INTERVIEW: Feminist western film ‘Thousand Pieces of Gold’ celebrates 30th anniversary
Photo: Thousand Pieces of Gold, directed by Nancy Kelly, stars Rosalind Chao and Dennis Dun. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber / Provided by press rep with permission.
Nancy Kelly’s landmark movie, Thousand Pieces of Gold, tells the profound story of Lalu (played by Rosalind Chao), a young Chinese woman who was sold into slavery by her parents and trafficked to Idaho’s gold country. She eventually is sold in a poker game to a man named Charlie (Chris Cooper), but, despite her many obstacles, she is determined to survive and overcome the hellish odds in 19th-century America.
Thousand Pieces of Gold was hailed at the time of its release in 1990 as a feminist western with important themes that still resonate. Upon its 30th anniversary and a special virtual run with a 4K restoration courtesy of IndieCollect, those themes are still powerful, even more so given the ongoing conversations about feminism, immigration and the #MeToo movement.
To celebrate the film’s 30th anniversary, Kelly, Chao, Cooper, producer/editor Kenji Yamamoto and screenwriter Anne Makepeace will take part in a live Q&A on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s YouTube page Wednesday, April 29 at 8 p.m.
“I am so thrilled because when we first met with Jonathan Hertzberg at Kino Lorber — the film had a preview last year at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Queens World Film Festival, where they gave me and Kenji a lifetime achievement award — he said to us, ‘This film has these marketing pluses,’” Kelly said in a recent phone interview. “Those words had never been uttered ever. … Honestly, the first time around, although it got great reviews, and it did well around the world, they never really knew what to do with it.”
Now audience members will be able to view the 4K restoration of the “undersung gem,” as press notes describe the film. Although the coronavirus pandemic has put a damper on in-person theatrical screenings, the virtual offering will give Thousand Pieces of Gold a wide audience — many of them eager to enjoy content from the comfort of their quarantined setting.
“I mean, it’s thrilling, and what the digital restoration has done, I was in tears the first time I saw it in a theater because the tools that you have now for color correction, there’s no words to describe,” the director said. “You used to have just four choices, lighter, darker, bluer, and now you can just go in, and you can change this little bit and that little bit. There’s more in the negative than we even knew from the 35mm prints, and the negative got torn in two during the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. And so there was always this white flash when you saw the print projected. I mean, I never noticed it, but Kenji, my filmmaking partner and husband who edited the film, he saw it every single time. And he was able in the color correction and the dust-busting process to erase that white flash. It’s just wonderful that the film’s natural strengths are now front and center.”
Kelly and Yamamoto commissioned Makepeace to write the script, which is based off her novel. Kelly had been friends with Makepeace and picked up a copy of the book. After reading it, she was inspired to make the movie and knew that Lalu’s story, which is based on actual historical accounts, needed to be told cinematically.
“It was a difficult shoot, of course,” admitted Kelly, whose other films include the documentaries Rebels With a Cause and Downside Up. “We were out in the middle of nowhere in Montana. We had to send the dailies to Seattle and then wait for them to come back. I think it took two days, so we were always a little behind knowing whether what we had shot was good.”
Kelly said the budget was so slim that they couldn’t afford real movie horses. Instead, they had to settle for “regular horses,” which might seem more authentic, but it also meant every time a boom mic was lifted above the animals’ heads, they took off out of fear.
“The ox ran away with the four actresses in the cart, just charging across the plains until the wrangler caught up with them and circled and made him stop,” the filmmaker said with a laugh. “Everybody always remembers that [Kenji and I] drove the camera truck from San Francisco to Montana because there wasn’t anybody else to do it, and we didn’t care. It was really a lot of fun to do it, and Chris Cooper and Rosalind Chao, they were so good. To see Ann’s script come to life with everything, the art direction and the lighting and the cinematography and their performances — I felt like making drama and directing drama, that was where my best strength as a director was. It was difficult, but it was also so joyous. You asked whether I remembered any of it — I’ll never forget a minute of it, I swear.”
It’s not every day that a filmmaker has IMDB credits that are both dramatic films and documentary pictures. Kelly has dabbled in both and enjoyed the possibilities of each art form.
“In narrative, you get take two, which you do not get in a documentary, at least the documentaries that I make,” she said. “With Thousand Pieces of Gold, we were adapting a novel. The novel started with Lalu’s birth and ended with her death. For a narrative feature, we just needed the most dramatic part of that, and I saw that the first time I read the novel. This is where it would start, and this is where it would end. … So I think with documentary, what I always feel like I’m up against, I’m never sure when I’m shooting whether what I’m getting is actually going to work in the film or whether it’s turning the documentary in a direction that I hadn’t expected. That happens. That’s what you have to really be watching for.”
At the time of this shoot, which took place in the 1980s, Chao was well known for her work in Diff’rent Strokes, AfterMASH and Falcon Crest, among other projects. Cooper, who went on to win an Oscar later in his career, was less of a known quantity.
“Our casting director, Laura Kennedy, we were able to get her to be our casting director because Thousand Pieces of Gold was developed through Sundance,” Kelly said. “They put us together, and she brought Rosalind in the very first morning of casting. Nobody ever came close to her audition. We kept looking. We just couldn’t believe that we had found the right actress morning #1. Chris, to us, was well known because of [John Sayles’] Matewan. We’re in the independent film world, and John Sayles is one of our heroes. So we knew Chris.”
Now, 30 years after this important film’s original release, a whole new generation will be able to experience this sad, but ultimately inspiring story of Lalu and what conditions were like for Chinese slaves in the 19th century. Kelly is hopeful that modern-day considerations will come into the minds of audience members as they watch this powerful and poetic story of survival and female empowerment.
“That’s what drew me to the story, the self-actualization that Lalu went through, that it was based on a true story,” the director said. “When she and Charlie lived on the River of No Return, that river was kind of a tourist attraction for wealthy people. They would ride down the river in boats, and they always would stop at Lalu and Charlie’s place. … She was a pioneer. She was a survivor.”
She added: “There were like 100,000 Chinese men who came to work on the railroad and then in the Gold Rush, and they weren’t allowed to bring their families — very similar to today. And so there was this big market for slave girls and for prostitutes. Those girls, most of them didn’t last very long because it was terrible. The trip across the ocean, a lot of them died, and the way they were treated in the gold camps or wherever they ended up, it was such a shock to be taken away from their families. … I’ll never forget the images of the suffering of those girls and the percentage who died, and then there was Lalu. She lived. She survived. She lived to a ripe old age. I really appreciate that this time out they’re calling it a feminist western and really acknowledging the feminist roots.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Thousand Pieces of Gold, directed by Nancy Kelly, will play in a new 4K restoration thanks to IndieCollect. Audience members can also watch a special Q&A with the cast and crew of the movie by tuning into BAM’s YouTube page Wednesday, April 29 at 8 p.m. EST. Click here for more information.
