Norman Yeung: Actor, Writer, Director, Painter

Norman Yeung works in film, theatre, and visual arts.

As an actor, Norman’s recent film and television credits include a supporting role in “Resident Evil: Afterlife” (Sony/Screen Gems), a series regular role in “Todd and the Book of Pure Evil” (SPACE/CTV), and a role in “Rookie Blue” (ABC/Global).  Films he has written and directed include “Marnie Love”, “Hello Faye”, and “Light 01², which have screened at international film festivals, on Movieola Channel, Mini Movie International Channel (Europe), and on Air Canada. He was Second Unit Director on “The Tracey Fragments”, a feature film directed by Bruce McDonald. He is currently writing “Anne Darling”, “Rowds”, “Scabs”, and “Margaret Loses Her Daughter”.

Plays he has written include “Pu-Erh”, “Oolong”, “Theory”, and “Lichtenstein’s an 8: A New Formula to Quantify Artistic Quality”.  “Pu-Erh” premiered in 2010 at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto and was nominated for four Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including Outstanding New Play.  “Pu-Erh” was a finalist for the 2009 Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition, receiving an Honourable Mention.  He was a member of the 2011 Tapestry New Opera Composer-Librettist Laboratory. He is featured in the book “Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism” by Xiaoping Li.

He has painted in public and not-so-public spaces since 1993. His graffiti and urban art can be found under bridges, on freight trains, behind warehouses, in transit tunnels, and on living room walls, from New York City to Brisbane. He has exhibited his work in such venues as Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Art Gallery of Mississauga, Board of Directors (Toronto), and curcioprojects (New York City). His painting and illustration clients include LVMH, Bruce Mau Design, National Film Board of Canada, MTV, CBC, and many more. He was featured on CBC Radio 3¢s “MAKE: Next Generation Canadian Creators”, CBC’s ZeD TV, MuchMusic, MTV, and in numerous publications and documentaries.

He holds a BFA in Acting/Theatre from University of British Columbia and a BFA (Honours) in Film Studies from Ryerson University. He was born in Guangzhou, China.

To learn more about Norman and his work you should visit the following sites:

www.normanyeung.com

www.tinyurl.com/normanyeungpage

www.normanyeung.blogspot.com

www.twitter.com/normanyeung

What are the current projects you are working on?

At this time, Season 2 of “Todd & the Book of Pure Evil” is airing in Canada on Space.  Season 1 is also airing in Canada on Much Music and Comedy Network, in the U.S. on FEARnet, in Germany on VIVA/MTV, and in Scandinavia on TNT7.  Probably in other countries, too.

www.toddandthebookofpureevil.com

www.spacecast.com

I play Eddie the Metal Dude, a badass with luxurious hair who wants  nothing but destruction.  Eddie and Satan are best friends forever, cracking jokes about losers while we pass the blunt.  We, the Metal Dudes, help unleash the Book of Pure Evil upon insecure teenagers in a Satanic town, and anyone who uses the Book will get their wishes granted, but limbs get torn and guts get spilled. It’s a horror-comedy that all kids over the age of three should be watching.  We’ve got a great cast that includes Jason Mewes as Jimmy, a janitor with some dildo skills who might be the Metal Dudes’ biggest pain in the ass.

I’m also busy writing plays and working on the libretto for a short opera.  Opera’s fucking rad, and a very very new interest of mine.  I’m also writing screenplays, one of which is a short film that I intend to direct next year.  Writing takes forever, man.

 

Which do you prefer acting, writing, directing, or painting?

All.  But at different times.  Whatever excites me at the moment is what I focus on, but I aways return to the other discipline and then back again.  It’s like rotating crops: one discipline informs the other and when you let one lay fallow for a bit, you’ll return to it with new vigour and clarity.

Some of my greatest influences are multi-disciplinary artists.  Look at John Cassavetes: one of the most important filmmakers who’s also an Oscar-nominated actor.  Look at Sam Shepard: one of the most important American playwrights in recent history who’s also an Oscar-nominated actor.  Most actors would sell their Botoxed souls to get anywhere near an Oscar, let alone make “Faces” or write “True West”.  Look at James Franco, Crispin Glover, Miranda July, Robert LePage, Don McKellar, Douglas Coupland, Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, Vincent Gallo, Julian Schnabel… my list goes on.  David Byrne.  How can you fuck with David Byrne?

How do you measure success?

Dying with no regrets.  …Oh wait, that’s how I measure happiness.  …Success… I don’t know how to measure success but I can say this: Don’t measure.  At least not against others.  We “creative” people have a terrible ego problem and it’s like this: As soon as you feel like you’ve succeeded, you realise the next guy has succeeded more.  And as soon as you feel like shit and your abilities have forsaken you, you forget that there are others who view you as a success.  It’s like we’re all leap-frogging over each other, taking turns being “successful”.  I have no fucking idea how to measure success because success is subjective.  I do know one thing: You are your own journey.  Don’t pay too much attention to who’s running alongside you because you will trip.

How do you handle rejection?

Guinness.  Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Labatt 50.  Labatt Blue.  Rolling Rock.  Yuengling.  Hacker-Pschorr.  Get angry.  Löwenbräu.  Put that anger into my work.  Kilkenny.  Work harder.  Old Milwaukee.  Assess what happened.  Brooklyn Lager.  Learn from it.  Birra Moretti.  Move on.

Did you always want to be involved in the arts?

I wanted to be a paleontologist, then a chemist, then I turned twelve and art took over.  But I’ve been drawing and writing stuff ever since I could hold a pencil.

What inspired you to become become involved with the arts?

Death.  I was twelve-years-old and visiting New Zealand with my dad.  We were watching TV in our hotel and “Twins” came on.  Half-way through the movie I realised that people are gonna remember Schwarzenegger forever, but who would remember me? I was getting old, I mean, I’m twelve and what the hell had I done with my life? Nothing.  So I forced myself to get into acting.  At first it was a naïve desire for fame, but as I matured, it became all about legacy.  I want my work to live longer than me.



As an existentialistic twelve-year-old, acting became my first professional pursuit.  It was the first thing I took seriously as a career and I fell in love with the craft, never mind all that fame shit.  All the drawing and writing that I did before twelve… I guess my inspirations were Archie, Batman, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Captain Britain, The Punisher, WildC.A.T.s, Tin Tin, Asterix… I also read a lot of novels as a kid.  I credit my sisters.

For filmmaking, it all started when I walked by the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver when I was seventeen.  They had a poster for their complete retrospective of Ingmar Bergman, and the image was Max von Sydow playing chess against Death.  I stared and thought, “I guess you can say something with cinema.  I wanna do that.”

What is your writing process like?

I do almost all my first drafts with pen and paper.  Absolutely illegible, always Bic black.  Then I transcribe the writing into my computer, making decisions along the way so essentially my first typed draft is actually a second draft.  I give it to a dramaturge or story editor or someone whose opinion I value.  I make a lot of notes.  I slot those notes into the existing draft and then write the next draft.  Sometimes I’ll let a draft sit for weeks or months while I go work on something else, go live some life, go clear my head, before I start the next draft.  Repeat this process over and over until nothing more needs to be cut out (revising is often trimming or slashing), or until the director says, “Yo, you done? We gotta put this on stage/start shooting in three days.” If it’s a play, I’ll likely still revise after the production.  Don’t we always look back on our work and think, I can make it better? When are we ever done? When we’re dead.

I prefer writing first drafts with pen because of the tactility, the immediacy.  I want a physical connection with my writing.  For screenplays I do my first drafts right into the computer because of the formatting.

How has your life changed since you became involved with the arts?

Way more babes.  Just kidding.  I’m not a musician.

What do you like to do besides acting, writing, directing, and painting?

Um… I watch a lot of hockey.  I eat a lot of salad.  Love salad.  But I don’t like crunchy shit in my salad like croutons and I’m not too fond of nuts and seeds.  Just vegetables, please.  I also have a huge appetite for music that would make most people go, “WTF OMG you call this music ROTFLMFAO!”

What are some of your favorite American films? Foreign films? Television shows?

Not to be pretentious but I’m gonna mostly list filmmakers ‘cause that’s how I approach my viewing.  I’m a big nerd.  Nerds and lists go nicely together…

American (or English-language): John Cassavetes, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Atom Egoyan, Quentin Tarantino, Mike Leigh, Woody Allen, Arthur Lipsett, Norman McLaren, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Lynne Ramsay, “Kramer vs. Kramer”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Citizen Kane”, “Pulp Fiction”, “The Brown Bunny”, “Control”, “Drive”, “Wild Style”, “Style Wars”

 

Foreign: Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Wong Kar-Wai, Jia Zhang-Ke, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, Jean Renoir, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ermanno Olmi, Pedro Almodovar, Roman Polanski, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, “La Haine”, “A Taste of Cherry”, “Cinema Paradiso”

 

 




Television: The Golden Girls

How would you describe your education?

Worked for years at an art house cinema.  Spent half my life in cinematheques.  A fun day for me was scouring the Vancouver Public Library’s excellent collection of VHS tapes of foreign and classic cinema.  Spent half my life in theatres watching plays.  I have a BFA in Acting/Theatre and a BFA in Film, but the real learning comes when you practise your craft.  Formal education only supplements the making and doing.

How has social media changed how people perceive the arts?

I wanna talk about YouTube.  And MySpace and the other things that helped Justin Bieber, Lily Allen, Russell Peters, and others to get noticed.  First of all, our attention spans have become nil due to the internet, and we have patience only for snippets.  I’ve only recently checked out Chat Roulette, which is very unsexy, but it’s also analogous to how we use the internet.  We give everything half-a-second of our attention, realise it’s yet another ugly penis, then click away to an uglier penis….  How do you make someone give you more than half-a-second? Well, on YouTube and MySpace and stuff, you make music or make people laugh.  Music and comedy can be instantly engaging, and after you’ve heard one verse or laughed at one punchline, you’re hooked.  And then you tell everyone on Facebook and Twitter.  And then that musician and comedian and sneezing panda cub go viral.  Boom.  Celebrity.  Social media goes hand-in-hand with music and comedy, and clever stuff, and oooh!-and-aaah! stuff, and weird images, and sexy images, because they are instantly engaging and quickly gratifying.  The pay-off comes very fast: three minutes for a pop song, fifteen seconds to tell a joke, one second to look at a cool picture.  Social media doesn’t seem to work for long-form narrative drama.  How would Rohmer fare on the internet? Narrative drama requires time and investment from the viewer, but the internet is grooming us to crave shorter and shorter. Twitter isn’t helping.  140 characters and everyone’s trying to be the next Oscar Wilde.

For the record, I have absolutely no problem with Bieber, Allen, Peters and others who got noticed from the internet.  In fact, I admire them because of their tremendous talent and ability to harness technology.  Their careers fascinate me.

What's your opinion on crowdfunding?

Smart.  Brilliant.  Ingenious.  Exciting.  I’ve donated.  I’ll probably use it in the future.  One issue I could see, however, is donor fatigue.  If you work in a discipline that requires box office, like film and theatre, then you’re already asking people to pay to see your work.  And if it’s independent, you’re probably gonna do some kind of fundraiser where you ask people to support your developing work with money.  So, you’re asking your same circles of people for money once, twice, thrice….  You don’t wanna exhaust your circles every time you have a new project.  I guess crowdfunding gives you access to people outside of your circles – the entire world – so maybe I’ve already answered my concern.

How does independent differ from the mainstream?

I used to be the biggest snob and my tastes could be deemed by some as pretentious.  The film had to be subtitled and the music had to be a post-punk/no-wave band that no one’s heard of.  My perspective was kinda like, the more obscure it is and less money it makes, then the higher the artistic quality.  But my opinion has changed since working on “Resident Evil: Afterlife”.  I learned that the amount of care by everyone – cast, crew, company – was overwhelmingly high.  You do take after take until you get it right.  You don’t move on until you’ve got it.  Yes, it could cost a lot of money but that’s what the money is there for.  The challenge for the independent artist is to achieve high quality with limited resources.  The challenge for the mainstream artist is to maintain personal vision amongst a sea of people telling you what to do.

A mainstream, commercial film could make tons of money back because it resonates with a huge population.  It’s a powerful thing to be able to make millions of hard-working folks part with $15-$20.  That power, that attraction, interests me, and I’m learning from it.  The independent artists – myself included – shouldn’t neglect mainstream tastes because we can only learn.  Even if we personally don’t want to make mainstream work, we should at least be cognisant of our relationship to an audience: what they want and what they don’t want.  If anything, those artists could then go fiercely against mainstream ideals because they have a better understanding.  If anything, take the money from working on mainstream productions and put it towards your own projects, whatever your voice.  Snobbery ain’t cool, although it is kinda cool.  I only listen to rap that’s from before 1998.

You could go back in time and see any film being made. Which film would it be and why?

“The Passion of Joan of Arc”.  To watch Dreyer guide that sublime performance out of Falconetti would be… so… uh… Can I say “I have a boner” on your blog?

What's your favorite quote and why?

Jack Palance in Godard’s “Contempt” says, “When I hear the word ‘culture’, I bring out my cheque book.” Why? Because it’s dope.