Warning: This article contains spoilers.
Marilyn Fu is a screenwriter with an extensive list of accolades and credits. Her work often focuses on stories exploring the Asian American diaspora and identity, and she has contributed to numerous films and series since her 2014 debut, The Sisterhood of Night. Before screenwriting, Fu worked as a reporter for several publications under Time Inc. after earning degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
On shaping her career path, Fu began, “I’d always loved writing, so I was always reading a lot of books. I would walk down the hallway in school while reading and even write little short stories.” She continued, “When I knew I was going to go to school for writing, I had to think about whether it would be for theater, fiction, or screenwriting. I still love every single one of those parts of writing, but I wanted to go into screenwriting because I felt like film and TV had the biggest audience, and it allows me to make the most impact. Honestly, though, I don’t think I was thinking impact at that time because I was so young. I just wanted people to read and to see what I created.”
Starting off as a journalist allowed Fu to develop her skills to put together coherent and factually accurate stories, but her love for watching films is what drove her creative side further. “I’m definitely a romantic, so I read a lot of Gothic Romance that really excited me when I was younger. I also learned from very specific screenplays when I was in film school. Good Will Hunting was a script that I studied, and another script that really blew my mind was The Sixth Sense. I was at UPenn at the time it came out. M. Night Shyamalan loves Philadelphia and is based there and shoots there, and he came into our class and gave us a script to read. He’s an incredible writer, and he gave us his time and a conversation about his process, and that was really inspiring.”
While in school, Fu’s hard work paid off, earning her Columbia University’s first ever William Goldman Screenwriting Fellowship. “I was actually just thinking about William Goldman,” she shared with a pensive, nostalgic smile. “That was 25 years ago! [Earning that fellowship] was a big deal for me, because not only was I in school, I hadn’t made anything yet. I had written some screenplays, but I didn’t really have a foot in the door in terms of a career, but William Goldman comes from this really Hollywood background. I remember he had a couple of us students from Columbia up to where he lived—at the top in the penthouse of a hotel in New York—and the moment you got off the elevator, huge Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid posters were there from floor to ceiling and across the wall. I believe it said Hollywood land, and he said it was because he’s a novelist, and he loves to write, and he wants to remember why he has this life, and it’s because of Hollywood. We’re from very different backgrounds. I’m a young Taiwanese American girl, and I was writing very independent, gritty stuff, so to meet William Goldman [was surreal]. I learned a lot from him, and I saw a different point of view of where this career was going to go, because he knew so much.”
Over the course of her career, Fu has worked on films like The Sisterhood of Night and TV shows such as The Baxters and Peacock’s upcoming show starring Simu Liu, The Copenhagen Test. “I really like working on both [films and TV shows], and I think that they are just so different. With feature films, it’s much more solitary, and you are the queen of that world, so you get such a fun moment in the beginning when you can just make anything happen. And then with TV, it’s so collaborative, because you’re coming in and you’re a team member, and there is one vision, but everyone is working as one brain, and that’s a whole different beast. You’re fitting into a collective, and you’re figuring out and really utilizing whatever your superpower is within that one brain.” Rather than preferring one medium over another, she’s more interested in the people at the center of the stories. “For me, it’s really about character. I love character, and I love showing the different spectrums of humanity within one person. I think we all have that inside of us.”
The characters Fu does choose to write about are often complex, strong, realistic women. “When I began writing women, it just didn’t feel like there was the kind of complexity and nuance that I wanted to see, and especially from Asian women of different ages and in different periods of their lives,” she began. “I think [it’s important to] write what you want to see and what you feel has been unexpressed. You’ll see that in The Sisterhood of Night. It was an ensemble piece, and in the short story, I think there’s a Catherine Anderson, and I made her a Catherine Huang and included her family, so you get to have this Asian American character within the ensemble. And then when I got to Rosemead, this film that is coming out in December starring Lucy Liu, I again just felt really hungry to tell a story about just one Asian woman, and really focus on her, not just as part of an ensemble. I wanted to uncover this kind of starring role that could be in this gray area her character is in. She’s a woman who is pushed so far to the limit of her love for her son and her desire to protect him, and I thought that was fascinating. It was such a challenge for me as a writer, and it was also a chance to tell a story that might have been forgotten.”
Rosemead is based on an LA Times article written by Frank Shyong about the tragedy of a mother and her schizophrenic son. This project became a way to bring awareness to mental health and take steps toward destigmatizing it, as well as honor the real people behind the story. “I remember I was in line to get my marriage certificate, and I got an email from Mynette Louie, who was one of our producers,” she began. “[Louie] had joined [producers] Andrew [Corkin] and Theo [James] who had optioned the article, and she asked me to take a look at it and see if it sparked anything for me.” Sparking something was certainly an understatement, as Fu immediately knew she needed to be part of the project. “I literally could not stop reading it. We got up and it was our turn [to register our marriage], and I was still just kind of reading this article because it was fascinating. I really thought about what the weigh in would be, and had more conversations with our producers, and ultimately came on to write it.”
There was a great sense of responsibility that came with the decision to write for this film, especially in lieu of its true origins. The team worked hard to ensure they weren’t dramatizing or sensationalizing anything, striving to truly honor the real-life mother and son. “That was a huge challenge with this project,” Fu admitted. “First of all, Frank’s article was written so beautifully, and in a way, it was already almost cinematic. I don’t think he was intending for it to be, but that was the style that came out. There were so many details in his article and in his research, which he shared with me, and I had to go through and just start cherry picking certain details that I felt would build these two characters who are no longer living.”
During this process, it almost felt like she wasn’t just a writer. “You’re kind of an investigator. You’re gathering things that are interesting, yet you’re always keeping your eye on what the story is about.” Fu was driven and motivated to keep as much truth as she could within the writing. “From the very first moment, I knew it was about a mother’s love for her son and a son’s love for his mother, and so everything had to push towards that. With Irene, I knew that she had gotten a degree in graphic design, and so that became part of it. I knew that they had this print shop in Alhambra and that they were doing very well. With Joe, I knew that he really wanted to swim. He had been voted most shy, and he actually turned it down for the yearbook because he didn’t want to be photographed. He also had an obsession with Dylann Roof. I ended up thinking, who was this person who was holding so much inside of him, who was fixated on this violence that was in our faces and in our society? And I started building from there.”
Another reason for avoiding sensationalism was the fact that mental health is already heavily stigmatized and rarely discussed, especially within the Asian and Asian American diaspora. “Everyone on our team, even some investors, had a passion for this story. These very personal experiences came up when questioned why they joined the movie, and it was almost always about mental health and some experience they’ve had as a caregiver or for themselves.”
Sharing something personal, Fu brought up her own family. “I remember a moment when I was really young, probably in middle school, and my cousin, who had come from Taiwan to the States to go to school, was working in finance. One day, she just had a breakdown. She could not go on, and she couldn’t function. Her parents were in Taiwan, and so they asked my parents to go and get her and bring her back to our house,” she started. “I remember a process of her trying to express herself and exploring what exactly was going on, and the feeling from her family was that they just wanted to move through this and not talk about it again. I actually don’t think that we have talked about it again. This isn’t the case across the board and it’s just what I saw and what we wanted to express in the film, but there’s a generational shut off when it comes to talking about feelings and talking about mental health in particular.” Thinking back on the film in its entirety, Fu recalled a few scenes in particular that touch on this. “There are actually scenes back to back where you see Irene within her community and her peers, not being accepted and having to hide what’s happening and her shame, and it’s paralleled just right up there with Joe and his experience with his peers who are actually trying to support him. We only touched on it a little bit in the film, but we hope that it can spark deeper conversation.”
It was a long process to finish creating Rosemead, not because of the length of filming or the length of the movie itself, but because of the delivery of its message and themes. In particular, the final moments of the film were some of the hardest to create. “The end of the film was actually quite difficult and challenging for several reasons. The whole movie was leading up to this moment, so how were we going to see it exactly? Whose perspective do we want to be with? How do we want people to feel coming away from it?” While there were many challenges, some scenes were also easily decided on. “There was a moment in the process when I knew it would always be at the end, and that was actually very simple. In Frank’s article, he talks about Irene’s friend, and how Irene asked her to burn her pictures. Well, in Frank’s notes, which were not in the article, I saw that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Ultimately, Irene’s sister burned the photos. Taking these two pieces from the article and from his research became part of what the ending is,” she shared. “Some things come easily, and others, you just have to keep working through the process of it. Our Director, Eric Lin, Lucy Liu, who plays Irene, and Lawrence Shou, who plays Joe, also played a big part.”
From the very beginning, Fu’s intention was to create a movie to cultivate empathy and awareness for those who face these types of situations in real life. “In addition to wanting to dig into this role for an Asian woman, the other part of that was the challenge of getting an audience to understand her actions and herself as a person,” she shared. Ultimately, Fu hopes for the creation of more genuine stories like Rosemead, not just for herself, but for the community. “I just hope that we can be honest with our stories,” she began. “I think that the more authentic we can be, the more vulnerable we can be, then truth draws people to the table. We want more people in this conversation within our community and other communities as well.” Rosemead has been on a film festival circuit for the past few months, earning several awards including Best Narrative Award at the Bentonville Film Festival and the Prix du Public UBS audience award at the Locarno Film Festival. “One of the touching things about taking the film around to festivals is that you really see that culturally, across the board, there is a real desire to share more and to not feel shame around this.”
Rosemead is set to hit theaters in New York on December 5 and in Los Angeles on December 12. The film will have a wider theatrical release in January 2026.
