Constance Tsang is a Chinese-American writer, director and educator based in New York whose debut feature, Blue Sun Palace starring Lee Kang Sheng, Ke-Xi Wu and Haipeng Xu, is out now. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Screenwriting and Directing where she was awarded the Robert Gore Rifkind Launch Fund. Her short film Beau is a Vimeo Staff pick, won the Directors Guild of America’s Jury Prize in their 26th Annual Student Film Awards (East Coast Asian American Category) and screened at The Metrograph, Palm Springs Shortsfest, Outfest, Brooklyn Film Festival, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and Melbourne Queer Film Festival, among others. Her previous short film, Carnivore, was a 2018 AT&T Hello Lab project, premiered on Direct TV and was acquired by Alter. Her work is supported by Starlight Stars Collective and Tribeca Film.
As filmmakers, when we’re starting off, many of us are told that the film you write, the film you shoot and the film you edit are always going to be three different films. I found that to be true with my debut feature, Blue Sun Palace, but more importantly found that the way I think transformed in each of the three modes of making.
When I was making Blue Sun Palace, I was forced to ask myself, What kind of film am I trying to make? And what am I trying to do with time and with pacing? And when we get to the edit, how will it work? These were some of these questions in my head, and it was scary.
However, despite that fear, I learned to enjoy everything that was happening by being fully present and feeling the scene as I was there with the actors. Because that was the only anchor for how I could understand the way I was seeing time and how it would work in the edit. And sometimes when I’m watching a scene, I just don’t know how it’s going to present itself in post.
Filmmaking is an act of faith – you have to trust the overarching vision in your head. All of the decisions you make as a filmmaker in collaboration with other artists, like your production designer and cinematographer, are just to make sure they provide the fire so you can get to that bigger flame.
But when you are trying to verbalize your vision to other people, especially when it is somewhat abstract and emotion-based, it can get a little bit tricky and it can muddy up what you’re seeing in your head. Over and over again, I remembered that Blue Sun Palace for me always came down to how people can make a deep impression on one another, but at the end of the day, they may only be together for a brief moment in their lives. However, that interaction and that moment will be something that stays with them always. I remember thinking, This is my North Star, this is the feeling I want to convey by the end of the film. If I achieve that, I will be OK.
Editing Blue Sun Palace was the most challenging and turbulent period for me, as it became very clear that when it was over, the final cut would be the representation of myself I’d be giving to the world. Because I had written and directed the film, and it is about a subject that is very close to me, I felt like I was being vulnerable for the first time. It’s a very scary thing to recognize the power of film and what it does for you. We make films for an audience, but more so a film is a reflection in a mirror of where you are at that particular time and place in your life. And I didn’t know if I was ready to reveal that part of myself.
The first cut of Blue Sun Palace was basically just an assembly, with all of the scenes laid out next to one another. There were no cuts made. The assembly gave us an idea of what we needed to do, but once we started to trim the scenes, things got much harder. It just felt like the rhythm was off. I started thinking about how I’d trusted my intuition when we were shooting the film and began to question if I’d made the right decision by having scenes play out, because they felt flat and had no momentum. That was when I had my moment of crisis.
Ultimately, the thing that allowed me to move through this difficulty was finding acceptance. I accepted what the footage was giving me. When I started seeing the footage for what it was, it started telling me how to cut it and I was able to let go of the preconceived notions I’d had in my head.
I love feedback screenings, because they have a visceral way of telling me what is working and what’s not. We had two feedback screenings which were extremely helpful, one with mostly directors and another where the audience members weren’t filmmakers. Listening to everyone’s feedback made it clear there were problems with the cut of Blue Sun Palace. We had a lot of differing (and sometimes conflicting) feedback, which made finding solutions a lot harder, but for some reason, that pulled me through, because I knew I had to find a way out. That slow erosion of who I was as a filmmaker, which had started during the editing, shifted toward me focusing on finding a solution, and that created a sense of urgency.
One conversation I had around that time underlined my need to rediscover a sense of confidence in myself and my decisions. A friend who is a cinematographer was driving with me to SUNY Purchase, where I was teaching screenwriting. She was a guest lecturer for the week and in the car, she asked me about how the editing on Blue Sun Palace was going. I told her my feelings about the cut and the spiral I was in, and she asked me about my relationship with my mother. Suddenly, it was like I was in a therapy session. The major thing I took away from that conversation is that so many of our relationships, especially with our parental figures, either give us confidence or take away our confidence.
The whole process of making Blue Sun Palace, and especially of editing it, became about trusting myself and my intuition. While editing the film, I basically had to soothe my inner child and tell her, It’s OK. What I’m doing is the right thing to do. I stopped seeing people’s notes as a criticism of me, and switched my focus to ask, How can I trust myself? And how can I create a film that is not about other people’s voices or pleasing other people, but about making the film I want to make?
Something I really realized is that when I first started writing this film, I still didn’t really know how to talk about grief. Even the way I talked with my family, emotions and feelings were never part of any conversation we had. We never asked the question, How does this make you feel? Feelings were always deeply repressed.
When I think about the transition that took place in me while making Blue Sun Palace, finding my voice through the film was really about letting myself feel, and finding the confidence to address my father’s death. Being able to write about grief and his passing only happened during Covid; I think that isolation really shifted something in me. I remember thinking that I finally felt ready; because there was so much death was around us, it made me reevaluate how I saw a death that was so personal to me.
I feel much more certain about myself now that I’ve made Blue Sun Palace. The film gave me building blocks, so now I feel way more secure. The first step is always the hardest to take, and now I’ll be able to look back and have a better understanding of what I need to do in the future.
Featured image, showing Constance Tsang with actress Ke-Xi Wu on the set of Blue Sun Palace, is by Julia Shropshire. All images courtesy Constance Tsang.
