CLARA LAW



Clara Law's most recent film, The Goddess of 1967, is awaiting release in Australia. It was selected for competition at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and its star, Rose Byrne, won the award for Best Actress. The film was also on the short list for the award from the International Catholic Organisation for Cinema (OCIC).

Macau-born Clara Law studied in England and worked in Hong Kong making such films as Farewell, China, Autumn Moon and Tempations of A Monk which featured at festivals around the world. Post-production on some of these films was done in Melbourne and in 1995 Clara Law and her husband, screenwriter, Eddie Fong, migrated to Australia. Their first film in Australia was Floating Life, selected as the official Australian entry for the Foreign Language Academy Award for 1996. The Goddess of 1967 is their second Australian film.

This 1996 interview incorporated some answers from her press conference in Venice.


Both Farewell China and Floating Life are stories of migrants, from China and Hong Kong respectively. You paint very different pictures of the fate of the migrants in each film. Your perspective on migrants to the United States seems to highlight the violence of American society whereas life in Australia is much more quiet.

There are different reasons for this. First of all, I think, it's my own development as a film-maker. Secondly, migrants from China and migrants from Hong Kong do come across quite different kinds of difficulties. If you are from Hong Kong and you're able to migrate to another country, you are more well-off. If you are form China, the language can be difficult. There are more hurdles if you do not know the language. So, for various reasons, the encounters were different.

But, at the time, there was a lot of anger and a tension between Europeans and Chinese. I think that now there is less anger and more of a process thinking things through, a kind of distancing and looking at it all from a bigger perspective rather than looking at it simply as Chinese migrant problems. I think it's more of a state of modern humanity.

You explain something of the meaning of 'floating' life in your director's statement about the film.

Floating life describes most aptly for me the world of an immigrant. An immigrant is cut off from history, both one's own personal history and the nation's history. He/she has to learn to live 'floatingly'. What does existence mean away from one's country, the non-existence of an existence when one is cut off from one's roots. Ancient Chinese philosophy teaches that there is a cosmic order to the universe. This order extends from heaven to earth to humans, from parent to child... I believe in this. This belief has given me the strength and faith in the making of this film.

In Floating Life, for the migrants to Australia, you chose to use extensively the theme of the house: houses in Australia, in Hong Kong and in Germany.

In the film, a house becomes and develops as more of a metaphor than simply being the house itself. A house signifies a home and in a home you are supposed to feel safe, secure and protected. And to find a house where you can feel at home becomes the most important thing for anybody, not just for Chinese, but for anyone in the world. Of course, as you can see in the film as it develops, the house is also illustrating the state of mind of each character, the state of mind of the character at that certain stage of his or her life. So you can feel the change as the film progresses but, you can also feel that longing to have a house, which is at the same time a home.

In Floating Life, Bing, the daughter who had already settled in Australia, can be seen as similar to the woman who migrates in Farewell China: there is such stress in trying to survive that the migration experience does, in some ways, drive them mad. Is that a correct reading of the films?

Yes, I think so. I know that is the biggest problem that faces the immigrants, especially the women. I researched that and found out that it's not a special problem just in America, as opposed to other cultures. But it is more of a problem in America. New York always gives the impression of such friendship. Even for me when I was there working, I felt so much friendship. But I suppose it's very easy to become very depressed because of that. This is especially prominent among the immigrants, especially the female immigrants, because I suppose they cannot work as much as they would like. And, if they don't come into contact with people more than, let's say, they would normally do in the place where they came from, then slowly I think they shut themselves into a kind of prison. This has become quite common among them.

The boys seem to be able to manage much better.

I think that is a little bit of a generalisation. I wouldn't say so but I think that because a lot of Chinese women, especially in America, came with their family, they would stay at home, which means they had less in contact with people.

Many people mention the impact of the abortion sequence and wonder what you had in mind. It has such emotional impact for the audience.

I think it's tied into the whole Chinese belief that posterity is one of the most important things, especially for older generations. But I think that even with younger people, because we're brought up in such a way that we know that there is a continuity between our ancestry and our posterity. For that young man, I think he came to a stage of his life where he realised that he had been into the sensual pleasures all the time and never been into the deeper issues. He always felt that he was alone, just this one, single person on earth and that this had nothing to do with his family's past nor his own past and that there was no future.

But, at a certain moment of his life, he somehow felt that he was not actually alone. He performed a casual act at a certain moment without thinking of the consequences. And... looking at it physically and having it all flash suddenly before his eyes made him realise that it is not just a casual act, that it did carry some consequences. He then experienced the feeling that he was actually part of the whole, that he was not just one individual alone in this universe. He is really part of the family.

I think this is like a special moment of realisation that can come to people sometimes. I would say it's something like that, a moment of awakening. He realises that he feels the love his parents had towards him, have always had towards him, a kind of faith and hope and never giving that up in spite of the fact that what he did was not what they hoped he would do. It's a moment of feeling that so much hope and love has been shown by his parents towards him that he is part of that home.

Was Floating Life well received in Australia?

I think it has been. Sometimes among the audiences, hearing their responses when I was watching the film with them or when I talked to them afterwards, the kind of response I got was very, very positive. And a lot of migrants said that they had never in their life been able to be part of the community. They felt their own pain and sorrow and they could see that they are like that. These are some of the best compliments I have had.

There was a background of migration themes in your ealier film, Autumn Moon. It's obviously a theme that fascinates you and your husband?

Yes, I think it is my background, given the fact that I didn't come from a place where I had stayed all my life. I was born in Macau. I went to Hong Kong to live when I was young. And there was my going to England to study. I think somehow I've never felt that anywhere is familiar. I felt I'd be totally lost, so I think that's one of the reasons.

And I suppose because when Hong Kong's future was being discussed in 1982, at the time when I was in England studying, having all my student friends around me who had either come from England or somewhere similar, very few of them were foreign students. They were, as I say, either British or from America or Canada or Switzerland and they would all talk about how they'd go back to their country after their study and work in the film industry there. And, suddenly, this was a time in my life when I realised that, maybe, Hong Kong's not going to be the same and that there may not be much of a future for me. All of that made me feel that I'm a little bit different, not having a place I can call my country, trying to find somewhere to shape my identity.

In your episode in Erotique, you had a young man from Melbourne in Hong Kong in love with a Chinese woman from the United States.

Yes, the theme of exile does come up in my work. A lot of times I have felt captive and exiled even when I was just in Hong Kong. There was not much of a cultural landscape there. But I found that I tied it to my culture through a kind of belonging to the ancient Chinese more than to contemporary China, China under the Communist government. I also think that the modern human race is caught up in a fast culture, and I don't think I appreciate that very much. I just feel that I don't belong anywhere, one of the reasons that I feel I'm still looking...

Would that be part of the reason for you making the Temptations of the Monk?

Yes, it was.

It was such a surprise, given the contemporary focus in your other films, that you should go to such a lavish re-creation of history.

I think I wanted a sense of a place and of time. The film is set in a period of history when China flourished most. It was the paradox of this emperor being one of the most respected emperors for what he did for the country and yet he got his place and his position as emperor because of a massacre. I think it's quite paradoxical and the whole drama of seeing what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, and then trying to assess it and find out about your own image of yourself: what you think your image is rather than what it actually is, that the image and the reality are different, so what you really are is honestly different. The monk's life was a spiritual journey to finding himself and finding what it is true for himself.

Which I suppose is relevant to modern searches in contemporary consumerist society?

Yes, I think so. There is some of the Buddhist tradition in the story. I think I look at that more as a philosophy than as a religion.

With The Goddess of 1967, you took your characters, a young Japanese man who found the car of his dreams, the Citroed DS, on the internet and a young blind woman who took him on a journey in the Citroen to her father and into her past, you took them into the Australian desert.

This for me is a new phase. However, with a new phase it is not that you cut off the past. I am very conscious that it is a gradual thing. Eddie and I have now lived in Australia with little experience of it. But as we went into the outback to look, to feel and to explore, slowly it worked on us and it became part of us. I found something that I can feel. I found colour. I found that there is an object and a subject but it is not that they are totally opposite. Slowly that landscape is saying to me a lot about what I have been looking for in the past. It's not as if it is a cut-off point. There is a lot that I experienced in Macau, in Hong Kong and in London and this is a continuation, a natural progress into what now, looking back, I see as a new phase.

I think that I approach a new country though the landscape. I'm always very interested in finding out what the country is like through the landscape because the landscape tells us a lot abut what the country is like and the people there, how the landscape shapes and defines the people. This is very true of the Australian landscape, it tells us a great deal about the people and why they are as they are. I found the outback inspirational because it is so primeval, so ancient, so intricate, so masterful and it reminds us of the impoverishment of the modern soul nowadays. I think this is now becoming part of the development of my creative work, a new phase and an important phase for me.

The Japanese man is a modern technological man and the car, which in fact was nicknamed DS, Deesse, the Goddess, whereas the girl was from the country and had suffered all her life.

I think technology has overwhelmed us and taken over our lives. We want everything to improve. We want everything to be visibly analysed and proved so that it becomes real. And, if that does not happen, we don't believe it.

I also think that there is a lot that cannot be seen, cannot be proved. I believe in the soul, in the spiritual and I think that it is only through that that we become more complete. It is wrong to think that science and technology is all. We think that we can be God and act like God. But I don't believe that. I think it is important to know that we are not God and we cannot be God, that there is a lot we don't know and because we don't know. It is only through knowing and finding our stories and the spiritual that we become persons.

I wanted the girl to be a physically handicapped. She is damaged but at the same time she has something very precious in her, a very positive energy and warm side. She is always ready to reach out and support and to connect. I don't believe that you need physical sight to be able to see. You can be blind but you can still have a lot of images in your head. You have imagination and imagination enables you to be inventive. So, not being able to see does not mean that you are handicapped. The Japanese man can actually see but he is stuck in his world, but he needs someone to open up his world for him in some new way. She does, and this is a total revelation to him.

The film looks very different from the average movie, different use of colour for the present - the flashbacks are in fuller colour than the present - and rear projection for the road journey.

I believe cinema is images and sounds. The visual has always been very important to me and I was trying to tell the story through the visual. I wanted to create a certain colour for the film, a colour that was very ambiguous. It is a grey tone, the grey area in people's lives because I do not believe there is ever total black and white. So, I wanted to create this colour which is ambiguous and corrupted and not primary. I think this is the way the audience can be closer to the journey of these characters.

The important thing for me at the beginning of production is to find a way to communicate to my Director of Photography what I want to see in the film. I find a lot of pictures. For The Goddess of 1967, I found a book by the photographer, Michael Kenna, beautiful photography which expresses what I wanted to express. I also look to the work of a Chinese painter I admire who embodies a perspective which is eastern but which at the same time is more than eastern. I showed these photos to Dion Beebe, my director of photography. This is the second time I have worked with him and so we have good communication and I would like to work with him again. He understand me very well.

What we were trying to do technically when I showed him all this wass to find a colour, not black and white, a colour and not a colour. So we found a 'bleach-bypass' process. We did the tests and I really liked it. I think this is how it should be. The funny thing about it is that with certain colours, the properties are totally changed. Green can become suddenly red. So we had to do a lot of tests, with costumes, with the design, the colour of the car. A lot of tests so that the colour we wanted would appear exactly as we thought. That was a very long process in pre-production, tedious and meticulous. But we did it and we got what we wanted.

I always like to choreograph within a shot, not just do a close-up or a long shot. The camera can move like a dance. Every shot can be a movement. Life is a movement: a centre, a space, action, silence. So I wanted to get it all right, the colour and the movement within the shot. What I normally do is to give Dion a list and work out the shots I want to do in a day. Some of the shots are very complicated but we had rehearsals before we started shooting the film, so I knew how the actors were going to move and to play out a scene. So, it's all in my head. But when we are on location, of course, we also have to improvise. It depends on such things as the light on the day and you have to accommodate to what happens on the day. But in preparation it is all planned out.

The rear projection for the journey was important. I didn't want to shoot in the car in a naturalistic way because the film is not an ordinary road movie. The journey is a journey into the inner road of these two people. If I had wanted to simply shoot the car naturalistically on a journey, just shooting from a car on location I would have been very much restricted with camera angles and the lighting. So, I wanted rear projection. I know it can look strange, but it turned out to be a very important experience because I think the rear projection did frame for the audience the journey in a non-naturalistic way. That helped them to enter into the journey.

In the background there are themes of dysfunctional families and their effects on children.

Nothing is easy in marriages, especially nowadays. I think a lot of our children are brought up these days not having the words to say certain things because we are brought up with a lot of technological words. We don't have the words to express our feelings, out emotions. We need the symbols in our words to express the meaning. To come from an entirely different culture is important can help in the process of our trying to understand each other. With a marriage between a Japanese man and an Australian woman, it's going to be a long hard journey for the couple in the film, but at least it's the beginning of the journey.

In all my films I have been touching on the dark side of all of us. This can surface in any form. There is always the devil but there is also the goodness - but through music, through art and through ourselves, we are able to get a little closer to the real goodness in us. In do believe that we are all good. Through upbringing people can be damaged especially these days, because I think parents don't know how to be parents but that damage can be be gradually repaired.

I like films that reach into the souls of the viewers. One of the greatest delights of film-making is to create this world in full, to visualise it to the most intimate detail, and then present that, as a whole, to an audience.



Interview: 6th December 1996