Senpai Spotlight: From JET to the Silver Screen
Eirene Tran Donohue (Nagasaki, 2002-2004)
Interviewed by Marco Blasco (Aomori, 2021-2024)
I had the pleasure to sit down with Eirene Tran Donohue, screenwriter and JET alumni. In this interview, Eirene shares how her JET and experience abroad shaped her life, her writing process, and advice to other creatives about keeping an open and perceptive mind.
Q: What led you to join the JET Program and choose Japan?
A: I grew up in Rhode Island and am half-Vietnamese. Immediately after graduating from Brown, I met my husband while I was traveling in Vietnam. I was visiting family and he was this Canadian backpacker who was actually on his way to China and Japan, and his plan was to teach English in Japan. I went home and he ended up getting pneumonia in China, so he came home as well. We reconnected when I was driving cross-country that summer, and I visited him in Canada and stayed for a month – that was 24 years ago.
Eirene with one of her Goto Island friends.
Eirene during her JET years with a few of her students.
He was the one who told me about JET, and since we couldn’t live or work in America or Canada together, we thought it would be a great idea. We both loved to travel and I was really interested in spending more time in different parts of Asia, and what I knew of Japan, I thought was super interesting. I wanted to live in another country and be a part of that country and community, not necessarily just as a backpacker. We both applied and got in – I was placed in the Goto Islands off the coast of Nagasaki, and he was in Nagasaki proper. We ended up doing two years on the JET Program.
Q: How did your experience in Japan impact you?
A: I had the most amazing experience. It was absolutely a super formative part of my life, and I am so grateful for everything that JET gave me as a person, especially in my 20s trying to figure out where I was going to go. Living on a fishing island in Goto, we were far in the inaka. Many residents did not often leave the island to go to the mainland. To see a really different, authentic part of Japanese society that most travelers don't ever get to see really opened up my perspective on the world. It was just so wonderful and beautiful, and my community was amazing. Even now, over twenty years later, we're still very close with many of our friends from that time, even though they live all around the world. Japanese culture is still so close to my heart – my husband and I still use Japanese terms for things that English just doesn't have a word for, like when we come home after a long day and say otsukare, we just know exactly what we mean.
Q: How did you transition from JET to becoming a screenwriter?
A: I had always wanted to be a writer. I grew up loving movies and storytelling. I worked in a video store in high school – you know, thinking I’ll be the next Tarantino. At Brown, I didn’t really enjoy a lot of the media theory classes, so I ended up becoming a history major and doing a lot of different kinds of writing.
Then after JET, we traveled through Indonesia for three months and South Africa, so I was just sort of traveling around in my 20s, not really doing any writing. When I was about 30, we were living in Rhode Island, and I was bartending, tutoring, freelance writing, nannying – all the things you do when you're trying to be a writer. My husband had to go away for work and so I gave myself six weeks to write a screenplay. I got some books on how to write screenplays, read some screenplays, and just did it. I entered it into the Nicholl Fellowship, which is run by the Academy Awards – it's basically the most prestigious amateur screenwriting competition. I ended up making it to the semifinals, which gave me the confidence to think, "Maybe this crazy dream of mine might happen." So then after that I connected with my manager who said if I wanted to do this, I had to move to LA. So we parked our '73 VW van down the street, and here we are, 15 years later.
On location in Vietnam filming “A Tourist’s Guide to Love”. Photo courtesy of Donohue’s personal collection.
From that point on, I got my agent and started selling. It’s an up and down industry and this career is a constant grind. There’s no set point and you’re always hustling for the next job. You could sell one thing and not the next, you could sell three things and then not sell anything for years. I’ve been very fortunate to maintain steady enough work that it has been my only profession for the past 15 years.
Q: How has your JET experience and living abroad contributed to your writing career?
A: I've always been someone who pays attention, who's very observant, and that was one of the things that made my experience in Japan so positive. Writing is about details, characters, relationships, setting. It’s about different life experiences. Being in a place where I had to watch and pay attention, try to figure out how I fit into it or how to navigate this landscape, meeting people that were just so different but at the same time so similar – that experience strengthened my perspective as a writer. I always try to tell stories that have universal themes or relatability but told through a specific experience. I found that in a land with a culture that was so completely foreign to me. Being able to find commonality in our humanity, that's something I bring to my writing. Whatever story I’m telling, you can always find that human connection and relatability.
Q: Can you describe your creative process and how it might have changed over the years?
On set filming Eirene’s 2024 Christmas movie, “Christmas in the Spotlight”. Photo courtesy of Donohue’s personal collection.
A: It’s still kind of haphazard. I’m the type of person that cannot stop coming up with ideas. People ask me where I get all my ideas, and I want to ask them how you can stop all the ideas from coming. It's almost overwhelming sometimes. I'm constantly taking in all this information, and I feel the need to turn it into something. My friends tease me all the time because they'll be talking and I'll be like, "Oh my God, that's a movie!" I keep idea lists going back 15 years – story ideas, character beats, fun set pieces. When one pops into my head, then there’s a balance to strike. I have to consider what will sell because I'm a professional writer – I need to earn my health insurance and pay my rent.
Usually, I start with a concept, then figure out the characters because I'm very character-based. I need to know who these characters are, what they need, what their emotional storyline is, before I can figure out the plot. Then I outline the whole story. Depending on who hired me or if I’m just writing for myself, there might be people giving me notes throughout each step.
For the actual writing, if I can, I like to go away and lock down because I can write very fast. I wrote 20 pages yesterday! But usually, it's slower because of real life. You know, laundry, soccer practice, all that stuff.
Q: What's been your favorite project so far? I know your movie, A Tourist’s Guide to Love, was #1 in the world on Netflix when it came out.
Eirene at the Netflix Premiere of A Tourist’s Guide to Love
A: I have a hard time picking favorites. Everything has its own place. For me, A Tourist’s Guide to Love was amazing because it's one of the first American movies that was made about Vietnam that isn't about the war. That was really important to me to show Vietnam in a love story and not a war story, to show it as a place of joy and love, and show that it's an absolutely amazing, beautiful, thriving country and culture that should be celebrated. It's also slightly based on how I met my husband, so that one is very personal to me.
I just had one come out a couple weeks ago on Lifetime called "Christmas in the Spotlight," based on the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance. That was super fun to write because Christmas and Taylor Swift are two of my great loves, and I got to write songs for it too. That was a great opportunity to explore a whole new creative outlet.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
A: Live an interesting life. For me, I did start a bit late compared to when a lot of people get started in their careers and there are times when I wonder what it would’ve been like if I started earlier. But by the time I started, I actually had a good level of success fairly quickly. And I think the reason that happened was because I had so much to draw from. I had so much life experience to draw from in all of my travels, all the different places I'd worked and lived, and all the people I'd met. I had been open to it all and paid attention to it all. So when I came up with ideas, they felt fresh to the people I was working with.
That's my biggest piece of advice, especially to younger writers just out of college who ask what they should do to become successful. Even if it's not interesting in an obvious way, everything can be made interesting, everything can be made into something. Use whatever it is from your lived experience and put that into your writing. If you have to work at a fast food restaurant, create a story about that world. If you had to move home to take care of your aging father, write about that. Whatever life forces you into, you can turn that into material and use all of that specificity to tell whatever story you want to tell.
About Eirene Tran Donohue (Nagasaki, 2002-2004)
Eirene Tran Donohue is a Vietnamese/Irish writer, originally from RI. A graduate of Brown University, she spent years working and traveling in Asia, Africa and New York before pursuing a career in screenwriting. Her first script was a semi-finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship, run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to identify emerging screenwriters. Since then she has sold TV and feature projects to multiple outlets including Lionsgate, ABC Studios, Freeform, Disney, Netflix, Lifetime and Hallmark. Her most recently produced projects include 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS EVE, starring Kelsey Grammar, A CHRISTMAS SPARK, starring Jane Seymour, CHRISTMAS IN THE SPOTLIGHT. A TOURIST'S GUIDE TO LOVE, starring Rachael Leigh Cook, was the number one movie on Netflix in the world when it was released. Her film, A SUGAR AND SPICE HOLIDAY, for Lifetime, was one of the first holiday-themed cable movies to feature a predominantly Asian cast. She has also recently begun releasing music under the name AUNTEE. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
The Senpai Spotlight series is brought to you through partnership between USJETAA and AJET’s CONNECT Magazine. The series features JET alumni from the US who have made successful careers for themselves in various fields—with the goal of inspiring young JETs and JET alumni to pursue their own dreams while also offering some words of advice only a senpai could know.
If you, or someone you know, would like to be featured as a Senpai Spotlight, please reach out to us at contact@usjetaa.org.
This edition of Senpai Spotlight was written by Marco Blasco, a writer and editor based in snowy northern Japan. Originally from America, his interest in Japanese culture and religion brought him to Japan through the JET Program in 2021, where he has made a second home for himself. You can find more of his fiction writing and cultural commentary about life in Japan on his website www.marcoblasco.com.
