by Mary Glucksman

Quentin Lee films Greyson Dayne (left) and T. Jerram Young (right) in Drift.

In the mid-‘90s, director Quentin Lee achieved notoriety as an enfant terrible of the New Queer Cinema scene after his first video short, To Ride A Cow (1993), was barred from entering Japan. He later shed that dubious distinction when his first feature, Shopping for Fangs, co-directed with Justin Lin, was embraced by the indie-film establishment and hailed as a serious exploration of "Generasian X" identity politics.

Director Quentin Lee

Shopping for Fangs (profiled by John Kim in FILMMAKER, Vol. 6, #3, Summer 1998), skillfully weaves together two separate stories about an affluent yet repressed Asian housewife with a split personality and a sexually frustrated Asian accountant who finds himself turning into a werewolf. Lee, who had previously worked at Strand Releasing and interned at Columbia Tri-Star, set up his own distribution shingle, Margin Films, in 1998 to release Fangs theatrically.

Originally from Hong Kong, Quentin Lee emigrated to Montreal at fifteen, went to college at U.C. Berkeley, then to grad school at Yale and UCLA’s MFA film program, and now splits his time between Vancouver and L.A. His latest film, Drift, a feature-length exploration of a gay love triangle, was funded through a production grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

In Drift, shot in L.A. on digital video, cultural distinctions take a backseat to its protagonists’ individual experiences of what is, what was, and what might have been. "It's essentially about the deep yearning for connection and how even the best intentions fail under the flux of human emotions and relationships," says Lee.

Drift unfolds like a Dogme-inspired version of the kind of alternate-reality stories in which the audience gets to see how a character's life would have turned out had they made different decisions in life. Recent variations on this theme range from Raul Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence and Alain Berliner’s Passion of Mind to popular hits like Sliding Doors and The Mexican – where a story within the story is thrice told to various effect. In Drift, that structure provides some fascinating twists and ample occasion for rumination on desire and attraction.

R. T. Lee (left) as Ryan and Jonathon Roessler (right) as Leo

R. T. Lee (left) as Ryan and Greyson Dayne (right) as Joel

In one strand Ryan (R.T. Lee), a screenwriter who moves out on longtime boyfriend Joel (Greyson Dayne) after meeting Leo (Jonathon Roessler), a young novelist, is drowning his sorrows in a bar when he ends up in bed with an aggressive tourist (T. Jerram Young). The next morning the tourist – who turns out to be a cult queer writer in town to promote his new book – wonders whether he should call an old friend he’s lost touch with. The film’s next strand finds the writer – never having met Ryan – in bed with Joel, his high school buddy.

Lee expects Drift to premiere in a 35mm version on the gay and lesbian festival circuit this summer. He’s also tackled his demons d'amour in fiction; his first novel, Dress Like A Boy, was published in a paperback exclusive last year by http://iuniverse.com, where you can read excerpts or buy it for $11.95.

With several screenplays ready to roll Lee says his next film should be the $3-million Campus Ghost Story currently in development at Wesley Snipes’s Amen Ra (Down in the Delta, The Art of War). "My goal is to jump to the next level and make smart pop movies," muses Lee.

Contact Quentin Lee through drift@marginfilms.com or the Drift web site at http://www.psychodandy.com; a separate site for Lee’s novel can be found at http://www.dresslikeaboy.com.

Shopping for Fangs will be released this summer on VHS and DVD via Vanguard. See http://vanguard-cinema.com for additional information.

Lee had Drift blown up to 35mm at Toronto's Soho Digital, http://www.sohodigital.com, which he recommends.

Lee discusses Conan the Barbarian, Michael Jackson, and his teen years growing up in Montreal for Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism (1994) at http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~critmass/v1n2/leeprint.html

Amerasian indie films of all persuasions show up each year at the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, which celebrates its 19th edition this month; additional information can be found out at http://www.naatanet.org/festival/2001