Wu follows her heart to intimate indie film
‘Fresh Off the Boat’ star puts big-budget projects aside for ‘I Was a Simple Man’
If you’re Constance Wu, life is good. Since the ABC series “Fresh off the Boat” made her a star, she has become an A-list movie headliner (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “Hustlers”) with the ability to pick and choose projects that she is passionate about.
When she checks in for a video chat with The Chronicle from Atlanta, it’s a late night after a long day of shooting a live-action/animated musical adaptation of the children’s book “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile,” co-starring Javier Bardem, which is slated to be Sony Pictures’ big Thanksgiving release in 2022. (“I’ve been begging my agents for like seven years to do a musical,” Wu said before operatically throwing up her hands and singing, “I’m finally doing one!”)
But that’s not what she wants to talk about. She instead wants to express her passion for the small independent film she made in Hawaii during the summer of 2019, “I Was a Simple Man,” which opens at San Francisco’s renovated Opera Plaza Cinema on Friday, Nov. 19.
Wu doesn’t play the main role — she’s the ghost of a dying man’s late wife — but that’s not the point. “I Was a Simple Man,” directed by Christopher Makato Yogi, is a film she believes in.
“The vibe and the spirit of the set and the crew was something that I really loved, and then I wanted to be around as much as possible,” Wu said. “(Yogi) has the type of passion that’s getting rarer and rarer in our industry. Our industry’s an industry of ‘cool.’ But no, he’s a truly emotional artist, and I value that so much. His directing style is pretty quiet, which I really like, because you find things in the silence.”
The dying man (Steve Iwamoto) spends his final days mulling over the regrets in his life. The ghosts of his past appear and disappear around him. But Grace (Wu) is a constant presence. She died young around the time Hawaii became a state in the 1950s. Grace helps him sort through his failures and his triumphs, to try to make sense of his life. She’s also there to help him transition to the next world.
Wu’s involvement with the project originated at the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs in the summer of 2015. “Fresh Off the Boat” had just become a ratings hit, and she decided to spend the break before season two began filming to donate her time at the Labs.
The Labs are a place for filmmakers to workshop their ideas, with the resulting footage not meant to be seen. She was paired with Yogi.
“I just thought it sounded like an amazing opportunity and way cooler than like anything else I could have done that summer,” Wu said. “I was like, ‘Wow, I have the freedom to not worry about paying off my student loans. What I want to do with that freedom is to do things that really excite me . ... To get to know up-andcoming people and pursue things that are more in line with my heart rather than my career.’ ”
Since that stint, Wu exploded into an international movie star. But when
Yogi got “I Was a Simple Man” off the ground, Wu was there for him.
“Oh, it was the best,” Wu said. “It’s the No. 1 thing I would have wanted to do with my time.”
In a separate video interview with The Chronicle, Yogi said Wu helped him develop the role of Grace during their time at that Sundance lab.
“Grace was very much based on my grandmother, who died before I was born,” Yogi said from Hawaii. “Her name was Grace, but because I hadn’t known my grandmother, that character was very much open for interpretation.
“Constance came in having done a lot of research and a lot of preparation. I still remember that first shot, which was a close-up of her face, and she didn’t have any dialogue. She was just listening. When we called cut, there was a stunned silence on the set, it was such a powerful first take. I thought, ‘She’s great.’ That character came alive in a way that it wasn’t on paper.”
Yogi said he was impressed with her professionalism in preparing for a role that wouldn’t see the light of day, but for Wu, it was simply fun.
“It’s as fun as going to a birthday party and getting wasted with your friends,” Wu said, with a laugh. “Me doing the character-study work is not being a super-disciplined actor, because I’m not f—ing disciplined, I am lazy. But I think it’s genuinely so fun to explore characters.”
Yogi continued to develop the character, the script and the resulting feature film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, keeping in mind the carefully paced art house films of Taiwan’s Mingliang Tsai and Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul as influences. It’s mournful and gentle, yet bright and colorful.
“And the sound!” Wu enthused. “I don’t know how they captured the sound of the islands. The way the wind moves through the greenery is a very unique sound.”
Wu spent 11 days out of the 24-day shoot on the Hawaii set, collaborating with a cast that featured several nonprofessional actors including Iwamoto and Boonyanudh Jiyarom, who plays Grace at a younger age.
“She brings so much to the set,” Yogi said. “She came in on the third day, and it was just like that workshop: The film suddenly made sense. Constance was the trunk around which these other performances blossomed outward. She holds down the center.
“She told me,” Yogi continued with a smile, “it was her favorite movie shoot ever in her life, which blew my mind. That was was definitely an honor.”
With the new film hitting the big screen, Wu’s schedule isn’t letting up. She said the two planned sequels to “Crazy Rich Asians,” set to be shot back-toback, are still on, though the project has been delayed by the pandemic. She recently appeared in the Amazon Prime sci-fi anthology series “Solos.” She’s doing her long-awaited musical and would love to do another that’s “more Broadway.”
Also on her wish list is a Shakespeare adaptation (she’s passionate about the Bard), maybe “The Tempest.”
Oh, and since the shoot of “I Was a Simple Man,” Wu had her first child, a daughter, with boyfriend Ryan Kattner, frontman of the band Man Man.
“They say motherhood changes you. It’s funny, I don’t feel like it’s changed me, I feel like it’s made me more myself than I’ve ever been,” she said.
“I feel like, you know, I’ve been hustlin’ to get somewhere, be somebody, do something. And being a mom is actually like, the best thing in life is right here. I ain’t gotta hustle for nothin’. Because of COVID, I was able to spend the first few months of her life just keeping it really private and having that special, intimate relationship. What a wonderful thing I got to focus on during that time.”