The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Asian women aren’t demure’
How Cathy Yan tore up a cinema cliché – and made a $100m blockbuster
In January 2018, Cathy Yan took her first feature to the Sundance Film Festival. She’d begun dabbling with filmmaking in her mid20s, and had spent the past three years working on Dead Pigs – a lowbudget, Chinese-language satirical drama about Shanghai’s up-andcomers and left-behinds. She’d edited it in the living room of her New York apartment, driving her husband half-crazy in the process, but got it finished in time for its world premiere, held in a converted hotel function suite.
“My only hope at that point was that a few people would turn up to watch the movie and the whole experience wouldn’t be deeply depressing,” says Yan, now 38, talking on a video call from her study. What actually happened was this: within three months of the screening, Yan had been hired to direct the $100million (£73million) comicbook blockbuster Birds of Prey, featuring the sometime Batman villainess Harley Quinn, after being earmarked by its star Margot Robbie as the only woman for the job.
Yan became just the second female director to be solely entrusted by a Hollywood studio with a major superhero title. Her only forerunner was Patty Jenkins, whose first Wonder Woman film was released all of 11 months beforehand.
This was, says Yan, “a really weird and challenging position to be in. Being held up as the first anything can be hard, and women are typically more prone to impostor syndrome and all that. So you have to get out of your own head, and just think about the work.”
When the fact she’d landed the gig was announced, Dead Pigs instantly acquired must-see status. The only problem was you couldn’t, unless you lived in China, since that was the only place the rights had been sold. Three years on, though, it’s returning to the west, courtesy of the world cinema streaming platform Mubi. Sweeping, wrong-footing and completely gorgeous, it is very much worth the wait.
Dead Pigs was inspired by a bizarre occurrence in Shanghai in the spring of 2013, when over the course of a week, around 16,000 porcine corpses came bobbing down the city’s Huangpu river, after having been dumped upstream by farmers in a nearby province. Profound unease quickly spread through the glittering metropolis, along with jokes about pork broth on tap. But for Yan – who had by then completed a stint as a
journalist in Beijing and enrolled in a United States film school – it was a darkly comic metaphor for the tension between the old, rough-edged China and the outwardly sleek superpower that was supplanting it. From this sprung a story of five interconnecting lives, from the hard-bitten manager of a beauty salon being hounded out of her tumbledown home to the awkward but ambitious young American architect working on the housing project that’s to be built in its place. The production had to negotiate Chinese censorship laws (which later turned out to be ideal practice for wrangling a huge studio film). The script was given the OK by the CCP’s propaganda arm and footage was regularly reviewed, with notes contesting everything from plot points to onscreen smoking.
“The film is neither a takedown nor a celebration of China, but has a kind of satirical distance,” Yan says. “You can sneak some very interesting and provocative ideas into comedy.”
The character of Candy Wang – the redoubtable salon manager played by Vivian Wu, whose costumes include a fluffy cheetah-print dressing gown – turned out to be something of a predecessor of Robbie’s exuberantly dressed Harley Quinn, too. “In a way, Harley was inspired by Candy,” Yan explains. “There’s this demure cliché of what an Asian woman is, but my aunties, my mother and my grandmother are so strong-willed, sassy and vibrant,” she says. “And I just didn’t feel I’d ever seen them on the big screen, ever.”
‘Being held up as the first anything is hard; women are prone to impostor syndrome’
Yan’s own earliest memories are of living with her grandparents. Her father left China to study in the US before she was born. Her mother followed when she was two, and Yan herself two years after that. She’s been back to China almost every year since – “which gave me a strange perspective on a country that’s changing at such a rapid clip”.
When making Birds of Prey, she was an outsider to the intense world of comic-book fandom too, and glad of it. “The superhero genre is an eradefining thing,” she says. “So I’m very grateful that I got to experience it. But there’s so much anxious energy – people waiting to see characters that have been in their heads for decades – that I had to tune out.”
She was keener on doing justice to the film’s girl gang as women. “It feels like only men get the privilege of being anti-heroes,” she observes. “Women are not allowed to make the same mistakes on camera. They’re not allowed to put themselves in weird, awkward situations. I wanted these characters to be fully fledged, flawed humans.”
One way of fixing this took a bit of perspiration. “I was very insistent that the women should be seen to sweat,” she says. “Because how often do we get to see that? We’re always infinitely more likely to see female characters covered in blood than sweat.”
That said, Yan herself looks remarkably composed, despite having come straight from a Covid-19proof location scout in the city for a forthcoming television project, and is also preparing for a feature adaptation of Jenny Zhang’s short story collection Sour Heart.
Another blockbuster, too? “I think these days you have to be platform agnostic,” she says. “It’s really not about TV or film, or cinema or home – although, I mean, there’s a part of me that hopes people won’t watch Dead Pigs on their phones. But I think all these different mediums capture people’s imaginations in different ways. And for filmmakers, I think the metaphor of the pigs in the river is true. Whether you want to move with it or not, the water is going to keep rushing you along.”