MICHAEL KANG is a promising Korean American filmmaker whose feature film debut The Motel (2005) will make its theatrical premiere in New York on June 28. The Motel is a coming-of-age story about the adolescence of chubby Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), set against the backdrop of his family’s rent-by-the-hour motel. The ensemble cast features Jade Wu as Ernest’s mother Ahma Chin, Samantha Futerman (Memoirs of a Geisha) as Ernest’s crush Christine, and Sung Kang (Better Luck Tomorrow) as motel regular Sam Kim. We met Michael Kang at his office in Manhattan’s Chinatown to discuss himself and his film.

TripmasterMonkey: What made you want to be a filmmaker?

Basically I didn’t have any other choices, I kind of painted myself into a corner. I wasn’t good at anything else and wasn’t very good at academics and so I went to the School for Dramatic Writing at Tisch, at NYU. So with a BFA with no commodifiable skills I just had to become a filmmaker. I’d always dabbled in all different kinds of art like drawing and music, and some lighting design. I used to draw comic books and I was always writing. Film was a way to combine all those things. I knew I wanted to be in the arts in some capacity, but it took awhile to figure out that film was what I was drawn to.

I came from theater—I used to act and did performance art for awhile. There’s that theater snob background where we kind of look down on film and Hollywood, where film is not as artistic as theater. So for awhile I kept it as a secret to myself that what I wanted to do was film. I think what finally broke me through that, was that I was doing a lot of theater and I was getting really frustrated because what’s great about theater and what also really sucks is that you perform the piece—you have a communal experience with the audience—but then it’s just an experience and it’s done.

With film it’s something you create and you can have it and you can show it again—just run the projector again. And each time it plays it’s a new experience. So I decided I needed to make a film and I made my first short, A Waiter Tomorrow. It was a spoof on John Woo films about two sushi waiters who have a gun battle with the customers. All of a sudden I became a filmmaker and people recognized me as a filmmaker once I made that short. I loved the whole process of it, the collaborative process of film. My brain works much faster than any other time of my life when I’m working on a film.

I will say that at the same time I was working at restaurants and it was frustrating so it was cathartic in that way. But it was an homage to John Woo. This was pre- any of his American movies, pre-Jackie Chan coming over, right when Hong Kong was really booming but hadn’t crossed over. For me, a big moment was going to see Hard-Boiled. It opened up my mind to make me realize that Asians can make films that aren’t about the Cultural Revolution—these sweeping Zhang Yimou films, which are great, but they weren’t what I was interested in doing. I hadn’t seen Asians portrayed in a way that I thought was just cool. I had no idea what Hard-Boiled was about and when I walked in, it blew my mind and opened everything up for me. I realized that I can define what Asian film can do by taking part in it. So that was my first step and I started getting over my hang-ups about film versus theater.

Do you see yourself more as a screenwriter or a director?

I was only writing because I was afraid to take the helm as a director at that time when I was going through school. In theater, the playwright is king. Theater productions are not allowed to put up a play if the playwright does not approve of the way that it’s being done. In film, the screenwriters are the bottom of the ladder. They have very little control over what happens. They write their script and then it gets sold, and it could get rewritten ten times by ten other dime-a-dozen screenwriters. My concept of screenwriters wasn’t equivalent to what I wanted to do with film, so I realized I had to direct. And I loved the process of directing and I would direct in theater as well.

I had acted in theater so I understood how to talk to actors. I didn’t take that many production classes in school, but my first short was my crash course. Who to hire, who’s the gaffer, who’s the grip, what does the AD do, what does the line producer do. Who’s who on the set and how much pizza to buy them for the day. The inner workings of a set you can learn very quickly. I did that in four days instead of four years of film school. From there, that was all I really needed to make that leap from one side to the other. I’m always rooted in the fact that I’m a writer first. Because I’ve had so much more practice as a writer I tend to be a better writer than I am a director but ultimately I’d like to be remembered as a filmmaker, which means more of a director, than just a writer.

What does ‘filmmaker’ mean to you? The connotation is that it’s a writer-director. The director is like the captain of a ship. You can’t actually take care of everything on the ship but you have to be the guy who says, ’ You need to be going this way.’ That has to do with production, and in editing that means being able to look at the film multiple times.

The process starts from the page. In a lot of films, you can spot the problem in the script, after the fact. It’s hard to see on the page how it will translate and then when it does you’re like, oh, it doesn’t quite do what I thought it was going to do. It’s important to have the script. The writer in me is always gnawing at me, because you can’t make a great film out of a crappy script. You could make a crappy film out of a great script but you won’t be able to make a great film out of a crappy script.

How did you transition from writer to director?

When I first got out of school I thought I’ll write. Eventually I’ll get into a position where I can direct. But for a couple of years I was just writing and I realized that that path doesn’t actually exist. There are very few screenwriters who cross over. I was having marginal success with my career as a writer. I was getting frustrated creatively and on the business end and so I decided I just needed to scrap everything. I got involved with performance art, and community. I did a lot of stuff with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Up until that point I wrote stuff that I was thinking of as non-race specific. I realized that I was shortchanging it by not embracing the Asianness of it, or the Asian-Americanness of it. That inspired me through The Motel. I think that’s why people who see it respond to the character as being fully realized—it’s because I care about that material.