Steven Dunning’s not a household name, but he’s had his hands in just about every aspect of the film industry. He’s worked with and learned from such Hollywood heavy hitters as Chris Carter, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The following is an excerpt from a conversation Tiffany had with Steve about what it was like to write, direct, and produce Now Chinatown.

Steven Dunning: I’m so involved with the Chinese community that my friends in mainland China and Hong Kong and my Chinese friends in the United States, whether they had emigrated from China or born and raised in the United States, it was extremely important to me that nothing came off as stereotypical; that there were no roles that people thought “Oh here goes Hollywood again making us something that we’re not. They have no idea who we are…” So I would send scripts out to main land China for my friends there to read it and get notes back on it. And then notes from friends in Hong Kong, friends in Taiwan and then Chinese friends in the United States as well who emigrated and others who were born and raised here.

And their reactions were vastly different because of their life experience is vastly different. Even after shooting when I started to get into our rough-cuts I would have marketing screenings and I would bring in a group of friends who had just come from mainland China. About thirty people at a time who were born and raised in mainland China and have only been here for a year or two, then people who were born and raised here. After that was a five-page questionnaire for them to answer and then we sat there and talked for as long as they wanted. It was just amazing the differences in reactions. I knew that they would be very different but the discussions that came up in those groups were just great.

They continued to come up in the screenings as well. Somebody will stand up and say, in New York, actually a white woman born and raised in New York with no Asian background at all stood up and said “This is America, this story can’t really happen. She’s treated too harshly, I don’t believe that this has happened.” I didn’t even get to respond to that before somebody else in the audience stood up who was American born Chinese and said, “Excuse me ma’am. Although I’m American born, my family before me emigrated here and suffered much more abuse and discrimination from their own community here as well as outside their community when they came.” The same thing happened in London. There was this Chinese girl, who was born and raised in England, who said, “Does this still really happen in America?” Someone else in the audience stood up, who was English but not Asian, and said, “You know you must not read the news papers here very much. Because just last week a shipping container of 35 Chinese people trying to come here from main land showed up and all of them were dead. Nobody survived the trip.” I already knew about this and it was going to be what I was going to say but somebody said it for me. That’s great that the education happens after the screenings as well.

Plus, the film has controversial points. There’s a government official who abuses his power to control people that he wants to. That in fact happens in every government around the world. That’s nothing new. With the Chinese government in particular they don’t ever want to be portrayed or any of their officials be portrayed in a negative way. But they are human just like American officials are who abuse their position.

Even though I intended to release the film in China I didn’t want to tiptoe around anything but I wanted to pick…You know I could have done a film about this house in Los Angeles in San Gabriel Valley, which is a large Chinese community that has been a prostitution house for about two and half years. Immigrants from all over Asia pay ten thousand dollars in their country to get over here on a boat but they don’t have the money there to pay it. So when they get here they are taken immediately to this house which has barbed wire fencing around it. They are locked in the house and they have to work off their debt by prostituting these young girls. It takes years to pay off the ten thousand dollars. Finally, the LA police department started investigating and raided the house and there was a big article in the LA Times. I could have done a story about that.

Or, I could have done a film about somebody who comes here who has money already from their parents back in Asia and their just going to college with a cell phone and a car and pretty normal. So I tried to pick something middle of the road between those so hopefully people from both ends could discuss it. As you see from some of the audience reaction, if I had made it too harsh even though true some people would immediately ignore it. And then other people, if I had gone the other way, people would have said what’s the big deal. So I get both of those reactions by going down the middle. She’s not treated well by her own people within her community. The guy that comes along, which happens to be me, sees that treatment and doesn’t understand it because he has no idea of her situation. So they try to learn and understand each other’s situation.

What was important to me was that it’s not a knight in shining armor story because I hate those kind of films where poor little Asian girl gets rescued by the big white guy. So he is just the spark that happens to say hey look over here there are other options out there. It’s up to you. You have to have the courage and strength to do whatever you want. So the film isn’t about him and her, it’s about her overcoming struggle and realizing who she is and trying to stay honorable to her very traditional upbringing and discover how she can make a difference on her own. And I think we’ve all been through that. That’s why people in London and Hong Kong and the Untied States or wherever it’s been screened that everybody relates to it so well because they relate on the struggle.

Tiffany N. D’Emidio: What’s the experience been like just getting the film together? You’ve said you did everything yourself from financing to writing, directing and producing.

SD: That’s very, very difficult obviously. When I went to Los Angeles and got into Hollywood I came from a small town in Pennsylvania right out of college and went directly to LA and started banging on every door begging to work for free. I worked for free for a long time for a lot of different companies. And it was like ok we’ll give you $50 bucks a day to be a production assistant for 20 hours a day. I was asked to clean up the coffee spills, pick up the director’s dry cleaning, go take the producers dog because it needs to get groomed somewhere…all that kind of stuff.

TND: So you really started at the bottom.

SD: Oh absolutely, at the very, very bottom. I didn’t know anybody in Los Angeles when I came here. So I just kept killing myself and working my way up. The best thing about that was having to work in every single department. Working as a grip, working as a gaffer, working in sound working in wardrobe…doing whatever I had to do. And I wanted to do that because I thought that if I want to produce something one day or direct something. Because I saw so many directors and producers that the whole entire crew just hated. So I didn’t ever want to be viewed that way by the crew because it’s one giant team that you have to have on your side the whole time. I consider working with the crew like family. They become your family. So I learned everything from every department so I could be a better director, producer and budget better and you can also do it all. So I was doing it all on the film and I had a great crew that came out and volunteered for it.

Over the years I had been saving my favors from everybody. I pulled every single favor that I ever made in the business over the past decade so I could go out and do this film as a regular studio feature. I worked for Amblin for two years, for Tom Hanks at Playtone for three and half years. The projects ranged from nothing to sixty million. There was no way I was going to make it less than a studio quality picture. There are a lot of independent filmmakers out there who unfortunately don’t have the access to make the film that way. But, you can get it if you work for ten years and beg and borrow…you can do it. I put the work into it so I don’t take excuses very lightly. Because my philosophy is anything is possible. And believe me 99% of the people I was going to or telling I was making the movie would say that it was impossible. You never burn your bridges but you need to work with people who believe in what you believe in.