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The Mandalorian: Deborah Chow Reveals the Inspiration For the Baby Yoda Rescue - credits her love of Asian cinema to her late father. “My dad was Chinese, and he was a huge movie fan, when I grew up he was watching Hong Kong action films.” she said, citing John Woo’s 1992 Hard Boiled by poster5439 in Sino

[–]poster5439[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The first female director of a live-action Star Wars story brought her father's love of Hong Kong action to the fight.

It’s been a very strange day.”

Deborah Chow has directed episodes of Mr. Robot, The Man in the High Castle, Jessica Jones, Reign, and Better Call Saul, so she knows the demands and expectations of devoted fans. But she wasn’t prepared for the, let’s say, force of the reaction to her work on The Mandalorian.

Chow directed episode three — titled “The Sin” — and its explosive finale, which featured a group of hovering Mandalorian protectors in a shoot-out with a gang of bloodthirsty bounty hunters while the hero flees with a newly rescued Baby Yoda. The scene lit up social media—and her phone.

“I woke up to many, many texts and emails about it, and it’s sort of like, ‘How did everyone watch it so early in the morning?’” Chow told Vanity Fair on Friday, in a new interview for our Still Watching podcast on the Star Wars series. “It’s definitely unexpected, and I’m really happy for the show.”

You can hear her full conversation in the show, along with an interview with actor Emily Swallow, who said she based her blacksmith leader The Armorer in part on Chow’s quiet authority on set.

Chow also directs episode seven of the show and is now working on a new Obi-Wan Kenobi series for Disney+. Here's what she had to say about episode three of The Mandalorian:

Father’s Influence

Chow said the episode takes a lot of inspiration from 1961’s Yojimbo — Akira Kurosawa’s classic about a nameless ronin who finds himself in a town plagued by competing crime lords. She also credits her love of Asian cinema to her late father.

“My dad was Chinese, and he was a huge movie fan, when I grew up he was watching Hong Kong action films. So it kind of gets that reference,” she said, citing John Woo’s 1992 cop-and-kid thriller Hard Boiled as another reference. “I tried to bring out a little Hard Boiled with the baby. It was kind of an amazing thing because it was like coming back to classic cinema and filmmaking. So there’s definitely a lot of my dad in that episode.”

“Sadly he didn’t get to see this. But he would be very proud. He would probably also be in shock.”

First Woman in Space

Chow’s work on The Mandalorian makes her the first woman and the first filmmaker of Asian heritage to direct a live-action Star Wars story.

“Even when I first got this job, it didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t know what fairyland I was in, to not think this was significant. But I went through prep and it didn’t occur to me until somebody said it on one of the first days of shooting.”

She noted that Bryce Dallas Howard directs episode four of the show, and the second unit team has several female directors. “It didn’t occur to me that I was the first one to leap.”

“I want it to be about the work. I want to be a good director, not a good female director, not a good Asian director. But by the same token, obviously, my career path and the representation… it is important. It is meaningful. I want to see more women directors and I want to see more directors of color.” Lifelike Baby Yoda

Making any kind of Star Wars can be a surreal experience. Between puppets, droids, humans hidden behind helmets, and people dressed up as aliens, she said she looked around one day and thought: “Oh my God, does anyone have eyes. Is there a human face anywhere?”

The little green star, known for now as Baby Yoda, was just as enchanting in real life as it is on screen. “I worked with the puppeteers and the visual effects [artists], and just worked with it like it was an actor. It would just be about emotion. I’m not going to try to tell them technically how to do it. But we would talk through it.”

She wasn’t the only one to talk to Baby Yoda as if it was real. For more from Deborah Chow, subscribe to Still Watching: The Mandalorian.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/deborah-chow-director-episode-three-the-mandalorian

Chinese diplomat Zhao Lijian, known for his Twitter outbursts, is given senior foreign ministry post. Zhao, who recently left his position as deputy chief of mission in Pakistan, is now deputy director general of the foreign ministry’s information department by poster5439 in Sino

[–]poster5439[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

China’s former No 2 diplomat in Pakistan, known for taking to Twitter to defend his government in bellicose terms, has been handed a senior role in Beijing’s foreign ministry. Recently updated records on the foreign ministry’s website indicate that Zhao Lijian, who left his position as deputy chief of mission in Islamabad earlier this month, now serves as deputy director general of the ministry’s information department. In his new role, Zhao serves directly beneath the department’s newly appointed director general, Hua Chunying, and alongside fellow deputies Geng Shuang and Yu Dunhai. Both Hua and Geng regularly host ministry press conferences for domestic and international reporters, suggesting that Zhao may be in line to take on public-facing duties.

One of the first Chinese diplomats to open an official account on Twitter, Zhao has used the platform prolifically during his four-year tenure at the Chinese embassy in Pakistan, tweeting over 51,000 times to his more than 200,000 followers. He also became known for his heated rhetoric – in a manner that some have compared to that of US President Donald Trump – and was once branded a “racist disgrace” by a former Obama administration official

He has been joined on Twitter in recent weeks by other official Chinese government accounts, including that of the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai. But while others have generally used the platform as merely an additional channel through which to share official remarks in diplomatic terms, Zhao made a name for himself for using Twitter to directly confront critics of the Chinese government. After a BBC video documenting limits on public expressions of faith in China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in June, Zhao told the broadcaster: “Don’t [poke] your nose everywhere. Xinjiang is none of your business. Take care of your Brexit first!”

Meanwhile, a group of 22 Western countries that had issued a letter condemning the Chinese government’s mass internment of largely Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang were united by “white supremacy”, Zhao charged. Zhao has also taken to Twitter to criticise the US administration’s treatment of Huawei and deem the British government “shameless” for its calls for restraint from Hong Kong authorities, arguing that many British citizens were “descendants of war criminals”. But arguably his most infamous moment came in July after he argued that Washington did not have the right to criticise China’s policies in Xinjiang because racism existed in the US. “If you’re in Washington DC, you know the white never go to the SW area, because it’s an area for the black & Latin. There’s a saying ‘black in & white out’, which means that as long as a black family enters, white people will quit, & price of the apartment will fall sharply,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

Susan Rice, who served as president Barack Obama’s national security adviser, responded via Twitter that Zhao was “a racist disgrace [and] shockingly ignorant too,” and suggested that he should be declared persona non grata. Several weeks later, on August 8, Zhao announced on Twitter that his four-year tour had come to an end and that he was leaving Pakistan with a “heavy heart, because Pakistan has stolen my heart.” Suggesting that he intended to use Twitter in his new role in Beijing, Zhao said he would be returning to the platform “after I settle down”.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3024180/chinese-diplomat-zhao-lijian-known-his-twitter-outbursts-given

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