The Cast and Crew of “Clean Slate” on Expanding Queer AAPI Stories
In Clean Slate, a short film by Emily May Jampel starring Josephine Chiang and Joyce Keokham, drama ensues when two best friends audition for the same role in “Untitled LGBTQIA+ Gen Z Series” and get confused for one another. As the dark comedy unfolds, Chiang and Keokham are forced to contend with the stark competition of the industry and the city—and we are left to wonder whether friendship can survive this dog-eat-dog world.
The film premiered at Nitehawk on April 15 and is available to stream online. On the occasion of the film’s release, The Amp editor Shannon Lee spoke to Jampel, Chiang, Keokham, and producer Yoko Kohmoto about their collaboration, inspirations, and what it means to tell queer AAPI stories.
JC: I threw a rough outline onto the page at 7 am one morning and sent it over to Joyce. They were living in Vietnam at the time. They said, “I’m coming back. We’re making this.” Over the next several weeks, we’d meet weekly over Zoom to write until they landed back in NYC.
We can get really lost in our own world. For example, since our film is about two actors auditioning for a TV series, we accidentally spent a whole session writing out the series– character descriptions and loglines galore. So, it was awesome to have Emily come in and help shape it into what it is today.
JC: True to the film, Joyce and I are always going up for the same roles and occasionally getting confused for the other, but we really could not be more different. That’s what a lot of the earliest drafts of the script were focused on. Whether it’s how to turn down someone you’ve gone on a few dates with or if a white therapist can truly understand you, we will approach the same situation in completely different ways and fondly argue our way through. In the film, when our characters get put in this messed up situation, these differences get pushed to the extreme. And that’s the yummy thing about fiction: you get to bring to life things that you wouldn’t normally do.
Something else I wanted to highlight is the scene of Josephine waiting in the casting room. It was one of my favorite images that we captured because that’s the image that’s in my head whenever I get an audition for a “queer, nonbinary” character. It feels like everyone else I’m up against is a white enby rocking a boyish pixie—that there’s just one way to be nonbinary. It’s not really touched on explicitly in the film, but it was impactful to me to be able to ask: are we reducing “nonbinary” down to this one aesthetic? Are we really making room for gender expansiveness?
EMJ: As a director, this was my first time adapting someone else’s writing and I had two main goals. The first was to make sure that the intention and spirit of the story that Joyce and Josephine wrote, rang true and came across in the final film. The second was to try and make this film the best version of itself—figuring out what visual style would fit this story best, how we could shoot and choreograph the big fight scene so that it felt believable. A big thing for me was figuring out how to balance the film’s very specific mix of tones.
I wanted to make sure that the film captured its subject matter believably, and felt emotionally grounded in a real friendship dynamic and circumstance, while also escalating into absurd surrealism in a way that wouldn’t lose the viewer, all while still making sure the film still felt like a comedy and retained a self of playfulness. I kept thinking, how can I make this film feel like Pen15 meets The Talented Mr. Ripley? Joyce, Josephine, Yoko and I collaborated on the script to help achieve the right tonal balance, and for the fight scene, we had an incredible movement director Celine Abdallah, who choreographed the entire fight scene. We blocked everything out in movement rehearsals, and on location with our amazing DP Leo Zhang, to make sure it all looked great on-camera.