Easily one of my most anticipated films this year was Rosemead, a passion project seven years in the making from icon Lucy Liu. The moving drama based on real life events follows Irene (Liu) a mother who has only four months to live, and is forced to not only face the fact that her teenage son’s violent obsessions could be much, much more. The film has her attempting to figure out how to not only protect him, but those around him he could possibly hurt. It’s the kind of choice no mother should ever have to make, that Liu has worked tirelessly to bring to the screen.
The film screened as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival and I got a few minutes on the red carpet to chat with not only Lucy Liu about the film, but Rosemead’s writer Marilyn Fu as well.
Lucy, you spent seven years of your life putting this one together and you’re also a producer, not just in title, but also you did the work bringing the story to life. Why was this story so important to you?
Lucy Liu: We want to tell this story because we don’t want it to be retold. We don’t want it to be repeated. We want there to be lessons in there without it being something that’s so didactic, just to see and witness this story between a mother and son, and how much they loved each other. But how just how it went awry and it breaks my heart.
Marilyn, when did you become involved with the film and its script?
Marilyn Fu: Well, I started on the script in 2018, so the actual events happened in 2015, I believe. And then Frank Shyong, the journalist, wrote this story in 2017. The process all happened pretty quickly when I came on to write the script, I was pregnant with twin boys.
Oh wow.
Marilyn Fu: My first time being a mother, so I was thrust into motherhood and this incredible story about a mother pushing every resource that she has to love her son, and so that was a really, big personal journey for me as well as, you know, of career goal to write a starring role for an Asian woman. This role is not typical. It’s not sexy. It’s very complicated and nuanced, and it needed someone who was brave enough and compelling enough and frankly, just had enough power to be able to take this very tragic story and bring it to light.
Irene is such a complex character, what was the most important intention that you wanted to put forth in this role?
Lucy Liu: I think that, I really wanted just to bring a light to this character because I think she had so much love in her heart and she felt like she had run out of options. That she’s not a monster, that she’s someone who really loved her son.
Marilyn, being an Asian American woman, what was one thing you wanted represented in this script that you were like, OK, I’m going to do this, but I need this in it.
Marilyn Fu: Watching my mom raise my sister and I, she was an immigrant from Taiwan. She met my dad over here in Kansas. So they came over here. They didn’t speak the language, they just studied really hard and got jobs and created this beautiful life for us. I think that when I wrote the script and tried to understand Irene, of course, I didn’t understand her circumstances. But I could understand a bit of her fear, her alienation, her feeling that she was in a place that was foreign to her, because I felt that all the time with my mom.
Lucy, you’re also an accomplished painter as well as an actor, and I love your work, but my question is, what is the difference between making a work of art and acting? And what do you find more or less difficult?
Lucy Liu: It is all the same thing to me because it’s a form of expression and I think both of those things save my life, so I cannot distinguish between the two. It’s creativity to me, and one is working more on your own and the other is working with a crew of people.
So, finally Marilyn what do you hope this film accomplishes in terms of opening up the dialogue about mental health and family dynamics?
Marilyn Fu: I hope that it actually just opens a dialog. I think that would be a beautiful first step. The conversations that can come from that, the activism, there’s different organizations that we’re so excited to work with once we can get the film to where we have that platform. But the first step again is just making people really feel and see that this story that you could have read about a woman, that act, that she made, it could seem monstrous. It could seem like something we can’t even understand, and we can get people to empathize and then we get these conversations.
Thank you so much!
