Peter Chen, the thirty year old writer and director of Market Price, was a broke agency assistant and sometime babysitter before he sold his first script at the age of twenty seven. Born in Taiwan, Chen moved to America when he was a toddler and spent part of his teenage years in a "cow town" in Texas before finally settling in Los Angeles. With the help of filmmaker David O.Russell (with whom he recently co-wrote a script), Chen's career has developed at an impressive clip and his days of negotiating L.A. traffic while perched precariously on a Razor scooter look to be far behind him.

EP: You worked as a story analyst, babysitter, tutor, agent's assistant and writer's assistant before selling your first script. Which of those jobs sucked the most?

PC: Probably an agent's assistant (laughs), yeah, definitely.

EP: You've had to invest a lot of time into just keeping yourself afloat financially. How do you maintain your creative energy through that?

PC: I just looked around at my friends... I was living with roommates who I had known most of my life and they were all kind of in, I guess you'd call them "real jobs." They were all working in finance or jobs that you made a lot of money in, and... they were all so unhappy when they came home. At one point my car was stolen and I didn't have insurance and I was riding a Razor scooter to and from the agency for several weeks and my roommate was driving like this BMW M3 and I realized at night that I was so much happier than he was... Not having money sucks but I think it sucks even more doing something that you dislike.

EP: David O. Russell has played a central role in your career. How did that relationship start?

PC: I was working as an assistant to these TV writers who are friends of his, Chip Johannessen and his wife Virginia Stock... they introduced me to David and I started doing coverage for David's production company... He read one of my reports and he's like, "Man, you write really good coverage... .What are you up to?" I had just optioned a comic book on my own. It actually never even got published but I adapted it and I had already had some interest from one agency and somebody at Fox... so I told David and he was like, "Oh man, let me read it. I'm starting to produce other people's projects, besides my own." So it was kind of like we were just off and running after that. We have kind of a similar sense of humor. He was a producer on the first script that I sold to Universal and then we actually have been co-writing something.

EP: Your film Market Price is a snapshot of the Cambodian community in Long Beach, the largest Cambodian population in the United States. What inspired you to tell this story?

PC: I'm the worst bargainer in the history of the world... I'm always afraid to ask for a discount. My fiancée's family, who are from Long Beach and are Cambodian, were all teasing me about it one day right around the time we were supposed to be writing our scripts so I thought, "Hm, that might be kind of cool."

EP: Tell me about the Granny you cast. She doesn't look like someone you'd want to mess with.

PC: She's actually my fiancée's real Grandmother and she's kind of like the matriarch. They have like, a hundred and ten relatives in Long Beach, there's probably sixty of them who live on the same street within walking distance. It's like a little village down there. She's tough. She's very sweet.

EP: Was she wearing Banana Republic too?

PC: Yeah! She was.

EP: Who knew you could outfit Granny at Banana Republic.

PC: I know!

EP: I notice you used a Dengue Fever song on the film. How did you get the rights?

PC: I contacted their manager and I wasn't expecting anything and... the manager got back to me within twenty minutes of my first email... it was funny because when they asked me about the money... I had set aside $500 for music and when I told them the offer, I think the publisher was like, "Is that really all the money you guys have? Alright. I'll tell the band members it's thirty dollars apiece."

EP: These films were supposed to embrace the French New Wave style. What do you have to say for yourself?

PC: (Laughs) It's funny because even in the development process I kept getting asked that. And you know a lot of the French New Wave elements we had we weren't able to include in this version. We had these really long tracking shots and they just, time wise wouldn't fit into three minutes. So there's that and you know, some people were telling me that the flashback of the Grandma is very French New Wave and I was like, "oh yeah... that's what I meant to do!" But I straight up told the Film Independent people at the script stage that I'm not a huge fan of French New Wave... so they kind of knew that I was focusing more on City Stories then on the French New Wave aspect.

EP: What are you working on next?

PC: I'm actually writing a horror film right now and I hope to shoot that with my friend, this actor who is in Twilight actually, Edi Gathegi. We're kind of old friends and we want to work on something together so I'm hoping he will read this script and like it enough to be in it.