Jason Scott Lee: Primal Man 4/6 | Asian American Personalities

Asian American Profiles

Jason Scott Lee: Primal Man

PAGE 4 OF 6

GS: Where is your farm? Is it near Kona?
JSL: Closer to Hilo.

GS: Is it near the ocean?
JSL: It's in the mountains.

GS: It's pretty remote then?
JSL: Oh, very remote.

GS: Do you need a four-wheel drive to get there?
JSL: Not necessarily.

GS: Maybe when you get a lot of rain.
JSL: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

GS: You were born in Los Angeles.
JSL: That's correct.

GS: And you have three brothers and a sister. Which sibling are you?
JSL: The middle. It's my sister, my brother, then myself, then my two younger brothers who are actually twins.

GS: What were your parents doing at the time you were born?
JSL: My father was working for the telephone company out there. GTE I believe, as an engineer. My mother was going to school and taking waitressing jobs. I think it was Los Angeles Community College. They moved down to Gardena after that.

GS: You wouldn't have any memories of your first years in LA.
JSL: I do.

GS: But you were only two.
JSL: Yeah, but I think people have memories of that. I remember going over to my neighbor's house. The neighbors at the tinme were my godparents. They were an older caucasian couple, Frank and Stella. I remember my father's car at the time, Chevy Impala station wagon.

GS: That's quite a memory for a two-year-old
JSL: But you see pictures too.

GS: Then you went to the North Shore when you were two?
JSL: No, Kaimuki area.

GS: We imagined you living near Haleiwa and going to Matsumoto's for shave ice.
JSL: [Laughs] We did that a lot, yeah. When you live on Oahu and you know the waves are best on the North Shore you tend to always travel in your teen years, you always take the bus or have a friend who has a car and travel out that way and get all those goodies along the way.

GS: Did you enjoy your early years in Oahu?
JSL: Oh, yeah, my dad was a fisherman and he was also a real outdoors kinda guy, so he would always take us out.

GS: So he gave up his work for the phone company?
JSL: He transfered to the Oahu branch of the phone company.

GS: Did you have any career ambitions?
JSL: Not really careerwise. You have no idea what the world means, what it pretends to be. You're just living day by day. People tell you to go to college, enter a university, study study study. If you don't know what to do, go to college anyway and take liberal arts or something that will give you diversity and all these ridiculous things.

GS: That's what your parents were telling you?
JSL: Yeah. Even now I think everybody thinks to get a higher education is the only way to live.

GS: What made you pick Fullerton of all places?
JSL: I have what we call here in Hawaii calabash cousins or calabash relatives who lived in Fullerton. I went out there on a vacation just to see California, see LA, I had a friend going to college in Whittier, so I ended up staying in Fullerton.

GS: Did you like coming back to the LA area?
JSL: It was new. It was very different which I thought was good. The main reason I moved was because I wanted to see for myself if academics was all people said it was. Like that you would learn if you went into academics. I realized that wasn't true for me. But I did it well. I put my nose to the grindstone and whacked away at it.

GS: So you did well at Fullerton college?
JSL: Yeah. I studied for a year and a half there.

GS: What were you studying?
JSL: It was just a liberal arts degree which means just history, mathematics and science. Just a gamut of things.

GS: That's when you got interested in acting?
JSL: Yeah. I met Sal Mineo at Fullerton College. He was my acting mentor.

GS: Did he get you into Born in East LA?
JSL: Kind of. He was the one who got me the agent who sent me out on that call.

GS: How did you get an agent while you were just a college student?
JSL: I was out of college at the time. I had been in Fullerton College for a year and a half and then I moved up to the LA area, Silverlake, I was trying to continue my studies at LACC. By that time I realized that I didn't want to be an academic person. But I wanted to keep my parents happy and sttay in school. So wgebn I went to LACC I was doing painting, I was doing life drawing, I was doing music, I was in piano, I was studying Chinese. It was kind of a free-for-all. I didn't last even last one semester there until I got Born in East LA. And that was goign to take me away for ten to 12 weeks. So I said it's impossible to stay in school. So I optioned to go the other route, the free-forming route. I don't really believe in education as such but I do believe in mentorship. I do believe in teachers.

GS: How had you proven yourself? Did Sal Mineo identify you as a talent?
JSL: I met him in Fullerton College. He just said, “I'm starting a theater in the Los Angeles area and if you want I would love to have you as one of the participants or to do some work there.” So I took him up on the opportunity and moved up there. He basically said, “You have a lot of potential.” That was it.

GS: This was '85?
JSL: '85, 86.

GS: So when you got the part in Born in East LA, did you say to yourself, “This is the life I want for myself”?
JSL: Well, when I met Sal, after studying for a while -- meaning after reading some books about acting and this and that, and some of the books that Sal presented to me -- and the way he taught, I realized that this is something I could do for the rest of my life. I realized there was no end. It was all according to your imagination.

GS: So you liked it for freeing you?
JSL: At first you're completely afraid of it and that's sort of a good sign. If you're afraid of something and you find interest in it, go for it. Then it became like a therapy for my strict Chinese upbringing. So it started becoming more emotionalized after so many years of suppressing it, having a very strict father. Then it becomes sort of a lifestyle, and eventually it becomes an art, hopefully when you get your heels down.

GS: One of the most interesting movies you've been in is Map of the Human Heart. How did you get cast to star in that?
JSL: That was an audition, straight in. I read the script first and thought this is the most amazing movies I've ever read. I don't think I've come close to reading something like that since. But as far as giving you a visual interpretation of a movie, it was just there, the ethnicity and the whole thing. It was just very clear. And it was right up my vision of the kind of movie I wanted to do. It was primal, it had ethnic foundation, it had international appeal. At the time I don't think anyone really knew how to market an art film which is what it was being called.
When I went in for the audition, I looked on the list and there were names I had seen, and I thought, “Oh my god, it's going to be tough!” Like Lou Diamond Phillips and Keanu Reeves. When you hadn't really done anything and you look at that those names you think it might be tough going, might be just another audition.

CONTINUED BELOW

GS: Did they recognize your physicality at the time?
JSL: I talked to Vincent Ward the director at the time and I said why did you hire me? He said because you're the most believable person out of everyone that came in. I buy it. I said, “Okay, that's all I needed to know!”

GS: Is that still one of your favorite roles?
JSL: Yeah. When I look back, it's hard because everybody's involved in making you look the way that it is and it's all complementary to each other when it does come out right. Like Vincent's interest in believability. He sent me on this reasearch trip to the Artic and I spent like a week in just a small village, basically just snow, with 300 people in the community. And I really got a sense of things and how these indigenous people lived and how they walked and how they expressed themselves. It wasn't too far off the mark of how a lot of our native Hawaiian people are. In that sense, I sort of feel like they've given me a license to be a champion of indigenous cultures. I get it, I understand. I grew up in it and I know. Whereas I don't think some actors can actually claim that.

GS: How did you feel doing that love scene?
JSL: The main thing I remember was that I was cold,. My buttocks cheeks were shaking and Vincent was on that giant crane with a loudhailer, one of those bullhorn things, going, “Jason, could you please stop shaking your buttocks!” [laughs] I said, “Yeah, fat chance of that! How do you control that?” I am a physical actor but there are some things you just can't control.

GS: It must have been like 15 degrees.
JSL: It was an English countryside in late winter.

GS: Any other memories?
JSL: Just some of the hunting episodes I had when I was in the research of it. Also getting to locations was the most adventurous thing I've ever been a part of. You wake up in the morning, you put on your costumes, you jump into a Twin Otter plane, you head up, you fly for an hour to I-don't-know-where, you land in an open place that's just ice and rock, and you get into a skiddoo with a box trailer in the back and you head out for another hour and you're on location. There were no roads, there was nothing, just ice. But he color of the ice and the gradations of the sky, it was just mind-blowing. After a taste of that kind of adventure, anything that came my way that was going to take me to some remote area of the globe, I was going to go. I've been fortunate that way. My perspective is a lot more different than a lot of actors because of that. PAGE 5