Mother Tongue’s ‘Labour of Love’: Talking with Jessica Li, Samantha Kwan and Francis Healy Wood

By Jessica Zheng

With naturalism as its medium and optimism its indelible imperative, Mother Tongue (2020) is a tender exercise in honesty. It plucks a little morsel from a person’s life – that of 17-year-old Jane Hua (Shirong Wu), as she reconciles her fraught relationship with Mandarin when her younger sister Jordan (Anani Ho) begins Saturday school lessons in the language. It is a film about language, certainly – and yet, the film arguably takes language as its mere agent, scurrying about between greater concerns of cultural bonds, familial ties and the immigrant child experience. To this, the film possesses a muted ache, a melancholic rattle that can be heard, but only faintly; for it is well tempered by its utter light-heartedness and undaunted pride. Unsurprisingly, Mother Tongue won the 2021 Melbourne Women in Film Festival’s Critics Choice Award, Best Next Gen Short and Programmers’ Choice. 

My own interest in the film budded not so much from the feeling of a spectator, an outsider peering in, as it did from a feeling of stirring – even disturbing – familiarity. Upon watching Mother Tongue, I recalled that peculiar sensation that swells up with certain works of art, which Hannah Arendt succinctly expressed as: “Yes, this is how it was”. The knee-jerk of looking into a mirror.

And so, it was that familiar creature of mingled excitement and nerves that slunk behind me to my meeting with writer and director Jessica Li, producer Samantha Kwan and cinematographer Francis Healy Wood. Here, we discussed their film, its philosophy and, as Li put it, its ‘labour of love’.

The award-winning team behind Mother Tongue

Jessica Zheng: To me, this film really resonated because of how personal a story it is – so I’m curious to know what the origins of Mother Tongue were. Was it the case that you were drawing from real life experiences and then blending that with fiction?

Jessica Li: Yeah, totally – very autobiographical. I was wanting to make a film about my culture and so it’s very closely drawn from my experience growing up in Australia as an Asian in the 2000s. And the characters are very much influenced by my own family members – like my mum, my aunt, my cousin, they all influenced the characters. And Jane was very much like me when I was younger. There’s been a lot of talk about diversity in media and film and I wanted to contribute to that as an Asian-Australian but also telling stories that maybe haven’t had as much attention as it should.

JZ: For sure – when I was watching it, what stuck out to me was how naturalistic or realistic Mother Tongue was. And the more I thought about it, the more that naturalism came into connection with the idea and importance of telling one’s own story. Is that something that resonates with your work as a filmmaker and your values?

JL: Definitely. It’s the really small details that make a story or even a conversation or a scene feel real. And you might not pick up on a lot of those tiny details if you haven’t lived that. So you can really tell when a writer or a creator of any kind is drawing on their own life; and that’s how, I think, you achieve really naturalistic or relatable content. And you can also apply this to actors – getting an Asian actor to play an Asian character, and so on. If you have an entire lived experience in a person, why not draw from that? It’s such a valuable and infinite resource – why would you not tap into that?

JZ: And I do think that that’s the virtue of this film – how it adheres to that embodiment of a person. Is there a deficit of that translation of lived experience to the screen that you notice when you watch other movies or TV, or read books, and so on?

JL: I’m sure that everyone watches so much content and a lot of it is not so memorable, it doesn’t dig as deep, and it doesn’t feel as universally relatable. Then when a certain text does, it hits different. With Mother Tongue, I really wanted the familial relationships to feel relatable and real – I wanted the sisters to feel like sisters, and the bickering between a parent and a child to feel relatable – and that’s just human. You can be from any background and find truth and humour in that. I don’t know if there’s a deficit, but you definitely notice that there’s a lack of truth in content. 

JZ: Yes! When I was watching Mother Tongue I had that experience that you just described of when something hits you differently; I felt as though the scenes, for instance the one where Jane and her mother are bickering in the kitchen, was plucked from my own life – to the point where it was almost surreal, even.

JL: I’m so glad! I quote Greta Gerwig all the time – she always says that idea about how none of it happened but it’s all true. My little cousin didn’t actually go to Chinese school but it’s all still real and true!

JZ: For you, Sam and Frank, how did you get to join this film?

Francis Healy Wood: I’ve known Jess for ages, since primary school. I think I was pretty familiar with the project as soon as it started getting written.

JL: Frank saw many iterations of the project, and then of the script, and then of the crew. I remember Frank thanked me because obviously it was a university project, and every writer and director has to pitch their project and convince a team to back them. And I remember Frank just saying, ‘I really want to work with a lot of women’, and I thought that that was so very nice!

JZ: What was it like seeing the development of this concept into writing into film? Was there any particular aspect of the film during the development that sticks out to you?

JL: Actually, Mother Tongue was initially not called Mother Tongue. Initially, the idea was my mother’s story in immigrating to Australia; a focus on her character, having a young son, and a transition into building a new life and a new home in Australia. And I remember trying to talk to my family, and they were all very secretive and closed off about it! And so I thought that maybe I didn’t know enough about this and that wasn’t my lived experience and perhaps it would be a better film if I drew from something that was more directly mine. So then it became a coming-of-age story with a little sister and a mother. And I’m very glad I made that choice because it made everything a lot easier and a lot more close-to-home for me. Sam and Frank had both been on at that point. They were there for all the script revisions and everything.

Samantha Kwan: I think part of the revision is about knowing that there are a lot of topics that you want to cover but it’s too ambitious for a short film – that’s why we kept shifting the focus from one thing to another, and that’s how we came to the language part of it.

JL: Yeah, I remember finding it very overwhelming to try and encapsulate the whole immigrant experience in a 10-minute film and thinking ‘what am I doing?’. And through script revisions and meeting and talking to each one of my HODs, we were able to focus in on a very specific part of the experience, which is going to Saturday school and that’s something that a lot of my peers can relate to – and that just felt right.

JZ: Definitely. For me, even if I had to write a creative story for high school English class, I wouldn’t touch that; there’s a guilt in representing this thing – which you know is so valuable – in a way that is not faithful or the most effective. And the remedy for that is to just have recourse to what you know, the pool of your own experience.

JL: That’s exactly right, and it’s really interesting that you mention that because when I was writing this, I actually felt a lot of pressure and was very stressed about how I was representing my mother in a way; and I wanted that to be really truthful but also not mean in a way in a sense, because you know they’ve been through so much and it’s a lot of pressure to represent people. 

SK:  I guess there’s a balance. Because it’s your personal life and you want it to be real, but not too over the line. 

JL: And also it’s a film about being proud of your background. And I really didn’t want there to be an external force of antagonism or conflict; I didn’t want it to be a film about racial tensions and whatnot. It took a lot of thinking to figure out a film that would just be positive. Sam, do you want to talk about how you came onto the project?

SK: I first came on as an editor because I was looking to do more postproduction stuff as part of our graduate program. And then Jess mentioned that she needed another producer for the film because her other producer was at another year level, so I came on as a producer in the end. So we were able to be more involved in seeing Jess’ scriptwriting process and brainstorming ideas.

JL: I think it worked quite well because an editor obviously has the bulk of their workload towards the end of post, and Sam was then able to be super involved in production and preproduction as well. And Sam also has the incredible skillset of marketing, graphic design, obviously editing, and managing the festival – so it was incredible having this spread of HODs.

SM: Even though it’s not my personal life, the story is still very close to heart – the whole experience of growing up in a foreign country. My first language is actually Cantonese and I also grew up in Hong Kong, so I’m not exactly like Jess – the way she experienced it in Australia. But the relationship with your parents is something that’s very relatable and personal, so it was difficult to not care about the project!

JL: And Sam helped me out so much with the language stuff because I was born here and even though I did go to eleven years of Chinese school, my Chinese is, I think, at a five-year-old level!

JZ: I mean, that’s the great thing about this film – like you mentioned Jess, there’s so many different entry points into this film: obviously the language aspect, but also being an older sibling, or going to Saturday school.

JL: I’m so glad – I have had middle-aged White men come up to me and say, ‘It really resonated with me,’ and I think ‘that’s so strange, but I’m so happy’. 

SK: Yeah, like my friends from France are not Chinese but in Europe there’s lots of immigrants as well so it relates to them even if they don’t speak Chinese at all or aren’t Asian.

JL: I’ve also had a lot of people come up to me and ask me if that’s really how the Chinese language works – it’s like they’ve gotten curious about other cultures’ languages and practices. And I thought that that was really nice because in a sense you’re also sharing the culture as well.

JZ: That’s brilliant. And that’s one of the great powers of movies, right? And so, in terms of capturing all of this, Frank, did you deploy any particular approach when it came to the cinematography of Mother Tongue?

FHW: From conversations that I had with Jess and from what I felt too, it didn’t need to have any particularly aggressive or in-your-face style or super dramatic cinematography to tell the story. I just wanted to have a couple of basic rules that I could then work within, which was shooting it in 4:3 – just to partly reference the time period that it was set in, the 2000s, and it’s a nice frame for people’s faces and for two or three people (the sisters and the mother). That helped keep the look consistent. And then it was about facilitating the drama of the script without having to put some other identity on it.

JL: Me and Frank and Heshi, our other producer, all went to Berlin for a study tour and we all saw a lot of the same films. I think me and Frank saw a lot of Japanese cinema and some of the films were in 4:3 and that inspired Frank to convince me that was a good idea, and I very much agree now! So we were trying to keep camera set ups to a minimum and we would run entire scenes just to support the actors so that they could feel the momentum of a scene and actually act it all the way through instead of saying a line, then going ‘Cut!’, and moving – and really slow down the process. We really wanted to make the actors feel as authentic as possible. And so I remember I had some silly shots listed for that second scene where they’re all in the kitchen, and Frank said, ‘Why don’t we just shoot this whole scene from this angle and the mum can walk in an out from the back?’. And that’s one of my favourite shots, I just think it’s clever. And you feel like a fly on the wall – an observer. And it’s almost theatrical in a sense, you’re watching it all play out.

FHW: I think I just wanted to find a good master shot for a scene where, if you wanted to, you could just let the whole thing play out. So then you don’t have to worry about working it out in your head because you’re watching it all happen on set. And it gives room to actors to do it however they want in the space.

JZ: Was that something that was at the forefront of your mind from the conception through to the development of the film?

JL: Because a film like this is so character-driven, you obviously do want to give your actors freedom and really support them and make every part of production as conducive as possible to them achieving their best performances. And working with me as an actor, I have an acting background and I do a lot of performance coaching, so I feel like my strength as a director is working with actors. I’m actually not super proficient in all the technical stuff, so I’m really glad I have Frank – because all the technical stuff does my head in, I wanted to keep it contained and simple. And also we just didn’t need it – I feel like we got everything that we needed and we didn’t really need anything else. We were very strict with how many shots we would get and we’d only get it if we were going to use it and we’d know for what part of the script it would be used.

FHW: Right, you can waste a lot of time on set and in preproduction and postproduction worrying about having heaps of coverage and lots of options in a scene and shooting a scene from seven different angles – and that can make things unnecessarily complicated which, if you’re focussing on the actors and their performances and the story, can create a level of confusion on set about whether shots will work and you realise that no one’s really paying attention to what’s being shot. It’s better to get the best versions of the three shots you’re going to use.

SK: I definitely appreciate that approach – for me when I’m editing, I don’t have to watch a billion hours of footage. Even though it’s always good to have more coverage, but the way Frank shot it and the way we did it was just perfect – and also the way we planned shot list plans worked very well. We didn’t have to insert a lot, or fix anything with ADR or have re-shoots. So in that sense, we planned it right and editing was easy. And I could tell - because I was on set – what takes work and how I would cut it and I didn’t need to overthink each shot because it was just enough, the right amount. It was good to work with the flow.

JL: Quality over quantity every time. I think that shoot-to-edit style is so efficient and I wouldn’t do it any other way. And it means that if you have less set ups, you have more time to really perfect what you are getting. You have the set up, you rehearse it, you shoot it, and then you can be really specific about what changes you want and eventually you can carve out your perfect little set. On set, even though every film set is always a bit of a rush, I really did feel like I had the freedom and the time to go through it with the actors and adjust what I wanted.

FHW: Also, testament to the quality of the script and the performances, that we were able to get away with not having coverage – we didn’t have to piece together performances that didn’t really happen, because we got the performances on the day.

SK: There were no bad takes at all – the actors were so great that you could use nearly every shot. I can’t think of anything that didn’t work in that sense.

JL: I feel like I got at least fifteen different people give me script edits, it really was such a labour of love. We were so lucky with the casting – we had auditioned for Jane and Jordan and Shirong Wu [Jane] and Anani Ho [Jordan] came in and I remember being so stressed about casting Jordan; but when Anani came in, this huge weight was off my shoulders and she was such a little pocket rocket. And her parents were also so supportive; and she just had no inhibition and was so open and energetic and open to playing. I never had to direct her ever; she just did her thing, and it was essentially perfect. And Shi, I had a lot of conversations with her; I remember asking her, ‘does Jane feel like a real person to you?’ And she said, ‘yeah – she feels like who I was when I was seventeen.’ And as long as the character youre playing feels real to you, that’s all that’s important. And we actually cast Lily [Hunter], who plays the teacher, four days before shooting because I just wasn’t super stoked with any of the options we had. And we met her four days ahead, did one rehearsal and it was the first time she acted in anything and she knocked it out of the park. And lastly, Ma, played by Kim Ko, I trained with her in the same acting studio and she was one of the only POC actors there – and I remember seeing her there and thinking ‘Friend! Friend crush!’ and I don’t think she knew who I was, but I sat next to her during one of the masterclasses and was fangirling because I love her work. She’s such a great dramatic actress and she’s also really great at comedy. And I remember typing this huge email saying ‘please be in my film!’ and thank goodness she said yes. So pretty much perfect cast. It’s one of the first things that everyone says to me after seeing it is telling me that the cast is so good, and I agree.

SK: We’re really lucky. Because it was challenging because the number of aspects we needed for them to meet – the age, the language, obviously their performance. We had difficulty at first with finding the right Jane that speaks Mandarin well enough and looked enough like Jordan (because they’re from the same family). So we were really lucky in the end.

JL: Shi actually speaks perfect Mandarin and so she had to dumb her Mandarin down for this film and I mean, I wish that were me! 

JZ: What was that like, to have everyone there on set, together? Especially because you had so many younger actors on set too.

JL: I was quite nervous, actually, about directing kids because I don’t feel like I’m naturally great with them. Frank works with kids in his other job but I was fine directing Anani because she was a goddamn natural; I would tell her to do something and she would just do it and it would be perfect – so there wasn’t that much direction involved. I don’t know if it’s because this was two years ago and I don’t remember it, but I don’t remember having to support her that much. I think I had more trouble directing the extras in the classroom scenes because I would try to intellectualise it to them – I would say, ‘Now you’re excited and you’re going to say this!’ And Frank telling me, ‘You shouldn’t tell them when you’re shooting them, you should just shoot them when they’re in their most natural state because kids who aren’t Anani kind of freeze up a bit and get camera shy when you’re pointing this huge camera at them’ – I think they get a bit freaked out. So for a lot of the B-roll cutaway shots, Frank just went around the room rolling the camera and being as inconspicuous as possible.

FHW: Just letting them do their thing. Kids aren’t really very good at acting – they can be good at performing, but it’s hard to explain to a kid who’s not an actor, which a lot of those extras weren’t, how to act or say ‘something is going to happen and you need to react to that’ because then you can just see them waiting for the thing to happen the whole time.

JL: Yeah, I was not good at tricking them! There’s that bit in the film where the teacher is writing that really complicated character on the board and asking them about how many strokes was in it. And I said ‘Go! Call out a number!’ and it was just silence, not a single person said anything – so I had to just go back and do a couple of takes to get our responses. I suppose that’s something I would change if I had to do it again, try to be better about directing the extras and getting more natural performances out of them. But it was already a struggle to find as many extras as we did, so we were so grateful when they showed up – and at the end of the day, first time on set, they all did amazing, and they were all so cooperative and happy and made a lot of friends. It was a very wholesome shooting experience.

SK: All the kids were so lively, they played games and you know. For Anani, she was just so much energy – because when working with children, we need to go on break every ten minutes so we don’t overwork them, but she was always like, ‘Can we keep working!’

JL: I remember one quite late night, we stayed back until about 9pm, for that scene where the mum comes home and she’s practising Chinese on the floor. I remember me, Frank and our first AD scheduling that day and thinking that we were going to be a bit late because we normally finished at about 5 or 6pm – and we were worried that Anani was going to crash and get really tired. But at the end she was still full of energy. And I remember telling her that she had to pack her things to go home and sleep, but she said she didn’t want to leave! 

SK: For the extras, we sent a casting call to the schools nearby asking whether they had a drama club and that’s how they responded. None of them were trained as actors or had lots of experience in front of a camera. Some of them were just there with friends. So it worked out for all of us in the end, I think. We were able to build a really nice relationship with Anani’s parents too, which we were really grateful for.

JL: They say that when you cast children, you’re also casting the parents because the kids are only going to be as available and open to you as the parents are – how willing they are to take Anani to rehearsal and rehearse with her at home. Anani doesn’t speak a lick of Chinese and she had to memorise these two ancient poems. And I remember her mum telling me how strange that was to get her to learn it because Anani doesn’t connect any meaning to the sounds, so all she’s remembering is random sounds. And her mum was trying to explain the meaning to her, but she wasn’t having it. 

JZ: I guess learning to trick children is one of them, but were there any other takeaways that all of you personally got from the experience of making this film?

JL: I was really stressed making this film and I don’t know why because I had such an organised team. But I was still stressing out – and I just feel like I need to relax on set because at a certain point, that stress isn’t serving you at all and it’s actually just getting in the way of you enjoying your job and doing your best work because you’re not here and present with your actors. So that’s what I’ve massively taken away from Mother Tongue – just trust in the preparation, trust in your team and crew and it’s not the end of the day. Surely you make films to have fun a little, and I do it because I love it so have faith in all of the preparation. So next time I’m really going to try and have faith in the preparation and just enjoy myself.

SK: I agree, I think this might apply mostly to student films but it’s hard to turn off your brain to not think about the film because it’s just so personal to do it. And you’re not paid to do it – you’re just attached to a project because you really want to do it. So you’re thinking about the film 24/7, in comparison to just going to a set and working and coming home and switching off your brain. Learning to balance your work and not letting it take over too much is a good lesson.

JL: We shot at Frank’s house, too. So the house we were shooting in was Frank’s house. And he kept the purple curtains that we put up. 

FHW: [laughing] Yeah, the takeaway is don’t let people shoot at your house! But I had a good time, I enjoyed it. And try to enjoy it. Sometimes you get caught up in thinking that you’re doing something more important than you really are, and you don’t want to screw things up; it takes away from the experience a little bit. 

SK: Looking back, that was two years ago. At that time, our lives were basically consumed by this film. It’s wild to think about balancing all this stuff with uni, and work, and doing this film, and our other projects. It’s a little crazy to think about it now.

JL: It’s crazy that we shot it two years ago. I feel like a very different person, so I feel like I’m riding on the back of someone else’s achievements a little bit. We had to delay our festival circuit because of COVID and so only now are people seeing it, but it’s so exciting because at the end of the day, you make films for people to watch and it’s amazing that people are actually seeing it now and that we can hear what they say. And then when all this is done, hopefully we can put it online. I watch a lot of online content and I think it’s really gratifying to cut out the middleman and go straight from the creator to the audience, and you get that direct interaction with comments and whatnot. You don’t have to pay either. Especially with a film like this, I want it to be accessible to everyone.

JZ: What’s on the radar for all three of you heading into the future?

FHW: Pretty much just been doing lighting work, going to keep pursuing that. Going to focus on that.

SK: I’m working as an attachment for a new SBS show, New Gold Mountain, it’s going to come out later this year, so that’s the main thing. And I’m working with another director to pitch a show that I cant talk about, but it’s very exciting! And I hope I can get more work in editing, because right now it’s a lot of corporate stuff, so looking to do narrative editing. I was really lucky to work with the marketing team in Brazen Hussies, shadowing them and seeing how they do the documentary, so I’m thinking of also exploring the documentary side of things.

JL: I’m about to direct a spinoff storyline of a YouTube series called Flunk. And I also play one of the main characters, so after I direct this season, I’ll be going into a season of that but acting. And after that, we’ll be working with the first Assistant Director on Mother Tongue, AD-ing a series called Trio which might come out on The Monarch Channel, which is a streaming service. And I might direct one of those as well – I was trying to get Frank on some of this stuff, but he’s going to Tasmania! But other than that, I’d love to do more first AD work and maybe more acting work too.