Penelope Chai on fairy tales and telling other people’s stories

By Tiia Kelly 

Penelope Chai is interested in the grand and the fantastical. In her award-winning screenplays, unrecognisable worlds become vehicles for the political: Mary, Mary takes place thirty years after a plague has killed every woman on earth, while Cinderella Must Die seeks to completely upend the traditional fairy tale narrative. Chai, who has been invited to the Melbourne Women in Film Festival as a panellist this year, is compelled by the exciting ways a story may be told, and in particular, the people who may be telling them. 

We spoke over the phone a few days before MWFF’s ‘Representation Starts Here’ panel to talk about infusing heightened stories with political elements, propaganda, and screen representation in Australia.

Tiia Kelly: Is today a writing day for you? 

Penelope Chai: It is, yes. I am at my computer trying to get going. 

TK: Are you someone who tries to have a solid writing process? Or do you usually have to stumble through it at the beginning?

PC: I try to be pretty disciplined. If it’s just writing at home, I try to stick to that. But I guess in the morning there’s kind of, you know, “oh, what emails have come in?” And “what are the new things on YouTube?” There’s a little bit of that, just to warm up. 

TK: Definitely. Especially with social media, sometimes it’s like: “I have six apps to check and then maybe I’ll get around to what I have to do”.

PC: Well, do you know what? I stayed off social media because of that, cos I will never write if I’m on social media. I don’t know how you guys do it! I think it’s too hard. 

TK: God, you’re an inspiration! 

PC: No, no, no! I just have no willpower in that respect. I have to be off it. 

TK: I was really interested in looking at your screenplays Mary, Mary and Cinderella Must Die, because you take stories of women and gender politics and fuse them with huge fantastical elements. Could you talk a bit about your interest in turning the ordinary into the extraordinary?

PC: I mean, often you want a movie or a TV show to be really entertaining and sort of hide whatever message you may have in there. That’s not always the case — sometimes you just want to watch a documentary where it’s completely schooling you and it’s fantastic. But I think sometimes it’s fun to have big ideas that are important to you and hide them in something that feels a bit fun. And if you can get them made, potentially it can reach a big audience and maybe an audience of people where these sorts of ideas and thoughts and discussions don’t permeate their everyday life. 

TK: So, it’s kind of a way of reaching people who might not always be considering the politics of something.

PC: That sounds so bad, though! I sound so condescending! 

TK: No!

PC: I think comedy’s really good. I think comedy is a way to say something without beating you over the head with it. I’m not a big comedy writer but I love watching comedies that are like that. If there’s a film where people are like “wow, Cinderella is the villain? That sounds crazy”, that’s kind of an entry point for people to watch it and then maybe interrogate that story a bit. 

My friend Matteo [Bernardini] and I wrote that together. By the end of it — I already knew [Cinderella] was problematic, but I was like “this is terrible! No one should read this story!” It’s so bad on so many fronts. 

TK: I know! I read a quote where you said that fairy tales are a form of propaganda. Did you have a specific point where you realised something was not exactly right about the messages being sent?

PC: That actually was Matteo’s brainchild. He was really fascinated with propaganda and he had this idea of “what if there was a really well-known, beloved story that actually was propaganda?” So, he came to me with that idea and said “what do you think? Could we do something with Cinderella?” And I was really excited for, exactly as you say, the gender politics of it. It sort of started with the propaganda and the gender politics came into it cos of the nature of the story. 

I worked on a big fairy tale project that Sue Maslin made quite a few years ago now, called Re-enchantment. I was her assistant for years, and that was written and directed by an amazing filmmaker and storyteller called Sarah Gibson. I’d researched for them, so I learnt a bit about fairy tales and their cultural currency across different eras and different cultures. With Cinderella, the story is in Ancient Egypt; China; obviously the ones we know are through Europe. And a lot of the time, fairy tales are kind of instructive, they try to teach kids not to go into the woods by themselves and stuff like that. But I mean, Cinderella... it’s insidious! Just this idea that a girl should be pretty and nice and then she’ll be rewarded. 

TK: Yes! I think there’s a lot about heterosexual romance especially in fairy tales, which is interesting to unpack.

PC: Yeah, absolutely. 

TK: I did read that in earlier drafts you had a bunch of other scorned fairy tale characters, is that true?

PC: Oh, we did. Gosh! I wonder where you read that, that was so long ago. There was an underground activist movement of all the fairy tale characters who had been written out of fairy tales and sidelined from the story. 

TK: That’s incredible.

PC: It was fun, but it was just a lot. [Cinderella Must Die] is basically a story about sisters. I have three sisters, I’m one of four girls, so it’s something that comes up a lot in my work. There’s the ugly stepsisters and then Cinderella, and we work out she’s the villain and she’s lied and made up this story and thrown her sisters in jail, basically. They’re in this gothic prison. And it’s about this rollicking tale of revenge but in the end, they come together before Cinderella is killed. Because she is killed!

TK: Oh my god!

PC: Yeah, I know! That was the response. We won some awards in Los Angeles and we went there and people were keen on it but they were like “I don’t know if we can make a film about Cinderella being so horrible”. People love Cinderella. 

TK: That’s the point — we need to turn it on its head! 

PC: Yeah! That’s what we thought. I feel like there will be a time when people will want to see this or where the companies want to make it. At some point, people will go “yeah, it’s time for this version of the story”, but I don’t know. 

TK: I don’t want to step too much on the toes of Sunday’s panel, but I do want to talk briefly about representation and its popularisation as a kind of buzzword. Because we have a lot of terms in current film culture that get thrown around a lot and used as the basis of these big, grand acceptance speeches at awards shows, but become divorced from real life, tangible action. Can you tell me what ‘representation’, as one of these sorts of terms, realistically means to you? 

PC: I think that for me — and this is not instructive to other people — but I guess I’m pretty particular about the stories that I feel it is my place to write. I think that representation and inclusion in terms of film and TV need to start on the page. Sometimes a project is being developed and plotted and maybe episodes have been written, and then they think “Oh, we’ve got this, for example, all-cis team and it’s about trans characters, or an all-white team and it’s a story about Asian characters. Let’s put on a consultant, or let’s just get one person who, you know, might be a bit tokenistic”. But it really needs to start at the inception of the project, and I think that’s up to the creator of the project to at first interrogate themselves and whether they’re the best person to tell that story.  

For me, I’m biracial — my dad’s Chinese, my mum’s Caucasian — so a lot of the projects I’m working on at the moment have biracial characters or Asian characters. The female-centric worldview is something that I just naturally gravitate towards and always have and always will. Because the other thing is, it’s not even “am I the best” like, ethically. I think you’re just not gonna do as good a job, you know? I think someone who’s trans is obviously gonna have lived that experience and have all the humour and pathos and that’s gonna be a much more brilliant piece of work at the end of the day than someone who hasn’t lived it. Don’t you want to create the best thing? You’re just doing yourself a disservice if you don’t have a connection to that experience. 

TK: I’ve heard people say that writing is like an exercise in empathy, and I think that’s often the thinking behind people saying that they want to write outside of their experience. But I also just think it’s empathetic to be like “you tell your story and I will listen to it”. 

PC: You’re exactly right, and I think the other thing we need to be aware of at the moment is that if there’s a sitcom about an Afghani family on TV and that’s created by someone who’s white and all the other people on it are white, and then there’s an actual Afghani-Australian creator who’s developing their own project, they’re going to be told “we’ve already got that show”. Because unfortunately, we’re not at the stage where we’re having multiples of these inclusive, diverse stories. It’s just the one show about the people with certain disabilities, or the one show about hearing impaired people, or the one show about Chinese-Australian people. You kind of need to go “well if I take that space, then I’m taking it away from someone”. 

I think some people feel like it’s maybe a bit restrictive or diminishing in terms of their creative output. Like some people say “what, am I just supposed to write a story about a boy who grew up in the suburbs and played cricket?” But you don’t need to be so literal. If you really look at your life, everyone has many dimensions and lots of different stories to tell. But I think it’s important for the people creating them and writing them to ask themselves “am I the best person to tell this story?” 

TK: What excites you about Australia’s film industry right now? 

PC: So much excites me about the industry at the moment, and I do genuinely feel excited about the awareness about representation and diversity and inclusion. Because that is so new, it feels like it was sort of the last five years or something. I think that certainly the people I’m talking to and working with, for the most part, and friends in the industry, that stuff’s all a given now for us. And I know it’s not for some people, but I do feel like there’s a real energy behind it and a real commitment and a passion for it. 

I don’t know if you saw Robbie Hood — you gotta watch it if you haven’t. It’s a show with an all-Indigenous team. I think we can all really learn from the Indigenous film and TV sector in Australia because they’ve been really committed to telling their own stories for a long time — and I mean, obviously, for millennia. As a result, they’re the best things on TV and in the cinemas. Something like Robbie Hood is so singular and so hilarious and just couldn’t ever have been told by a non-Indigenous person or team. I think stuff like that’s exciting. Obviously, as everyone says, we’ve got a long way to go, but we’re on the right track.

Come along to ‘Representation Starts Here’ to hear more from Penelope. Sunday 23rd Feb, 2:30pm RMIT Cinema.