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“Everybody Passed on It”: Sean Wang on Dìdi
Izaac Wang and Sean Wang on the set of Dìdi If having your first feature premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is an accomplishment, being nominated for an Academy Award the same week is pretty much unheard of. Nonetheless, that’s what writer-director Sean Wang experienced last January when his coming-of-age narrative feature, Dìdi, premiered to glowing reviews (and a distribution deal with Focus Features) while his nonfiction portrait of his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Still in his 20s, Wang’s career has skyrocketed over the past year, and now Dìdi “younger brother” in Chinese) opens in theaters riding a wave of strong press and audience reactions.
Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American, lives in Fremont, California in 2008 with his mother (Joan Chen!), grandmother, and older sister (Shirley Chen), crushing on girls, growing out of certain friendships, and hoping to get in with local skateboarders who seek a videographer to help film their stunts. The film is somewhat autobiographical: Wang was heavily influenced by the early work of Spike Jonze, grew up in suburban Fremont and made skateboarding videos for online consumption. And yes, Zhang Li Hua, Wang’s grandmother who was the co-subject of his Oscar-nominated documentary short, appears in Dìdi as Chris’s grandmother too.
Ahead of the film’s opening, I spoke with Wang about personal filmmaking, Dìdi’s road to getting financed, recruiting Spike Jonze to lend his voice to the film, and much more. Dìdi is in theaters today.
Filmmaker: There was something you mentioned during a recent Q&A that I found very interesting, about how your filmmaking has allowed you to bring up and ask your family about topics that you may not have been comfortable asking them in other contexts. I was curious about this idea of needing a purpose to ask these questions and the potentially awkward uncomfortableness that may come with it.
Wang: One of the great things about filmmaking as an artform, to me at least, is that it’s an artform driven by questions, right? Any film you make is driven by a question, of your wanting to interrogate a feeling. By the end of making the movie, while you may not necessarily have the answers you’ve been seeking, the process allows for the exploration of the feeling you had and what you stumble upon in the process. In regard to themes of family and, of course, my own family, so much of making something good is forcing yourself to be vulnerable and allowing yourself to “go there” and ask the hard questions, question yourself, and question why things are the way things are, especially in documentary filmmaking, which prior to Dìdi is where I did most of my work. In my day-to-day life [amongst] my friends, I’m a pretty open book and I think I’m trying to be more like that in other parts of my life too. Filmmaking is both a [means of] expression and a tool to help with that. When I make a film, I think I’ve become a better person.
Filmmaker: Would it be right to assume that setting Dìdi in 2008 with a lead character [the age you would have been at that time] was your way of looking more personally inward? [Journalists] are always grappling with trying to identify what’s personal [in a director’s work] versus what’s fictionalized.
Wang: For sure, and when me and my friends reminisce about that time in our lives, we’re typically saying, “Oh my God, wasn’t that crazy? Wasn’t this or that [event] big and loud and funny?” It’s easy to reminisce about the funny stuff. But when I first looked back and began mining through the funny memories I had while also knowing that I wanted to tell a personal story, I was quickly confronted with the notion that, “if I’m going to write a personal story about an Asian-American boyhood that takes place in 2008 (which was a different cultural time than today), I’m inevitably going to be writing a story that confronts the way that shame manifests itself within this young boy’s life.” Whether or not I knew it at the time, that was a defining feeling for me [at that age] and it ultimately became the defining theme of our movie, whether it’s explicitly talked about or just something I [internally] felt. Back then [in my own life], it was deeply felt, but now that I’m in my 20s and have more distance removed from those adolescent years and can look back on those feelings and define them in words and intellectualize and recontextualize them and figure out what they did not just to me but to my friends and hopefully, tangentially, for an entire generation of Asian-American kids, I’m able to look back and dissect those memories a bit more.
Filmmaker: Speaking of recontextualizing ofthings, you’ve said that in using the technology that was available in 2008, you wanted the viewer to view it from the perspective not of nostalgia but of a knowingess of what [these tools meant to us]. For me, a great example of this in the film is hearing a door loudly slam shut whenever somebody logs off AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). It gets a laugh because many of us instantly recall what that sound signifies, even if we’ve memory-holed it in the years since. Even if we’ve forgotten it, it brings some kind of feeling immediately back to us. I’m curious about the ways in which you thought about portraying that accurately while maintaining a knowing eye on the “period-piece nature” of the film that attempts to resist nostalgia.
Wang: It’s not lost on me that, by nature, our movie is going to be inherently nostalgic, but the hope was that it wasn’t just this nostalgic “museum piece”: “Wow, remember the internet?? Remember this website?” To me, that wouldn’t be enough. The hope was that people would get a kick out of what you just said, the sound of a door slamming shut on AIM or the look and feel of someone’s personal MySpace page, and say, “Oh shoot, I forgot about all of that.” But once you get over the novelty of it, to just use these websites and their user interfaces as parts of a story, as we lived (or at least partially lived) online during that time—I felt that none of the movies made during that period that [claimed to] capture adolescence utilized it, or even tried to utilize it. The filmmakers were always trying to work around it. So, for me, it was like, “okay, once people get past the nostalgia-based dopamine hit, then we can just use this [technology] as how it would be used, as a storytelling tool.” Those user interfaces still have meaning in our lives, and while, yes, they remind us of a time that’s now distant, we also associate those interfaces with the friendships that were both forged and broken on the internet. Friendships were made over Facebook Messenger! There’s so much meaning in all of these chatboxes, and it all depends on the context and how you frame it. The hope was that once the viewer gets past the nostalgia of it all, it just becomes part of the characters’ world. We’re not trying to showcase it in a way that is more than what it is, which is, in the world of Chris, a little mundane and just a part of his domestic life. It’s not the internet “with a capital I,” it’s not “we are now in the Internet.” It’s just there, lived in.
Filmmaker: I know you didn’t want to write necessarily an Asian-American story, but rather a story about an Asian-American kid that was true to your version of growing up. When writing scripts, did you ever feel any push and pull in dealing with what other people wanted from you as a writer? Specifically, in the many lab programs this project has gone through over the years, did you have to deal with less than helpful feedback that [threatened] your goal of staying true to your vision?
Wang: No, it wasn’t hard because no one prior to this movie cared about what I had to say. No one was reading [my] scripts and I wasn’t soliciting any material. I think the beautiful thing about the various labs, and the industry getting to read this movie, was that the labs were a special place that were really trying to get at the heart of what I, as a filmmaker, was trying to say. They weren’t trying to push me in any direction other than to go deeper. They were trying to figure out what I was trying to do with the movie and how much they could help me get to the best version of it. Their [line of thinking] was thankfully in opposition to the idea of “hey, while your movie is feeling like X, the industry is really looking for Y, so here’s how you can make it Y.” While I do explore themes of belonging or family or identity in a number of my documentary shorts, and while I do it from the lens of a first gen Asian-American perspective, none of them are trying to do that. It all just comes as a result of me being the person that I am and the films being rather personal films. By telling a story about my friends and I, a la a short documentary called H.A.G.S that the New York Times released, it ended up exploring adolescence through a first generation Asian-American lens, but I didn’t set out to do that. All my friends just happened to be of that intersection of identity, and that was the thing that I was trying to calibrate with Dìdi, which was admittedly a harder experience because you’re the one writing [the screenplay], so it’s a bit more like you’re conjuring things as opposed to taking something and reframing it.
Writing Dìdi, the story [began] steering into trying to make it feel more authentic, but it never felt more authentic. It always felt like we were leaning into some trope that had already been done in some other movie. Anytime I felt like I was [veering in] that direction, I was like, “No, I have to recalibrate whatever my writing brain is and not make it ‘more Asian-American,’ but to just think of how to make it more personal and more honest to whatever my lived experience was, or at least some version of that.” When I did, the script automatically became ‘more Asian-American’ as I was diving more into “I am this, and this is who I am.” Admittedly, that was a harder thing to calibrate, but I never felt like people were trying to sway me in any one direction. It always came from my own sort of personal calibration and the only reason that came about was because no one cared about what I had to write, at least until now.
Filmmaker: You shot the film last summer, 2023?
Wang: Yeah.
Filmmaker: After working on the project for a number of years, what finally led to it being greenlit, of the film become real and knowing that you and your team were ready to go? Was it the casting of Joan Chen?
Wang: Somehow it was a very lucky and fortunate few months and Joan was actually cast after we were already greenlit, so our financing was not contingent on a piece of casting, which I now understand is a very rare occurrence in the industry. Here’s the timeline in a very condensed way: I had been writing and developing the script on my own, with no team, for a minute, but it wasn’t until after I received a [$25,000] SFFILM Rainin Grant in early 2022 for development that I kind of felt like, “This script will probably never be perfect and I’m still going to work on it, but if someone were to give me the money to make this movie with this version of the script, I will make it. I think it’s pretty much [done], or it’s close to done, and I’m ready to show it to people and try to get this made.” That’s when I sent the script to the filmmaker Carlos López Estrada, who was the first person to come on board as a producer. We’d been friends for years at that point, having worked together on a bunch of shorts (I had even worked on his second feature, Summertime), so I sent it to him and asked, “what do you think of this? I want to make it. I think it’s bigger than Summertime but smaller than [López Estrada’s’ first feature] Blindspotting. I’m curious for your thoughts, and if you’re interested, let’s chat and see.” He was like, “Dude, I’m down. I don’t know how I can be helpful, but whatever you need, I’m here for you as a right hand. I’ll be your producer on this. I want to do this with you and help you get it made.” That’s how Carlos came on board and we went out with the script for about a year while I continued to develop it.
Filmmaker: How did that go?
Wang: Everybody passed on it. A lot of people loved it, but everybody passed. They were like, “It’s just too small.” It was all just industry stuff. Then, in 2023, a short I made, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, was accepted into South by Southwest and the script for Dìdi had just gotten into Sundance’s Screenwriters Lab and Screenwriters Intensive, and at that moment we were just like, “Look, I want to shoot this in the summer of 2023.” By that point, we had two other producers join the team, Josh Peters and Valerie Bush, and we set the date. We were like, “We’re shooting July 2023.” At this point it felt like we really had momentum. We were talking to a bunch of people who were excited about it but still had no financing. I can remember back on March 1st of 2023 thinking, “Wow, a lot has to happen in the next week for us to realistically make this movie” and in the span of 24 hours, I get a call from Josh and he said, “Hey, I have good news: we got our first drop in the bucket. This investor wants to invest a little chunk of money into the movie. It’s not enough to make the movie, but it’s the first drop and it’s enough to go and tell people that ‘Hey, someone believes in Sean with their wallet.’”
Immediately after that, I got on a Zoom with this company, Unapologetic Projects, who had received the script, loved it and wanted to meet with me. I remember they came in so prepared and I could tell they loved the movie. But their [concern] was more of “Can this guy pull off the promise of this script?” And I remember I pitched the movie better than I’ve ever pitched it in my life. I’ve never pitched the movie better before or after that meeting. It was like I was possessed by the film gods and this was all just happening on a Zoom meeting. When we were finished, I remember hanging up and thinking, “Damn, I’ve nailed that.” I could not have pitched and sold the movie any better. The next day, we were going to scout [locations] and I got an email from them saying, “We love the movie, we love you and we want to co-finance it.” Then we went straight into an investor meeting, which was a great meeting, and the [investor] told us, “Look…spoiler alert, I want to support the movie. What do you need?” and we told him, “we need X amount of money.” So we went from the movie having nothing [in terms of financing] to obtaining 80% of the budget within 24 hours, then all of a sudden it became extremely real and my producers were like, “Alright, start prepping. You’re shooting the movie this summer. There’s no looking back now.”
Filmmaker: I’m curious about your shooting in a multitude of formats, some of which come via the skateboarding footage in the film. I can only imagine the complexity involved in interweaving the camcorder footage with the footage shot via a more high-end camera and how you’re choosing to cut between those formats. Obviously, the influence of someone like Spike Jonze is [dominant] and then he’s literally namedropped in the film! Not only that, but in the film’s end credits, I see that he provides the voice of the dead squirrel [in a scene involving the lead character’s drug-induced trip].
Wang: Regarding the mixed media format first, I’m just used to it and it’s the language I know! It also felt honest to the time period. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we’re mixing media. Is it going to work?” I kind of knew it was going to work. It’s not just camcorder footage we’re including (we have the camcorder footage, we have the internet, etc.) and I knew it was going to be this hodgepodge of mediums that felt honest to the 2000s. A lot of it is [inspired] by Spike Jonze, as he is the reason I became a filmmaker and the person who set me on my path. Hs work has influenced me throughout my life, as I grew up skating and the type of format [he] used had a lot of texture and feeling baked into it. I got to meet Spike after we shot it and we hit it off, which was really awesome. Throughout [production], I had been the voice of the dead squirrel, as just a placeholder, but then I thought to myself, “I feel like Spike would be a great squirrel.” [laughs] He’s done all of these cameos in different movies, so I reached out and asked if he would do it. We then got together for a recording session and it was awesome…I was directing Spike! He started doing these [high-pitched] squirrel voices, and was like, “How’s that? Is that good?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s good.” [laughs]
Filmmaker: I wanted to ask about the blending of some of the nonfiction elements of the film with the narrative you’ve written. For instance, Chris’s bedroom in the film was your actual childhood bedroom, and, of course, your grandmother appears in the film as Chris’s grandmother. While on set, did you have any out-of-body experiences where those memories of your very real childhood came back while you were directing this film?
Wang: Every once in a while it would happen, but in the moment you’re just trying to get your shots for the day and catch up to the needs of the production. I never had the time to sit back and think, “Whoa, we’re shooting in my childhood bedroom today.” It was really just like, “Aright, we’ve got to go and keep [moving].” Also, shooting in my bedroom was not my first choice, it was just logistically a bit more sound. But yes, I always want to have one foot in documentary and one in narrative. I don’t really consider them different mediums; one informs the other for me. My narrative work is informed by my documentary work, and my documentary work is informed by my narrative work.
Filmmaker: And hopefully your grandmother will continue to be cast in these small, on-screen roles.
Wang: They were trying to get her signed! Agencies have hit us up. She’s gotten offers and people have reached out to ask, “Hey, will your grandma audition [for us]?” And I’ve asked her: “Grandma, are you interested in this thing? It’s over four weeks in New York City.” And now she’s like, “oh, I’ve got to read the script first. I’m not going to do it if it’s a bad script.” [laughs]. I’m like, “OK, grandma.”
Filmmaker: “Attention CAA, she does not do cold reads.”
Wang: No, exactly [laughs]. It’s funny because big casting directors have contacted me about having both my grandmas audition in the future and I’m like, “No, no, they’re mine.”
