Whining about L.A.

Actor and director Joan Chen tells Filmstew.com that her on-screen career stalled after The Last Emperor "because people don't know how to write for me, that's just the way it is." That will endear her to writers everywhere... She also was not a big fan of living in Los Angeles. Now a San Franciscan, she tells the website:

"From the age of 20 to 30, looking back, I was kind of miserable, anxious all the time, a lot of tension," she observes. "There was a lot of unhappiness. It's amazing looking back at the photos of myself back then, this is a beautiful girl. I look at her as if she's somebody else, it's so long ago...."

The day she left Los Angeles to get married to her husband in San Francisco, she calmed down. “What a relief,” she says. “That's when my happiness began."

Down south, she says, she was always insecure and anxious, feeling as if nothing she did was good enough. "I think I wouldn't have gone into directing or writing scripts if I stayed in L.A. It was too much of a vibration."

The interview is pegged to the DVD release of Saving Face, in which Chen plays the mother of a lesbian who struggles with the sexuality closet.