Vee Hua talks fundraising and film

Vee Hua (Credit: Auriza Ugalino)

After a “voice of God” moment in 2012, local indie filmmaker Vee Hua set about making their first film—a process that took five years. Since beginning their filmmaking journey, Hua has pursued all aspects of cinema, including working as the executive director at the Northwest Film Forum (NWFF), where Hua and the NWFF won the 2021 Mayor’s Award for Achievement in Film.

Hua’s latest film, created with co-writer Lisa Sanaye Dring, is called “Reckless Spirits.” The film is a metaphysical buddy comedy that tackles everything from cultural appropriation to cult mentality to parental expectations, all through a uniquely diverse lens with Asian-style comedy undertones. Despite currently existing as a proof-of-concept, “Reckless Spirits” has already received significant press coverage.

With a little less than halfway left to go towards meeting the film’s fundraising goal, before the end of the year, Hua recently sat down with the Northwest Asian Weekly’s Carolyn Bick to talk about the film, and their filmmaking journey.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

NWAW: Before I ask you about some of the elements of the film itself, I would love to know what your journey as a filmmaker has been like.

I started making films in 2017, after I had a voice of God moment in 2012 that made it very clear that I needed to make films. But it took me five years to figure out how to make my first short film. So that happened in 2017.

Then, I basically put filmmaking on hiatus for a while to be an arts administrator at Northwest Film Forum as the executive director, before coming back to doing this. [At NWFF,] I produced other people’s projects and did production design and assistant directing on other people’s projects, but I didn’t come back to my own until the tail end of 2021, where we made the short film—(the) proof of concept for this film.

And now we’re embarking on the feature.

NWAW: So, what inspired you to make the feature film, and what was the creation process like?

My co-writer, Lisa Sanaye Dring, and I started brainstorming it in 2016, when I was still living in Los Angeles. We’re both really spiritual people, but at the same time, especially in L.A., saw a lot of commodification of spirituality, sort of like cult leader-type dynamics, taking advantage of people. We wanted to make a film that commented on that through lead characters, which we feel like aren’t really seen on screen very much, both in terms of their identities and the type of story that’s being told.

And then I sat on it for a while again, while I was executive director (at NWFF), and then had been iterating on it in the background for … almost a decade—eight years or something. And that was just the time to hopefully try to make it happen.

NWAW: I really appreciated the layers of commentary in the film. I particularly noticed it in two places that I would love to hear you speak about: One, in the character of Yvette, where, as a young Korean American woman, she constantly apologizes and takes on everyone else’s burdens and feelings; and two, in the massive amounts of cultural appropriation from different cultures, particularly the not-even-acknowledged Indigenous practice of working with sage, abalone, and feathers in ritual, alongside the mish-mash of what boils down to New Age TikTok-speak.

Why did you decide to put each of those into the film?

Both of the characters are sort of alter egos of my co-writer and I. She was for a long time an actor, and now she’s more focused on playwriting.

But (the character) Yvette is who she might have been, if she went down the more stereotypical Asian straight-and-narrow. And Syd is my alter ego, I feel like, if I hadn’t been so repressed growing up as to who I actually am and finding it later in life, both in terms of gender binaries and in terms of performative personality type stuff.

And in the case of Yvette, her whole character is (that) she’s sort of doing this therapy thing in part because that’s what Asian kids do, right? In some ways, they’re doing these jobs that make money, their parents like—but also, maybe, they’re not even good at them, or they don’t like them at all. So, she definitely is that sort of persona, where she’s taking on this job, seems to have it all together, but actually hates the job and doesn’t have it all together.

And then Guy—I mean, I’ve watched so many cult-like TV shows and podcasts in the process of making this, and it almost always comes down to the same certain set of factors. And that is—generally, not always—a white man.

There are men of color and also women, sometimes, who take on the role. However, almost always, they follow the same tropes. And that’s abuse of their power. That’s taking from different religions and different world spiritual practices to create their own manipulative systems of power.

So, it felt like all that just had to be included as a part of designing the cult fundamentally.

NWAW: Yeah. And how he surrounded himself with young women.

Of course! We have to do that. And everyone has to be super-hot.

NWAW: I also want to ask with regards to this particular film, what do you hope viewers will also start to think about when watching it? Because, obviously, I saw the proof-of-concept, and so, to me, the proof-of-concept felt more like a clip of a TV show. But it’s not. It’s a film. And so how does that translate into the film? And what do you want to cultivate in people’s minds to start thinking about?

It is the first 12 or so minutes of the film. And really, it’s setting up a lot of the things that will be elements of the larger film, such as the presence of ancestors, the presence of these themes of the cult, and the two main characters. It’s sort of like the inciting moment that makes them start to wonder more about what is this world of inexplicable things around us, beginning with—not to give it all away—but Yvette has an unexpected circumstance, and there’s a visitation by an ancestor. 

We’re just wanting people to understand these things are going to be investigated in the larger feature, and extrapolated upon. And we’re going to get deeper with a sense of, “How do cults take advantage of people? How are they going to try to woo Yvette to join their cult, while their best friend, Syd, may not be particularly into it?”

NWAW: Actually, that’s something else I wanted to ask about, if you wouldn’t mind talking about this: Do you have any of your own ancestor practices that maybe were forefront in your mind, when you decide to create this film?

The presence of the different types of spiritual components are dependent on an amalgamation of my co-writer and myself. 

I, myself, feel like in this life, I am not well-attuned to things like spirits and ancestors, but my co-writer is. And that’s part of the work that she does, as well as a lot of other people in my life.

For me, it’s more in dreams and synchronicities … Tarot—all of those also show up in the film.

And so those are more my contributions to it. But as far as my own personal run-ins with ancestors, I’ve had some things, but not ones that I’ve controlled. [For instance,] I’ve had healings from an Indigenous practitioner, which I felt like was healing some kind of harm that wasn’t actually belonging to me.

NWAW: Can you explain that a little bit? The harm or the healing?

Oh, the healing. I’ve had a healing from an Indigenous healer that surfaced some emotions and some feelings that felt like they were being healed, but that they weren’t my own. It felt like they were healing some lineage stuff. So, I’ve had stuff happen, but not in a way that I’m actively controlling or pursuing. 

NWAW: A little bit of a different tack: What has your experience as an Asian American filmmaker been like? What distinguishes your particular journey as a filmmaker from somebody else’s?

I think a lot of Asian cinema did impact the way that I approach storytelling.

In terms of this project specifically, I think a lot of my sense of humor comes from watching a lot of Asian American kung fu comedies and just really silly, slapstick-y Asian American [media]—those stories, growing up. The sense of humor is just fundamentally pretty different from Western mainstream comedic humor. And I think that comes through, because my characters are very much acting with physical comedy and very—almost overly—animated in a lot of ways. So that’s one.

I think in terms of like experience, I think until very recently, Asian stories have been very much about, “My mom is so traumatic. My dad won’t let me be who I am”—which 100% resonates, because I experienced that and it makes sense.

But I also feel like, as we’re getting more representation, and while those stories are so important, it’s not the type of story I want to tell at all. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have a mom-dad traumatic story, but it’s not what I want to tell.

I’d rather tell stuff that’s more uplifting and more representative of other kinds of Asian American experiences that we’re not really seeing in cinema. … I still think we’re at the point where Asian American stories that aren’t simply traumatic are still perhaps a little hard to find in the same way that like, you know, you hear Black creators complaining about, “Oh, here’s another slave movie, whereas we want to tell a story about Black joy.” It’s like a similar thing, but with less representation with Asian people. So, it’s even more of a battle, I feel like.

NWAW: I want to ask—again, from your perspective—what plays into that? I’m assuming there’s no small amount of stereotype, bias, and racism placed on the AAPI community as a whole that plays into boxing in what kinds of stories are funded and told.

Totally. I’ll just give one example. 

There’s this film locally—it’s an Asian American kung fu film that did very well for itself, called “The Paper Tigers.”

I worked on their set. I also just helped them with a lot of going around and having equity conversations with tech organizations to talk about why this movie is important. It took them 10 years to get the movie funded.

And in part, it was because they just kept getting this line from a lot of white funders that they didn’t understand the story, or there’s two Asian American and one Black lead, and they wanted them to be changed to white leads. And [the film’s creators] were just like, “No, we can’t change those things because it’s fundamental to our experience. We grew up making kung fu home movies in our backyard. And we’re Asian—how could we not tell it from an Asian American perspective?”

But I still think that’s such a huge part of the battle, right? We’re still needing to be like, “There is an audience for our story. And like there are people who this would resonate with.” 

Obviously, there’s a million thousand people who do kung fu, but [the film’s creators] still needed to convince [the funders].

And with our short proof-of-concept, I know by having it in certain rooms that there is an audience for them. But I think sometimes the hard part is translating it to funders who are not from our experiences to trust that we can tell a story that our audiences want to see. And even if you don’t get it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean something, and that there aren’t a lot of people who get it.

NWAW: It sounds like what you’re saying to me is that it’s all just being approached from, “Oh, this society is white.”

Basically, I mean, yeah, it’s a constant struggle, I think.

NWAW: Is there anything else you want to mention about this film in particular?

[Among indie film creators, I’m known for being] very, very unintentional about my sets and making them feel welcoming to a large, diverse group of potential creators to be on set. Not all sets are like that. A lot of sets are very homogenous, and if you’re like the one person of color, you feel really uncomfortable, or you’re the one queer person or one trans person—or maybe there’s not even a trans person.

But mine are very much multiple trans people, mostly queer, mostly [people of color]. And the idea is to be able to have community agreements and have an environment where everyone feels really comfortable.

I think when it comes to filmmaking, like in fundraising, the amount of money we need for a film—you can make a film for cheap. But if you make a film for cheap, you’re not paying people to be on your film. So I think that’s something that you don’t always know.

When a film costs like five hundred thousand dollars, it’s because we’re trying to pay people and keep them safe and keep them fed.

Readers can find more information about the film and donate to the film’s fundraising efforts here.

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