Beyond the Rage. In Conversation with Chi Thai

Chi Thai is the producer of Paris Zarcilla's debut feature film Raging Grace, a horror drama about an undocumented Filipina worker and her daughter. She has been Cannes Lions finalist three times, she is CE50 production company’s voting BAFTA member and Screen International Screen Star of Tomorrow 2021

I am lucky enough to be stuck in a COVID bubble for the film with this brilliant woman, and it’s my immense pleasure to share with you some of her wisdom, rage and creative tips. 

Have you always wanted to be a film producer? 

I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was seven years old. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand the range of work involved in the film world. It was probably only when I went to film school that I discovered producing and I fell in love with it! 

The thing I value about producing is that you get to define the kind of producer you want to be. I think producers can have creative thumbprints as clear and unique as directors and writers. We should interrogate our voices and ambitions.

Producing is also hard, you love it and you hate it. There’s a steep learning curve with every project. I’ve really learnt to love the opportunity to always be learning and always be growing. This is the true gift of filmmaking. 

I can definitely see how you are the kind of producer you like to be. What’s your “mission”? 

I had spent the first part of my career producing without any meaningful intention. As a result I was failing, I hadn’t yet figured out what sort of producer I wanted to be. When I became a mom I also had a re-birth of myself and how I wanted to produce moving forward.

Motherhood definitely changed me in other ways too. The best thing I can say about motherhood is that I became a far more well-rounded person. Motherhood forced me to interrogate things. When you become a parent your resource of time is really compromised so that you become more efficient and you have to decide what you want to do with the time you have. 

That’s when it all changed. I let all the projects I had at that time go, because I realised I had no reason to be doing them. The world didn’t need me doing those projects.
I cleaned my slate and started focusing on what I want to do, which is mainly working with storytellers from a marginalised community - especially women or people from a background of diaspora. Because of my personal story, I’m also particularly interested in East and South East Asian stories. 

It’s really important to me to find a sense of justice in the narrative, as well as an element of disruption. I want the films and the work that I do to provoke a change. I like to think that, if you boil it down, my mission is to work with narratives and storytellers who can make this world a fairer place, somehow. 

Getting older, combined with motherhood, also made me let go of a lot of things. I stopped caring too much about what people think. Although I’m super competitive, I don’t see myself as competing with anyone in the industry. I see what I do as something really personal and specific. 

That’s the healthiest attitude you could possibly have in the industry - I’ll have to call you up in the difficult moments to remind me of this wisdom! 

I have reached that certain age I call the “I don’t give a shit about it anymore” stage. There were things that used to make me very angry, and now I’m more relaxed about them. I still have that rage - because I think there is a great deal of injustice in the world - but I tend not to let it get in the way of things. I focus my rage into the work that I do. The rage is there, but I try to use it in a creative and constructive way. 

With this comes a sense of freedom and empowerment.

I often wonder what I would say to my younger self... 

Most of what I would say is to stop seeking the approval of people. You don’t need it. I found this feeling really liberating.
For me this doesn’t mean I’ve opted out of the game but rather I try to find less conventional ways to get to where I need and I move on much quicker.

If I may ask, where is that rage coming from? 

I think everyone has the rage. I believe in the quote “well-behaved women seldom make history”. And I intend to misbehave. The rage comes from many places - being a woman, being a woman of colour, being a refugee, being a mother. I actually have a real thing about the show of anger. I feel a lot of people from marginalised backgrounds are not allowed to demonstrate it. I want catharsis. I’ve reached the time in my life where I really value catharsis. Let’s let it out! Catharsis is transformative. The world needs to see our anger and we need to experience the healing that comes from moving through catharsis. 

Being on Raging Grace together, I can definitely feel the catharsis here! 

This is the thing I’m most proud of in this film - which took me a while to really appreciate and grasp: in many ways there is something very different about Raging Grace from a classic horror film. Although it belongs to that genre, there is a departure from it. There is a part where the film moves beyond the horror and the trauma and there is joy and celebration. And this is exactly what I feel: if we let ourself journey beyond the rage, there we find this other space. And that space is where the soul of Raging Grace rests. 

But Raging Grace is also a horror because if you are an undocumented worker every breath you take is in a hostile environment. It’s a story that speaks very clearly to our time and to anyone who’s from a diasporic community. I relate to the film very personally. I didn’t come in this country as an undocumented worker, but I did arrive as a war refugee from Vietnam in the ‘80s. I grew up in a small post industrial town that was very poor. We were very much the only Vietnamese family in that place and my parents were very isolated. It took me a long time to figure out my place in this world. The thing I most struggled with - which is the same tension for the protagonists of our film, Joy and Grace - is that the way you see and value yourself is very different from how other people value and see you. And that’s how I felt as an Asian woman. But I came to terms with that tension, I’ve learnt not to care about how the world sees me, and to have my own barometer of what matters and who I am. 

Do you see yourself in Grace? 

My parents taught us to be good immigrants, and to be obedient. Although, and my mum would agree, I came out to be the least obedient child. 

So the answer is yes, except it took me much longer to be as smart as Grace is in the movie. This is a wonderful trick of colonialism: it has you learn your place. It took me a long time to rebel. I was an idiot for most of my life, it took me along time to see the world for what it really is. But this is the problem, this world that we live in robs us off the tools, the vocabulary and the language that we need to really understand who we are in the world. I had to figure it out for myself. This journey was a difficult, brilliant and heart-breaking part of my personal life and my creative work. 

And how did you overcome obedience? 

Through films, actually. I fell in love with films at an early age. For me films have been escapism. Cinema gave me a big window into the world from the small town with tiny windows I grew up in. But more than anything, cinema has been about healing. A way to fix things and make them better. And cinema loves its rebels, it celebrates them as heroes, and that is where it all started, I guess. 

Filmmaking entirely reflects power structures. I’m glad to be alive where we can finally share our narrative. I don’t want to wait anymore. And I want to urge everybody: go make your piece. Don’t wait for permission. 

I can see most of the things you say in the way Raging Grace’s production has been set up. A collaborative and free environment where everyone can contribute with their work and creativity. 

One thing that really preoccupies me is that a lot of people worry just about the message, the narrative. But for too long we haven’t really cared about how the story is made. I care about both. Anyone who has any agency should interrogate how we do things and how that contributes to the inequities of the filmmaking community and the wider industry. I always question: is this the right way to be writing, hiring, producing, running a set...the risk is to replicate unhealthy power structures by not thinking about these things. It’s not just about what we make, but also about how we make it.

I feel in these last years we have experienced a lot of rage, starting with the Me Too to the BLM movements...despite looking like the UK is going backwards with Brexit, are we hopefully approaching a positive catharsis? 

I’m not really hopeful. I think the pandemic and Brexit really amplified a lot of problems within the society. They illuminated the crisis that the world is in and how we talk to each other when we don’t agree about things. The world is so polarised. In reality something can be really good, and really bad at the same time. Things are complicated. Especially in this day and age of social media we’ve forgotten how to have conversations. Everything is boiled down to a headline. We need to go further. 

And we have to stop getting offended about being put in an uncomfortable position. Sometimes you have just to feel uncomfortable and come through it. 

Hannah Gadsby, the Australian comedian, was the first person that made me really think about the importance of occupying a place of discomfort and tension, without running from it straight away. I think I want to make films that keep the audience in an uncomfortable spot and don’t let them off the hook for as long as possible. 

I’m sure Paris feels the same. How did you guys meet? 

I met Paris a few years ago. I pride myself to know most of the British Asian diaspora storytellers. I’ve been tracking him since he made Pommel, a great short film partly drown from his personal experience when he was a gymnast as a young kid. Creative England, who I have worked with, introduced me to him as he was looking for a producer. There was a short we were going to do, a follow up to Pommel - we did get the funding from BFI but then COVID happened. Then during lockdown Paris wrote Raging Grace, and I loved it since the first time I read it. It aligns with everything that I want to do, it really spoke to my soul. 

There were a lot of lucky external forces that led us to make it straight away. He just gave me the first draft in February, and now it’s November and we are filming it. But we were very committed to make it now. It’s mad, but we are here! I’m very proud we are doing what we set off to do. And hopefully it will be out next year. 

This film has really been a healing process.

Final bullet questions:

One thing you love about the industry
It’s messy - it’s human

One thing you’d like to change about the industry

Just one? Redistribution of power and quotas!

One special moment of personal success 

The day we got the offer for financing was incredible. 

One thing you’ve learnt working in films 

Working with people is difficult, beautiful and unpredictable.

One tip for female filmmakers 

Don’t wait! Just do it! - just have the confidence of an average white dude!