The Ivy League is no stranger to show business — starlets Natalie Portman, Claire Danes and Julia Stiles all did stints at fancy universities. But when you're an Asian-American overachiever, it's hardly typical to find yourself in the reverse trajectory, forsaking the Ivory Tower for Indiewood.

     Yet that's just what writer-director Georgia Lee opted to do, unfulfilled by the straight and narrow path her parents had mapped out for her. Leading a double life — management consultant by day, filmmaker by night — she notched a few short films to her credit, and even caught the eye of Martin Scorsese. Finally, as an MBA candidate at Harvard, torn between her creative flow and filial piety, she chose filmmaking, and left business school after her first semester.

     Lee's debut feature, Red Doors, is about a seemingly blissful Chinese-American family whose lives are anything but harmonious. Dad's suicidal, and his three daughters are faring no better: the impeccable Samantha is rethinking her engagement, sweet and meek Julie has discovered girls, and Katie's on the verge of expulsion thanks to an escalating prank war that involves pornography, sex toys and a flaming bag of poo. Red Doors opens this week, having gathered prizes at the Outfest, Cinevegas and Tribeca film festivals. Lee talked to Nerve about defying parental expectations and stumbling into a cultural firestorm. — Lily Oei

Yours was not the traditional path into filmmaking.

I was probably the most traditional of stereotypical Chinese-American girls. I studied biochem at Harvard and thought I was going to become a doctor, because that's what you do. But when I was at school, instead of going to the organic chemistry lab, I would go to the film archives and watch movies.


When did you realize you wanted to make the switch?

I didn't want to be a doctor. I didn't really know what to do. I ended up at the consulting firm McKinsey. I was flying around doing the consultant thing, but I wasn't really happy. I realized I was always interested in art. But I had done nothing in terms of education in film, so I took a sabbatical from McKinsey and enrolled in a summer course at NYU. A short six-week course, where you basically write, edit, direct, produce on a bunch of a short films. That's where I fell in love. I knew that as miserable and difficult a career path it would be, that's what I had to do. It still took me a while to make that leap of faith. It was very, very hard to convince my parents. I never really did convince them.


Even as a novice filmmaker, you managed to overachieve, attracting Martin Scorsese's attention. How'd that happen?

I think it was luck. My professor suggested I send him my short, The Big Dish. He thought he would appreciate it. I was twenty-one and naïve, and the thing about being naïve is that you're fearless. I called 411 and said, "I'd like to have Martin Scorsese's phone number and address." The woman said, "You want De Niro's too?" and hung up on me. I ended up sending it to his fan mail address. It was an experimental short about Tiananmen Square. He had done a short about Vietnam years ago — mine was inspired by his. And somehow he watched it, and I guess he liked it. I was in Florida on a cost-cutting study, drowning in Excel spreadsheets, and I got a voicemail: "Marty liked your movie and would like to meet you." I thought my friends were playing a cruel joke.



And what did you learn from him?

I asked him, "How does one become a filmmaker?" He said, "You make films. You don't talk about making them, you go make them." And he told me to make another short. So I took another sabbatical, took another NYU course the next summer and made my next film. At that point, Gangs of New York was greenlit, so he invited me to be an observer. I ended up apprenticing under him in Italy for five months. I took notes on how he chose to shoot shots, how everything was edited together, how you work with actors, with crew — it was my de facto film school.


How did your parents deal with these career tangents?

When I told them Martin Scorsese invited me to be his observer, they were like, "Martin who?" And then, "Great, but you're not going to do it." I really had to fight with my parents. I said I wouldn't quit, that it was just a sabbatical. I came back to New York, made another short, Educated, and continued to lead a dual life, working at McKinsey and trying to be a filmmaker at the same time. I tell this to a lot of people and they're like, "It's so obvious, you should have quit your job." And I say it's not obvious if you have Asian parents!



In our family, you took music lessons, but only to embellish a transcript. Sound familiar?

Yes, we were very culturally aware — we learned music and dance, but that was simply so you could get into the right college. Which is tough, because you develop this love for art, but you're expected to be bankers and lawyers. I have a lot of messed-up Asian friends. My parents wanted me to get a graduate degree. I went to Harvard Business School for a semester because I had never not done anything my parents wanted me to do. But it just wasn't the place for me. I would sit in class with two windows on my screen: an evaluation spreadsheet and Windows Media Player. It was a split life. Finally, I realized I couldn't do it. After a semester, I went to the dean and was told I could take up to five years off. I left Boston, moved to LA, and wrote Red Doors in 2004.



You teamed up with friends from school to make the movie.

I knew Jane [the film's producer] and Mia [one of the film's stars] from Harvard, and they're both good little Asian girls.
Mia — she says she's half Asian but fully messed-up — was at Goldman Sachs and wanted to be an actress. I think her mother still wants to kill me for making her a filmmaker. This is the story we wanted to tell, something we hadn't seen on the screen. We felt representations of Asian-American women were all of geishas, Lucy Liu dragon-lady types, kinda bitchy. We just thought it didn't represent the people we knew. We wanted to tell a story about a family that was quirky and dysfunctional, but human and relatable. And we cobbled together very little money — less than $200,000 — to shoot it.



Were you at least able to hit up friends from your business-school days?

That's exactly what we did. We put in a lot of our own money and still have maxed credit cards to pay. Half came from really great friends and private investors, and a lot were from HBS and McKinsey.


So how much of you and your own family life is in this story?

It's funny, because I left a second draft on the kitchen table and my father looked down at it and said, "We have red doors too." It's almost completely inspired by my own life, and I think my family was not aware of it at first. But my own little sister plays Katie, and all the home videos in the film are the actual home videos my dad took of us. We shot in my parents' house, partially because we were so low-budget everything had to be grabbed, but also because it made sense to shoot there to get the texture. I just couldn't build the set to look like a Chinese-American home.



You've actually worked with your younger sister before in Educated. Does your middle sister just prefer to stay away from the camera?

The character of the middle sister is inspired by my sister, who is quiet and more introverted. She's the dutiful, diligent daughter — she's in medical school. But the sexual awakening was based on another friend of mine who has been struggling and discovering her own sexuality.


I found it interesting that the crisis in that relationship wasn't that Julie was discovering her own sexuality but how her new girlfriend's fame got in the way. Why opt for this angle?

People have asked, is this an Asian-American film? A gay/lesbian film?
I didn't set out to make a representative film about anything. It's a story about individual characters who I find interesting. People go through struggles that are global, whether you're Asian, African-American, Hispanic, gay or straight.
While I do think it's important, I think it's misguided to make it a coming-out story or place the immigrant issue front and center. I think the best thing to do is to portray marginalized groups as the complex individuals that they are. Being gay is only part of who that character is. For me, Julie's larger journey was being someone who is shyer and introverted; what happens to her when she falls in love with someone who's very strong? It's a love story between two different types of people. It could have been between a man and a woman, or someone of a different race, but it's about how two different people make a relationship work.



That explains why you have Julie's first relationship blossom with a big-time movie star.

Well, she's not supposed to be a huge Angelina Jolie type, just a B-list TV star. But she's still larger-than-life than Julie.



The male love interests are Caucasian —Êthat seems to have upset some people.

We didn't realize it was such a cultural flashpoint. It really brought up issues of gender, race and cultural politics, and I was just trying to tell a story about a family I knew. We've been attacked; people have emailed me very vicious things, just short of death threats.


Did you anticipate criticism?

We were surprised. Attacks were coming from people who haven't seen the film. At first, I didn't publicly reveal our casting to protect the privacy of the actors, and didn't feel I needed to explain creative decisions, but it's become an issue. Originally, two of the male love interests were supposed to be portrayed by Asian-American actors. Lee-Hom Wang, who's a big rock star in Asia — like the Justin Timberlake of Asia, and who is also in the next Ang Lee movie — was meant to play Alex. Leonardo Nam, who I worked with in Educated, was meant to play Simon, Kathy's nemesis in the prank war.


What happened?

I cast them — and this was lost on a lot of people — not because they were Asian. I cast them because they were right for the part. Lee-Hom had the broody musician feel. And Leonardo had the rebellious, disaffected youth feel. Both of them had to drop out right before we began shooting, Leonardo to do The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Lee-Hom to fly back to Taiwan to meet an album deadline. It happened to be two Asian-American male actors we needed to recast, and there was no one who showed up to our recast. If we had infinite amounts of time and money, I could have gone and found them, but that wasn't my point. I wanted to find the best actor for the role.



Has it been difficult to defend your decisions?

We have certainly been given a hard time. On IMDB, there's a cleaner version of the attack in the comment section. A whole thing on "Where are the Asian guys?" I keep saying to these angry guys, "You're preaching to the converted. Don't attack us, we get it. Try and be supportive." We've gone online, saying we did cast — and while that's not the point — but we did. And they say, "We don't believe you."



So do you think this family could have been any ethnicity?

I made them Asian because that's my experience. I do want to see more Asian-Americans on the screen, but it wasn't a navel-gazing experience. I wanted people to relate to characters first and foremost. After one screening, a seventy-five-year-old guy from Long Island in a cable-knit sweater came up to me and said it was first time he had seen a film about a man retiring. Everyone has a point of entry to the film, and for him it was about the dad.

Is it true Red Doors was going to be a CBS series?

After the Tribeca Film Festival, CBS bought a pilot script for a one-hour drama. We never shot the pilot, but we had a great working relationship. They've bought another drama pilot for Jane and I to develop. It's about twentysomething women in New York. That's all I can say right now.



On the Red Doors site, your producer Jane worked out the math to figure out how to gross $10,000 per screen opening weekend based on the average ticket price and the number of seats in each theater. Is this your McKinsey training coming out?

I realize that it's very business-like. It's so Jane, very no-nonsense and very strategic. I thought that it was completely normal, but then I thought my dad choosing my courses in college was normal.