Intersections: A Journalistic History of Asian America: Entertainment, March 2025

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I am thrilled to be among the writers contributing to Intersections: A Journalistic History of Asian America. This book, which started as a celebration of the Asian American Journalists Association’s 40-year anniversary in 2021, has blossomed into a collaboration with UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

Within the chapter on entertainment, I have written a short profile on one of my friends and mentors, Jeannie Park, and a longer feature – including interviews with esteemed colleagues such as Jeff Yang, Paula Yoo and Neal Justin – on why it is important to have Asian American journalists and artists both celebrating, documenting and evolving pop culture.

To purchase a copy of the book, click on this link.

Adam Elliot Finds a Lifetime of Treasures in Memoir of a Snail

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A Q&A with the Oscar-winning animator about his first feature-length film since 2009’s Mary and Max

Portrait of Adam Elliot with Grace, courtesy of Madman Films.

By Cynthia Wang

Snails. Why’d it have to be snails? It’s what Indiana Jones would have asked if he were a gastropod-fearing protagonist in a big-budget, live-action version of Adam Elliot’s latest movie, Memoir of a Snail. But since our hero is little Grace Pudel, a grief-stricken, introverted dreamer voiced by Sarah Snook and rendered in stop-motion clay animation, her entire world is populated by snails — as knickknacks, mementos and actual confidantes in a jar — and as a metaphor for her insular life.

But look throughout Elliot’s work, including his 1996 debut short film Uncle, Oscar-winning 2003 short Harvie Krumpet and acclaimed 2009 feature Mary and Max, and you will find snails alongside figures looking out of windows, snippets of detail from his own biography and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard — that life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward. “I love revisiting visual motifs in all my films,” Elliot says during our interview at the Golden Age Cinema and Bar in Surry Hills, NSW. “There’s snails, there’s so many things I repeat. And I love repetition. Sometimes I worry and think, ‘Oh, well maybe I’ve overdone the snails.’ You know, I love shots of characters looking through windows, looking out and themes of imprisonment and agoraphobia, and I love films like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and I love the framing of a rectangle within a rectangle. That sort of metaverse is in this film.”

You can find my main story about Memoir of a Snail in this week’s issue of TV Week (on newsstands starting October 15 with Kitty Flanagan on the cover for the season 3 return of Fisk). In the piece, Elliot talks about the casting of Snook, Jacki Weaver and Tony Armstrong as voices for his characters, and what he would love audiences to experience with his film. My time with Melbourne-based Elliot was so illuminating, however, that I wanted to include more of our chat online. Perhaps you may want to read this interview after you see the 94-minute film, in cinemas across Australia starting October 17, but here is more of our discussion on the making of his latest clayography.

Grace (Sarah Snook), reading her pulp novel of the week, is surrounded by guinea pigs, snail art and slices of Australiana. Film still courtesy of Madman Films.

Your themes are universal, but there are Chiko rolls and digs at Canberra in Memoir of a Snail. Are those particular nods things you love to give to your Australian audiences?

With all my films, I like it to have an Australian flavour in there. But ultimately I’m making the film for people in Sweden and Japan and Iran and America. It’s tricky ’cause you don’t wanna stick in kangaroos jumping down the street. So I go for things like food, and places like Luna Park. This time around, we had a lot of fun with Melbourne and choosing things that you wouldn’t normally put in a film, like the housing commissions in Collingwood and Brunswick Street. So yeah, we had a lot of fun. And it’s interesting how many people — we’ve shown the film in Spain and France — how they really relate to the suburban-ness. Even though I thought, “Oh, maybe they won’t understand Canberra,” they [say], “Oh no, we have places just like Canberra!”

The little details, like your love of books, come through in the things that the characters read, which reflect moments narratively in the story.

Reading is my first love. I prefer reading to watching films, and I don’t watch many animated films. I watch a lot of documentary and I love live-action feature films. But reading certainly is my first love and I love the classics. A lot of them I read as a teenager and I’ve always been fascinated by, “How does a classic become a classic? What are the ingredients? What is it in the zeitgeist that makes that work?” Also, maybe it was important that for Gilbert and Grace, their father, Percy, instilled in them the importance of reading and how reading can be a sanctuary from the everyday world and your troubles. And so that was important. But then, you know, I also wanted Grace to go through a period where she’s reading bad literature!

Percy (Dominique Pinon) takes kids Grace and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to Luna Park. Film still courtesy of Madman Films.

It must have been great fun to come up with book titles like The Fiddling Scotsman. Where did they come from and how did you enjoy peppering the film with those?

Yeah. I had fun coming up with all those book titles, and I designed a lot of the production design of the film in [COVID] lockdown. So I spent a lot of time having the luxury of just spending a whole day thinking of wacky book titles. And actually, I think The Ginger Chested Pirate, that one I found on the internet somewhere. So I think I can’t claim that one! But you know, I think that with my films, I’m trying to create as much visual humour as possible so you almost have have to watch the film a second or third time to see all those jokes.

Is that part — being able to get into that minutiae — also the joy of world-building?

Oh, absolutely. As an animation director and writer, I could never do live action films because we get to play god in stop-motion. We have that creative freedom and control to create any world we want. Our characters can look however we want them, and we can go into the minutiae and we can add all these little gems all the way through the film. And look, I love drawing, and so I had a great time. I drew, I think, 5,000 character designs, props and set designs. I drew the entire storyboard. Drawing is probably my second love after reading. You can get carried away, though. You have to learn to know when to stop and move on.

Adam Elliot looks at his storyboards. Photo courtesy of Madman Films.

You had to create the thousands of snail objects that Grace collects. So in her hoard, what’s happened to that hoard?

Yes. That hoard is now on display in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Fed Square. Not all of it survived; a lot of the sets disintegrated, but we’ve kept the good stuff. And it’s on display for two years.

That’s another layer to this story, which is the idea of people surround themselves with objects both to relive nostalgia or to contain their grief. Was that explored to the way that you had wanted fully once you saw the movie?

Great question. Because that’s what it is. It’s a process of distillation. I’ve actually just gone through a process of decluttering my life. I’m quite a minimalist now. We did this with my mum, and when we were going through my mother and father’s semi-hoard — they’re mild hoarders, Dad’s passed away now, but he had three sheds full of stuff — we’d literally pick up every item and say to them, “Do you need it?” Or, “Do you want it?” And, you know, “What degree of sentimental value does this have?” For example, my mum had 92 champagne glasses. Yet she doesn’t drink and never had a dinner party. So it’s like, “Oh, but my great auntie gave me those.” And I said, “Well, let’s keep one and donate the others to charity.” So it’s that sort of thing. And that’s what Grace does. She gets to the point where she keeps hold of things, including her hat. There’s that moment where she goes to burn that hat, and she says, “No, this is really important. So let’s keep that, and I’ll keep the picture frame of my brother, and my mother’s ornamental snails and the ashes jars.” I think what I’m trying to say with all of us, is that we’re bowerbirds. We collect all this stuff and surround us. We live in a consumer society and a capitalist world, but really, particularly just for the environment’s sake, we’ve all gotta declutter and reduce, reuse, recycle.

Memoir of a Snail began its run in Australian cinemas on October 17, 2024 and now screens on Stan. For more information, go to https://www.madman.com.au/memoir-of-a-snail/ . This piece also ran on my page in Medium. Below is the TV Week story.

Cynthia Wang piece that ran in TV Week, October 14, 2024.

Hunter Page-Lochard rolls with the punches in Kid Snow, September 15, 2024

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In the midst of a successful streak of contemporary television roles, the actor joins a cast a fellow rising Aussie stars for director Paul Goldman’s ’70s-set drama

Portrait of Hunter Page-Lochard courtesy of Madman Films.

Portrait of Hunter Page-Lochard courtesy of Madman Films.

By Cynthia Wang

Growing up in a family of acclaimed dancers, Hunter Page-Lochard saw firsthand how moving the body could move the soul. Enmeshed in theatre arts from childhood, he discovered that the quicker he could master choreography or learn how to behave as naturally as a character would, the better he could manifest the essence of that character. “As actors, you’re always looking for something interesting to do and for something that you want to do that’s impactful,” he says. “It’s something more than background noise. You grow as a person.”

With that in mind, Page-Lochard has battled flames in the 2021 series Fires and hit the surf in 2022’s Barons. In February 2024, he won the AACTA Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his powerful portrayal of Indigenous rights activist Lynus Preston in season two of The Newsreader. In each instance, he says the physical demands of the role have informed him as an actor. “You take the elements from everything,” he explains. “Fires is probably a really good example. It’s not so much that I left that going, ‘Oh, I know how to firefight now.’ But it’s like you understood what a certain demographic goes through, what that workforce is and taking that into account.

“Each project and each thing you learn adds to your repertoire and to your personality,” he says. “It’s always kind of uplifting. I think projects like that… as actors, you’re always looking for projects that elevate you and your personality.”

Page-Lochard found such a project in Kid Snow, the latest film by director Paul Goldman (Australian Rules, Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story). In it, themes of loyalty, redemption and finding one’s self-worth populate the carnival-like world of Australian tent boxing in 1970s Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. “Kid Snow is a roller coaster ride into a story about brothers and the burdens of family,” Goldman wrote ahead of the movie’s release. “A story of simmering relationships and the uneasy truces people make when haunted by the past, until secrets and lies inevitably surface, tearing them apart. These are lives cruelled by fate and destiny, redeemed by learning what and who is worth fighting for.”

Page-Lochard shares a light-hearted moment with director Paul Goldman on the set of Kid Snow. Photograph by David Dare Parker courtesy of Madman Films.

Although Billy Howle (boxer Kid Snow), Tom Bateman (promoter brother Rory Quinn) and Phoebe Tonkin (single-mum Sunny) drive the central plot, the ensemble cast includes Page-Lochard (Lizard), Mark Coles Smith (Lovely), Shaka Cook (Armless) and Nathan Phillips (Billy) as Kid Snow’s boxing-troupe mates. Lizard, in particular, becomes Kid’s confidant, trainer and corner. “Out of anyone really, Lizard would step up to the plate and represent that group really as one individual, really, to kind of uplift him and get him ready to where he needs to be,” Page-Lochard says, “but also to ground him in a spiritual place, ground him to country.”

Years ago, Bidjara and Māori Australian star Deborah Mailman told Page-Lochard a story about a relative of hers who boxed in the tent circuit, “so I kind of knew about the world a little bit, but I didn’t know the details per se,” he says. Yet on set, former amateur pugilists and a tent showman served as consultants. “Learning from them and hearing their stories was quite insightful,”  he says, “and it just finished colouring the full picture that Deborah Mailman started.”

Lizard (Page-Lochard, left) tells Kid Snow (Billy Howle) just how much further he needs to push himself to get in shape for the fight of his life. Photograph by David Dare Parker courtesy of Madman Films.

Naturally, Page-Lochard had to pick up enough boxing skills to be viewed as someone’s mentor. He also had to run across a vast amount of outback terrain without seeming winded. “That was grueling, I’m not gonna sugarcoat that,” he admits with a laugh. “Look, I’m very fortunate again for growing up in a physical family, in a dancing background, a theatre background. So pushing through the pain, I’m very used to it. But poor Billy was not! So there was a lot me being Lizard in real life trying to push him along.”

Making up for the energy exerted was taking in the scenery. “It was fun because of the landscape,” Page-Lochard says. “You’ve got to do this run 20,000 times and then change locations and do it another 20,000 times. But still, when you are waiting there to do your take, you just take a moment to look around and you just breathe in the country and you go, ‘OK, I’m not that mad about this!’ You look at where we are and think, ‘This is pretty gorgeous.’”

“That was grueling, I’m not gonna sugarcoat that,” Page-Lochard says about running across the Kalgoorlie landscape with Howle. Photograph by David Dare Parker courtesy of Madman Films.

When Lizard isn’t running or sparring, he spends the nights with the other boxers. Collectively, they have passed on their customs and culture to Kid Snow, imbuing him with both a sense of camaraderie and the freedom to find himself. That’s why they aren’t too worried when Kid leaves the tent for a few days; they tell a frantic Rory that his brother is just on walkabout and will come back in his own time.

Of that moment, Page-Lochard blended the traditions of his Indigenous and African American heritage with that of his costars to make their characters rich in purpose. “We had a great rehearsal period in Kalgoorlie, and those were some of the things that we did definitely delve into,” Page-Lochard says. “I think that’s a great example of a scene where there is a level of understanding that not many other characters would understand, and there is a sense of spirituality and a sense of groundedness. It’s sort of like an initiation and Kid definitely does go through a sense of initiation, and it’s something that especially Aboriginal men are very familiar with.”

It doesn’t hurt that Page-Lochard got to catch up with Smith and Cook, sharing their personal and career experiences during down time in filming. “We always say this to each other as actors — it’s lovely being able to work in mainstream and to be able to call this a living. We’re very fortunate and grateful for that,” he says “But, you know, when you do get to work with mob, it’s always nice.”

Billy (Nathan Phillips, left, kneeling) and Armless (Shaka Cook, standing by the lockers) lend their support for Kid Snow (Howle) in silence whilst he receives a last bit of instruction from Rory (Tom Bateman, far right) and a shoulder rub from Lizard (Page-Lochard) in Kid Snow. Photograph by David Dare Parker courtesy of Madman Films.

For Page-Lochard, working on Kid Snow also represents a different kind of Aboriginal representation. “I think the more we all are seen together in motion pictures like this, where it isn’t traumatic, the more palatable it’s going to be for the Australian audience to not feel like [our presence in films] is political,” he says. “There’s elements of colonialism in there, but it’s not so much a story about that. I feel like there are more places for Indigenous characters like that in motion pictures and doing films like Kid Snow is great because the more people see it, the more we get to make more movies that aren’t traumatic.”

To that end, Page-Lochard travelled to the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival to pitch the upcoming slate from Djali House, his production company. “It’s very exciting — we’ve already spoken to certain people, certain investors, certain sales agents and distributors, and kind of gotten a real lay of the land,” he says. Although he cannot get into more details about a project involving his father, former Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director Stephen Page, he is thrilled at expanding his directorial range beyond shorts and TV episodes.

“I’ve got a feature film that I’ve been working on for a while called Native Gods, which is my sci-fi epic fantasy,” Page-Lochard says. “That’s kind of the main priority at the moment, just working on that. That’s the one that’s got development funding. And yeah, it’s exciting. It’s funny — when you can be ambitious and want something of a scale really, really big and to have everyone around you tell you you are crazy — when you just put the work into it and really organise yourself and talk to the right people and stuff like that, it looks less impossible. Watch this space.”

For more information, go to https://www.madman.com.au/kid-snow/. I published this piece on Medium as well.

Mojean Aria: Finding His Way Home – Who Magazine, January 16, 2023

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Gaining fame in Hollywood, the Iranian Australian actor is back Down Under to shine a light on his own community. On a personal note, it is a privilege to check in with this fabulous actor and update milestones in his career. Thank you, Mojean, for your time and trust.

Film editors Maysie Hoy, Mark Yoshikawa and others reflect on their careers – CineMontage June 2, 2022

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For the second year, I had the privilege of documenting two virtual sessions arranged by the Pan Pacific Asian Steering Committee of the Motion Picture Editors Guild in celebration of AAPI Heritage Month.

Elisabeth Moss: Time to shine – TV Week May 2, 2022

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Elisabeth Moss, star of The Handmaid’s Tale, leads an award-winning ensemble through Shining Girls, a twisty new thriller on Apple TV Plus.

Yesterday on DVD, Chloe Bayliss, Lizzy Caplan, Jane Hall and more, TV WEEK Oct 19-25, 2019

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I spoke with Doctor Doctor’s Chloe Bayliss on her memoir, receive answers from Ellise Chappell on Yesterday and Lizzy Caplan on season 2 of Castle Rock, talked to Jane Hall about narrating One Born Every Minute Australia, and tease Total Control and early seasons of The X-Files.