At the Los Angeles Press Day for "3 Needles," MoviesOnline sat down with actress Lucy Liu to talk about her latest film directed by Thom Fitzgerald. "3 Needles" is a three-paneled look at the worldwide AIDS crisis: in Montreal, a porn actor (Shawn Ashmore/Denys) schemes to pass his mandatory blood test; a young novice nun (Chloe Sevigny/Clara) makes a personal sacrifice for the benefit of a South African village; and in rural China, a black market operative (Liu/Jin Ping) posing as a government-sanctioned blood drawer jeopardizes an entire village's safety.
Director Fitzgerald explains, "I really wrote the character of Ping with Lucy Liu in mind. And Lucy provided many of her own thoughts and insights over the course of a year of conversations. Lucy approached the character with great respect and she chose to play the character as most vulnerable to ignorance. The director elaborates, "Ping has no vocabulary to even discuss the illness consuming her because she has no name for it. As I watched Lucy’s performance come alive, I saw how that underlying principle informed every scene. She dug into the depths of fear when one faces the helplessness of a nameless, faceless illness."
Lucy Liu achieved popular fame with her Emmy nominated role on TV’s "Ally MacBeal" and parlayed that hit into an enormously successful feature film career, beginning with the #1 box office hits "Charlie’s Angels" and "Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle," through such hit action films as "Shanghai Noon" and "Payback," and the Oscar-winning blockbuster "Chicago" for which she shared the SAG Ensemble Cast Award. In 2003, she starred in Quentin Tarantino’s sensation "Kill Bill" and in 2006 co-starred with Josh Hartnett in "Lucky Number Slevin." Lucy recently completed filming "Rise" with Michael Chiklis, "Code Name: The Cleaner" with Cedric the Entertainer, and "Watching the Detectives" with co-star Cillian Murphy.
Lucy won a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award, an MTV Award, a Blockbuster Award, and in 2006 was honored at the Asian Excellence Awards. She is an Ambassador for UNICEF and was recently honored with the Humanitarian of the Year Award at the 2006 VSDA (Video Software Dealers Association) convention.
Here’s what Lucy had to tell us about developing her character for "3 Needles," her humanitarian work on behalf of UNICEF, and the future of "Charlie Chan." For our interview, Lucy wore an attractive black dress and a stunning new shoulder-length hair cut that we couldn’t resist asking her about:
Q: Is that hair for a role or just for you?
LL: For me and now it’s the role’s. [laughs]
Q: Were you worried about cutting it?
LL: No. I wasn’t.
Q: You were ready?
LL: Yeah, I felt like it was, you know, you can’t get too attached to anything especially your hair and it grows back. And people are so used to seeing you with long hair. Actually it’s great because when I have short hair, people don’t … They’re like, ‘it looks like that person’ but they don’t approach me. So it’s like almost a disguise oddly.
Q: Well you can pull off long and short. You can do both.
LL: I don’t know about that. I like it. I just think it’s nice to do a change. If I had an opportunity to shave my head, great, you know. It’s not that precious.
Q: Who did the dress?
LL: This is Diane Von Furstenberg.
Q: So tell us about Ping? What was it you liked about her and that role?
LL: What I liked about her was that she had an emotional trajectory and she had sort of a choice she had to make towards the end that she was forced to make. I don’t think she would have made that choice if she didn’t started recognizing herself as a human being because she was put in such a situation where her back was up against the wall and she felt like she had so little free will.
You know, like she had to do this, she has a son, she’s pregnant, she owes this man money, but ultimately she recognized that she couldn’t as a human being go on making people ill, not knowing what it was she had herself. She obviously had AIDS and HIV but it struck her that she couldn’t continue this way. And I think that is a really courageous choice to make, to be forced into that situation where you can either go on and just take in whatever people give you or you can stand up and you can fight against it.
Q: What was the dialogue? Was it Mandarin or…?
LL: Mandarin. Yes.
Q: And you speak that fluently?
LL: Yes. I speak that at home with my family.
Q: So did doing the role in the language and recreating China make you feel closer to your roots?
LL: You know what it did? It really made me feel like I was at home. I think there is something about when you do a movie or anything that you do and you are speaking a different language, whether it is your home language or not, there’s a different feeling to it. It feels more tangible somehow. It also brings a very romantic quality, in my mind, into the role and so doing the movie… Let’s say Kill Bill was in Japanese.
There was something, a quality, in that work that I thought was different from anything that I had done and doing this role in Mandarin definitely brought that about too. Not only because of the dramatic situation and all that was going on but also because… It’s almost like it’s like a silk feeling. I don’t know how it is or how to describe it. It’s hard to explain but it makes you feel more rooted to yourself like something in your soul that’s deep in there, that’s always been there, like part of your DNA that you touch upon when you do something like that.
Q: Now everybody and their mother is beating the drum for AIDS in Africa and rightly so. What can you tell us about what’s going on in China because you don’t hear about that as much?
LL: Well, I think the same exact thing is going on in China. I think the reason why we don’t hear about it so much is because there’s a very different culture in China. There’s an Asian culture. Things are not communicated as much and things are more… They try to sort of figure things out on their own and they don’t like to… It’s basically if you take the analogy of the Great Wall of China, it’s like we decide when we’re going to raise the curtain, we decide when we’re going to let you in. You know what I mean? Like there’s a reason why it’s called the Great Wall and there’s a reason why it’s called The Forbidden Palace. There’s reasons why things are titled the way they are titled because these are things that are not open to other people. When they make information available, they want to have control over that information and so I don’t think that it’s very different from Africa.
I think the plight of the people in Africa and the plight of the people in China are the same. They’re just different cultures and I think this movie brings that to light by connecting how cultures, how countries, how continents, how people are all synchronized within each other without even knowing it. It’s a domino effect, you know. It’s not like if things happen in Africa, they’re happening there. It’s not going to affect us. Eventually maybe short term it’s not going to affect us, but long term it is going to affect us because if let’s say the water is contaminated in the ocean on that side, it’s going to be our water here. And people don’t think about that. They think that’s their problem, we’ll just continue going and watching the movies that we watch and doing the things and going on vacation and making our plans. It’s like plagues don’t have plans. Plagues just take over. They do what they want and it’s a socially ignorant thought that we are not connected to one another.
Q: Do you think there’s a cultural disinclination in China more so than in Africa to talk about it?
LL: I think there’s a definite value of losing face. I think there is a value of embarrassment and I think there’s a façade that Asian cultures to a degree have of how things are presented, how things are seen, how things are being taken in by outsiders. Everyone and everything is an audience as opposed to here’s a look into our lives, you know, the intimate, personal part of it. I think that they keep it very close to the vest. And I think that’s good because in our society the media has permeated everyone’s lives whether they’re government officials or celebrities or regular people to the point where nothing is a secret.
Or before something can be fixed it’s already been exposed and now there’s no way to go about it in a way that can be positive. And so they might want to do things in a way that maybe is trying to figure things out before it gets to an extreme panic because when things get out and people don’t know about it, they immediately have panic because fear is something that drives us. So we have in the news, ‘This is going to cause cancer,’ ‘Too much coffee causes cancer,’ ‘Too much of this.’ It’s like everyone doesn’t know what to do. They may as well all just live in a small little box. It’s so fear driven and I don’t think that‘s a good way to manage anything. And I think that with the elections that just occurred, it’s a very clear sign that people are sick of being told what they should be afraid of. They’ll be the judge of that.
Q: How heavy does a role like this weigh on you while you’re doing it and how long does it take to recover after you’re finished?
LL: Ironically, I think that this role as heavy as it was, it really felt so light afterwards because the doing of it made me feel like there was… injecting that kind of energy into the role made me feel like I was releasing something into the role that was a very positive message and so the more I put into it, the more light I felt afterwards. And I don’t know how to explain that exactly but I felt like I was floating, especially after the birth scene. I felt so exhausted but at the same time so light.
Q: Does it ever happen in reverse like when you’re doing a light movie, something makes you feel weighted down?
LL: Depressed? I don’t know. Normally when I’m doing comedy, it’s pretty fun. But at the same time, I think that you can’t have one without the other. Even if you’re acting in a comedy, it can’t just be slapstick unless it’s specifically that genre. I think you have to always weigh the two which makes it a little more dynamic in the performance in the end.
Q: How’d you learn to waddle like that?
LL: [laughs] My friend, my best friend was pregnant at the time and I’m the godmother so I was with her from the moment that she found out she was pregnant to the moment she gave birth. I was in the room with her. So I watched her change and grow and I knew exactly how difficult it was to get up and sit down and everything.
Q: I heard that Thom (Fitzgerald) wrote the character with you specifically in mind. Did you have a lot of input into developing the character as well?
LL: When I got the script, I loved the script. I thought it was great. I just thought that the role was very limiting at that point because he had her driving in on a van, and then she was collecting the blood, saw that the people were sick, and then she fled. So I was kind of like ‘she comes in and she leaves.’ You know there was almost no dialogue. I think there were two lines. And so I called him and I said I think the script is great. I just don’t understand why you want me for this role. What am I going to add to it because it doesn’t seem like there’s a middle part. There’s a beginning and there’s an end, but there’s no center. And so we talked about it more and I just said we need to talk about what’s at stake for her.
Okay, so maybe she isn’t a great person because she’s going around spreading this disease unbeknownst to her but why is she doing it? What makes her flee? What makes her do it? Is her back up against the wall? So then we started raising the stakes more and more and I said I think it’s important that she has a child or if she’s pregnant so you put both of those in. I think it’s important that she actually has the disease as well and doesn’t know what it is. There’s this certain air of ignorance that’s within that storyline that’s created, that’s formulating her decision in the end.
The ignorance can’t last forever. You have to come to a point where you hit a certain place where she makes a choice. So we sort of started mixing it and mixing it and over the course of a year we kept going back and forth with the rewrites and it just turned out great. He’s a very collaborative director and writer and he has a great vision for human --like an emotional source for people -- and he can bring that out without making it about AIDS and HIV. It’s just about these people that are in survival mode essentially.
Q: Can you talk about the scene where you’re still pregnant and the police find out that you’re smuggling the blood in and they all raped you when you’re pregnant?
LL: I know. Isn’t that great? I think that in that scene she in some ways acquiesces to that situation because she realizes that she could be put in prison. She’s pregnant, she’s sick with something she doesn’t know, she has a son. So she gives herself up to those people as a trade in order to be free which is… At the end we find out that she’s sick and they find out that all those soldiers slept with her so now they’re infected with the disease.
So it kind of goes around in a cycle and that was something that Thom thought was important as a way to see how dire her situation was and how impoverished people in that area are that they have to sell their bodies and that people would be so cruel and so cold as to not care whether she was pregnant or had a situation, they just wanted what they wanted. And that’s the interesting thing. Everyone in this story in some ways wants what they want until they can’t actually have what they want. Even if they want it and they get it, it’s not really what they want in the end.
Q: Just like that guy who you owe money to?
LL: Right.
Q: Because you’re pretty much a slave to him.
LL: Exactly. She’s indebted to him and he’s got all the strings. He’s controlling that and so it’s interesting to see how everyone’s controlled by their people but ultimately, does that matter? What’s fear really? Is fear him or is fear continuing to destroy and kill other people. It’s how you weigh your conscience basically.
Q: At this point in your journey, what’s more important to you – the industry awards you get or the awards you get for your humanitarian efforts?
LL: First of all, the fact that I’m getting awards at all is pretty amazing because I feel like I need to work more and do more. I think for humanitarian efforts it’s a lifelong thing. And it’s great to be recognized for that and it’s encouraging and actually puts pressure on to the point where now that I’ve received the award, I have to do more. You know? Not that I wouldn’t anyway but working with UNICEF for a few years does not make me someone who has cleared the path.
If anything, the people that work at UNICEF have and I think it’s important to recognize their work and to look up to that and try and work as hard and as diligently as they do. So I think they go hand in hand and I think it’s important that this movie sort of combines both of those efforts that I love so much -- working with children as well as working as an artist.
Q: So are you the Audrey Hepburn of the New Millennium?
LL: I don’t know. Am I? [laughs]
Q: What’s up next for you and are you still doing Charlie Chan?
LL: I’m still working on Charlie Chan and it’s been about six years. We are still forging the way to a script that’s feasible. And you know, you have to remember that it was a television series that people absolutely loved but it was also something that was in some ways racially backwards at the time because it was cast with Caucasian people dressed as Asian people so we have a lot of stereotypes to work through and you know, we want to bring what people loved about Charlie then and bring it to light now so …
I realize now as I’ve been going through it, you know. When I look back, it’s not a process that is fast and no, the wall comes down doesn’t mean we all have democracy all of a sudden. You face the issue and then you have to sort of break it down and recognize, okay, what is it we want to achieve as opposed to putting something up and being disappointed and disappointing other people. You know what I mean?
Q: So how close is that now?
LL: It’s not. I mean I think it’s closer than it’s been before. I can tell you right now. It won’t take another six years, as far as I know, but I think it will be worth the wait.
Q: So what is next on your plate?
LL: I did a couple of movies that are coming out. I think one is coming out in January. It’s called Code Name: The Cleaner.
Q: Cedric.
LL: Cedric is funny. It’s comedy. And then I did something with Cillian Murphy over the summer, Watching the Detective. So I don’t know what’s going to happen with any of them. It was done for very little money so I think it will go to the festivals or something like that. And then there’s Rise in the mix somewhere in there too.
Q: I know a lot of Asian Americans look at you as one of the few actresses that has been able to transcend a lot of stereotypes and be able to act in many different projects. Do you still feel bound by that culturally in Hollywood? How do you feel about that?
LL: I think that you have to make choices for yourself. I think if people look up to you -- whatever culture and whatever ethnicity they are – that’s a wonderful compliment that you are doing something right. But I think if you start making your choices based on what other people would like or the general consensus would like you to do, you are going to find yourself down the line a very unhappy person because you will have not lived for yourself.
You will have lived for other people. And when you wake up one morning when nobody is going to see any movies and you’re not making any movies let’s say, you won’t even know who you are because you’ve sold yourself through everyone else’s eyes. So I’d like to definitely wake up every morning and know exactly who I am regardless of how the box office does or regardless of whether people acknowledge my work or not because I can only exist for myself and the more intimate you make something, the more universal it’s going to be.
Q: Thank you.
LL: Thank you.
"3 Needles" opens in limited release in theaters on December 1st.
