Kelly Marie Tran Helps Unearth A Ghostly Slice Of History

Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), a grieving cellist who recently lost her husband, drags her daughter Gracie (Aria Kim) and mother-in-law Nai Nai (Fiona Fu) to a new house in Rock Springs to start fresh. But their arrival in the small Wyoming town comes with all sorts of strange omens: Nai Nai warns her about the consequences of moving before her husband’s spirit has finished his business on earth; Gracie seems to have picked up a strange imaginary friend in the woods; and Emily keeps imagining that she sees her husband’s ghost.

But Rock Springs, an atmospheric new horror movie written and directed by Vera Miao, takes this ghost story one step further, cutting to the late 19th century, when a group of Chinese miners living and working in Rock Springs was brutally massacred by disgruntled white miners. Soon, it becomes clear that the lingering cultural grief of this historic atrocity has started to haunt Emily and her family in real and malicious ways. It’s all a tangle of grief, trauma, and history that Miao wanted to explore in her search to really capture “diaspora through horror.”

“That’s a ghost story.”

“There’s some fragmentation that comes with that,” Miao tells Inverse ahead of the movie’s premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. “And perhaps, therefore, like a feeling of grief and maybe being haunted by something that you don’t have. That’s a ghost story.”

For Miao, it was important that her lead for Rock Springs be as much an outsider to the story as the general audience is to the forgotten history of Rock Springs. Tran, a Vietnamese American actress, plays a Vietnamese adoptee of white parents, making her mostly unaware of the spiritual rites that Nai Nai frantically urges her to complete, or the ghostly figures that Gracie has a connection with.

“One of my favorite parts of this film is when Emily says, ‘I didn’t know,’ which sort of encapsulates this entire thing,” Tran tells Inverse. “She didn’t know this event happened. She didn’t know that she was being affected by it.”

Inverse spoke with Miao and Tran about making Rock Springs, lending humanity to a real-life tragedy, and cultural ghosts.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

To start off, how did this project get conceived?

Vera Miao: The genesis of the story was really a question that popped in my head about whether I could explore diaspora through horror. Unpacking what that meant was like, first you take diaspora, what does that mean? And I was talking about the emotions and the lived experience of being part of diaspora. I’m a child of immigrants. And really thinking about that emotionally in terms of feelings like loneliness, about longing for a sense of belonging, about being split across different places, different cultures, different histories, different timelines. And feeling in part like there’s some fragmentation that comes with that. And perhaps, therefore like a feeling of grief and maybe being haunted by something that you don’t have. That’s a ghost story.

So pretty quickly, I knew what my answer was to that question. I knew it was going to be a contemporary, present-day story, but that it needed to intersect and lift up some untold history of the early Chinese communities in America. So that was a thread that I went down doing some research. And when I came across the Rock Springs massacre, at first I was really shocked that I’d never heard of it and didn’t know about it at all. And then I dug one centimeter underneath and knew right away that this was the piece of history that I wanted to foreground in the film and intersect with my present-day story that Kelly leads.

And in discovering that real-life massacre, how far along in the process were you researching this project? Like, you had the idea. Were there any other real-life case studies that you found fascinating? Was the Rock Springs one that was the first to capture your attention?

Miao: I actually started looking at the history of the Chinese in the Mississippi Delta. I had spent some time in the Delta and then had come across Dolly Li’s documentary about the history of Chinese store owners in the Delta, who were the only businesses that sold to both Black and white community members in the Jim Crow era. And that documentary is what ended up inspiring Ryan Coogler for his Chinese characters in Sinners. And it was fascinating, but I didn’t quite know my way in for what I was trying to do. It sort of led me to go west a bit. And one of the questions that I asked was “Were there Chinese cowboys?” Did Chinese cowboys exist that we don’t know of? And in doing that search, I came across the Rock Springs massacre.

It was a massacre I’d never heard of, and it was shocking in its brutality and violence. And it kind of reminded me of the Damon Lindelof Watchmen reboot, and how it really foregrounded the Tulsa massacre. And that was my first time learning about it. And it was almost apocalyptic in how just violent it was. Was this sort of your intention in the movie to sort of educate and show that this did happen, and this was a part of our shared cultural history?

Miao: Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t setting out obviously to documentary. I wasn’t trying to do a historical reenactment. This is purely in the realm of fiction and storytelling in that respect. So I don’t know that I was trying to set up to educate people. I do know that what I set out intentionally to do was to humanize. If anyone does even an initial dive into the Rock Springs massacre, they’ll go to the Wikipedia page, right? The Wikipedia page is short and brutal, because there’s not a lot of historical facts still documented about the Rock Springs massacre, but there is a list of the official dead, and they’re listed by their name and their body parts. Their name, their age, and the body part that was used to identify them as one of the official victims. Really brutal.

So you start to immediately see how I started going towards body horror and a creature, right? Because it was actually determined by my research. I’m like, “Wait, what? You know this guy was killed in the Rock Springs massacre, this is his name, his age, by his torso? And this one by his foot.”

So I felt really strongly that I was going to depict this massacre, but because I was going to depict the massacre, and because people probably didn’t know about it, because I didn’t, I’m a relatively self-interested person in Asian American history, and because there was so little information in existence about the early Chinese communities to begin with, and also these victims in particular, that they could not exist in the film only as victims. They needed to be humanized. And this is why I actually think a fictional narrative, for me at least, was the right approach to this material, because I got to build them and imagine them as fully fleshed-out humans on their day off, completely relaxed, on a Sunday at 5 p.m., when this massacre they had no forewarning of just sweeps over them and completely breaks their day, but also their story and their timeline.

And educationally, you could just focus on the massacre, but that’s not what I was interested in. I was interested in the humans. So I would say that I didn’t set out primarily to educate. I set out to humanize, so that we could understand this event, but first and foremost... know them beyond how they were victimized.

“I feel it on a soul level.”

Kelly, I wanted to ask you, you’re Vietnamese American, you play a Vietnamese American character. Why did you get drawn to this project, which is so steeped in Chinese diaspora history and folklore?

Kelly Marie Tran: Well, I read the script, and it just spoke to me on a visceral level. I think Vera is such a genius in the way that she tells this story. But also something that she talked about earlier, that I fully relate to, is this idea that in America, especially, we use the term “Asian American” all the time and group an entire country of individuals together. And a lot of times, people assume that we’re a monolith, but there are so many different identities within that group of people. And I think that what Vera does so well with this film is being able to explore many different parts of different Asian experiences within one film, whether that’s Chinese, Vietnamese, and adopted Vietnamese women, and also throughout time. And how has that identity evolved over time?

The idea that we’re grappling with this historical event that, yeah, perhaps I as a Vietnamese woman, it didn’t happen within my family, but if we talk about the context in which we’re living today, where Asian Americans are really grouped together, it is in the context of my family. It’s pretty incredible to grapple with these ideas that, regardless of if we knew about this event or not, we are in the present day being affected and feeling the repercussions of this happening. I feel it on a soul level.

Did you find, too, that it was helpful, because your character is kind of coming from an outsider perspective in some ways and is learning about a lot of these traditions and folklore as it’s happening? Was that something that helped aid you in your characterization?

Tran: Absolutely. I don’t think we even talked about this, Vera, but one of my favorite parts of this film is when Emily says, “I didn’t know,” which sort of encapsulates this entire thing. She didn’t know this event happened. She didn’t know that she was being affected by it. She didn’t know that she was playing an active part in perpetuating more violence. And that sort of realization moment of “I didn’t know, and I’m part of this.”

I do think coming from the experience that I had growing up and maybe not knowing the specifics of the sort of Chinese culture, but at the same time, there’s a lot of similarities between Chinese...

Miao: There’s some shared stuff, yeah.

Tran: But having that revelation as that character and also as me, as like a woman who in my own life has interacted with historical events that I wasn’t aware of, and what cycles of trauma and violence am I also acting upon that I am unaware of? So it made me ask a lot of questions, and I think that’s a really good thing. That’s what I felt like is such a gift being able to work with Vera. We’re exploring these questions, and we might not have any answers by the end of it, but the idea that, like, we get to do this together, what a gift.

Miao: Yeah. I mean, I think Kelly’s character is Vietnamese, but adopted by white parents. And so, there’s all of these ways in which these are all actual, obviously actual identities within a diaspora that might be defined from the outside as monolithic, as Asian or Asian American. I actually have found a lot of similarities in Vietnamese culture and belief systems about death, the afterlife, and the journey that our spirits go through. I was raised with that idea, and I think it really introduced me and grounded me in an understanding of death that is not maybe as taboo or as fearful as I find white Western feelings about death to be, but I do think that’s what Emily as a character embodies. She was raised without an active relationship [to death]. Ancestor worship is a form of relationships to ghosts, right?

And the film is so much asking that question, what’s the difference between a ghost and an ancestor? To me, it’s just fear and love, but Emily’s character doesn’t even have that as a lineage. And so, it’s what in my film I think makes her character even that much more emotionally adrift, because at least Nai Nai and Gracie, through Nai Nai’s teachings, they’re in an active relationship with their loss, and they want Emily to be a part of that, but for many reasons she refuses. It’s not her point of reference, and it also is terrifying for her, because then she would have to face her grief.

“Ancestor worship is a form of relationships to ghosts, right?”

And I think that what I’m trying to do is, without putting, like, a crazy button on it, is to say that we’re not monolithic. There’s so many nuances when you dig one inch below the surface, even on the white miners and townspeople’s side. Obviously my job in the film is not to explore them as multidimensional characters per se, one of the history cards at the end just notes that many of the folks who were involved in the riot, they were recent immigrants themselves. So they were speaking different languages. They’re from Wales or Scotland, or Sweden, or Ireland. And so, the category white, what is that? What is the category Asian?

So that’s sort of all in play and trying to sort of unpack it a bit, at least a little bit through the course of the film.

Rock Springs played at the Sundance Film Festival and SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a distributor.