“The Half of It begins” An adventure about abstract and conceptual “love”

Director Alice Wu returns to the film industry after 16 years

Director Alice Wu has had an unusual career. Born in San Jose, California in 1970, she was raised by parents who were immigrants from Taiwan. At the age of 16, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later transferred to Stanford University. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science and started working as a software engineer at Microsoft, so it's a complete no-brainer.

Alice Wu, who worked at Microsoft and was blessed with literary talent, suddenly started writing novels. As she wrote it, she instinctively realized that it could become a movie script, so she studied dramatization from scratch in a screenwriting class at the University of Washington, and eventually wrote the script for an original feature film.

Convinced that film was her true calling, she gave up her steady career and moved to New York, making her directorial debut in 2004 with ``Look at Me...' '. A human drama in which a daughter who has lived her life hiding the fact that she is a lesbian and a mother who becomes pregnant with a young man find the meaning of life in the midst of friction with the strict Chinese community. was.

However, after this one film, she suddenly disappeared from the film industry. He left his house in New York and returned to San Francisco to care for his sick mother.

"I was 39 years old at the time. I thought that in my 20s I would become a computer scientist, in my 30s I would make this movie, and in my 40s I would take care of my family." (VARIETY Article Interview) (excerpt from)

As time passed and her mother's condition stabilized, Alice Wu decided to return to the film industry. To reward herself, she deposited a $1,000 check with a friend and asked him to mail it to the NRA (National Rifle Association) if the script wasn't ready within five weeks. is gun control).

After five weeks of struggle, the resulting scenario was ``The Half of It.'' Netflix acquired the distribution rights, giving Alice Wu the opportunity to take over the megaphone for the first time in a while. This is the first new work in 16 years since ``Look at me as I really am...''. The finished work, far from giving the impression of a blank space for many years, was a masterpiece that was a condensation of more than ten years' worth of thoughts.

“The most personal thing is the most creative thing”