In Jing Ai Ng’s Forge, Coco (Andie Ju) and Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo) are siblings who work as art forgers in Miami whose latest high-risk, large-scale job heats up just as FBI Art Crimes agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran) arrives in town and happens to befriend their mother.
Awards Buzz spoke with Ng and Ju about their own relationships with the art world. Ng shared her fascination:
“I’m a bit of an art crime fanatic. I really specifically love stories about art crime and I guess the inspiration of Forge came from knowing that the forger behind one of the largest art forgery cases is an Asian-American guy that fled for China and hasn’t been interviewed since.”
Ju came at it from a different place:
“My relationship to the art world is a museum-goer and someone who took art history in high school. So reading the script was really fun. It was just a fun ride, because you get to see a peek behind the curtain of this cool world of art forgery. It was very fun to go through that experience of something that I had studied in high school.”
Ng spoke to the emphasis on specificity and cinematic enhancement:
“Funnily enough, I think the public has a fascination with art crime. It just so happens that art forgery is one of the more technical crimes that you can commit under that umbrella, but even then, people have such an interest in art forgers. They have such an interesting personality type. When we were working on the forgery sequence, for example, it was about blending real-life forgery techniques but also enhancing them with movie magic, right? To make it so that the painting is glowing a bit brighter than it would in real life. It was about complementing what was already there rather than inventing.”
Ju shared whether she feels competent to forge art like her character does in the film:
“No, I would not in any way shape or form be able to forge anything right now, but I did read the script and then talked to Jing and she recommended this really great book, The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney. Just reading that and seeing how prevalent forgery has been throughout time, and then also it makes you wonder as a museum-goer what art is actually real and what has been forged through time.”
Watch the video above to hear if they’d like to see this story continue and how audiences at SXSW responded to the film’s premiere.
Forge will open with week-long theatrical runs in Los Angeles beginning May 15 at the Landmark Nuart Theatre, followed by New York beginning May 22 at Quad Cinema, with additional select markets rolling out nationwide in the weeks ahead.
