MANILA, Philippines – AIM chats, MySpace Top 8 placements, flip phones, Warped Tour bands, and YouTube skate videos are some of the visual paraphernalia that populate the latest indie hit, Dìdi (弟弟), written and directed by Sean Wang. But beyond serving as an aesthetic motif, these are markers of life in late aughts California that the 30-year-old filmmaker, in his debut feature, attempts to reproduce on screen.
“[These] were things that I think a lot of kids grew up with, but I hadn’t really ever seen them in movies, like shown the way that we use them,” Wang, in a modest dark turquoise shirt, tells me over Zoom. Behind him are a shelf of books, a guitar, a Pokémon stuffed toy, and the poster for his Oscar-nominated short, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, plastered on the wall.
“So it felt like a unique opportunity to try to make an accurate time capsule of what we were all sort of, what we were all like on the internet during that time at least for me, you know, being 13. I don’t know what 25-year-olds are doing on the internet,” he continues.
Dìdi, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and went on to win an audience award and a special jury prize for its ensemble cast and later acquired by Focus Features, centers on a Taiwanese American teenager named Chris (Izaac Wang) in the summer of 2008, as he tries to make sense of his identity on the cusp of high school and amid his sleepy hometown of Fremont in Northern California, where the director himself grew up.
Like many kids of his age, Chris often bickers with his sister (Shirley Chen), gets annoyed by his mother (Joan Chen), learns how to flirt, and finds thrill in blowing up mailboxes with his best pals Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang).
Wang articulates this push and pull of experience, not far from his own, with unbridled tenderness and punk-rebel exactitude. In fact, the main house in the film is actually the director’s family home in the Bay Area just as the playground where Chris kills time is the same one Wang had growing up.
And it’s a story he’s long been wanting to create. “I think it came about from just a love for movies,” he says of the film’s provenance, “like Stand By Me and [The] 400 Blows and Ratcatcher and This Is England and, you know, Water Lilies, just movies about adolescence that I felt like treated adolescence with as much emotional maturity that I think adolescents can be, that it wasn’t pandering to kids, and just wanting to do my version of it and see what I could uncover by diving into something that was sort of more through my perspective.”
This, even as he never imagined himself becoming a film director. “I didn’t even have the language for what filmmaking was until I was maybe 19 or 20,” Wang admits, “but I was making stuff all throughout like middle school and high school and like skateboarding videos. That’s similar to the character. I kind of was a skater.
And that’s kind of how I fell into all of this and just making skate videos with my friends and putting it on YouTube and it kind of just grew from there. I always liked movies, though. I just never thought I could be like a director until much later.”
This sort of do-it-yourself, YouTube-to-filmmaking trajectory of Wang’s career parallels that of his idol, Spike Jonze, also a skater turned filmmaker, that he would later meet and cast as a voice talent in the film.
In an interview with GQ Magazine, Wang recalls his first conversation with Jonze. “We just talked about [the] process and he was like, ‘Dude, if there’s anything I learned in the last 30 years of making stuff, it’s that anything can be anything. A music video can be anything, a commercial can be anything, a feature can be anything.’ I remember going into the edit afterwards like, ‘Guys, anything can be anything! We should try everything!’ We threw so much at the wall, and then in the end we cut all of it.”
It was summer last year when Dìdi, the affectionate term in Mandarin for “little brother,” was shot, within 24 days, a process that Wang describes as both “really fun” and “really stressful.” “I mean, the hardest part of it was, I think time, you know, like any independent film, it’s time [that] costs money and you never have enough money, you never have enough resources, but you try to make the most of what you can and what you have. So yeah, it was always about time.”
In many ways, the film also acts as a coming of age for its actors, especially for its lead, Izaac, considering what the role requires of him. “I felt like we both grew a lot through working together and working on this project,” Wang says of Izaac, who has appeared in other titles like Good Boys (2019) and Raya and the Last Dragon (2021).
“And I don’t want to speak for him, but working with him was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. Because we really found the character together and we were in it together every day. And I really saw him grow and challenge himself as an actor and he really, you know, pushed himself. And I think he delivered an incredible performance,” he adds.
From left: Izaac Wang as Chris Wang, Chang Li Hua as Nai Nai, Joan Chen as Chungsing Wang, and Shirley Chen as Vivian Wang in writer-director Sean Wang’s ‘Dìdi (弟弟).’ Photo courtesy of Focus Features/Talking Fish Pictures.
Of Joan, who imbues her character, Chungsing, with so much emotional weight, fortitude, patience, and grace as a mother also caught in liminality, Wang says, “I think working with [her] was such a gift. She really upped everyone’s game and she was so generous and kind and warm.”
Also part of the film is Wang’s maternal grandmother, Chang Li Hua, who has starred in Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, his documentary short that premiered at last year’s South by Southwest where it won the grand jury prize and audience award. The film was shot at the height of COVID-19 pandemic, when xenophobia and hate towards the Asian community were heightened.
Wang says working on the project with her “was really special.” “I think having her on set made everything feel a little bit more familial and like we were just kind of making a movie with our friends,” he shares. “She would come on set and everybody from my producers to Joan, to the boom op, to the gaffer would be so excited to see her and would make sure she was safe and taken care of. She would dance with the crew in between takes. So it made it all feel like how I wanted it to feel, which was fun and homegrown.”
“Homegrown” is such a fitting word to describe the film in its entirety, not only because of the film’s cardinal point but where Wang takes it and how he compellingly extends inner life and sensoria to various corners of teenhood, motherhood, immigrant realities, and notions of home. At turns erratic and gentle, trippy and earnest, Dìdi affords us a visual vernacular of what it means to love without measure and to carry on with life, despite the inevitability of grief, in its many iterations.
And considering the terrains Wang has mapped in his past films and, by extension, his past lives, past selves, it seems like all of it has been gesturing towards this moment, this debut. “If you look at the last seven years and all the shorts I made, like I started writing this movie seven years ago, so if you smash all the shorts together, you kind of get Dìdi, you know, there’s shorts about my mom and there’s shorts about my grandmothers and there’s shorts about my friends. And so it really does seem like they were all informing one another and they were all coming from the same place,” Wang realizes.
He says further, “I don’t know why I gravitate towards that, but I think anytime you feel something strongly as a filmmaker, you should chase it. So it’s interesting looking back and knowing I wasn’t trying to make like a collection of shorts that all explored that, but I think it’s just kind of where my heart was at. So it just kind of happened that way.”
Now that Dìdi is set to hit theaters, Wang hopes that it won’t be the last of its kind. “I think it’s really important. But the hope is that you just get more, for me at least, more storytellers from those backgrounds to tell stories that are personal and meaningful,” he says. – Rappler.com