Saving Face (2004)

Interesting facts

Saving Face is a 2004 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Alice Wu, in her feature-length debut. The film focuses on Wilhelmina, a young Chinese American surgeon; her unwed, pregnant mother; and her dancer girlfriend. It was the first Hollywood movie that centered on Chinese Americans since The Joy Luck Club (1993).

Production

Alice Wu, who directed the movie, wrote the script several years earlier while working as a program manager at Cinemania and Music Central, Microsoft's CD-ROM entertainment department. She originally started writing a novel inspired by her experience coming out as a lesbian to her middle-aged mother.

In 2002, Wu submitted her script for Saving Face to a contest sponsored by the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment and won. It was there that she met Teddy Zee, the president of Will Smith’s production company, Overbook Entertainment. Zee described the process as "an awakening for me about the Asian American experience in Hollywood, because I was always such a part of the studio system.

As a first-time director and writer, Wu faced many challenges in maintaining her vision of the film. Studios that saw potential in her script wanted to make it like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She was asked to make the characters white so that they could cast Reese Witherspoon as Wil and Ellen Burstyn as her mother.

Alice Wu described the casting process as “a challenge” due to her difficulty in finding Mandarin-speaking actors. She felt the film needed to be bilingual in order to make it authentic and believable and thus met with over one thousand actors before finding the right cast.

Saving Face was Lynn Chen's first feature film and Michelle Krusiec's first lead role.

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