Cathy Yan, the Birds of Prey director who went back to Sundance with a corpse for sale

Cathy Yan

Photo: Lega Nerd / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 25, 1983 China
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), Dead Pigs
Awards	Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury (shared)

Cathy Yan stood on the stage of the Eccles Theatre in Park City, looked out at the seats and joked that the room was a lot bigger than the one where she had last premiered a film. She had come back to Sundance, the festival that launched her, with The Gallerist, a farce in which a gallery owner tries to pass off a dead body as the centerpiece of her new show. Between the two premieres sat the job that made her name known well beyond the festival circuit: directing Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, then watching an industry decide what that film’s box office said about women behind the camera.

The new film turns on a question Yan has had reason to think about. She put it plainly after the screening: she was interested in what art is, and in who gets a say in it. For a director whose studio debut was judged by its opening weekend before it was judged as a movie, the subject is close to home.

Yan was born in China and spent her earliest years there with her grandparents. Her father had been given a visa to study sociology in the United States and her mother followed him two years later; Yan joined them at the age of four and grew up in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. By eight she was carrying a video camera around the house. At fourteen the family moved to Hong Kong, where she finished high school.

Film was not the obvious route. She studied at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, graduating in 2008, and became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, filing from New York, Hong Kong and Beijing. Newsroom habits never quite left her: her films keep returning to money, institutions and the people who get crushed between them. She went back to school for New York University’s dual MBA/MFA program, studying business at Stern and filmmaking at Tisch, and finished in 2016, having made shorts such as Down River and According to My Mother along the way.

The reporter and the film student meet in Dead Pigs, her first feature. Its starting point was a real story from Shanghai, where some 16,000 pig carcasses were found floating down the Huangpu River in 2013. Yan spun it into an ensemble comedy of interlocking Shanghai lives, shot it in Shanghai with a bilingual crew and Chinese investors, and brought in Jia Zhangke as executive producer. Vivian Wu, Mason Lee and Zazie Beetz led the cast. At Sundance in 2018 it won a World Cinema special jury award for ensemble acting. When it finally reached a wider audience on Mubi in 2021, Yan had cut twelve minutes from it.

Within three months of that premiere, Warner Bros. hired her to direct Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), written by Christina Hodson and produced by Robbie. Yan became the first Asian woman to direct an American superhero film. She made an R-rated, candy-coloured action comedy narrated by Harley herself, with a villain, Ewan McGregor’s Roman Sionis, whose menace comes from humiliation rather than spectacle. She later told The Hollywood Reporter that she had to fight to keep the nightclub scene in which he degrades a female customer, because it was uncomfortable, and that there are cuts of the film without it.

Then came the numbers. Birds of Prey opened in February 2020 with $33.3 million in North America, below what the studio expected, on a budget reported at $82 million. Reviews were good, and the film went on to gross about $205 million worldwide, but the story that stuck was the opening. Yan has said what bothered her most was the idea that the film proved audiences were not ready for a female-led superhero movie, an extra burden she felt she already carried as a woman of colour directing it. The criticism of her that holds up is a different one: for six years after that, the projects announced in her name outnumbered the films. A24’s adaptation of Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, a FilmNation feature from Rachel Khong’s story The Freshening with Ali Wong producing, and a live-action series of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel Paprika for Amazon were all reported, and none has reached a screen.

Television gave her the clearest win of those years. Her first TV directing job was “The Disruption”, the third episode of the third season of HBO’s Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s drama about a media dynasty, at the height of its run. It earned her a 2022 Emmy nomination for directing a drama series, in a year when the award went to Hwang Dong-hyuk for Squid Game.

The Gallerist is the return to independent film, though not a small one. Yan co-wrote it with James Pedersen, who came up with the original idea, and set it during Art Basel in Miami. Natalie Portman, who also produces, plays Polina Polinski, an icy gallery director in financial trouble after a nasty separation; Jenna Ortega is her assistant, Kiki. Around them she assembled Zach Galifianakis as an art influencer with two million followers, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the artist at the centre of the chaos, Sterling K. Brown as Polina’s ex, Catherine Zeta-Jones as a ruthless buyer, Daniel Brühl and Charli XCX. Yan’s producing partner Ash Sarohia is among the producers. At the premiere she thanked Robert Redford and said Sundance had changed her life.

The reviews were split. TheWrap called the film uneven and The Playlist wrote that its art-world farce could not close the sale, while the festival’s own write-up described a room laughing in waves. The film’s real wager, staged almost as one long, nervous take, is that a satire about putting a price on work can be made by someone who has watched her own work priced in public.

Roadside Attractions and Vertical bought the American rights after Sundance and will release The Gallerist in US theaters on December 4, 2026. It is her first feature since Birds of Prey, and the first since the Harley Quinn debate in which the argument will be about the film she made rather than the weekend it opened.

Tags: Margot Robbie, Natalie Portman, Succession, Birds of Prey, Cathy Yan, Dead Pigs

Related People

Related People

Discussion