For the Director of Wicked, There’s No Place Like Silicon Valley

Jay Ruben Dayrit July 23, 2024 the big story Leave a comment 20 Views

When Jon M. Chu enters the restaurant, I barely notice him. He looks like a regular customer here for an early lunch. He doesn’t project the air of a Hollywood big shot, though by any measure he is one. Chu directed the 2018 hit Crazy Rich Asians, and he’s currently at work on a two-part, $145 million film adaptation of the musical Wicked. Normally, I, the interviewer, would immediately rise to greet my interviewee. But I’m preoccupied listening to Chu’s father, Lawrence—the Chef Chu of Chef Chu’s—and his brother, Larry, who now runs the family restaurant alongside their dad. They’re rapid-fire talkers, regaling me with overlapping stories. And there are plenty of stories to tell about this place.

Chef Chu’s started as a Chinese take-out joint 54 years ago with only 12 items on the menu. As Silicon Valley grew up around it, it expanded into the institution it is today, where families and tech workers routinely gather. On weekends, the parking lot is often full of red cars, a sure sign that Asians eat here. Steve Jobs used to eat here. Mark Zuckerberg still does. Larry tends to seat him in a quiet corner, where people won’t sneak selfies with Zuck in the background. It happens on occasion, but he’s a good sport, according to Larry, who chides, “Bro, you started all this!”

Chef Chu is telling me about how he created a menu that’s at once authentic and popular when I see Jon point to a small table and say, “That’s where I used to do my homework.” He addresses the comment to his assistant, but it seems like he is politely signaling to me—without interrupting his father—that he, the interviewee, has arrived. I wait for Chef Chu to wrap up, which takes a minute, and then I introduce myself to Jon.

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The director looks younger than his 44 years. I am envious of his voluminous head of hair. He is more soft-spoken than his older brother, more measured when he speaks. When he talks about his projects, he says “we” a lot. Is this the royal “we” of a boss who sees his underlings as extensions of himself? Is it the falsely modest “we” of someone who knows it’s a bad look to take all the credit? No, I decide that this “we” is a reflection of the collectivism that Asian immigrant parents—like mine, like his—hope to instill in their children when they come to the United States, out of fear their kids might acquiesce to American individualism. This is Michelle Yeoh’s character’s refrain in Crazy Rich Asians.

Chef Chu’s figures prominently in the director’s forthcoming memoir, Viewfinder. (No credit-hogging here, either: The name of Chu’s collaborator, Jeremy McCarter, is clearly attributed in the book.) Viewfinder chronicles Chu’s journey from tech-savvy Silicon Valley kid to Hollywood heavyweight, via the University of Southern California, where he earned accolades and the notice of one of his childhood heroes, Steven Spielberg. Straight out of undergrad, Chu was tapped to direct a big-budget reboot of Bye Bye Birdie, which landed him on the covers of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. But Bye Bye Birdie, like many projects in development, died on the vine. As much as Tinseltown loves a meteoric rise, it also savors an Icarian fall. A line in Variety read, “This kid didn’t stay in the picture.”

For years, Chu toiled away like every other young director trying to make their mark, pitching ideas and getting rejected. Taught by his parents to persevere and never complain, Chu eventually became the go-to guy for sequels: Step Up 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and Now You See Me 2. Though these movies received middling reviews, they raked in enough at the box office that Warner Bros. was willing to sign off on another—an adaptation of the novel Crazy Rich Asians, which Chu pitched with its author, Kevin Kwan. The blowout success of the film started a cultural groundswell, proving to studios that movies about Asian Americans could put up big numbers. On its heels came such Oscar-winning films as Minari and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Of course, Chu would never take credit for all that. He’s a collectivist.

At the time of this interview, Chu is finishing up edits on the first part of Wicked, which the execs are banking on as a big Thanksgiving hit. He and I go upstairs to the restaurant’s empty banquet hall, away from the clamor of the kitchen. We take our seats under the watchful eyes of nine gold dragons lining the eastern wall. Nine for longevity. Gold for prosperity. East, the direction your most honored guests should face.

Jay R. Dayrit: You do know that one of the signs of a good Chinese restaurant is a little Asian kid doing their homework in the corner, right?

Jon M. Chu: [laughs] I’ve never heard it put like that, but yes, I was that kid.

This place is your origin story.

A hundred percent. This is a house of stories. My mom and dad are constantly telling stories. When people who worked in tech would come in and see me sitting there studying, my parents would tell them stories of how I love making films and that I’m learning to edit. So one of these guys gave me a PowerBook Duo and then eventually a Macintosh Quadra. Someone else gave me editing software with no instructions. I was compelled to figure it out.

Your book is called Viewfinder. Are you more comfortable being behind the camera than taking part in the action?

When you’re the youngest of five, everyone else is speaking over you, but they did stop to listen to the TV. So if I made a little video and they stopped everything to watch, that gave me a sense of purpose and voice. When I had the camera in hand, everyone wanted me around. I could go up to the cool kids at school, anyone on the street. It was my backstage pass. Even in sixth grade, I didn’t have a camera, so I made a fake one out of an empty Kleenex box and a toilet paper tube. It gave me access to sit and talk with people. They thought it was hilarious. Well, I don’t know what they really thought, but I could go anywhere. And even to this day, I feel much more comfortable talking through my movies.

Now everybody has filmmaking tools in their hands, but they’re working with social media’s rules—shooting in portrait mode, sticking with the platforms’ limits on duration and content. How do you feel about that, and future filmmaking and filmmakers?

We never had control over the medium. I didn’t control the aspect ratio of a TV or the size of a movie theater or the sound quality. As a storyteller, you use your creativity to fit the constraints of the canvas and do whatever you can do to break it open. You are saying things with every cut. Those things can be dangerous. They can be inspiring.

Dangerous in what ways?

I know the pressure of posting something on the internet and it goes viral, and then you have to feed the beast. How oppressing that can be. How the comments, if you accept them, become a part of how you think of yourself. It’s a psychological tornado we should be talking about more and guiding young people through. I’m not sure all the adults fully understand those ramifications either.

Your book has sidebars that offer guidance for young filmmakers.

The number one thing is: Make something. You’ve got to make something. You can talk about making something. You can cry about not making something. But if you’re not making something, then you’re not putting anything out there. Start today. Make a mess of it. Learn the lessons. Keep going.

You were inspired by Steve Jobs.

I put the WIRED cover, the one with the crown of thorns around the Apple logo, on my wall in college when Steve Jobs came back, and I said, “Everybody, just watch.”

Jobs had a reputation for being monomaniacal, impatient, and petulant. How do you feel about that leadership style?

Yeah. I’m sure we have very different styles, but that doesn’t take away from what he created. I’ve seen from every introduction—from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone—how the public didn’t believe in that vision at the time. And then watching him push through. It wasn’t about the showiness of the product or about himself. It was always about the solution. There was a purity to that that I admire. I don’t believe human beings are geniuses. We get into situations when things align, and genius comes out of us.

There’s a moment in your book when you’re at USC and you’re at a screening of another student’s short film about a woman’s dating life. At one point she slams the door on an Asian guy who’s interested in her. It’s played off as a joke. That’s a very specific humiliation for a lot of Asian men in the US. For me, that was Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles.

That moment at USC was so impactful, because my parents protected me from all of that. They created a bubble. The restaurant is respected, and they’re leaders in the community. In grade school no one’s making fun of me for being a kid from a Chinese restaurant. I watched a lot of movies, not seeing a lot of Asians, but when there were Asian people, like The Joy Luck Club, we were so excited. We took a minivan on a Sunday to go see it. It felt like it was our family. They were funny. They had depth.

So then at USC, at this prestigious film school, I was enjoying the short film, but then the door opens on this normal-looking Asian guy and everybody laughs. I literally didn’t get the joke. I was like, “Oh, that’s weird. What?” It never hit me that the joke is that Asian men are unattractive and bumbling idiots. To hear everybody laughing was a shocker. So what do they think of me when I walk into a room? It was an awakening.

Thanks to you, we now have Henry Golding in Crazy Rich Asians. And we have other Asian actors like Simu Liu and Steven Yeun appearing in bigger roles. And we have Bowen Yang and Jimmy O. Yang, funny men who are not clowns but comedians in their own right. I know you can’t claim full responsibility, but I do want to thank you for putting hot Asian men onscreen.

My brother, Larry, he’s not very emotional, but when he saw Crazy Rich Asians, the moment where Henry Golding comes out in that white suit and Awkwafina says, “Oh, it’s the Asian bachelor”—Larry started to cry. I talked to him afterward. He said, “You don’t understand the weight of your own self-consciousness, of how you see yourself, until you realize you’ve never seen that on screen.”

Thank God that the newer generation is not going to have the Long Duk Dong experience.

I’m sure there’ll be some. America’s going through a cultural identity crisis. We have to be able to confront each other and not just destroy each other in that confrontation but put stuff into the world that says, “Hey, this is the place where the dream still exists. It just may not be in the way that your parents told you.” To me, that’s the job of future storytellers who are now equipped with all this new technology.

In Hollywood, with the writers’ and actors’ strikes, there’s been a lot of consternation over AI. How do you feel about AI in entertainment?

We are creative beings, and every innovation we thought would take away from our creativity didn’t. AI is different for sure, but it’s a thinking tool. We’re going to have to learn how to use it. We need to fill the pipeline with hundreds of millions of movies, because AI is going to be running off that content, and whoever’s making that content is, purposefully or subconsciously, filling the engines with who we are. And we need people who understand technology, who are young enough and curious enough to learn the ins and outs, to make the right policies.

Chapter 9 in your book is about how your parents met. It’s lovely. It’s written like a screenplay. There’s an ambiguity to it that illustrates the reticence of your parents to talk too much about their past. As a child of immigrants myself, I understand. It’s difficult for our parents to reminisce about the lives they left behind and to think too much about what might have been, because it undermines all the sacrifices they made to get here. We have to pull those stories out of them.

Even when I ask them now about this stuff, I hear different stories. I think they’re still trying to protect us. I also think they’ve blocked out the reality of how hard certain things were. For me, it became compelling to connect the dots, so my kids could have a record of what that was like. I’m raising children now, and I needed to look at my parents as young people becoming adults and not just the untouchable beacon. It might’ve crushed them to give me the flaws. I think the book as a whole is how I resolve my journey, because it’s so full of dead ends and loose ends.

You seem to do that in your movies too—tie things up with a bow, give the audience a satisfying ending. Should we expect the same from Wicked?

I’ve thought a lot about what Wizard of Oz means. It’s the American fairytale, to follow the yellow brick road. There’s someone who’s going to give you your heart’s desire at the end of it, but you have to prove yourself. And yet nicely contained stories don’t actually exist. Life just keeps going. In my work now, I’m trying to almost dissect the idea of happy endings. Especially with Wicked, which is all about how uncomfortable change is for a place like Oz, which is all about being happy. Sometimes the anger that Elphaba brings—the frustration, the sadness—is necessary for new things to grow. Expressing how others have hurt us and how we may have hurt others is the only way through. It felt very personal to everybody on set. Elphaba says the words, “Something has changed within me. Something is not the same.” Those words are the thing that made me realize I have to do this movie now. Part 1 is the choice to rise, and Part 2 is what happens when you stand up. It gets way more complicated.

[As Chu and I are talking, his mother appears in the banquet hall to kiss her son on the forehead. She’s a spry, slender woman with short, gray hair. Chu says, “Hi, Mom! Love you.” She turns to me and says, “Now, he won’t disappear. When you kiss your kids, they don’t disappear.” I choke up. Chu says to his mother, “We’re in the middle of a meeting. I was trying to stay focused here.” She waves off his concern and leaves as quickly as she appeared.]

I love that she came to give you a kiss.

She didn’t fix my hair. That’s good. Or say that I’m fat.

I know, right? To Asian relatives, we’re always fat, even if we’re not. Are you a good cook?

No, I’m terrible.

But you grew up in a restaurant.

When people cook for you, when are you going to learn how to cook? Although, when I do cook I think I could be good if I just focused. I’ll tell my wife, “I think I’m on to something.” She’s like, “No.” I definitely love setting the table and getting the people in and then bringing each dish out and talking about it. But no, I am not a good cook.

Food is like a character in your movies. The hawker market scene in Crazy Rich Asians made me want to go to Singapore. Of course, I love your dance numbers, especially the choreography in In the Heights. The scene when they dance along the side of the building, I mean, come on.

I took tap, but I’m not a great dancer. You would never see me and say, “That guy should keep doing that!” No, but I was friends with great dancers. I know what they’re trying to express. If a B-boy gets down and he starts spinning, don’t spin with him. Let him carry. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a concept, but a lot of times it’ll be driven by the dance.

You don’t write much about taking tap classes in your book.

Because it was just my sister and me with an old woman playing the piano. I was too embarrassed to tap with a bunch of girls. I was 8, 9, or whatever.

I trained as a dancer. I started with ballet, then jazz and modern. I’ve never taken tap though. Will you teach me?

I can teach you how to shuffle.

OK! First I need to hear more about Wicked. Let’s talk about casting. Fans of the Broadway show are so used to seeing Idina Menzel as Elphaba and Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda.

With Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, we cast actors who people knew but didn’t really know. Our instincts were good. We were going to cast all unknowns in Wicked, but I realized after seeing a bunch of auditions and getting so many incoming calls from big stars that these two roles are very, very difficult. You need someone who’s at the top of their game. To hit those soprano notes that Kristin Chenoweth originated—if someone can do that, they’re already known. And acting on top, to bring a sense of reality to these characters. It takes someone who can do both.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were pros.

They were. I held off on meeting Cynthia for a while, until I saw everyone. She’s so iconic, so on her own planet, that I didn’t know if she could play the vulnerable Elphaba, which is what Part 1 of the movie is all about—this person who has dreams and is naive and then gets hurt. I didn’t know if asking her to do that would be rude, so I held off. There were some very, very talented people, but none of them made me think “I’ve never seen that Elphaba.” So I met with Cynthia on Zoom, just to get a vibe. She was youthful and so cool. I saw her eyes twinkle. She agreed to come in, and when she sang Wizard and I, the first three notes, I could feel it in my lungs, the physical frequency. I know that’s weird.

Not weird! Do you often know instantly this is the person?

That didn’t happen with Ari. It’s sort of publicly known that this was her dream. I was resistant. It’s also Ariana Grande. She has this whole other image, and Glinda has to have her own thing. But of course, we had to see her. She came in 20 minutes early. She was good, but she had on all the makeup. So we asked her to come back without makeup. I kind of wanted to see if she was willing to go there, and without question, she was like, “Absolutely!” She came back, again 20 minutes early. I couldn’t even recognize her, but I could tell she had been working on it. I was still resistant though. I mean, she came back five times. We brought in these women who were the top of the top, but at the end of each day, I’d think Ari is still the most interesting. She was just Glinda. She earned it.

You’re editing Wicked in VR?

The Vision Pro allows me to scale. I can work as we normally would as if it’s on a 60-inch monitor. I can pull back as if it’s on the TV. I can make it huge as if it’s in a movie theater. All three points of view make you feel different things. It’s spatial computing. It feels like I’m in a boxing ring with the movie.

You mention in your book that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have sort of taken on the worst characteristics of each other.

Growing up in Silicon Valley was a dream. It was essentially Americana. Boy Scouts and band and being the school mascot. It was about creation and innovation. We’re next to Stanford and NASA’s Ames Research Center. On the weekend, maybe you’d see a solar-powered car. It wasn’t about the flashiness. But now, coming back, I can feel the flashiness. Going to a bar, there’s a different dress code. Back then, nobody cared. People weren’t so laser-focused on money. Maybe because I’m older, I feel it more.

And Hollywood?

Hollywood used to be, for better or for worse, mavericks making art choices. In the ’70s and ’80s, those movies had something social to say. Of course, you have to have balance in the movie business, but there were those big bets. You’re betting on a filmmaker. You’re betting on art. You’re betting on a statement. I went to Hollywood in 2002, when there were still remnants of that, and then I saw conglomerates take over telecommunication companies and make them tech companies. Now it has become about mining data, which is more valuable than oil. You get those numbers by going for the lowest common denominator. It’s about getting eyeballs, not making statements. The incentives are different. Executives are different. How they keep their jobs is different.

Despite that, you’re still pretty enamored by technology?

Oh, I love it. Silicon Valley gave me the tools to be able to go to Hollywood. Innovation and progress never get old.

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