With her key supporting role in Ang Lee’s new film, Lust, Caution, and a definitive DVD set of the groundbreaking Twin Peaks hitting stores next week, there will be plenty of opportunity to glimpse Joan Chen on screens both small and large this fall. And that’s fine with the multi-hyphenate 46-year-old.

“I think it’s great,” Chen says. “In China
they’re forever stuck on Little Flower,
which was a film I did when I was 17. So when people (see me), they’re still
like, ‘Little Flower!’ Here, it’s
mostly Twin Peaks.
I mean, The Last Emperor is a great
movie, but I think more people saw Twin Peaks, and people who followed it are so staunch. When it first came out it really was special. Never had
anything been done on TV like that. It was very exciting to do something so
different, and to know that TV could be that way. There is more sort of
copy-ish stuff now, and I think American TV is doing very well.”

Chen — who helmed 2000’s Autumn in New York, and may also soon be tackling another film behind the camera, an adaptation of a story from Lust, Caution author Eileen Chang, ironically — has writer-director Michael Almereyda’s Tonight at Noon in the can, and also just recently finished another film, titled Seventeen, in her native China. “I play a mother from this extremely remote mountain village,” says Chen, “losing her son to the big movement
to the city. The director is 25, and everybody who worked on the film is
like 20. They’re like different species; it was fun.”