictable.
That’s where that tension comes from—living a life full of that tension. Even if that tension wasn’t coming from other people, it was coming from the bills. The bills that your mom couldn’t pay, or your dad couldn’t pay. Just not knowing how you’re going to make ends meet the next month.
So, you mastered the low-budget indie. When you got the script, was it much more significant? Were there elements where it’s kind of like, “Well, we can’t do that because we don’t have money?” What were considerations made with the story, knowing what resources you had to make it?
Johnson: Hedy wrote an excellent script, but in some ways, it was bigger. Like, she had younger versions of the character in the film. But it was also a film that was way more about the other characters than it was about Tera. So it conflicted with what drew me into the film. When I read it, my first reaction was, “It isn’t even about you.” I started thinking about it from the perspective of someone who I knew personally. I knew how much I was going to ask Hedy to sacrifice to make this film. So she better damn well be in it and be in it a lot. And the fact that I was interested in it because of her, and not all of these kinds of like peripheral characters.
The film she wrote was more docudrama. It would’ve played well if you did it, kind of like the film End of Watch and just kind of followed this person… That’s the way I would have done that film. But I think we were both more interested in telling a more grounded, narrative-style film with a lot of thematic meaning and social relevance.
