By: Karen Huang
Name: Michael Zhao
Hometown: Toronto, ON
Program/Year: Interdepartmental Honours in Immunology, U3
Dream Job: Asian James Bond
Realistic Job: Transplant surgeon
Hobbies: MOVIES, running, rowing, brunch, piano
Favourite Place to Study at McGill: I’m a regular fixture at Cybertheque.
Tell me about your fascination with movies and cinema.
Movies are magical. A great movie can make me feel whatever emotion the director wants me to feel. In Lost in Translation, I remember empathizing entirely with Charlotte and her wondering what to do with her life. Watching Wes Anderson’s whimsical and idiosyncratic films, I feel silly. Tarantino pulls me into his films with his enthralling dialogue. And action flicks like Pacific Rim or Die Hard are just a hell lot of fun. The point of movies is to make you feel something – excited, intrigued, happy, melancholic, or everything and anything in between. And I love escaping to all these fantasy worlds that have the potential to evoke so many feelings. Although we all live in the real world, which is pretty cool in itself and filled with its own brand of fun and mystery, reality can be busy and tiring, and its pacing on Sundays especially isn’t so great. That’s when it’s time to escape to a make-believe world, be absorbed into it and laugh, cry, and think.
Who are your favourite directors? What do you like about them?
Too many to go into very much detail, but the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson are some of my favorite directors. It’s hard to describe exactly why I like the Coen brothers. If I didn’t know already, I’d have never guessed that O Brother, Where Art Thou and No Country for Old Men were directed by the same guy, the former being a distinctly witty comedy, and the latter a tense thriller featuring one of the most terrifying antagonists ever written. Tarantino’s films share a much more distinctive style – they all have intriguing, dense dialogue, and fleshed-out characters, along with his trademark aestheticization of violence. Similarly, Wes Anderson movies always have his dry, quirky humor and poignant characters on the backdrop of his methodical, aesthetically pleasing cinematography and saturated colour palette.
Celebrity Crush(es): Alison Brie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Audrey Hepburn, Ryan Gosling
Describe your ideal girl.
Confident. Elegant and cute at the same time. Comfortable with who she is and knows exactly what she wants in a relationship. Other than that, whatever – as long as she’s cool. It’s hard to put into words what exactly you like about someone. For me, the catch-all is ‘cool.’ It’s deliberately vague to describe something vague itself. Maybe she’s witty and funny, personable, or we have similar interests. Or maybe she isn’t any of those things, and I find her captivating anyways. Who knows why exactly. But she always has to be cool.
Looking back, what do you wish you had known as a freshman?
It’s not so much knowing something, but I wish I had been more confident and strove for better. My entire first year here, I just played video games and chilled in rez. I guess that’s a part of the university experience, but there has to be some balance, and I was leaning over to the side of ‘couch potato.’ I should have trained for a sport, been involved in clubs, and gone out more. But in terms of knowing things? Maybe I’d tell my old self, “Don’t date that girl you’re going to date.”