This might be one of my favorite phone interviews that I’ve ever had the privilege of doing. Not only is writer-directorAlice Wu’s journey from first feature to second quite inspiring, but I also greatly appreciated how she challenged my thoughts and questions throughout. That turned our planned 20-minute interview into a 40-minute conversation so that means you’re getting more than one piece on Wu’s journey and her new Netflix movie,The Half Of It!
Leah Lewisleads the film as Ellie, a super smart high school student who keeps to herself for the most part. Her interactions with her peers are limited to the school assignments she completes for them in exchange for some extra cash. However, things change for Ellie big time when Paul (Daniel Diemer) offers to pay her, not for an essay or to complete his homework, but rather, to help him write a love letter to his crush, Aster (AlexxisLemire). One letter turns into many and in the process, all three learn more about themselves through each other than they ever could haven expected.
Wu’s feature directorial debut,Saving Face, celebrated its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival back in 2004 before opening in select theaters in the summer of 2005. So why the 15-year gap between that andThe Half Of It? It’s quite the story of navigating personal obligations and industry challenges. If you’ve ever found yourself struggling with writer’s block or veering down a different path and looking for a way back, Wu’s story is a must-read. Check out the first part of our interview below covering her journey fromSaving FacetoThe Half Of It, and what she needed to do in order to push herself to get that first draft done.
CatchThe Half Of Iton Netflix on May 1st.
I do know that this is your first feature in a long time, so why the wait? Was it a matter of this story being a challenging one to get off the ground or were you just working on other things?
ALICE WU: Neither, actually. [Laughs] I left the industry 10 years ago to take care of my mom. Yeah, so I actually totally thought I was done with film and stuff.Saving Facecame out, as of Memorial Day this year, it will be exactly 15 years [ago]. I mean, to be totally honest, who thought that movie would get made, right? At the time, I was just focused on trying to get that movie made. It hadn’t even occurred to me that it could get made, and then I didn’t think about my “career” after because the likelihood of that movie getting made was minuscule. And so when it did happen, I think I was like a deer in headlights. When people were like, ‘What’s next?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know!’ [Laughs] And so I was just sort of responding to what the market was sending me. I did a lot of work for hire. I only picked things I truly did love, but they were definitely -you know, it’s different when you write something that comes entirely from yourself versus say something that you really like and then you fall in love with because you’re working on it. But it’s definitely like you’re serving other masters, right?
And so I did that for a few years and then, long story short, my mom had a major health issue. I had just sold a TV pitch to ABC when that happened and I ended up dropping everything, moving up to San Francisco. At the time, I didn’t know I was moving. I went for what I thought would just be a few weeks, but then it just became clear that I just wanted to be close to her. And so after a number of months, I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve moved to San Francisco.’ Because I remember my agent calling me after like eight months of my being away, and just saying, ‘What is happening? Are you coming back?’ And I finally was like, ‘No, I’m not. I moved here.’ And in my head, I remember thinking like, ‘Okay, that’s a chapter now that’s closed.’ In my 20s, I was a computer scientist. In my 30s, I went off to make film. And I was 39 at the time and so I remember thinking like, ‘Okay, I guess my 40s will be about really taking care of my family and being close to them.’ So that’s what I did, and it was only about three years ago that I got pulled back into the industry by a studio exec friend who’d always wanted to work together, who said out of the blue, ‘Hey, are you still writing?’ And I had been doing no writing for seven years! I was doing improv for fun. I do long form improv. But otherwise, I just was not.
Every now and then I’d take a workshop and I’d try to write, and I just had epic writer’s block where I just could not write at all. But then when she contacted me, I ended up pitching her this gig, I got it, and I had this very fun year of writing. She worked at DreamWorks Animation at the time. I had a very fun year of writing for them. And that sort of got my mojo back. And then I thought, ‘You know, I’ve never written something for myself to direct sinceSaving Face. I’m gonna give it another shot.’ Because in the back of my head, I’d had the idea forThe Half of Itfor a good number of years before that, but it was just a vague sort of idea and every now and then I would be like,‘Oh, what about this?’ Never really sat down to write. And I finally just forced myself to sit down and outline it. And then by the time I finished writing it, it was very different than what I thought it was gonna be when I started.
Then the part that was shocking is that - it’s funny because when I wrote it, and I think it’s true ofSaving Facetoo, they’re sort of very commercial hooks, but I tend to show characters you don’t usually see. For me, I think the thing I love is to be very specific with those characters so that there’s a texture to their lives that I don’t think always get reflected on screen. But the hook is commercial. But at the time I wroteThe Half of It, Hollywood hadn’t “discovered diversity” yet. And I remember being like, ‘Well, if I write it like this, it’s probably gonna take me another five years to make this film, just likeSaving Face.’ But in my head I was like, ‘Alright, I’m signing up for that. That’s what I’ll do.’ And the big shocker was that when I finished the script, and I just sent it to a few people I knew, and it kind of got flipped around and within a few months I had like three financing possibilities, and that was still beforeCrazy Rich Asianscame out! So I think that was still shocking to me because people were not out there looking for diverse stories yet. But then yeah, then I end up choosing Netflix, and here we are!
With the DreamWorks project, was there any specific element of what you were writing over there that might have been that spark to get you back into writing?
WU: No, it was just writing. Honestly, here’s what it was. I apparently, knock on wood, I’ve never missed an external deadline. This was a crazy thing where they needed a first draft written in like four-and-a-half weeks, and it was so insane but then I did it, and the fact that I was able to do it was like, ‘Okay, I do know how to write and I can write! So then what is this weird writer’s block thing I have?’ Actually this part of the story is sort of hilarious because I was like, ‘Gee, I can do it. I can do it on time. I’m super happy! Folks like my work!’ So then when I sat down to write my own work, actually six months went by, and they actually called me again to be like, ‘Hey, we have other projects! Did you finish your spec?’ And I had done no writing. Once again, I’d gone on my computer every day hating anything I wrote, Googling endlessly about Trump. And finally, when they contacted me again, I was like, ‘Oh. Maybe I should just take this gig, because I’m happiest when I’m working.’ But then it was a little bit like, I was dragging my heels a bit, and then that friend of mine said, ‘Look Alice, I just think you’re never gonna be happy until you write that script, even if it sucks. You’ve just got to [get] it out of you, move on.’
I clearly am bad with my own deadlines. Apparently I respond to external pressure. [Laughs] So I wrote a check for $1,000 to the NRA and I gave it to one of my best friends CJ, who’s a butch firefighter and who’s the only one of my friends who absolutely would send that check in because she gave her word. I said, ‘Alright, I’m gonna give myself five weeks.’ I wrote that other first draft in four-and-a-half weeks, surely I can do this in five weeks! So I gave myself five weeks, I said, ‘On August 8th, it could be the crappiest first draft ever written, but it must be a complete draft; if it is not done, you are sending that check in.’ And then I just told everyone. I told all of my friends for the accountability. And it was a crazy stressful time where everyone was texting me like, ‘You better not become a donor to the NRA!’ But that’s how I got it written. Basically I got the first draft written and then I took a good five months to really massage it, and then that’s the draft we shot.
You mentioned that it changed a lot from the beginning to the end, so what was the thing that changed the most?
WU: It’s funny,Saving Faceis like this too, where everyone always assumes anything I write is exactly my story. And in part, they’re not wrong. I write from a very deep personal emotional place. So all the emotions in what I’m writing are true. Any time a friend of mine sees a movie that I’ve done, they look at that main character and they’re always like, ‘Oh my god, the actor’s basically doing you!’ [Laughs] So apparently the main characters have a lot of similarities.
I fictionalize the actual environment. Like, my mom didn’t get pregnant for example at 48, like inSaving Face, however I did write that because my mom was going through a time in her life where I really, really wanted her to feel like her life wasn’t over. That actually, her life could also just be beginning. So that was the impetus there, and withThe Half of It, I was trying to explore something about the nature of love specifically. We live in a society that exalts romantic love. From the time we’re practically born, all of our stories about trying to find your perfect other half or your perfect love, and by that they’re not talking about the greatest friend you’re ever gonna have; they’re talking about your romantic partner.And I definitely grew up imbibing all of that, but when I think about it, I realize after I came out to myself as gay, which I did my senior year of college, my first real truly best friend was a straight guy. He helped me so much with my own acceptance of my coming out because my parents weren’t speaking to me at the time. There was something about that kind of acceptance back then.
I was just trying to figure out, what is that friendship for everybody, especially at that time? This is in the early ’90s, and at that time, I think a guy and a girl, it’s just assumed you’re straight. And if you’re friends, it’s assumed that if you’re single that you will end up dating. But what happens if you essentially meet your soulmate, but you have no desire to have sex with them? Like, what is that? And I think that’s something that’s been sitting in my head for a long time of exploring just the different shades of intimacy and love when it doesn’t follow the traditional format of, this is going to be a romantic relationship. And it’s especially interesting to me if it’s like a lesbian and a straight guy; well, what is that? It’s not exactly not romantic, which is what’s funny. And so I think that was the impetus and it was initially supposed to be a story about people in their 20s figuring it out.
But in the process, at a certain point I realized perhaps it might just be a TV show because there’s too many shades to explore there that I personally couldn’t figure out how to cram that into a movie. But then, I just remember, I was actually on an airplane when I suddenly felt like, ‘I should set this in high school.’ Just partly because every feeling in high school feels like the first time you felt that feeling, right? And so everything is heightened, and so you can cover a lot of emotional territory very quickly. In a lot of ways the story is kind of about what happens if you meet someone who is like the last person on earth that you think you will have a connection with, but that person ends up changing your life. And for Ellie, the character of Paul, there’s no way at the beginning of the movie she thinks that guy is gonna have anything to offer her. But by the end, it’s really the strength of their connection [that] has caused both of them to move forward in their lives, and I wanted to explore that.
And the great thing about high school is that once you get into the world, the world can conspire to make your friendship base narrower and narrower. If you go to college, then it narrows it down. Which kind of college did you go to? What do you do? What is your economic class level? Soon, before you know it, you’re living somewhere and all your friends are somewhat similar to you. But in high school, you may really have very disparate groups that are all in a very tiny geographical space. In this case, you can have, like Paul is in his social circle, the jocks. Aster is in her social circle, like sort of popular rich kids. And then you have Ellie in a circle of her own entirely. These three wouldn’t really cross, except that in the course of the story, they collide. And that causes all three of them to learn something about themselves. And I think high school allows for the possibility of the widest variation, whether it’s class or race, the widest differences all walking down the same corridors.
