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Sometimes, following your unique dreams can lead you to win unexpected rewards in coveted places. At least, this was the case for the Chinese-born writer-director Wendi Tang. In the surrealist drama Fishtank, which won the grand prize in the Tribeca Chanel Through Her Lends program, a young woman named Jules (Tiffany Chu), coming to terms with her year-long sobriety, finds herself with a new affliction: vomiting up goldfish when triggered by anxiety. However, things take an unexpected turn when she meets a fish enthusiast.
Here, Tang talks to Deadline about her journey to becoming a filmmaker, female film narratives and following your dreams no matter how weird they are.
DEADLINE: Fishtank has been making the rounds since 2022. What do you think has changed for yourself as a filmmaker since then and now?
WENDI TANG: When I first submitted my first-ever draft to the Tribeca Chanel Through Her Lens program, I didn’t think about it much. I just wrote the story. I dreamt of the idea and the image in my mind and wrote it down the second day. I was like fuck it, I’m just going to submit it to every program that’s opening right now and see where it goes. I have two sides of myself. One is very idealistic, the other is very practical. The practical side kept telling me this is too absurd, too weird, too odd. Do you think people are going to like it? And the other side was like, I don’t give a fuck. I’m going to submit it and then see if it gets any attention. So, when the time came and I won, I just cried and cried. It was super unexpected.
It was an unforgettable experience. I got to talk to a lot of great female filmmakers about this program and their own experiences. That gave me a lot of insight into how prevalent this feeling of being judged or ignored or not being taken seriously is among all the women, not just in the industry but throughout society. This made me more confident in the story that I was telling.
DEADLINE: How did you end up in filmmaking? Were your parents creative? Where do you think you got your creative filmmaking ambitions from?
TANG: I think none of my family, for the last three/four generations, have done entertainment or filmmaking [laughs]. I’m the first in the family who wanted to do that. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time on my own because I was the only child in the family and both of my parents are working parents. They got very busy with their jobs, so I had to relocate with them very frequently because of this, too. We moved from the northern part of China and all the way down to the southern part to a coastal city in China. While they were busy, I was spending a lot of time with the TV and a little cam recorder that my dad had, so I started filming everything around me. Sometimes, I would also ask my friends to come to my apartment to play games after school, and a lot of the time, we ended up discussing a TV show we had seen and asking ourselves how we could recreate them.
I get very self-conscious when I’m acting, so I would be the one to be like, “OK, you play this role, and I’ll be telling you what to do.” [laughs]. I didn’t know the word for directing yet, but I ended up taking the directorial role in the group and telling them who was playing who, where they should be, and how to recreate the scene we were going for. We would drift away from the storyline, and we’d explore some other possibilities. It was really fun. So, I think that was my first initial directorial experience. But I didn’t realize that until high school, because that’s when you have to start thinking about what you’re going to do in the future.
DEADLINE: Right.
TANG: My parents, of course, like most Asian parents do, they wanted me to have a stable job. They were always telling me, “You’ve got to be able to support yourself. We can’t be with you forever,” and so I was just like, “OK.” I think I was a smart student, most of the subjects are not very hard, in my opinion. So, I was able to do OK, but I just had that feeling in myself that none of these subjects and the jobs would really allow me to fully express myself. So, I think that was the moment I decided that I wanted the chance to go into filmmaking.
Also, I didn’t know if I could be a director during this time. Because that was the time I started learning what directors actually do. I have a lot of directors that I admire. The more I learned about the process, the more I became hesitant. This was because none of my family was doing this, and I had no one to speak to and no resources or background in the industry. So, I got the idea that perhaps I should go to the States. When I told my parents that I wanted to go to the United States for college, they were like, “Are you insane? How are you going to do that?” And I was like, “I don’t know, but I Googled it. So, I think there’s a way, Mom, I just have to start this process now, or it’ll be too late.”
It was a completely personal feeling. I wanted to stay creative, and I didn’t want to let go of those ideas that I had in my mind. That’s why I decided to apply to NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. It was not an easy process, but I’m glad I got in. During college, I did end up getting two degrees, one in filmmaking and the other in business. That way, I could show my parents that if I can’t make it in film, I have something to fall back on [laughs].
DEADLINE: Fishtank has a very unique premise. Where did this idea come from?
TANG: The idea came from two different aspects. The most direct inspiration was the image from my dreams. I dream very wildly. I don’t know how or why my mind is capable of doing that. I probably should see a therapist. I have those really wild, imaginative dreams. In this dream, I was walking in the middle of nowhere in a desert, trying to find a way out. In the dream, I just suddenly felt the urge to throw up, and when I did, in my hands, I saw a little living, jumping goldfish on my palms. This woke me up, and I was like, “What was that?” So, I thought it could be a fun idea, so I wrote it down and just put it on the shelf with the attitude of maybe one day it’ll come to me. But days after that, at least a week or two, I just kept thinking about that image. It had a very magical power that kept pulling me back to think about the connection between the image and myself. So, I decided to really take some time to dive deeper into my history, and that’s where the second part of the inspiration came from.
This drew me back to the memory where I had my first goldfish when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed to have furry animals as pets because my parents didn’t like them. So, they were like, “Oh, you can get a goldfish.” I was like, “Great,” and I got a goldfish. In many Asian cultures, they represent luck and prosperity. And that’s what I was taught as a kid, but when I saw my little goldfish in the very small fishbowl, all I felt was sadness. I felt very sad when I was looking into their eyes because they’re trapped behind this glass bowl, and there’s just a lot of food that people toss at them every day. Sometimes, they don’t even remember if they’ve had that food or not because they only have seven or eight seconds of memory, according to scientists.
When I started working in the industry and just becoming an adult in general, I feel like I understand the fish more because sometimes I feel like I am in the same situation as them. I was trapped below the glass ceiling. And people sometimes judge, and people toss the food to us, that we, the fish, have to fight against each other in order to get the food. Sometimes, it just gave me that feeling. I think that’s how I wanted to really write out the story and have the final cathartic moment in the film of breaking the glass, breaking the tanks and having the character regain power and voice at the end.
DEADLINE: There’s something really intimate about this woman having this particular affliction be a manifestation of traumatic things that happen to her. Why explore the complex female narrative this way?
TANG: We as women have different desires. And sometimes those desires are in conflict. For example, Jules wants connection with people and to put her life back on track. Those two wants, sometimes they’re in conflict. She knows that if she wants to seek outside connections with people, there’s a chance that she’s going to get hurt, but she still wants to try. I really want to write out more of those complex feelings that we, as humans, not just women, often have but don’t get portrayed on screen fully.
I do still have that feeling that a lot of the time in movies, the female characters only have one objective. Humans don’t just take one objective and keep at it from the start to the end. It changes. Sometimes, you have other thoughts that add to your desire and might complicate the whole situation. I remember growing up, I watched a lot of TV and movies. The one question I had was, why are the characters that I liked, mostly male? They are allowed to have those very complicated intentions. Sometimes, they break their own words and explore different things. But I don’t see it enough in female characters yet. And I think all female characters deserve the same, if not more.
DEADLINE: How did the act of getting the fish and working with the fish come together?
TANG: Tiffany Chu, who plays Jules, and I had a lot of conversations surrounding the fish because we couldn’t put a real live fish into her mouth and have her throw it up. So, we had some silicon fish made that were mouth-safe. When we were shooting the shots that involved covering her mouth, we used the fake fish to do that action, and then we cut away to the actual fish that was in the sink. For example, in the first scene, when you see her vomit the fish, what landed in the sink is the real fish. We worked with a fish wrangler named Mark [Weitz] in Hollywood. We learned a lot from him about how much each type of fish can endure. He told us the fish that we use, particularly in that scene, can stay out of the water for eight minutes max.
DEADLINE: Wow. That’s pretty long.
TANG: Yeah, they’re very strong and feisty fish. Each take went about 10 seconds, so it was fine, we only did two or three takes. No fish were harmed in the making of this film. I just want to put that out here [laughs].
DEADLINE: What would you like audiences to take away from Fishtank?
TANG: There are two sides to this answer. One is that I don’t want them to feel too comfortable walking away from the movie. I want at least some image or some of the plots to strike them either in a good or negative way. I want it to have some influence on them. Whatever group you’re in, you are part of the power dynamic. Either on the higher side or the lower side, you’re in that dynamic. I want them to know that you’re part of it. You just can’t opt-out. If you’re a woman you would know that I’m talking about through the film. The things that we need to break. And if you’re a man or another gender, you would also know that you can’t just stay out of this and be like, “This is none of my business.” You’re part of it, you’re part of it, and you have to acknowledge that.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you? Anything coming up that you want to talk about?
TANG: I am working on two things right now. One is the feature film of Fishtank; I’m already on the second draft working with a director I really like. I just feel like there’s a lot of stories left untold, because of the length of the short. So, I really want to have the time and the feature film to really fully explore this character. Aside from that, I’m also working on another short that we’re shooting in January in New York City. It’s a love letter that I wrote to the city because I spent seven years over there. It encapsulated a lot of my personal experiences and fleeting thoughts about the city.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
