Anthem Magazine

Sean Wang is having a “career year.” For one thing, his narrative feature debut, Dìdi, picked up the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. “I feel like I’m in a fairytale,” Wang told the sold-out crowd gathered at the Ray Theater in Park City, Utah in January. What’s more, that moment happened to coincide with his Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject for Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó. The 29-year-old filmmaker is no overnight sensation, mind you. Dìdi was six years in the making.

Dìdi is the story of Taiwanese American teenager Chris (Izaac Wang). It’s the summer of 2008 in Fremont, California—the time of Livestrong bracelets and click-wheel iPods. Chris is adrift in his family: his mostly absent father is away on business, his mother (Joan Chen) is a world away from his understanding, and his sister is college bound, which to him might as well be the ends of the earth. Stranded between middle and high school, he’s also a familiar type of lost between friends and crushes, hampered by a nascent sense of shame and embarrassment at his own unique identity.

As the shared last name between Wang and his subject suggests, Dìdi is semi-autobiographical and Chris is the filmmaker’s on-screen proxy. Like Wang, Chris is a Fremont-raised son of Taiwanese immigrants and wields a budding interest in film that manifests in crudely made YouTube prank videos. With Dìdi, Wang pushes beyond his nonfiction canon to explore a litany of interrelated themes: intergenerational bonding, the untenable expectations thrust upon first-generation children of immigrants, the concept of home, and the truths one must leave behind in order to assimilate.

Dìdi opens in select theaters on July 26 and expands nationwide on August 16.

Hi, Sean. So we finally get to meet.

What’s up, Kee?

Listen—I don’t think I need to ask how you’ve been doing. You’ve been on a ride with Dìdi.

[laughs] It’s been cool, man.

Every time I look on social media, you’re notching a new milestone, there’s another cool screening, or you’ve put together a potluck and a small village shows up in support, basically.

It’s been really, really special. We wanted this movie to feel community-driven. We wanted to keep it indie and engage with the communities it’s a part of. The fact that we made an Instagram post—“Show up and bring a dish”—and then have 500 people show up, we’re like, “Cool, alright.”

Is rallying together a community and maintaining this homegrown, grassroots dimension to the project, both magnetic and approachable, something you envisioned doing 7 years ago?

In a way… I mean, it was always the hope that this movie didn’t feel like a giant Hollywood production. It was always the hope there would be a beating heart underneath that is resonating with people. From the beginning, the hope was that the movie doesn’t only feel fresh and unique—that it’d be about my real family coming together with the film family I’ve gathered around me who I make stuff with. That was by design. Then there is also the larger community of independent filmmakers I’m a part of and that our crew is a part of. So I think we always wanted to keep one foot in that world ‘cause I do think this movie wears its heart on its sleeve. It has a scrappy nature to it. We didn’t want it to feel overly polished. We wanted it to feel a little rough around the edges.

Mobilizing an audience is no small feat, and I think authenticity has such a huge role to play. Realness. I think authenticity is one of the most valuable currencies we have left. Are there anxieties in telling such personal stories in your work or does that come naturally to you?

I don’t feel them, and I don’t know why. [laughs] Really, I think I’ve kind of learned to keep my life and my filmmaker brain separate. When something ticks in the former about the latter, it feels like a magnet. I think my short film called 3,000 Miles started it all. That short was about my first year living in New York City, as chronicled by the voicemails my mom left me from back home. It’s very wholesome and sweet and a love letter to my mom. That started me on this theme of family in my shorts, and it was 3,000 Miles that really encouraged and inspired me to stop looking outward about what to make and start looking inward. It was about asking myself, “What’s buzzing inside of me? What’s keeping me up at night? What am I excited about?” And when I started looking inward, all of my shorts happened to be about family. Every family is complicated and a little turbulent so that would activate my filmmaker brain. There’s so much emotion there. There’s a lot to mine for stories. So the question becomes, “How do we translate that into a film? Can it work?” Anytime I feel strongly about something in my personal life, I’m wondering how to best translate that emotion into something an audience could kind of wrap their head around.

It’s that whole thing about, “If I’m feeling this way, there’s a good chance that other people feel this way, too.” And Dìdi is for absolutely everyone. Yet, there are also nuances specific to an intersectional identity we don’t get to see as often on screen. I felt so seen by Dìdi because there’s this overlap in our Venn diagram, too, to the point where I’m like, “Sean, are you me?” I went to middle and high school in the Bay Area—in Lafayette, which is an hour out from Fremont. I went to USC film school. I have a sister 4 years older than me. My mom is an artist, and the furthest thing from a tiger mom. My dad was largely absent in my teenage years because he was working in Korea. Maybe I could’ve used this film at 13. Who knows?

Wow, man. For sure. Yeah, I don’t know… People sometimes say that a movie would’ve saved them and I don’t know if it’s like that for me. Had I seen this movie when I was a 13-year-old boy, maybe that would’ve done wonders for me. Maybe it would’ve helped me feel seen in a way where I think you feel less lonely. It’s the way you feel less alone in the world when someone else gets it.

For example, this concept of telling your friends you’re half-Asian because that might be more desirable or palatable is so heartbreaking, relatable, and specific to our journey. It’s one of the many shames explored in the film. Does Dìdi hold therapeutic properties for you?

Almost too much. [laugh] Really, I should’ve just gone to therapy instead. There were so many things about this movie that was about me entering my 20s and looking back at my childhood being like, “Hmm, that really fucked me up in a way I didn’t even know at the time.” People would say things to me like, “You’re the whitest Asian I know. You’re the coolest Asian. You’re the cutest Asian.” With distance, you understand that these were backhanded. I talk to friends about it now and they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, when I was young, I remember people would say things to me like, ‘I don’t even see you as Asian.’” And that was supposed to be a compliment, right? When you’re young, you take it as a compliment. It messes with the way you see yourself, and I don’t think you even know it at that age. You just don’t have the vocabulary for it. So the writing of the script started from a place of, “Let’s think back to how crazy that time was.” And once I started thinking about it, it triggered a lot of things. Then you have perspective. You have distance. You can be like, “Let’s unpack that a little more and see how everything fits in a narrative perspective.” So much of the movie is me trying to showcase things as they were, but watching it with 2024 eyes going, “Ohh, we had to unlearn that. We had to learn from that. I’m still learning from that thing Chris is processing and having trouble with, which will stick with him for the next 10 years.”

So it sounds like there were significant breakthroughs in the 6 years that you were chipping away at this story, and Chris is for sure your on-screen proxy. It might not be a one-to-one portrayal, but it’s very much semi-autobiographical. And now I’m remembering this one interview where a journo asked if you ever thought to make Chris more likable. Considering what you had set out to do—telling your story—I find that line of inquiry kind of ridiculous.

[laughs] I have no comment on that.

I’m curious about your ethos behind navigating between reality and fiction. You cast your maternal grandmother to play Chris’ paternal grandmother. Joan Chen’s paintings are your mom’s actual paintings in the film. When I found out that you filmed in your childhood bedroom, I figured that’s what you always wanted. It’s only later that I learned you didn’t really want to do that and it was a practical decision to have a standing set. So, given your full embrace of so many other nonfictional ingredients, why not film in your old bedroom?

That’s a good question. You know, I do think sometimes that those two worlds have a way of bleeding into one another even if you don’t want them to—when you’re making something that’s so close to home, literally and figuratively. For me, in the writing process, there was a time when all of this was truly autobiographical. I got that out onto the page first, where everything I wanted to say was there. Then it becomes about where we take those pieces. Now it’s like, “That’s not my mom. That’s not my sister. That’s not me. These are characters.” At that point, I also know what the story’s themes are. It’s about shame and love and pride so everything has to point back to those themes and you start moving around the pieces. You start changing things. By the time we were shooting, it was no longer a documentary about my life. So it’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna shoot in my childhood bedroom, we’re gonna cast my grandma, and we’re gonna do all of these things that are so autobiographical, but Chris is different from me. Vivian isn’t my sister.” Obviously, there are shades of everyone from my life in these characters, but really, by the time I got to directing the movie, I was working from a script. It’s an interesting balance. Intuitively, reality and fiction get folded up together in this kind of way when it’s both objective and personal. That’s the process.

That bedroom evokes such a sense of time and place. I understand it was left untouched in some ways so it’s a direct window into you. At that time, you were also entrenched in the online space like any normal teenager, except you also understood how to create content and disseminate them. I’m wondering at what point you graduated from thinking about creation in that context and on to thinking about it as a career. I mean, where is 2008 in relation to your filmmaking journey? Is it the starting point where you’re making skateboarding videos for yourself and your friends out of pure joy, or do you place that marker someplace else?

I guess you could consider that the start of my journey. Honestly, I just didn’t have the words for it back then. I wasn’t a 13-year-old making skateboarding videos going, “I want to become a filmmaker.” I was thinking, “This is fun. I could spend 18 hours a day editing.” Time would fly. Then I made short docs and tried different things, and it wasn’t until I was maybe 19 that I could articulate to myself I wanted to become a filmmaker, whatever that meant. I didn’t know what my place in the industry would be, or how what I was doing was filmmaking or could translate to that.

I’m guessing you had more clarity than ever before when you applied to USC film school.

Kind of… By the time I graduated high school, I had the bug, but I didn’t know that the stuff I loved—shooting, cameras, and photography—was filmmaking. I didn’t have the best grades in high school so I was asking myself, “Do I wanna go down the four-year path in college to study something I have no interest in? I don’t know that I would do well doing something I’m supposed to be doing.” And even going down this other path, I went to community college for 2 years, hoping to transfer to film school, because I thought that’s what you do to be a filmmaker. I didn’t know what being a filmmaker was or meant because no one tells you about commercial filmmaking or how to make money. I had really thought you either become Spielberg or make minimum wage. [laughs] There’s so many ways to make money as a filmmaker now. This is how I felt: “I like this enough to figure it out. And I don’t think I’m bad at this.”

Is that where Spike Jonze comes into play—connecting skateboarding and filmmaking?

Yeah, for sure. There’s been a lot of examples in the skater-to-filmmaker pipeline. But Spike was the first one for me. He made some of the seminal skate videos of the ‘90s and 2000s. His company, Girl [Skateboards], was so much a part of that. Those videos really, really, really shaped me. I loved ‘em. That’s how I understood Spike. I knew him as a skater. I knew him as a skate-video guy. Then I think it was in the ninth grade when Where the Wild Things Are came out. I’m pretty sure that was in 2009. I remember his company was doing a line of boards branded to that film. That was weird to me. I thought that was a random collaboration. I thought they were collaborating with Urban Outfitters. [laughs] And then it dawned on me: “Ohh, Spike directed the movie.” It was one of those things: “This does not compute.” That really opened my eyes, seeing somebody attached to both no-budget skate videos and a proper studio movie. That’s when I went down this rabbit hole where I’m like, “He also made these Charlie Kauffman movies, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich.” Again, I don’t think I could’ve articulated any of this at 14 years old. Still, I was like, “If he could do it, I could do it,” because I knew him as a skater first. He wasn’t a director who happens to skate. I saw him as a skater who directed a hundred million dollar movie.

I also get your appreciation for people like Mike Mills. There’s obviously the coming-of-age aspect to it, but also the fact that he likes to incorporate graphic design and photography, in which film becomes this open canvas. I’ve now come to kind of associate you with these guys.

Wow. Thanks, man.

From a visual standpoint, the thing that sets Dìdi apart is the period-specific desktop screens and programs you recreated from scratch. That must’ve been tedious work. It paid off.

Tedious work for the team. [laughs] I wasn’t the one hand-tracing everything. We really went to great lengths to recreate every asset from scratch so that it could be blown up on a big theater screen. You can pinch in and it’s still high quality. It doesn’t ever feel like screen grabs. That was always baked into the movie’s DNA. I was trying to showcase the internet of that time in a way that I felt like it hadn’t really been seen before. I was trying to make it a part of that world, and not in a textural way like, “Remember the internet?” It was something felt deeply by the character.

As painstaking as that was to recreate, I just imagine that recreating past tech is far less scarier than trying to predict future tech in film because we’re inevitably going to come up on a true version of that reality. There’s room for impending ridicule, and a point at which your film will probably get dated and is no longer timeless. But then again, maybe not for you. Maybe you will feel confident and would have a good handle on that. You did work at Google.

Maybe… [laughs] I do wanna do something that takes place in the future.

Do you? In the case of Dìdi, you’ve talked about “reverse engineering” to make a movie at a reasonable budget, and a movie that makes sense for where you’re at in your career. My guess is that you have tons of other ideas. Are there certainties for what’s coming next? Is it important to direct your own scripts? Do you want to scale up a lot? Fiction of nonfiction?

I’d say no certainties. I’m just following things I’m feeling excited about. I do have a next feature I’m currently writing, but I’m also open to being surprised. For the first time in my life, people are sending me scripts so I’m seeing if there’s anything that clicks. Again, I’m always looking inward: “What do I want to do? What’s something I want to say or make that isn’t out there already?”

It’s always interesting to see how the industry perceives you, especially when you strike gold with a debut. You can gauge their perception in the scripts that get sent and in the offers that are made, don’t you think? So what have studios sent you? Are they coming-of-age stories?

Surprisingly, no. It’s been pretty varied.

That’s a great sign.

Yeah, totally. I really thought I was gonna get a lot of kids stuff. Some of the stuff I’ve been getting have been interesting, for sure. I haven’t read a lot of them yet, though. I haven’t found the time.

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It has been a total whirlwind for you, and I actually do want to ask you how you are feeling.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this idea that Dìdi really lived with me throughout my 20s. I started writing it when I was 22. I’m 29 now. The movie comes out on Friday, and a month and a half later, I will turn 30. With everything you make, you have the period of making them and then the period of reflecting once they’re out in the world. I remember the person I was when I was making Dìdi. I remember my friends I was hanging out with. I remember who I was dating at the time. That memory spans almost an entire decade. So with this movie coming out, it’s like I’m really putting an end to all of that—a very defining chapter of my life. I think I’m both excited and nervous to move on to whatever the next chapter of my life will look like.

As you complete your journey with the film, it’s ushering in new ones for fresh audiences. And before we part ways, I want to add that, even when I’m not connecting with the film in the specific way that I see myself in you, Dìdi is a wonderful addition to the call-your-mom canon. Because this film is so fresh in my memory, I noticed that I’ve been extra nice to my mom all week. I know that doesn’t make me sound great. That is the true gift of any film.

[laughs] Thanks, man. I appreciate that.