What's Happening in Asian Cinema: Talking to the Organizers of the New York Asian Film Festival

From June 20 to July 6, the boys at [Subway Cinema] (Dan Craft, Grady Hendrix, Paul Kazee, Brian Ns, Goran Topalovic and Marc Walkow) return to the [IFC Center](http://www.ifccenter.com/index) and the [Japan Society](http://japansociety.org/) with a little something for everybody at the Seventh Annual [New York Asian Film Festival](http://www.nypress.com/21/25/film/film3.cfm). This year’s festival sports another [terrific line-up of films](http://www.nypress.com/21/25/film/film3.cfm), including two new gems by Johnnie To (Mad Detective and Sparrow), a double-bill of Thailand’s The Bodyguard franchise, two new over-the-top exercises in Technicolor insanity from Takashi Miike (Like a Dragon and Sukiyaki Western Django) and many, many more! The free prize giveaways before every show, special events, great movies and lots of high energy from Grady and the gang keep this festival from falling into typical cinephile drudgery.

I sat down with Dan Craft and NYAFF’s mascot, Grady Hendrix, a month ago for a look at the last year in Asian film, NYAFFs lineup this year, as well as a discussion about what works and what doesn’t in distributing Asian films in America:

NYPress: As a result of last year’s change in venue [from the Anthology Film Archives to the IFC Center], have you seen a change in who is attending the festival?

Grady Hendrix (GH): Nah, I don’t think it’s changed at all.

Dan Craft (DC): It grew a bit.

GH: Yeah, it grew a bit. We’re not reaching particularly different people, but we’re getting to slightly more of them. It’s a little higher profile in terms of exposure. I don’t know, we’d have to look at the numbers this year to see how it’s changed.

DC: What I’d be interested to see is how many kids attend this year. This year, we had a table at [the New York] Comic-Con. If every fourth kid that messed themselves when they saw that we’re going to show L(: Change the World), we’ll see out both screenings just to them. That’s the demographic we have some of, but…

GH:…not enough. Yeah, it’s funny, no matter how long we do this, I feel like we miss people who think, “Really? I totally want to go to that,” but they still don’t hear about us.

DC: Kids at the Comic-Con asked me, “You showed both Death Note films last year?!” “Yeah, we promoted the crap out of them too (laughs)! How did you not know that?!”   GH: Maybe we need a MySpace page…we do have a MySpace page! Maybe we need to be on Twitter.

Do you think the critical eyes of New York are looking more at you now that you’re at the IFC Center or no?

GH: Nah, I don’t think so.

DC: I don’t think it’s hurt it. It also depends on what crowd you’re talking about, too. There’s a certain kind of prestige from being at the Anthology, but if anything (being at the IFC Center) has raised our profile with the public, because that’s a legit venue and it’s in a much more public place.

How has the market for Asian films in the U.S. changed since last year?

GH: Um, gone in the toilet!

DC: The bottom fell out.

GH: Everyone thought last year was bad, but it’s gotten worse. Everyone’s closing. Even [Picturehouse], the people that released Pan’s Labyrinth are closing. No one’s picking up Asian films because there’s no money in it. It’s all flopping at the box office because nobody knows how to market it.

To be honest, I know of at least three companies that release Asian films, not exclusively, but along with the rest of their films, and they’re all either going to merge with other companies or be declared bankrupt or have massive layoffs by September of this year. It’s just bad. It’s hard out here for a pimp.

DC: Part of that is because the [Writer’s Guild] strike gave the major studios and corporations to cut a lot of stuff that they would’ve prevaricated about cutting earlier. Some of that stuff is way overdue. It’s not that this year is any different but rather that the clock ran out on a lot of things.

GH: A lot of investors are losing their patience. No one knows how to sell this stuff anymore; it’s too hard.

Were your expectations of how certain genre films would perform at last year’s festival met?

DC: Korea[n films] fell apart (laughs)! I just can’t believe how many films we’ve watched and the few of them that we’ve actually liked. I almost feel like they [Korean directors] decided to sabotage it [the industry] because their government cut their quotas. Otherwise, I can’t see how they’re putting out so many baaad movies.

GH: I agree. It’s funny, nothing last year did differently than we thought it would but we’ve been seeing this trend for years where the horror films have done worse and worse and what’s doing better are the pop films, the fun ones, the stuff that’s actually really good and different. Memories of Matsuko  sold out and even something like After This Our Exile did a lot better than we thought it would do.

The horror movies didn’t do that great so this year we’re not doing that many. The only horror film we did last year was that Pakistani one, Hell’s Ground and I think that’s because we had a huge Pakistani audience.

DC: Was Art of the Devil 2 two years ago?

GH: Two. And (laughs) that did badly two years ago. People are tired of this stuff and action movies and big, period martial arts movies.

DC: Just like anything else, it’s reached the point of saturation and people have turned away. What killed Hong Kong is what killed Korea. I was thinking the other day that we could tie what kind of year Hollywood’s been having. Last year was a bad summer—a little sequels, a lot of blockbusters. Stuff like Matsuko is the kind of stuff Hollywood’s not doing. I’d be curious to see how we do this year because it’s a big summer, a crowded summer.

GH: I also think we’ll do really well with some of our smaller stuff, like Fine, Totally Fine and Adrift in Tokyo.

Getting back to what you said about Korean films flopping, Korean romantic comedies have always performed rather well at the festival. Do you see any way that that kind of film could appeal to a mass American audience?

GH: Korean romantic comedies? No. A) Korea’s not making very good ones right now but also B) no, I don’t think the mass market has a taste for it.

DC: Well, several of them would do well with a mass-market audience if you could just get them to sit down and watch them. Without a company devoted to selling them, could it be done? That’s the thing a lot of people overestimate, the foreign-ness of the film. Most Korean romantic comedies work on a pretty universal level.

GH: Yeah, you don’t have to have a PhD to know what’s going on, it’s more that people won’t sit down to watch them and I think they still won’t. Even if someone does a Pan’s Labyrinth-type campaign, I just don’t think the market is out there right now.

So then would you say the audience for your festival is different than your concept of the mass audience?

GH: Oh, yeah. One hundred percent. For instance, we showed Funky Forest: The First Contact  a few years ago. There’s a radical difference between going to Funky Forest at the festival after you read about it and you stand in a line with other people that are jazzed up to see it and you’re in a crowded room where everyone’s passing beers around and having fun and going to The Imaginasian on a Thursday with four other people. There’s a radical difference.

People have been saying for a while that a lot of the acquisitions that come out of Toronto have been doing really shitty business. They say, “It’s the ‘Toronto Effect.’ Anything you’re excited to pick up then, no one’s going to care about later.” Festivals do a huge amount to get people jazzed up about going to the movies.

On [Grady’s blog] [Kaiju Shakedown], you said that releasing films like Death Note as an event seems to be the way to go…

GH: Well, we don’t know if it works yet.

Why do you think they (Fathom Releasing) decided to dub it?

GH: I don’t know. Do they not know what they’re doing? Is the anime doing well and they wanted the same voices dubbing them, because the anime’s dubbed. I also think there’s a big difference between how anime fans how live-action fans take to dubbing. Death Note is a live-action movie and they’re approaching it from an anime point-of-view.

DC: Most of the people that are going to go to it are anime fans.

GH: Yeah. I read several comments on message boards saying, “I hope this isn’t subtitled. I don’t want to read my movie!” I think it’s a mistake but maybe not.

DC: I’m sure they look at it from how they sell the DVDs and if right-to-left manga sells more than left-to-right manga.

GH: Do they?

DC: Well, they sell them both ways. Not for each title, but some publishers do. I’m sure they draw some kind of correlation from that. My guess is that the cost for them doing that is miniscule and the return is probably miniscule so the idea that they’re doing a lot of research is probably wrong.

That’s where the future of the industry lies though. When the industry gets over the Crouching Tiger model and gets over the idea that every Asian film is getting to break (to a) wide (audience) so they pay for it to break wide and then it fails on them. I don’t believe that Glenn Ford westerns sell more than a couple of thousand copies.

GH: But they do.

DC: Really? Even just old catalogues that they put out? Every film starring Yul Brynner just came out on DVD. You can’t tell me that each one of those titles sells more than ten thousand copies.

Once they get used to that model for Asian acquisitions, they could be everywhere and people could have access to them, but they don’t. They spend a lot of money on them so they need a lot of money back and it makes them think there’s no market for it, but there is. There is this dependable niche market if they just…well, I don’t want to say lower their expectations…   GH:It’s like [the] Criterion [Collection]’s samurai stuff. I was just talking to [Outcast Cinema’s] Marc [Walkow] and that stuff sells a couple of thousand units each year, for many years. It’s just reliable. It’s not Crouching Tiger, but it’s a business.

Do you think that there’s any genre film that could break through with that model in particular, like the action film or the art film?

GH: The art film. When I say the art film, I’m including stuff like Memories of Matsuko or The Taste of Tea. It’s not going to be an action film. That well has been poisoned.

DC: Well, there’s that idea that action fans aren’t smart or sophisticated so they’ll never read a subtitled movie and dubbing a movie devalues it. They tried it with District B13 and they came close but people didn’t take to it. Plus, it’s probably cheaper to bring that director [Pierre Morel] over here and just have him make something for you.   GH: Much and much more lucrative.

DC: Look at the Taxi films, which are a world-wide hit, their quality notwithstanding. I like them and a lot of people don’t, but they’re a franchise that has made three sequels and they have relatively big stars in it, like Marion Cotillard. No one has made the slightest attempt to even put out a limited amount of DVDs of them here. Car chases are fine in whatever language. So, no, I don’t think foreign action films are likely to do good business here.

It always seems like the action films, like Hero, A Bittersweet Life and City of Violence are the films you guys like to advertise most at the festival though.

GH: I would say that last year, Dasepo Naughty Girls was the big thing on our posters and that did killer business for us. We sold out two houses before that. What was on the poster the year before that?

DC: A Bittersweet Life. I think action, like horror, tends to be a visible genre so it’s easy to fill houses with those films. Something like Dasepo, which is way art-directed and way out there, it’s hard to put in a genre that doesn’t say anything about the movie. Those pictures from Fine, Totally Fine completely fail to convey anything about that movie.

GH: Fine, Totally Fine is one of my favorite things at this year’s festival and I looked at the stills from it and thought, “Jesus!”

DC: That poster for (Vietnamese action movie) The Rebel is easy to sell because it shows exactly what it’s going to show them. Plus, we’re a little bit of a fanboy festival.

GH: Hey, I like action movies.

The festival caters to both genre films though and “art films” and, like you said, both do pretty well. How does that work?

DC: It varies from film to film.

GH: Look, we all got into Asian film when action and cult stuff were really big so that’s the lens I’m looking at it through. I’m old, man. I’m irrelevant. I’m 35. Fuck me. I should just go off and die. What people respond to is a lot different, with a lot more plot or a lot more manga or anime influences and date movies. That’s what we clean up on. And of course the big name stuff, like Park Chan-wook.

But even Takashi Miike had to cut down his Sukiyaki Western Django down by 23 minutes. Even though people like him as a cult director and know him as the guy that did Audition, he still has to censor himself to get his film released.

GH: I’m glad he cut it down. Did you see it? The long version is a little snoozey in the middle. I saw it up in Toronto and I literally slept through the middle so I’m really glad he tightened it up. But I know what you mean.

DC: I don’t know how he gets people in there but I think people want to see Asian films because there’s a lack of cynicism that affects even our most sappy American film, which tugs at your heart-strings in a very cynical way. A lot of films like Matsuko reminds of being a kid in the early ‘80s.

The other day, I was watching Back to the Future on the big screen with my wife and then later I caught Back to the Future 2 on TV. The first film was made in 1984 and the second was from 1989. Somewhere in those five years, that cynicism switch clicked and all the things that are so easy to buy into in the first one are winked at and nodded at and made garish by the second one. Asian countries, especially Japan, can still really make a film without making you know that they’re aware of it.

GH: Accuracy of Death should not be a good name. It has one of the lamest pitches: Takeshi Kaneshiro is the angel of death with a talking dog, judging if people should die or not. It’s really fucking good. I saw it twice and it’s totally unapologetic. Takeshi Kaneshiro gives a performance that this movie doesn’t deserve based on its concept. He and the other actors and the director too, by underplaying things rather than overplaying them, make this ridiculous concept really work. Even the talking dog works.

I don’t know what it is but they’re refusing to engage with irony on some level…

DC: Well, Survive Style 5+ isn’t cynical but it’s ironic but something like Adrift in Tokyo and even after the first twenty minutes, I thought, “I’m going to hate this,” and then twenty-five minutes into it I thought, “Man, I love this movie.”

GH: Fine, Totally Fine is seems so sarcastic and mean and cynical but it winds up being completely sweet and innocent. Maybe part of it is the distancing. We’re watching Asian actors and they’re in another country with another language and maybe that distance allows me to get past my own cynicism.

I do think, objectively, these movies are better in terms of craftsmanship. They’re not all glossy but you get the feeling that there’s a guiding principle behind them. Someone picked these shots and this style of editing and these performances and put them together. I’ve seen so many movies where they think, “Ok, we’ve got Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt’s on-board! And we can shoot here for a tax break!” And it all hangs together very badly, like Frankenstein. I think it’s a little bit of distancing. And no Helen Hunt.

It seems though that Bollywood movies use that very same innocence but where Krrish does very well at the festival, there was a very hard time for you guys getting (director) Ram Gopal Varma’s other films to do well at the festival in the past.

GH: I think the key difference there was that Krrish was new. We were showing it the day before it opened around the world and the Varma stuff was older. Also, what we didn’t know but should’ve was how much the Bollywood audience hated Varma. He was really widely despised.

DC: It’s a shame, because they’re some of the best movies Bollywood produced.

GH: Ek Hasina Thi and Ab Tak Chappan are both great movies.

But those two movies have a sense of cynicism about them that most people don’t associate with Bollywood. Was the fact that they were Bollywood films and people expected the characters to be breaking out into song why they didn’t go see them?

DC: Yeah, because they would’ve thought that they are going to see some silly thing with dance numbers even though it was about a cop that kills people and there wasn’t any dancing.

GH: That would make me buy a ticket though, frankly.

DC: Bollywood is almost like a genre, like kung fu or something, so therefore it’s not real filmmaking to some. Those experiences burned us…

GH:…traumatized us.

Do you ever think you want to expand from the usual line-up of Hong Kong, Japanese, Korean and one or two Thai films?

GH: We’ve always done Thai movies. This year we have the King Naresuan movies. We have Kala from Indonesia, which is really good, I think.

DC: We get stuff from many different countries all the time, it’s just….

GH: …it’s rare that we think that an audience would go for it.

DC: Also, those bigger countries’ film industries out-produce the smaller countries. For every 10 Japanese film, we might not get to watch 10 Malaysian films because there weren’t 10 submitted to us.

GH: We’re doing The Rebel from Vietnam this year and I had to rewatch it again to write the blurb for it on the website and I thought, “This is really good.”

DC: I watched it again too and thought, “Maybe I was just being really kind because I wanted it to be good,” and I rewatched it and thought, “No, it’s really good.” (Thai actioner) Dynamite Warrior did really well with a crowd and this is a far better film than that.

We also discuss if there’s anything we want to show that doesn’t fall into our Asian film niche. We totally discuss where Iran sits technically or Turkey.

GH: We were going to do a Turkish film a year ago and the distributors said they’d do it, but they changed their minds.

DC: We were discussing for a while whether or not to show the films we showed at Comic-Con, the Mark Zaror films (Kiltro and Mirageman) and we ultimately decided we probably would. I would, in a heartbeat. The question is do we want to commit ourselves to having to find things outside of Asia every year to keep that aspect of the festival alive?

GH: Also, just working with distributors because they’re not as known quantities.

What at this year’s festival has you most excited?

DC: Well, I’m excited about The Rebel, because it’s got a lot of good action. It’s like Logan’s Run in French-occupied Vietnam except without any robots; Always 2: Sunset on Third Street is another one, one that I’m excited to see in a theater; and then the two Johnnie To films, Mad Detective and Sparrow. We like to keep our toe in that water. Subway Cinema has been one of his biggest promoters, way before anyone heard about Election.

GH: One of the first things we did was a Johnnie To retrospective.

DC: I remember sitting through a double-feature of Expect the Unexpected and The Longest Nite and realizing that I was going to have to pay attention to that guy’s name for a while.

It’d also be great to see the King Naresuan films on a big screen with an audience. If we can get the word out to the Thai community, that’ll do really well because not only is that a Thai film, it’s a prestige Thai film because it’s about their king and it’s directed by a prince (Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol). We got all the Pakistanis out of the blue for Hell’s Ground without even realizing it so I think Thais should show up for this. If they hear about it.

GH: For me, it’s Johnny To’s Sparrow, which I think is one of the best movie’s he’s ever done and is very much like a musical. Everyone has a fabulous entrance and the acting is the kind that actors do right before they burst into a dance number. It’s not a natural kind of acting but it’s not completely stylized; it’s somewhere in-between. It’s really all there. He (To) does this technically perfect stuff without even thinking about it anymore and it really works in Sparrow so well.

I was watching a screener and I was in the worst mood. I just wanted to watch it for the blurb and get it over with, and by the time it ended, I felt great. I was having such a great day by the time the film ended. It’s also like 87 minutes long. It ends in an hour and twenty minutes.

I’m super-psyched about United Red Army. It’s completely unpleasant to watch, but it sticks with you for a long time afterwards. (Director) Kôji Wakamatsu is so committed to this movie that he funded by the movie by mortgaging his house, is distributing it himself because he doesn’t trust any distributors and used his house in the country as this lodge that gets completely destroyed by the film’s end.

I also think that there’s this view in the States that we own the ‘60s, as if it only happened here. This is a whole different view of Japan that they’ve never seen. It’s a Japan where people are rioting in the streets. It’s hardcore.

I’m excited about everything but the last one has to be Fine, Totally Fine which is completely ridiculous and I hated it when I started watching it but by the half-hour mark, I started to relax and enjoy it. I could watch, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, the lead in this, for weeks on a movie. Just so good.

Were there films that you were dying to get but just couldn’t?

DC: Chocolate.

GH: Chocolate. Forever the Moment, which is a Korean women’s handball movie and it’s just great.

DC: Exodus.

Has working with distributors and producers gotten any easier by now?

DC: This year, the (New York) Korean Film Festival really stepped up their game and asked for a lot of stuff in a timely fashion and scooped us on a bunch of stuff. That’s all our doing, we just took our time and didn’t take them seriously.

GH: Well, it’s also because Korea had such a lousy year last year so there was some stuff we wanted but we wanted to try to see if there was anything better. By the time we realized that that was as good as Korea got last year, those films were gone. I would blame our optimism. We hope there were better films out there.

Dan said this already but it’s astounding how far the Korean film industry has fallen in just a year. I could name 10 movies from 2006 that I would’ve been happy to have shown at the festival but this year, I could think of five movies from 2007 and this far into 2008, maybe six. It’s been such a bad year. I don’t know what happened, man. No one in Korean can make movies anymore.

One of the movies we’re showing is The Butcher, which is completely independent but we all thought that for it is, it’s good. It’s like a Hostel-type horror movie. The guys that made it at least had the intestinal fortitude to have a vision and see it through.

In light of that, how optimistic are you about this year’s line-up?

DC: I think it’s amazing that we’re going to have a decent year and I think we’re going to have a good to average for screenings, which is where we want it to be. We don’t have a single break-out movie that we could screen four times to a sold-out audience, like we’ve had the last couple of years but we have a good year.

Our mood comes from the fact that we feel we shouldn’t have to work this hard to have the year we’re going to have. We’re going to have a decent year, but man, it’s a lot of work to bring it all together, more than any other year before.

GH: Seven years in and we still have to fight. Distributors come to our festival and say, “That movie did so well! I can’t believe no one else picked it up,” and they don’t realize how hard we work to sell every single ticket. I’m not blaming the American public at all but it’s still tough, man. Asian films are still not a surefire guarantee.

It always kills me when Film Forum does a two-week engagement of Jules and Jim or Days of Being Wild runs for three weeks and yet you can’t get those same people to take a chance on something new and better. That always baffles me. I always feel like we’ll hit this tipping point where it all gets easy afterward and it’s just never going to happen. We still have to fight for every ticket.

But people have fun. As much as I always want to cancel the festival because it’s a pain in the ass, you go and have 200 people really having a good time that’s worthwhile and you like.

DC: We look at the list of films and we think, “This is going to do great, this is going to do great,” and we’re not usually that far wrong on those but there’s usually three or four things (per year) that really surprise us when people go crazy over them.

Are you still financing the festival on your credit cards?

GH: Pretty much.

DC: Just to cover gaps, just until we get paid for it. As long as that stays true, I’m willing to do it.

GH: Yeah, as long as we break even.

DC: I always thought that we’d become this self-perpetuating entity that paid to do the festival. I went to Fantasia (Film Festival) for the first time last year and just to see how hard they have to work to get the crowds they get….

GH:…Although they do sell 900 tickets or something, and that always kills me. I mean, 900 tickets for one movie?   But they all have day jobs and stuff. This is a thing we’re always going to keep doing but unless someone like Tribeca (Film Festival)—whose pockets are apparently not as deep as everybody thought—unless someone like that gets interested in us, we’ll keep struggling. But the festival itself makes it worth it.

GH: Actually, I do.

DC: I do, too. I get all giddy when I think about what’s going to happen.