50 Years of Filmmaking

“It was a selfish pursuit, to make my own films about the things I cared about.

When I started, like everyone else. I wanted to direct. But I didn’t have faith in the system of starting as an assistant, slowly working my way up the ladder. I worried about getting stuck somewhere in the middle, well-paid, but not doing what I set out to do, watching the producer’s niece or nephew zoom past me. Besides, how many Asian American directors were there then? None. I’d always rather figure it out on my own - start small, live cheap, lean on friends, learn by doing - that was fine, easier than changing oil for a living. The hard part was pushing myself out there - making the phone calls.

In 1976, I started my filmmaking career producing and directing children’s films (I thought I should start by directing kids and work up to adults) for Churchill Films, a small but influential educational film company on Robertson Blvd. in Los Angeles. My first film, A-m-e-r-i-c-a-n-s (1977), was a short documentary about ethnic diversity which was broadcast nationally on CBS, and my second, A Little Joke (1978), was a short drama about racism.

50 years later, I completed my last film for HBO Documentary Films, Heroin: Cape Cod, which was screened for the White House and helped bring the oxycontin/heroin crisis to national attention; and Mifune: The Last Samurai, my tribute to my boyhood hero, Toshiro Mifune, which I had the privilege of making for Toshiaki Nakazawa, one of Japan’s great producers.

At that point, that craving I've always had to make the next film disappeared.  My favorite part of filmmaking was thinking about what I might do next.  Ideally, I'd take a year or a year and a half on a production, then move on to the next.  Even my two most ambitious projects, Black Tar Heroin and White Light/Black Rain took just two years to complete because they required it.  I don't know how people work on one film for six years.   Each film is a different challenge, a different experience, so you want as many experiences as possible, right?  But when I finished Mifune, I finally felt done, as far as filmmaking was concerned."

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