Time Out Singapore profiles Michelle Chong ’00, director of ‘3 Peas in a Pod’
Actress and filmmaker Michelle Wong ’00.
The movie 3 Peas in a Pod, directed by actress and filmmaker Michelle Chong ’00, draws obliquely on her Bates experience, she tells Time Out Singapore.
The road-trip film follows three university friends from Singapore, Taiwan and Korea as they drive across Australia after graduation.
Chong, who wrote the script, tells writer Benita Lee that she wanted to “do a story about being young and passionate, about loving unconditionally and not having to care about work life and meeting deadlines, to try and reminisce that period of my life.”
For Chong, “that part of her life” was at Bates, where she studied for a year, and the script draws on her feelings and observations about being an international student.
The experience, she says, “taught me about separation and how sometimes friendships and relationships are quite transient. You develop such strong friendships there, spending 24 hours a day together, seven days a week. But in the end, you have to go back to your respective countries. At that moment, you don’t think it’s goodbye forever, but it is.”
