Computer engineer Peter Longman has made a fortune while still in his twenties, but his success has come at the cost of friends and family relationships. After working all day in the Silicon Valley, Longman retreats to his home and surrounds himself with a trio of monitors, making a more intimate connection with the impersonal world of the Internet rather than with a real human being. Peter's world flips upside-down when he has a chance encounter with a woman named Florence at a local coffee ship. Florence's exotic job excites Peter in not just a sexual way but connects with him emotionally as well, and he comes to an agreement with the young woman to come with him to Las Vegas for a weekend. Wayne Wang shot The Center of the World digitally, then transferred it to film.
Erotic dramas seem to always touch an exposed nerve with audiences.
Similarly, the characters in Wayne Wang's The Center of the World also deal with the taboo subject of society's views on male and female sexuality, finding themselves both empowered by these preconceptions but also raw and unprepared to discover that they have created for themselves huge emotional vulnerbilities. I ve always wanted to make a film about sex, Center of the World 's director Wayne Wang says. In college, in the 1970s, I loved movies like I Was Curious Yellow and Last Tango in Paris . Once Wang had his film degree and found work at the film production company of Golden Harvest in Hong Kong, he was offered but turned down the job to make softporn films for Japanese and Korean audiences. I didn t end up doing it because I got another job, but it s always been in the back of my head, comments Wang.