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After college, Lee and Chen both worked at McKinsey and Company, a major consulting firm, while making short films on the side; Lee even apprenticed with Martin Scorsese on Gangs of New York, then returned to work at McKinsey. Riverton moved to Los Angeles after graduating from college to pursue an acting career, but told her parents that she was only going to take one acting job and then become a consultant; she eventually became a staff producer at Fox Television Studios.

“I think we've always been interested in the arts and in filmmaking, but I think because of being Asian, it was not anything we would consider seriously as a professional career,” Lee explains. “We were trying to hedge our bets, if you will, trying to keep a good, secure day job that our parents would be proud of, and then we were trying to do the crazy thing on the side. And finally the crazy thing took over and became a full-time job.”

Lee had even gone back to Harvard for business school when the idea of Red Doors drew her to Los Angeles to work on it full-time. “We kind of lured her out of business school with the promise that we would get together and make this feature,” Riverton says.

“I basically wrote Red Doors in her kitchen,” Lee remembers. The film, she says, is “emotionally inspired by my own family and then fictionalized for the dramatic value of it.”

When it became clear that the film was going to be an East Coast-based film, all three women relocated temporarily to the New York area for the production, which was financed entirely independently. “From the very beginning we knew we were going to make this film ourselves,” Chen says, “and we were going to make it the way we wanted to make it, and allow Georgia's script to go as written. And so we did it all completely outside the system.”

The independent nature of the production meant all three women took on a variety of roles. Chen explains, “I kind of liken independent filmmaking to start-up companies, because while technically I was the producer, I kind of did everything. Like, I cooked the meals, and we shot for two weeks at Georgia's parents' house, so I placated her parents while we were shooting.”

Riverton adds with a laugh, “Jane was the trouble shooter and the problem solver. And occasionally a trouble maker.” But even though their strong personalities sometimes led—probably unavoidably—to conflicts, the three women maintained a very democratic working relationship. “The good thing about having three people is that if you put it to a vote, there's always a majority,” Chen says dryly.

In an unprecedented confluence of events, the year that Red Doors premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2005, was the same year that Saving Face, another film featuring Asian American lesbian characters, saw its theatrical release. Inevitably, Red Doors, which won't see a theatrical release until this fall, has been compared to Saving Face.

“I think that…the films are quite different in the way they deal with the lesbian content,” Lee says, explaining that for her, it was more important to focus on the characters as individuals, rather than as Asian American or as lesbians. “One of the things I always joke with Jane and Mia about is that while I do think about being Asian a lot, I don't spend all my time talking about the Asian immigrant experience.”

In writing the relationship between Julie Wong and Mia Scarlett, Lee focused less on their sexuality than on the dynamics between their personalities. “What was fascinating for us about this relationship was that here you have…a power difference in their relationship,” Lee says. “One person is really famous and the other person is quiet or a shyer type. What happens in that relationship, and how do you try and make it work? How do you reconcile those differences? That's what we were interested in exploring in that relationship.”

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