Diversity in Film: Constance Tsang

By
Gina Hackett
May 14, 2020

Diversity in Film is a bi-weekly series covering underrepresented groups in Film.

This week, we sat down with current student Constance Tsang

On the heels of shooting her most recent short film, Beau, Tsang discussed working with Cary Fukanaga, how shooting on 35mm makes her more present, and building sets that mimic the world we want to see.

You’re originally from New York City, right? It’s fortunate you’ve been able to remain in your home base during the COVID-19 crisis.

Constance Tsang: I am, but that’s why it’s been so tough! My mom, she lives right in Dumbo. I’m like, “I want to walk to you!”

How have you been coping with quarantine as an artist?

CT: Have you ever seen The Goop Lab, that Netflix series with Gwyneth Paltrow? I have become a big Gooper in this time of crisis. One episode is with this Danish guy who...he swims in ice, I guess? He developed this thing, the Wim Hof Method. He just breathes. That’s his whole spiel. He breathes and takes cold showers. So that’s literally what I have been doing. I’ve never taken a cold shower in my life before this experience, so it’s been interesting. 

You shot a short film in January, produced by current student Tony Yang. How is COVID-19 impacting post-production?

CT: We’re so used to sitting with our editors and sitting next to them in a session, but we haven’t been able to do that. So it’s just been us having more conversations. I do what I usually do. I take notes on scenes and takes and then send them over, but it’s more of an electronic communication than in-person, so that’s been hard. 

You shot this film on 35mm film. Looking at the rest of your work, it seems that you have a special affinity for film. Tell me more about that. How does it change the experience of shooting?

CT: Absolutely. Shooting on film is an incredibly wonderful process. Yes, on the one hand you feel the texture of it, but of course with the cameras we have today, we can always mimic that look. But with shooting on film it’s the process itself. Everyone on your set feels so much more present because, first of all, film is expensive. You only have so many takes that you can do. For example, on my previous short, Carnivore, we were shooting on 4-perf, which is a little more expensive than the 2-perf that we shot on for my recent short. But the amount of attention your crew gives to you, and the seriousness with which you take it, I think that really matters, and I enjoy that so much more: knowing that I know exactly what I’m doing going into the take, and that I know exactly what types of things I need to elicit from my actors. I much prefer this way of working, rather than pressing record and just letting whatever happens happen. I like knowing exactly where everything is, and then of course, if shit does happen, you fix it, right? But you try to limit the risk. 

Your Director of Photography on this shoot was Norm Li, who shot Beyond the Black Rainbow and has done some beautiful work in the industry. What’s your ideal collaboration with a DP?

CT: Someone that feels like a brother or sister to you, where you can have a really deep, strong connection. You might disagree, but at the end of the day, you and your DP are doing what’s best for the film and have the best intentions in mind, and they are just as excited about creating these images as you are. You know, just before you called, I had a two-hour conversation with Norm, who has gone through each cut with me, and I like his sensitivity towards storytelling. He’s not just a DP, he’s a filmmaker and a really good collaborator, and of course, a friend. So all of that is essential to having a good relationship. 

You received Tribeca Film Institute’s AT&T Hello Lab fellowship a couple of years ago, which allowed you to shoot on 35mm under the mentorship of Executive Producer Cary Fukunaga. Tell me about your experience working with him and how it influenced your path on that film.

CT: That film was...it was my first real thing. We had a big budget. Cary was attached to it. Our crew was about 60 people. It was big in all ways, shapes, and forms for a short film. This was one of the biggest things I’d ever worked on in my entire life, and going from my directing class exercises, I was like, ‘I have to step it up, or I’m going to make a fool out of myself.’ And so I made sure that, first of all, I had good collaborators. Once again, I had a strong DP, strong production design. My producers, including [current student] Marta Cruañas Compés, were amazing. Having a strong, supportive team makes you the best communicator. 

It kind of funnels through all of this, in terms of working with Cary. You know, he really helped at a script stage, asking the basic questions that we picked up at Columbia too. Why this character? Why do we care? How are we going to follow this character? Even on a crew level, he was giving advice, like to always listen to your collaborators because they might have better ideas than you. You have to be open-minded to hear that. Your ideas may not always be the best ideas. That is something I’ve truly taken to heart, and that’s why I feel it’s so important to me to have a crew that I really respect, because I look to them for opinions when I doubt my choices. Of course, as a director, you don’t want to doubt your choices, but sometimes you have a question, and you want to be able to talk to the people around you, especially your DP or your producers, and ask, ‘Hey, what is the solution? This clearly isn’t working.’

It sounds like the scale of that film put a lot of pressure on you. I’m curious what you learned from that experience and what you did differently this time. 

CT: Absolutely. I’m a pretty calm person. I never raise my voice. I always expect the best out of people, and I hope that they too expect the best out of me, and I approach my working relationships that way. 

My DP, Albert, was, like Norm, super talented. He came to me with really good ideas, and we had a visual language, but that was the first time I worked with a DP on that professional caliber. I made sure to work with someone who had a good knowledge of film, as well as filmic language. But being on that set, where my DP was (in a good way) extremely opinionated, and his opinions were sometimes not what I needed to hear, I basically had to realize, ‘I have to control the bull a little bit.’ Exercising that voice is hard for women sometimes, especially when your DP, a man, is kind of dominant. So that was something I had to get over in myself: ‘Connie, just step up and say it. Say it if it’s not right.’ That was something I learned. And I didn’t learn that at Columbia.

Constance Tsang

It’s funny how a big part of directing seems to come down to managing personalities. 

CT: People don’t tell you that, but it is a huge part of directing! Huge. You can be extremely talented and have the most amazing shots and magic dust spread all over your set, but it is so much about managing personalities. If you can’t do that, then you can’t have a cohesive team to support your vision. Because why should people care about what we make, right? To get them to care...that’s all management. 

Yes. It seems to me there’s just more distance afforded to male directors on set, and that it’s more put upon female directors to sort out what’s happening in terms of morale, personality clash, that kind of thing. 

CT: Yep, I completely agree. Ugh!

It’s almost as if we—as women, or for me, a person of color—have to disconnect from who we normally are. It’s like you’re taking on a role yourself. I wish it wasn’t the case that we have to do that in this day and age, but it does feel like that sometimes.

I’m glad you mentioned that. How has working as a Chinese American female filmmaker informed your work?

CT: A theme that I’m always interested in is power and how it operates, not just on a personal level, but on a systemic level, and I think that has to do with the way I grew up. How the world viewed my immigrant parents, and understanding how Asian women appear in culture is something that I’ve always had in mind and something that I live through. And I’m learning. I now understand how crucial it is to have a set that mimics the world you want to live in, and I feel like that’s one way I’ve been able to...I don’t want to say to shelter myself, but to have my voice heard. 

That’s a really nice way to put it: imitating the world you want to see.

CT: Yes! Because you want to have a crew that has lots of women, lots! Lots of people of color. And it’s so important that we’re not just working with men. I don’t want to say I’m tired of it, but I want to see the people I love and care about represented, not just in front of but behind the camera. 

When was the moment you first saw yourself in the director’s chair?

CT: I assisted this Swedish director, Anders Hallberg, for two years. All those music videos you’ve seen with boy bands in the 90s...he basically started that in Sweden. 

It was an experience, let’s just say. I had never really been on a set in that capacity. So my first time thinking that I too could do this was by seeing him direct. Those sets were always fairly large, lots of crew. Anders was mostly based in New York, but all his jobs came through his European reps, so we would travel to Europe. Literally four transatlantic flights within a month and a half. It was that, all the time, on high velocity. 

The spirit of collaboration is definitely something I saw in Anders. How he approaches relationships with his DP, his editor, and the attitude he took towards inspiring people on set was something that I grasped from him. 

That’s interesting. One might assume it was seeing someone that looks like you direct that made you believe you could do it.

CT: I wish my first time realizing I could direct was from a woman. I wish! But you’re digging into a deeper issue, which is that not many women are given the chance that men in this industry are given. And I can tell you all about my love for cinema, but loving cinema and watching films from a young age doesn’t necessarily turn you into a director. Seeing someone do it, it’s completely different from watching films. 

Speaking of your love for cinema, how did you find filmmaking in the first place? I know you attended NYU for your undergraduate degree.

CT: Yes, I too grew up loving cinema, ha.

Not every filmmaker does!

CT: I didn’t say it was good cinema! I grew up watching a lot of commercial films. The things we all watched, like rom-coms, when we were growing up in the late 90s, 2000s. But I was lucky enough to have parents who watched a lot of Hong Kong cinema. Some of my earliest memories of films are watching horror films from Hong Kong from the 1960s, and my first taste of what an arthouse film was through Wong Kar-wai. I probably didn’t grasp it growing up, but I am very lucky that it entered my mind on a subconscious level. 

What are you working on now that you’re excited about?

CT: I’m definitely excited by this short that I just shot, Beau. It’s about a relationship between an installation artist and her lover that’s extremely toxic. Both people seem trapped in it but they still love each other. It basically takes place on the day this installation artist is revealing her newest piece, dealing with her lover’s expectations and how she’ll manage to deal with her success. 

It’s exciting digging into footage, digging deeper into performances, and crafting that. For me, editing feels very nerve wracking. Your footage never lies to you, and it is a clear indicator of things you did well, things you managed to get from your actors, but also things you might have missed out on, things that probably needed another take. It shows everything. I think it always takes me a minute to get into it, but once I’m in it, I’m trying to look forward and see solutions to my mistakes, and to see another form of creative storytelling. 

And you cast Chase Sui-Wonders, who’s about to blow up. She’ll star in Lena Dunham’s new series, Generation, and she's in Sofia Coppola’s new film, On the Rocks.

CT: I did, I nabbed her. I love Chase. When she came into the room, my casting directors didn't say anything and I said, “Just watch her performance, watch her audition.” And she blew everyone away. She’s so smart and so intuitive, and it’s remarkable when you find that in an actress. 

Anything else on the horizon?

CT: I’m mostly dealing with a third draft of this feature that I’ve been trying to break for a year and a half. It’s a psychological thriller about this woman on a dig. It’s also a relationship story between a young woman and this paleontologist who comes to the site. It’s set in southern China, and basically the young woman is quite impressionable, and she falls under the spell of this almost maniacally driven paleontologist, and what they uncover is not what she thought she would find. There are some ghosts in there. 

That sounds amazing! Circling back to what you said about finding the film in the edit, I have to ask: When you edit, is it faithful to the script?

CT: It’s pretty faithful. It looks the way my script feels. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. 

I think it is! It shows intention and follow-through. 

CT: I sometimes worry. You know how we’re always told, ‘Be risky on set! Be bold!’ But I need to know what my shooting plan is. I can’t go in without a plan, I can’t use improv. I really admire directors who can. I really do.

Do you ever get those ads for Masterclass on Instagram?

Yes, all the time. 

CT: I’ve never purchased one, but I think there’s one from Werner Herzog where he’s like, ‘Fuck the storyboard.’ I think he says it’s only for people who aren’t “courageous,” and I’m thinking, ‘Man, if I showed up to set without an idea…’

First of all, I think that idea is gendered. Secondly, Werner Herzog is insane. He’s a charismatic despot. He asked people to carry a boat up a mountain. 

CT: That’s how we’ll know we’ve made it, ha! When we can ask our crew to carry a boat up a mountain!

Constance Tsang on set of 'Carnivore'