In the late '90s, Chester and Sonny are a long-term, committed, romantic couple. When Sonny wants to redefine their rela | dG1fY1FwSm12R1dTUm8
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00I think I'm falling in love with someone else.
00:02What do you want to do?
00:04I guess I'm just asking for your permission to see where this goes.
00:10Paying for it is a, my friend says it's a double act of portraiture,
00:14based on, adapted from the graphic novel by Chester Brown,
00:18which was a memoir in itself,
00:20and because I was a character in the graphic novel,
00:23I took a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't in the novel
00:26that I was privy to in our relationship as former lovers,
00:30still family members, and kind of brought it in.
00:34So it's really kind of a hybrid of reality, fiction, all mausled up.
00:40Where I did cast through a regular manner
00:43was through for the casting of Chester and Sunny.
00:47She's called Sunny, not Suk-Yin,
00:49because I take more artistic license with her.
00:51She's a work of autofiction.
00:53Many of the things that she went through are derived from my own experience,
00:56but kind of molded and shaped,
00:58whereas I try to support Chester's story as he sees it in his memoir.
01:02With Sunny, it was important that this person come from
01:06a real-lived sort of alternative life experience.
01:10And then also, Emily and I are first-gen, Asian-Canadian,
01:14and so we understand the discord involved in intergenerational trauma
01:20that informs, it's not on the page or in the story,
01:23but it informs her decisions and many of her choices.
01:27She's different from me in that she's much more grounded
01:31and very kind of emotionally more mature.
01:35I think I'm much more, you know, probably neurotic.
01:43And when I brought Dan and Emily together for a Zoom
01:49audition, she was in Vancouver, he was in Toronto.
01:53They couldn't see each other, and they were doing stuff that was like,
01:57oh my God, it was...
01:59She passes him the book, and they literally passed the book
02:03through the two separate monitors.
02:06And I just...
02:08And I believe this relationship of love,
02:11despite conflict and differing wishes and desires,
02:16you can't help but have that resonate.
02:18And then also the love relationship between Chester and I.
02:21He's still my family, my best friend, the person I call first thing,
02:25last person I talk to on the phone.
02:27And it's deep.
02:29And I think you can't fabricate that stuff.
02:33And it just resonates from the story and all elements of the filmmaking,
02:36the messenger.
02:38I'm thinking of writing about this.
02:40My experience is paying for sex.
02:46♪