After eight long years of hard work on her directorial debut, everything is coming up Rachel Michiko Whitney. The journey of documenting and crafting her family’s Japanese and Japanese American legacy has come full-circle at the Newport Beach Film Festival, Whitney tells Deadline. In her first attendance at the festival, she starred alongside George Takei in the 2018 narrative short film, American, that centers around a 94-year-old Japanese American World War II veteran (Takei) who experiences traumatic flashbacks after encountering a woman (Whitney) searching for family history while at the Japanese American National Museum, where he serves as a docent. Now, her latest project, playing in the line-up at NBFF, is a documentary film called Yonsei.
Co-written and co-directed with Jeff Mizushima, the docu-short follows Whitney as she pauses her tenuous acting career to write and star in a film about her mother, Elizabeth Reiko Kubota (who also served as an EP on American), a struggling Japanese American actress in the ’80s. In uncovering her mother’s racially stereotypical journey through Hollywood, Whitney finds herself examining American and Japanese race relations as she digs deeper into her grandmother’s history, which involves falling in love with her grandfather while captive in a Japanese American WWII camp. Whitney spends the film torn between exploring her family, friends, Asian bias, and trailblazers in the film industry, and creating a compelling, personable narrative to honor her family legacy.
Here, Whitney opens up about unearthing the truth while maintaining vulnerability and privacy for the sake of her loved ones.
DEADLINE: How long did this documentary take to put together?
RACHEL MICHIKO WHITNEY: Originally, I wrote two screenplays: a fictionalized version of my grandparents’ story and my mom’s story. So, that dates back to writing in 2017. I think part of the reason I wrote screenplays was that, and this is something I struggled with in the documentary, I wrestled with respecting my family’s privacy and asking myself, is it OK that I’m telling their stories? I think it was a way of respecting their privacy by making a fictionalized version of their story.
But I met my co-director, Jeff Mizushima, at the end of 2022. So, when I told him about my family story, it really resonated for him and we started talking about it, and over the next year we started having conversations about potentially making a documentary because I have access to the footage that my mom was in in the ’80s, the TV shows that she did, the music video that she did, and my grandfather had 8mm reels that we were able to digitize, and my grandmother has all these photographs dating back to the 1930s. So, it kind of made sense to make a documentary. And also, my grandma’s still alive. She just turned 101 a couple of months ago, actually.
DEADLINE: What did your family think of the finished version of the documentary?
WHITNEY: I was nervous to show my family because again, it’s their lives that I’m putting on display, but I was actually very surprised that my grandmother had the most positive reaction. All of the feedback was positive, but my grandma is 101; she doesn’t have the best memory, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. She loved it, and she said, “It’s so great that future generations will be able to see this documentary,” which really meant a lot to me. I hope that really resonates with the Japanese American community and with everyone. I think this is, at the end of the day, a family story, a three-generation Japanese American story. I hope it resonates within and beyond the Japanese American community.
DEADLINE: In the documentary, you show the divide between your mom and her parents in the way they didn’t really support her acting career. But I’m wondering about the parallels in your experience with your mother and in your decision to enter filmmaking after originally declaring a mechanical engineering major in college.
WHITNEY: My mom knew that I always wanted to follow in her footsteps as a kid. But because I grew up in a town just north of New York City, where no one worked in entertainment. So, it never really seemed like this could be a fun hobby for me. My mom never wanted me to act as a kid, and I always begged her to take me to auditions in the city. I would get backstage and circle the auditions that I wanted to go to, but she really wanted me to go to college. And then, after college, if I wanted to do that, she would be very supportive, but she was adamant that I go to college first. And I think learning about her experience and her being the first person in her family to graduate from college, I understood why she cared so much about that.
She was always going to be supportive, and she understood when I had that conversation with her and my dad about wanting to move to LA to pursue acting and a career in the arts. Even though I went to Duke to get my mechanical engineering degree, I think the skills you learn as an engineer can be applied to many different fields. So, it’s not that I have any regrets about it. I do like math and science a lot, and she probably knew, deep down, that I was never going to pursue an engineering career. And I think just having that life experience and the people I met have given me so much as an artist, too.
DEADLINE: Talk more about tracking down some of these iconic figures in Asian Hollywood history, like Joey Miyashima and the Cold Tofu founders.
WHITNEY: So, my mom became friends with Joey Miyashima, Marilyn Tokuda, and Denice Kumagai because she was in Cold Tofu, which was a predominantly Asian American improv group that was started in the ’80s by Marilyn and Denice and two other women. So, she had always stayed in touch with them. And growing up, Joey and his family were living in Utah, and he was still acting. And as a kid, Joey was in High School Musical. So as a kid, I would see him in these Disney Channel movies, and we would visit him and his family in Utah. So, Joey, Denice, and Marilyn were always sort of in my life when I was growing up, but I don’t think I had the full context of what they did as Asian American actors in the ’80s until I was in college and after.
So, when I started working on this documentary, I reached out to them and asked if they would be interested in being interviewed for this documentary that I was making. And I just have so much respect for what they did, because the landscape for Asian American actors in the ’80s, I will never understand it. It was just such a different time, and I think we’ve made so much progress. It’s really important to understand where we came from and what it was like during that time, and to hear from those actors directly. So, I’m glad I was able to give them a little platform and interview them about what they’ve done.
DEADLINE: This is your directorial debut. What was the most challenging aspect of making this?
WHITNEY: Because this is the first project I’ve ever directed, I worked with an amazing co-director, who I mentioned earlier, Jeff Mizushima, who has directed films before. So, that was very helpful. And then he has two filmmaker friends, Sam [Yano] and Junya [Sakino], who helped us with filming, and they were our co-producers. Then I also have to give a shout-out to my friend Ben [Flesch], who composed some beautiful music for us. I would have to say the most challenging part was that this was such a personal project for me. So, I really relied on Jegg to help give some perspective sometimes, similar to how my mom and grandma would say, “Oh, my story’s not interesting, my story’s not important enough.” I would feel that way too sometimes. And at first, I really did not want to be in the documentary because I was like, “Jeff, this is not about me. This is about my mom and my grandma.”
But I really trusted him. I’m like, “OK, if you think it works that it’s sort of told through my lens and that I’m interviewing them because I’m working on a screenplay, then we’ll do that.” But I would say that because it’s so personal, it was hard to be more objective about everything and to know what’s actually interesting or what we should highlight. That part was probably the most difficult for me.
DEADLINE: What did you learn either about yourself, your family or the filmmaking process while doing this?
WHITNEY: Well, first, I’ll say part of the reason why I was so excited to be making this and working with Jeff is that I do find that there aren’t a lot of stories about the Japanese American experience told by Japanese Americans. And so, I was thinking about it, and when I’m interviewing my mom and my grandma, and they’re like, “Our story’s not interesting. My story is boring.” I was thinking it is almost like we’re in this cycle where, because I feel that too. I’m like, oh, I don’t know if this story is interesting enough. And I think it’s because my grandmother believes her story isn’t interesting enough. When she was sent to a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, she met and fell in love with my grandfather. She doesn’t believe it’s interesting, and so she doesn’t want to tell her story, and then we don’t see those stories. And then, for future generations, because we don’t see those stories, we believe our stories aren’t interesting enough to tell. And I think that we’ve kind of gotten stuck in this cycle, and I get it because I feel kind of stuck in it too. It’s scary to take up space, especially in this industry. There isn’t space for anyone. So, if you want to tell your story, you have to tell your story. You have to put yourself out there. And so, I think that’s one thing that I was thinking about.
Another thing is, this is kind of a mouthful, so I don’t know if there’s a better way of putting this, but I wanted to look at generational trauma when older generations try and not pass on their trauma to future generations by not talking about their past. My grandparents not talking about their experience being sent to a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, and then also my mom never talking about her older sister, who passed away before I was born. I think when we don’t talk about the past trauma, we also aren’t talking about past positive experiences. And so, I realized there are so many things about my aunt that I didn’t know anything about. And this is someone who was the most supportive person in my mom’s life. I don’t know why I never thought of that before, why I never questioned why I didn’t know anything about her, but I just thought it was interesting that my mom wasn’t talking about this person who was so close to her in her life. I didn’t get to hear about all the amazing things about her—what she was like as a person, how fun she was, and which sports teams she rooted for. That’s a big theme also in my family, we’re all very big sports fans, and so I think maybe that’s where I got that from, too.
DEADLINE: What would you like to do next?
WHITNEY: I would love to continue telling more stories about the Japanese American experience. I have been developing a project: it’s a true story about a Japanese-Italian American gangster, Kenji Gallo. It’s based on his book, Breakshot. He wrote it in 2009 and sold the rights in 2010, but Hollywood wasn’t where it is today, and he was basically told, ‘ We can’t make this with an Asian American lead. ‘ But that’s another reason why I’m excited, because I think that now is a great time to be telling his story. I never thought I would feel so strongly about telling a gangster project, but because this guy is also half Japanese, that feeling of never really feeling like you fit in anywhere when you’re growing up and working really hard to be accepted by different groups of people really resonated with me. So, I would love to tell his story.
Also, I have to say, because George Takei is in my documentary as well, I’m really excited to be screening at the Newport Beach Film Festival because one of the first short films I ever acted in was with him about the Japanese American internment camps, and it screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival in 2018. So, this experience with the documentary has been a cool full-circle moment. There are other stories I would love to be working on, and I hope that I can just continue.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
The post Filmmaker Rachel Michiko Whitney Examines The Struggles of Asian American Actors Through Personal Family History & World War II in ‘Yonsei’ appeared first on Deadline.
