Wayne Wang has spent a rich career alternating between major high profile Hollywood studio fare such as
The Joy Luck Club and
Maid In Manhattan, and personal independent works typified by
Smoke. Wang was born in Hong Kong after his family fled from China following the Communist takeover in 1947. He graduated from Wah Yan Jesuit High School and came to the United States at the age of 18 to study film at California College of the Arts And Crafts in Oakland. Wang's first feature film was his graduate student project,
A Man, A Woman, A Killer, co-directed with Rick Schmidt. He returned to Hong Kong with a Masters degree and went to work at the public broadcasting outlet R.T.H. (Radio and Television Hong Kong), which had become a launching pad for young film school trained directors known as the
Hong Kong New Wave. While there, he directed several episodes of the landmark realistic drama series
Below the Lion Rock, about the daily lives of ordinary Hong Kong citizens. Returning to the U.S., he moved to San Francisco and worked for a time with new immigrants from Asia. The experience inspired his second feature film, the critically acclaimed
Chan Is Missing, in which he used a thriller plot as a vehicle to explore social conflicts and political divisions in Chinatown. Made in 16mm black and white for only $27,000,
Chan Is Missing was a decade ahead of the recent wave of
micro-budget successes such as
El Mariachi and
Clerks. Wang's third feature,
Dim Sum: A Little Bit Of Heart, had its world premiere in the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and received a British Academy Award nomination as Best Foreign Film. He next directed the thriller
Slamdance, starring
Tom Hulce,
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and
Virginia Madsen. New York's Chinatown was the setting and the subject of his subsequent
Eat a Bowl of Tea, a period drama set in the 1940s and starring Wang's wife Cora Miao and
Russell Wong. This was followed by
Life Is Cheap...But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, a gangster comedy filmed in Hong Kong. Wang's first major studio film was
The Joy Luck Club, an extremely popular picture based on the best-selling novel by Amy Tan. He next directed
Harvey Keitel,
William Hurt and Forrest Whitaker in
Smoke, from novelist Paul Auster's original screenplay. The picture won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for France's Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film. It was an enormous box-office success in Europe and Asia. Wang and Auster subsequently co-directed
Blue in the Face, a second story employing many of the same actors and settings as
Smoke. More recently, Wang directed
Chinese Box, a romance set in Hong Kong starring
Jeremy Irons and
Gong Li;
Anywhere But Here, starring
Susan Sarandon and
Natalie Portman; and
The Center Of The World, a digitally shot independent film starring
Molly Parker and
Peter Sarsgaard.
