Setting Your Foundation of Immovable Truth: A Conversation with Erin Lau

Mixed Asian Media - June 10, 2022

By Bri Ng Schwartz

Erin Lau, filmmaker and Hawaii native, is hard at work with projects being supported by the Future Gold Film Fellowship, a program sponsored by Gold House, Netflix and Tribeca Studios to help drive and support the pipeline of API talent in the film industry. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Erin in between shoots to learn more about her current projects, how she became a filmmaker and what she has learned along the way.

Congrats on all the recent success that you've had. Can you tell me more about the Future Golden Film fellowship and about your project that they’re funding?

The script was written by my creative partner that I've worked with for the last eight years. It's loosely inspired by his life at home. He grew up selling photos on the side of the road that his dad would take of the lava over the years. In his teen years, he would sell these photos to tourists, where they would be arguing over five dollars. He's fifth generation Japanese, Gosei. His ancestors worked those fields and came on the promise of the American dream. Here he was arguing with a representation of those descendants over five dollars, five generations later. 

The Future Gold Film Fellowship seemed like a perfect opportunity because it was about championing Asian Pacific Islander voices. And it is for both of us, just like our wish to elevate and platform more voices from Hawaii. It is predominantly this paradise narrative, You also need stories that show all our families are dealing with. So it felt like a really good partnership to bring this story to this initiative.

Can you tell me about the project that made you say, “This is what I want to do with my life?”

I come from the music family. My father runs a Hawaiian music nonprofit, and I couldn't play music to save my life. So they threw me the camcorder to document the concerts. Film allowed me to process confusing and difficult experiences, relationships, and feelings that I didn't know how to articulate. I started making music videos and I got into making just my own shorts. When I got into high school, I started to screen festivals locally. I found that a lot of what I was going through was shared in our community.

What really set fire to this as a career choice was I saw the first native Hawaiian language film to play Sundance called Stones by Thai Tsonga when I was 16 years old in my high school auditorium. I had never seen anything so authentic, really reflecting who we are until that film. It just blew my mind. I'm like, “We can do this. We can have a career and bring our stories to such a beautiful big canvas.” From there on, I haven't stopped for over a decade.

Were there any other filmmakers that you look up to or inspire your work?

Taika Waititi was huge. He used to come visit Hawaii for the Film Fest. Now he's like a mega superstar, his film Boy had a really huge influence on me. It was rooted in its specificity to him as a Maori man living in the country. Maori is very much a relative culture to us, so he was the closest person that I had to a role model.

Besides shorts & documentaries, are there other genres that you'd like to experiment within the future? 

I’m a big horror fan. But I think what I'm trying to be very careful of is putting out work that re-traumatizes your own community at the cost of educating. 

What has started to attract me about horror is that I think it allows you to take what could be sensitive or traumatizing and put it in a safer packaging with a little bit of distance. We've seen Jordan Peele do it beautifully. I think Mike Flanagan does it really well. It gives you an imaginative canvas to externalize things that are really hard to show. One of my favorite horror films is The Babadook, which talks about grief and resentment, but it's externalized through this monster, and if she doesn't work through her trauma, the monster will destroy her and her son. 

There’s always the possibility of making mistakes, but I'm going to try my best to make them feel seen, but not out of exploitation.

What advice would you give to other up and coming filmmakers based in Hawaii? 

Really embrace who they are. We all grew up wanting to be Spielberg or Tarantino and sort of try to embody them in our work. But I think the power as individuals who have largely been overshadowed in media, is to bring to the table who we are. I think if you can just be really raw and vulnerable about who you are in the work, it will help set you apart. We already have Tarantino. We already have a Spielberg, and they're very good at being themselves.

Also be setting your foundation of immovable truth. Our industry is so fickle and sometimes they're going to be input situations that are unsafe, unethical or challenging. You need to know where you stand and who you are so that you're not wavered. It's important for your sanity. If you're basing all of your self worth off a product, I'd argue, it's a very colonial way of thinking. We have worth that isn't associated with things or productivity. Understanding that will help to protect. Community, family, and being a good person is what's important, and you just simply channel that through the work.

In a long time from now, when you've gotten to the end of your career, what is it that you hope you’ve accomplished? 

I just need to get to the end of my life and know I did it all for the right reasons. Am I doing this purely for selfish reasons? Or do I truly believe this work is helping to better the world? That doesn't always mean like a serious drama. I will always be appreciative of Superbad. 

I hope at the end of my life, I taught a lot of students, I was involved with a lot of nonprofits and activism. I hope my life is a triangle and film is simply one corner of the greater purpose in the center, which is bettering our community and the world. I do try to keep my foot in all of those places. So I hope at the end, it wasn't just about movies.