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Wayne Wang's
Center of the World
By David Geffner
Wayne Wang (Photo: Terry Lilly)
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Everyone's going digital these days, including some filmmakers who have been around long enough to remember when shooting a feature in 16mm was as equally daring a move as embracing the new electronic medium. I'm talking about Wayne Wang, of course. The San Francisco-bred, Hong Kong-born filmmaker whose contributions to the American indie film movement loom as large now as they did 20 years ago, when Wang's ultra-low-budget puzzle box of a movie,Chan Is Missing, helped to create a new type of American cinema.
But, shooting a film in 16mm for $22,000 on the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown is ancient history. And Wang, whose credits include Smoke, The Joy Luck Club, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Chinese Box, and his first digital video (DV) effort, Center of the World, will tell you as much. What's got Wang's directorial mojo stoked these days is digital filmmaking, which he calls "so explicit and voyeuristic, it's a little bit scary."
Wang's DV feature, Center of the World, which was done under the DGA's Low Budget Agreement, is a dark, offbeat love story about an L.A.-based computer "geek" who falls in love with a stripper and heads off to Vegas for a lost weekend. Shot with three consumer model three-chip cameras, Wang's approach to the dark material was to simulate the familiar high quality of film at the story's outset, then begin a gradual disintegration into electronic grain as the characters' lives unravel.
The equipment Wang, and his cinematographer, Mauro Fiore, chose were three Sony DSR-100 Mini-DV cameras, a high-end consumer model which is capable of swapping out a single wide-angle lens and is about as close to home-movie equipment as many directors would care to get.
For Wang, however, the DV experience was summed up in a single concept: freedom. "These cameras are amazingly light and acrobatic," Wang marvels. "We would attach one to a stick and from about four feet away, shadow the actors through the scene. The DP is just another piece in the scene's blocking, a dancer in the choreography you could say. We also used these tiny surveillance cameras which could be planted on a lamp. We had an Army sergeant who was an expert in video surveillance in the Gulf War as our technical adviser!"
Wang, who joined the DGA in 1994, calls the DV medium "liberating" because it allows the director to quickly detour from the screenplay. Wang's method on Center of the World was to shoot rehearsals (which were heavy on improvisation), then pick and choose the strongest parts and shoot the scene again until it felt right.
"At first I was fighting my impulses to get enough coverage and agonize over how the DV material would cut together," Wang notes. "I was so locked into that seamless type of coverage that film editing requires. But, this technology has a life of its own - for example, jump cuts work great in DV - so after the first week I began to trust the technology and not impose my film sensibilities."
According to Wang, some of the myths swirling around DV were evident from the beginning. "You can't just walk into a room and start shooting," Wang laughs. "The medium requires precise lighting, just like film. And, while you can use a smaller crew, I was still at 65% of what I would have used on a film. The biggest myth is that shooting digitally means you can dispense with craft, and nothing could be further from the truth."
Perhaps the most dramatic revelation for Wang was how the digital process altered his relationship with his actors. "It frees them up big-time," the director explains. "They knew they could make more mistakes. They knew they could take more time. Often I would yell action and keep going past any cut point. We'd just keep rolling and start again from the top of the scene. The process also frees me up because I don't have to worry about shooting hundreds of feet of film that the studio will see in dailies and question. The give and take with actors is liberating."
Center of the World ultimately proved to Wang that shooting digitally is best for certain types of projects. According to Wang, the electronic medium cannot compare to the "scope, sweep and epic quality of film. We shot entirely in a hotel room," the director shares, "because we knew these cameras could not capture those big wide exteriors you get with film. You also can't project your DV dailies until you've transferred to film. So, you're never quite sure what the finished image will look like on a big screen. That will change as digital projection systems become more common. But, for now it's a frustrating part of the process. At a certain point, I had to forget about image quality and focus solely on content."
Content, of course, not technical refinement, is what began Wang's career on the streets of San Francisco. In an odd, cyclical echo of the American indie movement, Wang feels the digital medium is as much about the freedom to tell offbeat stories as Chan Is Missing was two decades back. "You can easily make a very polished DV movie for under $1 million, including the transfer costs to film, with room to breathe," Wang imparts. "You can also do it for $100,000 or less. But, you need to be careful, simple, and very controlled at that level. Regardless of what you spend, the biggest plus to shooting digitally is the freedom it provides. You can take more chances, both visually and in the storytelling, and not freak out about making mistakes."
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