Interview: Tze Chun

Tze Chun is a talented young filmmaker who first gained attention with his indie drama Children of Invention. Indiewire describes his latest movie Cold Comes the Night, starring Alice Eve and Bryan Cranston, as a “tightly wound noir thriller.” Having screened the movie myself, I concur wholeheartedly.

Here are links to the five installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “In high school I taught myself how to use cameras and how to do linear editing. And in college I met a couple other kids who taught me how to use Adobe Premiere and Final Cut. There was something attractive to the freedom of the DIY approach.”

Part 2: “One of the challenges of directing child actors is that kids might know instinctively how to play a scene, but they may not know how to interpret the words on the page. So that’s the director’s job — to translate the script into something the kids will understand either on an intellectual or emotional level.”

Part 3: “We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to do a thriller with an atypical protagonist. We wanted to turn the ‘woman in peril’ genre-trope on its head.”

Part 4: “But Bryan (Cranston) had an interesting point — if we made Topo an immigrant, he would feel that much more removed from everything around him.”

Part 5: “I find that it’s hard to write a scene without a goal. It’s not necessarily your goal. It’s the goal of the people you’re writing, your characters and you’re checking in on them for these two pages because they’re either going to get what they want or not.

Tze is represented by WME.

You may check out the Facebook page for Cold Comes the Night here.

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