By Mary Dang
Daily Bruin Contributor
Tom Huang looks like a typical Asian guy. With his black track
pants, matching fleece sweater and sneakers, he could easily blend
into UCLA’s campus as a regular Bruin student.
However, looks can be deceiving.
Instead of reflecting back on his years in college, this UCLA
alum is busy filming about it as he recaps college life in a movie
called “Freshmen.”
“Freshmen” follows the lives of four students in a
fictitious Los Angeles University as they struggle over finals and
better self-understanding. The movie, which runs at the
Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 on April 26 to May 2, tries to capture
the realism of being in college at all of its awkward, wacky, and
touching moments.
The 31-year-old Huang’s main push into filmmaking and
writing was only a side interest in contrast to his initial desire
to act. Ironically, Huang found himself suddenly behind the camera
in order to find better roles on the screen.
“In high school I realized that opportunities
weren’t there for Asian Americans in a normal role unless you
did “˜South Pacific’ or something like that,”
Huang said. “So then I came to UCLA, and I actually ran into
the same thing trying out for the one-acts here. The only roles for
Asians was like being a butler or playing a girl. It was that point
in college I realized that if I was going to do some really
interesting roles for Asian Americans it would have to be created
by myself.”
After graduating from UCLA in 1992 and spending a year
backpacking in Europe, he went to Loyola Marymount
University’s film school. It was there that Huang transformed
his 60-minute graduate thesis into the 120-minute feature film
“Freshmen.”
“The way LMU at the time worked was they gave you a camera
and say “˜Here go do whatever you want.’ So I decided to
use my time to make a feature which they weren’t completely
happy about in the end,” Huang said. “In fact,
there’s now from what I understand something called a
“˜Tom Huang rule’ which is people aren’t allowed
to do theses longer than half an hour.”
The idea of “Freshmen” originated as a backlash
against the film industry’s vulgar mindless spew of college
flicks. In growing disgust, Huang wanted to paint an accurate
picture of college starting with underrepresented minorities.
“I started writing this when I got out of college and I
noticed that there weren’t any films that showed what college
was like,” Huang said. “There weren’t any films
that dealt with what people are going through in college. Of course
the only aspect in all the films that I saw was that everyone in
college was white, and the only people who weren’t white were
wacky in some way. I really wanted to have some real characters who
just happen to be African American or Asian American and how they
kind of deal with each other.”
In creating the character of San Ling (whose role he also
plays), Huang admits that Ling’s questioning about his
Chinese identity had a lot to do with his own personal issues with
it.
“The kind of things (Ling) went through is kind of what I
went through in high school as far as like dealing with being Asian
American,” Huang said. “I was brought up in Fremont,
which is now like 40 percent Asian, but at the time I was there I
was only one of the few Asian Americans, one of the minorities in
general in the high school area I was at. I kind of developed this
complex about being Asian and I didn’t really realize that
until I came to UCLA and I noticed that I didn’t have any
Asian friends.”
Huang’s gleaning of his own life experiences in order to
better construct the film’s realism was also abetted by his
raw directing style. With LMU as a backdrop for the film, Huang
mainly used hand-held cameras to produce a sense of vividness in
the film.
“We were going for a documentary style look because we
really wanted to make it feel like you’re kind of there and
watching it. That’s the way I directed it too. There’s
a lot of two-shots or just shots where the camera just goes and you
watch where two people interact.”
Huang also allowed the actors to freestyle their lines and
actions in order to trap those special spontaneous moments that
bolster the story’s sense of reality.
“I consider myself an actor’s director. I like to
allow actors to take what I give them and sometimes we improv in
rehearsal. I allow them to change the dialogue as the scene goes to
whatever comes out of their mouth as opposed to what’s on the
script.”
Huang believes “Freshmen’s” depiction of real
life will suck the audience into the lives of these four characters
and also inside the world of Los Angeles University.
“I think people end up just liking the people in it. All
the characters are nice, positive people and you start investing
yourself in their life and want them to end up doing well in the
end,” Huang said. “The other thing that I think will
appeal to people is just the whole college environment. A lot of
people have commented that when they saw the film, it just brought
them back to when they were in college. A lot of times, I had a lot
of parents come up to me who watched the film because they want to
see what their kids are going through in college as
freshmen.”
Huang anticipates that “Freshmen’s”
true-to-life atmosphere will not only get viewers to care for the
characters involved but also identify with them as well.
“I just want to make honest films and I want hopefully
someone in the audience to think about their (own) lives”
Huang said.