Friday, April 20, 2018

Asian American woman to direct DC superhero film

Cathy Yan will direct Margot Robbie, right, as the DC comicbook character Harley Quinn.

THE FIRST Asian/American woman director has been chosen to helm the next feature based on super villain Harley Quinn, a yet unnamed movie spinoff from the DC Comic superhero universe.

Cathy Yan will direct the movie starring Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn from the girl gang "Birds of Prey" comic, reports Variety.

According to Buzz Feed, Robbie, who will produce the film, strongly advocated for a woman director, to join the largely female team behind the camera, including scriptwriter
Christina Hodson, who wrote Shut In, Unforgettable, and Bumblee: The Movie, according to Variety.

Yan is best known for her 2018 Sundance entry, Dead Pig, a highly-praised Chinese language comedy, which won the festival's 
U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Acting. 

In that film, a mysterious stream of pig carcasses floats silently toward China’s populous economic hub, Shanghai. As authorities struggle to explain the phenomenon, characters intersect. They include a down-and-out pig farmer with a youthful heart struggles to make ends meet, an upwardly mobile landowner fighting gentrification against an American expat seeking a piece of the Chinese dream, a romantic busboy hides his job from his father, and a rich young woman struggling to find her independence.


The Shanghai-born Yan is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and received both an MBA and an MFA from New York University.

During an interview at Sundance, Yan talked about how touched she was that two Chinese Americans approached her to talk about the impact her film had on them personally.

"I didn’t really want to make Dead Pigs a political film. It has political ramifications but it’s not overtly political," said Yan. Indeed, winning the ensemble acting award was appropriate for the New York City resident, who said she was influence by Robert Altman's films, which often employed huge ensembles to tell his stories.

The DC comics girl-gang 'The Birds of Prey' that inspired the Harley Quinn storyline.
(Views From the Edge contributed to this post.)
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