Stephen Park
speaker
139 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Stephen Park’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
he's shooting to exactly what he wants on the storyboard. So there's no master shot. So if there's a shot with me crossing the screen and like there's one scene where I'm crossing and I have this injury on my arm and the storyboard is me going. So that's exactly what I'm doing. Just going across the screen and like I'm in pain and then cut. So he's shooting exactly what's on the storyboard.
He's not... he's not having a scene play out and all kind of, you know what I mean? Like he's shooting exactly what's on the storyboard. And Wes goes like even one step further where he does an animatic, which is basically a moving storyboard or a cartoon. So every shot has already been planned and visualized. And then he voices all the characters. And so he,
before you, when you arrive on set, you get to watch the animatics. It's like, you're basically, you watch the movie with his voice. And then he pretty much sticks to exact. So in a way, like when you look at a Wes Anderson movie and you look how the characters move, they kind of, you know, and then they kind of move sideways. You know, there's a kind of stick figure kind of quality.
Maybe to his movies. And it's, it's kind of looks like the, the animation.
But he likes that. That's his... aesthetic you know and it really it really works and there's something very funny about it and there's something very kind of almost cartoonish um but uh it's very it's very wes it's very affecting who is left for you on your dream list of directors or co-stars who who have you not worked with that you'd love to uh i don't know i mean my god i mean
I mean, I would love to work with Park Chan-wook. I don't, you know, it's funny because I haven't even asked myself that question because it's like everybody I've worked with has been such a surprise.
I never thought I'd be working with any of these people. So, hmm. I don't know because I've already been blessed with working with so many amazing people. So I don't even, I don't know.
Um, well, let me just say that the show is friends.
Um, it was, um, at the time for me, I felt it was kind of a toxic environment and this racist, the, the, ad calling um james hong was was the actor who was also on the episode with me and he was calling him to the set and you know essentially saying you know you know where the is the oriental guy get the oriental guy um so when i i called screen actors guild after that i happened and
The person I spoke with recommended I write an article to the LA Times. And I thought, oh, okay, that might be a good idea. And I just seen Jerry Maguire. I don't know if you remember that movie, but he writes a mission statement. My wife tells me he's in that movie, by the way. And, uh, for some reason that just kind of like struck me like that's kind of a, yeah.
Why don't I write a mission statement to Hollywood? Because this is bigger than this show. This isn't, this isn't the first time this has happened, you know, but this is the environment where this is business as usual in Hollywood in 1997, I guess it was. And, uh, and nobody felt, um, the need to, uh, correct this or say anything about it. So this is, this is normal behavior.
And so I started writing this mission statement and I sent it to the LA Times. They sent a couple of reporters and they interviewed me and then they never printed it. And so this was like the beginning of the internet. And I had my email list and I sent my mission statement out to who was on my email list. And I said, you know, if this moves you, you know, please forward it along.
But I just explained, I was interviewed and they're not going to print this. So if you feel moved to send this along, please do. And then within a week, I was like, I was getting responses from all across the country from publications that were asking permission to reprint it. And so this, it was like this, it went viral, you know, before viral was even a word.
And I went to San Francisco at some point that year to do a play. And I was like interviewed up there. I was, um, uh, on the cover of the guardian, you know, wrapped American flag. I was interviewed in the examiner and, um, it all kind of culminated. I mean, I also spent about a year being invited to different colleges to speak about this. And, um,
And then I was given this award by an Asian American arts foundation up in San Francisco. And it was handed to me by Jesse Jackson. And so that's kind of how this all played out. And then, you know, soon after it was like, my son was born in 2000. And right before that, I decided to quit acting. Like I was, I was kind of, I had become so race conscious that,
and so angry that I, like I, everything, I was looking at everything through the lens of race and I felt like I couldn't, there, there's like, I was just, there was no freedom. I didn't feel any freedom. So I didn't have any idea what I was going to do, but I just decided to drop out. And I told everybody I'm not acting anymore.
And so about a year went by, I was just being a, you know, stay at home dad. And, maybe about a year later, somebody asked me to audition for something. And I said, okay, because I didn't know what, I wasn't doing anything. And then that was like a slow climb back into the business. And it was very, very gradual. And I think, you know, there wasn't a lot of work anyway for Asian American actors.
Yeah. But it wasn't until a few years later, I remember I was listening to Bobby Lee's podcast and And he was talking with Margaret Cho and Bobby Lee. Like he mentions my name and he said, Oh, you know, he got blacklisted. And like, I was blacklisted. I had no idea.
But, but then I realized like, Oh, that is the common kind of like, I think a lot of people thought that, especially in the Asian American community, I think believe that I was blacklisted. And I thought, Oh, wow. And I remember I texted Bobby and said, you know, I wasn't blacklisted. Um, but, uh, But who would have known anyway? Because I wasn't really working much anyway.
There wasn't a lot of work. But yeah, it took me a while, I think, to not only get back into the business, but to move beyond this race consciousness that had overwhelmed me. And it was a lot of spiritual work. I've been on huge spiritual journeys. I've gone to Machu Picchu with Don Miguel Ruiz who wrote the four agreements, you know, I've done meditation retreats.
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