Interview with Director of I Think About Killing You, Ran Ran Wang (full transcript)

Below is the full interview transcript of Lotus Magazine’s interview with Ran Ran Wang, director of I THINK ABOUT KILLING YOU. Coupled with a thematic review of the short film, this interview transcript serves as a supplement to give more context and details from the director herself. 

LM: As someone who grew up as a competitive athlete, what sport did you play and why did you decide to make a film about rowing? Was it always your intention to draw on your experience for a project, or did that idea come later while reflecting on those years?

RRW: Yeah, I was a competitive judoka. I was not a rower, so those things are kind of far apart, but I was talking with a friend of mine who was and she was the one who inspired the story. We had very parallel experiences with certain coaches and how we felt about those [relationships] in retrospect, now that we were much older and have left it behind. And I had wanted to write a story and to talk about what it means to be a woman in community with other women, and what it means to be a woman in sport. I felt that this was just the perfect opportunity to have those conversations. 

Rowing ended up being the perfect vessel for that because all of these girls, when they're rowing in a boat, have to be so in sync and work so closely together that they're a single cell organism. But they're also competing with the very same girls to get their seat in the boat, and it's a microcosm for what it's like to be a woman. To be women who are pitted against each other. And so, it ended up being the best prism for the conversation. It wasn't until my friend and I were talking that I was like, oh, this was not just me. That was really validating. I just used that opportunity and expanded it into a story. 

LM: That’s so interesting because I think what you did in the 14 minute runtime is so impressive. I love the depiction of different team dynamics, like the competition but also the respect that exists between Dani and Lara, and then the camaraderie that can also be taken as pity between Dani and Charlotte. Were there specific nuances in the teammate relationships that you really wanted to showcase when you were developing the story?

RRW: Whenever I'm developing characters, I want them all to be in conversation with each other. And I don't mean the dialogue that they say to each other on screen, but what do their characteristics reveal about each other? What did the extremes of their personalities reveal about the characters around them? When writing Dani and knowing that she had this very intense personal relationship with the coach, I was looking at the girls around her to be foils and to show us what it could look like to have different kinds of relationships in the same room, with the same people, but be motivated by different things. At the end of the day, all of these women are in this room together. All of them are experiencing the same abuse by this coach. The ways they approach their similar situation may be different, but at the end of the day they are united by the thing that they are mutually experiencing. 

LM: I can’t help but think—they’re literally in the same boat.

RRW: That's literally it. They’re literally in the same boat. The metaphor extends for miles.

LM: What was the casting process like? Did the cast have to train on the rowing machine? What was the preparation?

RRW: We did not set out to cast rowers specifically, just because it seemed like a really big ask say, “We have a short, there's very little money, and also you have to be an athlete, and you have to rower, and you have to be an actress,” and it was like, whoa, tall order. But we had a really amazing casting director. Her name is Tanya [Giang], and we knew that all of the extras don't have to be rowers because you can teach someone how to use an erg machine and look convincing in thirty minutes. But they do have to be really strong, athletic girls. And so [Tanya] went out and she did a really good job finding us all of those featured rowers. Without her, I would have had a really random assortment of non-rower looking people. 

And then we got really, really lucky with our main actress Tiana [Le]. It was not a requirement that people be a rower, but I think naturally, if you row, you are attracted to the subject matter and maybe to the casting call. Tiana was actually not only the perfect person for the role—and was someone that I really believed, from her audition, was capable of killing someone—but was also a competitive rower in high school. Any coverage that we have of her just looks really awesome and really convincing. 

And you know, again, very little resources. I had my friend who inspired the topic of the film come in and she was also one of our rowers. We had an earlier call time and she taught [the actors] how to erg in like forty minutes from zero experience. All of them came in with such an incredible attitude. They were just like, “Yeah, I really want to learn how to do this and do it well.” I was just so impressed by their dedication and desire to do it, and to do it well. We got really lucky with how passionate everyone was and how willing they were to learn. 

LM: I was very interested in the intersection between athletes and Asian American women specifically, where the latter are often expected to be obedient and quietly endure abuse such as with the coach. Was that something that you had in mind while writing and casting the role of Dani? 

RRW: I think it's impossible to separate my identity from the things that I write. When I wrote this short, I was like, we're going to cast whoever is the right person. But of course, you're very astute to pick up on that influence in the writing. I was a female athlete, and when I look back on that time, I recognize that I wanted to be great. Often, the alignment of being great was also about obedience. Eat this. Weigh this much. Do this training plan. Show up at these times, sleep this much, drink this much water. The pathway to greatness was obedience. And I think that when you're an Asian woman and you live within those stereotypes of submissiveness—within obedience, within deference—it’s even more difficult to recognize when your desire to be great and the obedience required to do so have been taken advantage of. Especially when it comes from someone that is meant to be your advocate and is meant to, especially with a female coach, understand more than anyone what is being asked of you and to what degree it's being asked of. 

At the end of the day, we cast the best actors but I think that there is something about Tiana being half Vietnamese. Miya [Kodama] who plays Lana is half Japanese, half Korean. I think that background speaks, and you can feel it in their performances whether or not it's explicit because it's impossible for us to come to the table as artists and leave behind all of this context. It's a part of what I wrote. It’s in the DNA of it, and it's in the DNA of these people's performances. 

LM: Speaking of the coach. Obviously what she's doing to these girls is abusive and not at all conducive to team spirit. But also, I'm curious if you think there is any love there, whether it's misplaced or not. She was herself a competitive rower and what she shared of her own experience as an athlete was terrible. It's not the exact same thing she's doing to the girls, but I feel like that can't be ignored. 

RRW: I appreciate you asking this question, because she is such a fundamentally complicated and sorrowful character. She really is so tragic to me because I think she feels love for these girls as far as they are an extension of herself. She really sees these girls as her, whether they are capable, whether they win, if they're bad, if they're good—it reflects immediately upon her because they are extensions of her. 

And I think you can tell that this is a character that does not like herself very much. It is impossible for her to extend any true love and compassion for these girls because she's not capable of extending that loving compassion to herself. Because she sees them as part of herself. The really sad and complex thing about this is that you feel so much pity for her because you can imagine her being just like one of these girls. Not so long ago, she was in Dani’s position and she had a male coach, and someone did everything they could to make her great. Whether or not that was worth it, whether or not that was what she wanted, it's what happened to her. The nuance of the conversation is that she's right, right? That monologue where she's talking about the difference between being a man and a woman, all of these things that she's doing, if she were a man, would receive much less scrutiny. I think this is the misplacement of what she thinks is bad and not necessarily the treatment itself. 

The other complicated thing about this is that I think the film acknowledges that pushing people does make them better. And we can say that [the coach’s actions] are bad. But we do have to acknowledge that [the athletes] are better for it. And that is really complicated and uncomfortable to reckon with. Obviously, they're gonna try and get out of this situation. They don't think it's worth it. You can watch Whiplash, and it's a very much a different argument there. Same conversation, different argument. At the end of Whiplash, he's better, and it's worth it. And he feels like it's worth it. I think it's... it's really complicated. 

LM: I really enjoyed the dim lighting and the aspect ratio of the film. The close-ups also really contribute to the intimacy between the viewer and Dani and heightens the anxiety in a room. What was your process to create that visual language?

RRW: I worked with this amazing [Director of Photography], Zoë Simone-Yi. This is my second time working with her and I'll probably never work with someone else if I can help it. We start literally from writing our own language. What are the rules that we set forth for this world, and how do we express it? When we know the rules, then we can choose to break them. 

For example, the fantasies were really, really sharp, and then all of a sudden it's not. We can subvert those expectations and surprise people because we establish a language. And so we start there, and we start with all of the stuff that you were talking about, like what do we want people to feel? You’re like, wow it felt so anxious. Yes! So we go piece by piece. What aspect do we want this in? Well, let's keep them boxed in. Let's really close them in and really make them feel anxious and really make their world feel centered and small. That's the really beautiful thing about the 4:3 aspect ratio, is that you really do have to rely on the middle of the image. It forces everything to be full center. 

And then, there’s camera movements and being really intentional. Let's do everything static on sticks because we want the movement in the frame to be about the actors and the people, not the movement of the camera. We're thinking, what do we want people to feel? How do we tell the audience the rules so that they can be surprised when we break them? 

One of my favorite parts of making films is getting to create a unique language for every single film and being like, it's going to be this color. It's going to look this way. We're going to use a depth of field this deep. We're going to use lenses this long. When you have boundaries and conditions that you work within, you get really scrappy, and you get really creative. To some degree, Zoe and I have to make rules so that we can be creative. Because if there were no rules, you could do anything and suddenly you have the paralysis of choice and you make no decisions at all. I think the best thing you can do as a director and working with a DP is to make strong decisions and live and die by them until you break them. 

LM: You've made a short before, and you’ve also written feature length screenplays which are now in production. What about this project made you decide this should be a short rather than a feature length exploration. What are the challenges of the short besides its runtime? And maybe what are some freedoms that come with it?

RRW: I will say that this is a proof of concept of a larger feature. So if you liked what you saw here, there's more story, there's more world, there is a future version of this that I've written. My team and I are probably going to go out with that feature version with this as the proof of concept pretty soon. So it’s not the last you’ve seen of these characters. If you're curious about them, there's a real mystery in the larger version. 

I think when people make proofs specifically, you are very tempted to pull out like ten pages from the feature scripts. But I really think when you make a short, and this is a personal opinion where I think people may disagree with me, it's important to have a beginning, middle, and end, and a satisfying arc of transformation for a character. Which is really hard if you're just pulling ten pages out of a larger script where you're using a hundred pages to arc a character instead of fourteen. A lot of shorts end up being poems or punchlines.

The really, really hard thing is letting a character arc in ten minutes. I really think that shorts are harder to write than features, because you just have so little space. When you're making a short, you have to really exaggerate so many things because you have so little time for nuance. You have so much time in a feature to establish the depth of the abuse, and to be like, oh is that really what I think it is? And then you have space to ramp up that feeling. But in this it's like, what can we do to bring people in immediately? That's why you end up with a title like I Think About Killing You. Because I need people to be in immediately. They need to know exactly what we're doing here, because we don't have time to buy their understanding. They have to come in with some amount of it. That's why you start so soon with that fantasy. We have very little time, so let me tell you exactly what you're watching. Usually, in a feature, you have more time to do that stuff and to build that trust. And so, building the trust between the audience and the film is the hardest thing in the short, because you're trying to do that in one or two minutes. 

But the short form can be so rewarding and so beautiful because it's like a little snack. It's a beautiful little snack, and a snack can be very, very delicious if it's made well. Shorts also really allow you to take big risks. Things that you wouldn't try in a feature because the stakes are too high or there's too much money on the line. But in a short, it's kind of like: hey man, we're gonna go for it. You have so little time to make an impact, so do something crazy anyways. Making this short allowed me to test and prove that the thing that I had written and those very fast cuts worked. Bringing people in worked. 

A short is a really awesome place to choose something that you want to focus on. I have a lot of friends who are like, I'm making another short and this one's going to be action choreography based because I've never done stunts before. And I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to learn how to do that so that when I hop onto a feature and I want to do those things, it's not going to be my first time. So use the form to take big risks!