Happy 41st Birthday, Jon M. Chu! Born today in 1979 as Jonathan Murray "Jon" Chu, this American screenwriter. producer and film and television director made the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in a modern setting.
Chu's earliest break came as a film school student at USC. This was after writing and directing his twenty-minute 2002 American short film, 'When the Kids Are Away'.
The short eventually won the admiration of Steven Spielberg. Soon enough, Chu was signed on to the William Morris Agency and attached to several high-profile projects.
Chu had stated: "When that happened, the floodgates opened. I was twenty-two years old," of whom was then thirty-eight.
"I was either going to write my own thing, or find another project," Chu recalled. He was in his mid-30s at the time and had directed seven feature films in nine years.
These included 'Step Up 2: The Streets' (2008), 'Step Up 3' (2010), 'Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011), 'G.I. Joe: Retaliation' (2013), 'Justin Bieber's Believe' (2013), 'Jem and the Holograms' (2015), and 'Now You See Me 2' (2016).
Chu's training in dance had an impact on the content of his first films. "It's movement/poetry," he explains. "Movement—and not just dance—communicates what a piece of dialogue could never communicate."
Said Chu, "I was trying to feed this other side of me that I hadn't fed before." Although his parents are Chinese immigrants, Chu was born in the United States and had never been to Beijing or Shanghai.
While Chu's films were hugely profitable for the most part, he began to question his role in the bigger picture. "So I went. Read a ton of scripts. I met with a lot of people. I got a lot of deal offers. Financing, all kinds of crazy things—but nothing felt personal to me.
"What am I actually contributing to movies?" he asked himself. "I love doing these sequels—that's fine. I can basically do whatever at this point. What am I actually changing, here? What should I put my energy towards?"
It all just felt like: 'I don't know what to do with this.' I didn't add anything to those stories— they weren't my stories. I didn't feel compelled. Then my sister emailed me.
'Hey: What about Crazy Rich Asians?' I'd read the novel by Kevin Kwan a couple of years earlier. She knew that and had been keeping after me: 'You should be doing this movie.'"
These reflections took Chu back to China—and his sister's suggestion about Crazy Rich Asians. "When you're the only Asian in the room, the last thing you want to talk about is you being Asian.
For my whole life, I just didn't want to touch it. My parents moved here when they were nineteen or twenty years old. I'm of the first generation born here.
Getting something wrong is like your biggest nightmare. You feel like your whole family is going to be shamed from that."
However, his sister's confidence, his own liking for [Kevin] Kwan's novel, and, ultimately, a world of kindred spirits he discovered on the Internet convinced him there was a worldwide diaspora to be tapped into.
He later asked his agent about the rights to the novel and, by pure coincidence, received a script that day from American film executive Nina Jacobson, American film and television producer Brad Simpson and President of SK Global John Penotti.
"When things like that happen, I'm not sure how superstitious I am," laughed Chu, but he had to conclude: "This is a sign. This is the movie I've been looking for."
'Crazy Rich Asians' was announced in August 2013 after the rights to the book were purchased. Many of the cast members signed on in the spring of 2017, and filming took place from April to June of that year in parts of Malaysia, New York City, and Singapore.
The novel's adaptation by Peter Chiarelli (the film's co-writer) was skewed to traditional romantic comedy.
Chu pitched a fresh take with Malaysian-born American film and television producer and screenwriter Adele Lim, "a Malaysian American who could bring the specificity that I needed, and the female side that I didn't have at all." Lim was also a co-writer on the film.
Chu had wondered about how does one "direct" a writer? What did directing all those sequels, with their prefab characters and franchise expectations, teach him about staying off a writer's toes yet getting what he needed out of them?
"One, I love working with people who are smarter than me, like Adele," explains Chu. "Two, I trust the process.
Working with a writer is freeing. I can have more of a thousand-foot view of the thing, while they bring stuff, the way an actor brings stuff to the table. I love the struggle.
The debates? I've learned to embrace that, more than dread it—they get you to do things you couldn't do alone."
In terms of the leap from handmade student films to handling massive productions, what has been Chu's most demanding, and rewarding, discovery?
"When a studio gives you $150 million to go make a movie," he says, "the hardest part is when to restrain your ability to make that giant explosion happen—make the giant score orchestration happen.
By saying no to some of these things you're actually carving out who you are in the story."
One must also resist the shared enthusiasm of one's collaborators. The sheer kinetic joy of making things happen can be so heady: "Everybody wants to do their best when they have big resources," Chu explained.
"When you have a war scene and you're trying to get the guy from A to B, your explosion guy will be: 'Yeah—a hundred explosions!' And your music guys will be like, 'Yeah—we'll crank a huge orchestration.'
And then your sound effects guy is like: 'Yes—it's going to go crazy, and we'll take it all the way.' Everybody is telling you that their thing is the best? Okay: great, great, great, great, great—but actually?
As a filmmaker, your job is to say: 'No explosions. I just want one violin playing one tone, the whole time.'
Or, 'We can have all those explosions over here, but I want them to clear out so that we have space [to] really hit them at the end.' That is actually storytelling. That took a while for me to learn."
Two years after 'Now You See Me 2', Chu directed the film of which he is best known. This was the 2018 American romance/comedy film 'Crazy Rich Asians'.
The film was based on Singaporean-American novelist and satirical writer Kevin Kwan's bestselling 2013 humor domestic fiction romance novel of the same name.
Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) is happy to accompany her longtime boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), to his best friend's wedding in Singapore.
She's also surprised to learn that Nick's family is extremely wealthy and he's considered one of the country's most eligible bachelors.
Thrust into the spotlight, Rachel must now contend with jealous socialites, quirky relatives and something far, far worse -- Nick's disapproving mother, Eleanor Sung-Young (Michelle Yeoh).
Chu still likes to stress that listening is a key skill for any film director.
Listening to his sister proved life-altering: 'Crazy Rich Asians' has, under his direction, become one of the outstanding critical and box office successes of 2018.
It featured an all-Asian cast, in an all-Asian setting. It's in English, the operative language in Singapore, where it takes place.
The film is the first non-period studio picture in more than twenty-five years to feature an all-Asian cast, and it represents a new chapter in Chu's decade-long career.
Above all, it touts the all-American flash of a romantic romp yet serves as a funny, fish-out-of-water culture clash and a serious hymn to family and working sacrifice.
'Crazy Rich Asians' is the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in a modern setting since Hong Kong–American director, producer, and screenwriter Wayne Wang's ('Smoke') 1993 American drama/adaptation film 'Xǐ Fú Huì' ('The Joy Luck Club').
A major critical and commercial success, 'Crazy Rich Asians' grossed $238.5 million on a budget of $30 million, making it the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the 2010s.
It also received praise for the performances, screenplay and production design. It also received numerous awards.
One critic says: "It deftly girds its glitzy surface with earthier foundations and successfully draws out universal themes.
Ultimately, however, this fizzing cocktail of comedy, romance and culture clashes, proudly represents an Asian-centric entry into that small, joyful club of cinematic game-changers."
Beyond its measurement as the latest watermark for inclusion and diversity in a rapidly changing industry, what the picture represents with greater meaning and urgency to fellow film directors is a creative breakthrough.
This was the one of which Chu had achieved after a decade—mostly under the radar—devoted to painstaking mastery of his craft.
In an interview, Chu addressed a question he is often asked, "Why do all of your films have dance?"
He responded, "I don’t know why. It seems so obvious. But there’s something about the dancers that motivate me the most.
I don’t know if it’s just dance, but I do think that the dancers are amazing artists, and every time I meet a new dancer, that triggers something in my brain, and I’m more creative than I could ever be. When I feel that creativity burst, I go with it."
Chu has been active from 2001–present.
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