What I love about the term “all-American” is that in today’s America, what you imagine an all-American to be could be very different from what I imagine it to be, and yet both can exist under the same umbrella. It was the word that stood out to me after speaking with Jon M. Chu about his most recent film Wicked, currently nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Cynthia Erivo, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana Grande. Chu, having just come off of a win for Best Director at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, has had a long career of directing not only musicals and dance films but also big-budget films that all seem to encompass some aspect of the American dream. From his major hit Crazy Rich Asians to his feature debut Step Up 2: The Streets, Chu is constantly redefining the idea of being American through his director’s eye and the camera lens. And despite the criticism and naysayers, it’s Chu’s ability to evolve and change and move forward that’s given us hits like In the Heights and Wicked. With a Broadway version of Crazy Rich Asians — still no word on a sequel film from Chu — and the film adaptation of Britney Spears’ biography The Woman in Me in his future, we sat down with him to discuss his career’s highlights, the success of Wicked, and the yellow brick road he walked on to make it there.
Growing up the youngest of five kids in the Bay Area, Chu’s earliest memories are of taking pictures. It wasn’t until his mom made him carry a video camera for the family vacation that things changed for him. “I remember the shift of how the world looked to me in the lens. I was invited into spaces more. People were so happy to see me,” Chu explains, sitting across from me in a Zoom meeting. “I remember feeling like it was sort of a passport into people’s lives, and my observations were on the record,” he continues. “I remember editing it for the first time from this little mixer that I got in Sharper Image and showing my parents what I made with some oldies music. Seeing their reactions to it really changed me, and really felt like I had discovered a pencil and a paper, and I got hooked. It was something that I felt like I could speak through.”
Although he loved theater and was attracted to the creative arts, it was the camera and editing that gave him a different and unique voice from everything else. Drawing from his childhood, Chu recalls how the first film that affected him was Steven Spielberg’s E.T. “Watching that blew my mind because it didn’t seem real to me that you could have kids ride a bike and have it fly in the air, that you could have such a beautiful relationship between a kid and an alien that I felt so strongly for, and of course, at the end, as the spaceship flies off, I just felt like I was swept away into another world. It had a profound effect on me — the John Williams score, the editing, the cinematography. It felt like what a book felt like, if that makes sense.”
Of course, we all know what it’s like to be swept away by a story, especially a film. To want to talk about the movie immediately after leaving the theater, to imagine yourself as a part of its narrative, to play with the toys and make your own stories — that is what is unique for Chu about film. “It still stays with me even to this day, thinking about how I watch movies and what I want to make in my films about sweeping people away. It’s beautiful. We have this medium that actually forces you to put down your phone and give something space.”
Chu is no stranger to musicals. In fact, out of the eight feature films and two documentaries he’s made, seven of them directly feature music as a core part of the film. Whether it’s a musical or a dance movie, the guy has made a bit of a niche for himself. Growing up, Chu remembers going to San Francisco on the weekends to see different shows, whether it was ballet, opera, or musicals. He cites influences like Michael Jackson during his “Black or White” era and movies like The Sound of Music, Singin’ in the Rain, and Little Shop of Horrors. Chu says these elements created a romantic view of the world, adding, “That romanticism is very attractive. Painting that your life could be like that, your love could feel like that, that anger could feel like that, to me, was something that I held onto.”
And Chu paints that sort of romanticism in all aspects of his life. He looks back at his parents’ restaurant — Chef Chu’s in Los Altos, California, for the curious — and calls it a house of stories. “My dad and my mom were constantly hosting people and telling them the stories of us, of our lives, even if it was a heightened version of our lives,” Chu explains with a smile on his face, recalling stories of his parents bragging about him starring in Oliver. “Then we would hear their stories about their lives,” Chu continues. “Being surrounded by that was storytelling at all times. There was a lot of creativity around a Chinese restaurant, even though it doesn’t necessarily seem like that. Even the pictures on the wall of the different stars that came into the restaurant over the years. They were enamored by American culture, by America, by Hollywood, by stars, and I think that just seeped into what this magical place could be.”
They were enamored by American culture… and I think that just seeped into what this magical place could be. Growing up in my own parents’ Chinese restaurant, it was easy to relate to Chu. The stories that can come out of just one small gathering space could fuel a creative person’s inspiration for a lifetime. Though, I was curious how he managed to convince his parents that filmmaking was the right avenue for him. It’s no secret that immigrant parents, especially Asian parents, want their kids to be doctors, lawyers, and engineers. They normally don’t want them to be artists. Chu says being the youngest of five helped, but that didn’t necessarily lessen the pressure he was facing. “Once they got past that,” Chu explains about the novelty of studying film, “They were like, ‘Well, then you have to be the best, and you have to study it.’ My mom bought me piles of books on filmmaking, and they said, ‘You have to study it.’ So, there was that pressure in a different way. I didn’t talk to them after this weekend, but I’m sure they were like, ‘Why would he only get an A CinemaScore and not an A+?’ That’s definitely still around.”
For Chu, being a director means focusing on storytelling, not just one aspect of it, but involving all corners of filmmaking. “What we’re learning is how to tap into who we are to tell a perspective of a story, whether that is through sound or through costumes or through music or through camera, you have to keep your antennas up and find the road that is best for you in your storytelling,” Chu explains, pointing out that the change in the medium of film has changed the role of a director immensely. “The fact is, you’re becoming a storyteller,” he emphasizes. “Directing is a very specific job. It is part politics, part you’re a therapist, part you’ve just got to stay focused and keep the ship moving, and also do the storytelling and do the promotions and try to figure out how to raise money. So, it’s a lot of different things that aren’t necessarily even that creative, although they are all storytelling.”
And that idea of keeping your antennas up certainly did reflect early in his career when he first started. Looking back, Chu first made a splash on the scene thanks to his short film When the Kids Are Away. Spielberg saw the film and had a meeting with him that he admits is a moment that “sets you off on a trajectory that gets you into the business.” Thanks to the nod from Spielberg, he was attached to multiple films with different studios at just 23, “It felt like I’d won the lottery,” Chu remembers. But despite the furor over his popularity, he points out that, “making a movie is very different than developing a movie,” and that meant there was a lull of about five years when nothing was being made.
Then comes Step Up 2: The Streets — a direct-to-DVD sequel to the smash hit. But not one that included the leads of the original Step Up film. Conflicted about the offer, Chu recalls a story he’s told often where he called his mom, saying he wasn’t interested in the sequel, especially after the nod from Spielberg. But it was his mother’s response that grounded the filmmaker: “Well, when did you become a snob?” she asked, adding that if “you’re a true storyteller, you should be able to tell a story in any way; you should be telling a story around a campfire.” It was the kick in the butt he needed to get involved. In his film, he brought in new dancers, going around the world to meet performers, including Asian American dance crews like the Jabbawockeez, who make a cameo in the film. Committing to the film allowed him to overcome his fears. “The fear of being pigeonholed or the fear of what people might think about, that’s all bullshit. If you’re in this for the long haul, not just a one-off movie, then you’re on a journey, and you’ve got to start somewhere, and then you can build where and how you go,” he says. That’s how he viewed every one of his projects; there was always something valuable to take away.
In Step Up 3D, it was about learning 3D and working with dancers again; in his Justin Bieber documentaries, it was about the singer’s road to fame; in Now You See Me 2, it was the confidence of working with such a star-studded cast. “During all those times, it was basically my grad school. I got to learn how to maneuver the levers of not just independent movies; these are studio movies. I got to understand the giant machine, who to listen to, who not to listen to, and mistakes that could be made on these projects that weren’t the highest stakes. I feel very lucky now that the business kept me around long enough to learn all the things I needed to learn because I don’t think you can just learn that on one movie.”
Each project became a stepping stone to the next, no matter how small or insignificant they seemed. “Every movie I’ve done, as different as they are, has been a journal entry for me to learn and to dive into a world,” Chu explains, reminiscing on his earlier films. “I’m going to be around for a long time, so I’ll go on my journey, and then everyone will catch up with me when they find it and figure it out.” And we did catch up and figure it out because, in 2018, Chu made his biggest splash with his mega box office hit Crazy Rich Asians. Based on the novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan, the $30 million film ended up making nearly 10 times that amount at the box office and not only became a smash hit but launched several Asian and Asian American actors into the mainstream. It is credited as the movie that brought Ke Huy Quan out of retirement and to later star in Everything Everywhere All at Once (which later earned both Quan and the film multiple Oscar wins). For Chu, who was finishing up Now You See Me 2 and had gained the confidence he needed from that experience, this was a time of identity crisis. Was he taking the safe route with his movie choices? Or was he challenging himself? “I told my team at that time, I was like, ‘Hey guys, I want to clear my whole slate. I’m not doing G.I. Joe 3. I’m not doing Now You See Me 3. I am going to figure out my own voice, and I’m ready for that. So, I might not make money for you for a few years, but I just need you guys to know I have to do this.’
Like many Asian Americans and his own lead Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), there will always be a bit of an identity crisis. I feel that myself as an Asian American and I can see that Chu understood this in the way that he presented Rachel to Singapore. “The thing that I was most scared about was my cultural identity crisis, that identifying myself as an Asian American would put me into a thing where, ‘Am I only going to get Asian-American scripts? What is the community going to think about what I have to say about being Asian-American, which may not be accepted by other Asian Americans?’ I know what it feels like because I was a very Americanized kid, and I know what it feels like and the judgment you get when you declare anything about your identity. It’s just a really sticky subject, but I knew that I had to do it,” Chu says, echoing my exact thoughts on the subject. Being Asian and being Asian American is not the same thing, and it takes going to Asia for an Asian American to understand that and to know how vast the cultural divide is.
“The way in when I read Crazy Rich Asians was Rachel Chu,” he explains. “I totally understood, like what you said, what it felt like to go to Asia and think you are now part of something and be like, ‘Oh, I’m not part of this at all.’ I just thought that was so relatable, and I knew I could do it in a delicious package and bring an audience to Singapore, to a place that they had never been. There were just a lot of touchpoints to me wrapped in this vehicle that I think, whether you’re Asian or not, could get wrapped into. I also loved this idea that our vehicle as an American is through an Asian American, so then you would root for her going to Asia, but you would identify with her first and foremost. I just loved that that’s what we were going to do for our audience.”
We had the power of the movie to put something out into a theater, not streaming, that would declare that this was something worthy of people’s time. And while Chu humbly says that they didn’t think anyone would watch the film, “the fact that people did, and it became this phenomenon, was the most fulfilling of any movie [he’d] ever gone through up to that point, that’s for sure.” Citing conversations like #OscarsSoWhite and #StarringJohnCho as part of the reason why he chose to do Crazy Rich Asians, Chu also was looking at the new up-and-coming Asian American creators on YouTube and in new media. He says it felt like mainstream media was not aware of this growing group of people, “but it is here, and it’s in front of me, and so I’m going to make it something.” Thanks to the support of the Asian American community, he admits “we had the power of the movie to put something out into a theater, not streaming, that would declare that this was something worthy of people’s time, whether you’re Asian or not, and that was exciting.” The first film grossed $240 million worldwide.
While In the Heights is likely the musical you think of if I ask you what is Jon M. Chu’s first musical film, the reality is it’s actually the 2015 film Jem and the Holograms. While Jem was not a financial success, the project did solidify Chu’s team, including his cinematographer, Alice Brooks, and his choreographer, Chris Scott. For Jem, which was working on a $5 million budget and was filmed in under three weeks, the lessons learned from filming that and his web series, The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers directly contributed to the success of In the Heights. “Going into Washington Heights, we knew we weren’t going to build sets — we didn’t have the money to build sets — that we had to run and gun on the streets of Washington Heights. I needed a crew that could move and shift quickly, that I was really close with, and that would understand what kind of style we’re bringing to this, and that was Alice Brooks and Chris Scott. Now I had Myron Kerstein, our editor, who I’d met on Crazy Rich Asians. So we got to make this. To us, it was La La Land in New York,” Chu says, mentioning the team that would then go on to work with him on Wicked.
To us, it was La La Land in New York. In the Heights would help Chu solidify how he wanted to approach musicals and how he wanted to tell the story on film rather than in front of a live audience. “Musicals, to me, don’t feel like a layer of performance on top of a story. It feels so organically a part of it that it emerges from the words of the dialogue. To me and to Alice and to Chris and to Myron, we already had a concept of, like, ‘Okay, it can’t feel like a performance,’ even though we want a performance level of wonder, especially when you’re talking about dreams. But our transitions in and out have to feel so a part of our story that you almost have to forget that you’re in a musical, and you’re inside of a full-on musical number by the time you realize it.”
Although COVID and its subsequent lockdown affected the release of the Warner Bros. film, In the Heights was ultimately like the first taste of what audiences could expect from Wicked in the future. Surprisingly, another influential film in Chu’s repertoire is his take on the G.I. Joe sequel. Not only did G.I. Joe: Retaliation offer him a chance to use visual effects, working with the world-renowned ILM studio that was founded by George Lucas, but it offered him a direct look at just how much was involved in a big-budget movie. “There’s a lot to balance,” Chu confesses. “Everyone’s offering you 120% of what they’re giving you. The score is 120% more than maybe it should be, the production design is huge, the VFX are huge, [and] the action pieces are huge. I didn’t know quite how to say no to those toys or those things, and I think I got a little bit overwhelmed. I still love the movie, but I definitely felt underwater a lot of the time.”
“Once you go through it, you realize that your voice actually has to come through the saying no, that the carving of the marble comes in your restraint, not in the exercise of your ability to do anything, really, at that point. So, I learned a lot of things through that, mistakes and victories, that allowed me to do something like Wicked, something like G.I. Joe.” Chu cites a deep passion and love for the franchise, but he recognizes his flaws when it came to directing the film, “I just wasn’t necessarily ready — ready to take it and make it my own yet.” And if Chu was a fan of G.I. Joe, then he was a superfan of the musical Wicked. “I’ve been waiting for this movie for 20 years, too. I was waiting for which filmmaker was going to make it — I didn’t think I would get chosen to do it,” he admits. However, that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a vision for the film. Chu went to the performance of Wicked back when it was showing for the first time in San Francisco, 22 years ago, before it got its official Broadway debut.
“I had no context before I saw Idina [Menzel] and Kristin [Chenoweth] performing for the first time in San Francisco, and so I had the most pure intake. I’ll never forget those moments that swept me away, those moments that I was in awe, the moments I thought were so clever of integrating The Wizard of Oz with the story, or the bubble coming in, or ‘Defying Gravity.’ I could protect that side of the whole movie that we were developing because I knew the parts that spoke to me as a first-time viewer.”
As a result, every scene and every line was analyzed. There were the technical aspects that needed to be adjusted for a movie rather than a live theater audience, plot lines that needed to be adjusted, and technicalities that needed refining. Dots need to be connected. But let’s face it: Chu is not the only Wicked fan in the world, and everyone has an opinion about the production. Alongside stars Grande and Erivo, there was also producer Marc Platt, director of the original musical Stephen Schwartz, and Wicked book author Winnie Holzman — all of whom had their opinions about certain lines and moments from the musical. “There were a lot of protective layers, and what the trick was, was to live in our version of Wicked long enough to allow them to let go of the past and start to see what this Elphaba and Glinda needed in the story to build that relationship,” he explains.
One of those protective layers came with the casting of Elphaba and Galinda. Any musical fan before the movie came out might have had a hard time imagining someone other than Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth in those roles. But as Chu points out, “half the job of a director is to survive the naysayers because they’re not in the room when we see people. If you could just cast things off of a dream list, life would be way easier, but a director actually has to see them in the room. ‘Does this actually make sense? Yes, on paper, but in person, are they evoking something new? Are they giving? Are they making me curious? Are they making me interested in what they’re doing?'” When Cynthia does that, I mean, there’s no other movie you’re making except for that movie, and then you’ve got to follow it. For Grande and Erivo — who were hired separately rather than together, Chu emphasizes — it was the way they presented the well-known story that captivated him the most. “Every time I saw it, I was like, ‘I know Wicked, and this is Wicked. Those are the words, but how they’re doing it [like] I’ve never seen before.'” He admits when Erivo sang “The Wizard and I” or even “Defying Gravity,” that something really “changed” in him.
“Something is not the same,” he exclaims about the initial sentiment. “I’ve never felt that. That she’s not just declaring it, that she’s actually torn because she doesn’t want to change, but she has to change because it’s such a momentous moment in her heart that she has to leave her friend and leave her dreams, but she has no other choice. When Cynthia does that, I mean, there’s no other movie you’re making except for that movie, and then you’ve got to follow it.” It’s clear that Erivo and Grande were deeply connected to the project, as Chu points out their tearful press tour, and that bond is something you can feel in the film. The dedication and love put into it not only by the actors but by the crew working behind the camera and the creatives reimagining the story is clear on the screen. “We were in it,” Chu says. “We connected so closely to their own wounds, and we were all changing, especially after COVID, coming back out in an unsure world. We were unsure of ourselves already, so now, we’re building back up. That is a process that we were going through while making the movie. The fact that audiences are relating to that, which I never knew that they really would see all that detail, means the world to us because we had it on our backs the whole time.”
With Wicked going around the awards circuit, fans have their eyes not only on the Academy Awards but also on the second part of the film, Wicked: For Good. I’m curious what the biggest struggle is for him moving forward to part two, and Chu seems relatively unbothered. “What I’ve realized is worrying or stressing about worry is misused imagination, that artists often worry because we have a huge imagination. We’re going to picture every scenario, and it’s not going to be great. When you’re worrying about that, then you’re not focusing on the creation. We had to redirect that imagination to creation. That’s what we would do every day,” he says. And it seems almost as if Chu feels light about the road ahead as if he’s faced off against the worst of it and, with that strong team behind him, ready to take on the world.
“We had to build it together. I was looking for people who, from our production designer to Paul [Tazewell], our costume designer, to hair and makeup, to the actors, we were jumping out of a plane. I had to get the best people that I knew who could build [the] story with the medium that they were in so that we could land this thing with a parachute that would land softly,” Chu explains, saying that the worries and fears were too overwhelming to consider. Could they save the musical movie? Could they ruin Grande’s career? What about Erivo’s? Or Michelle Yeoh’s? There was a major responsibility to making sure everything was done right.
“We were in it. We jumped out of the fucking plane, and we had to focus every day on doing a couple of things great so hopefully the collection of it is something great and actually truthful because we knew the only way out was through the truth,” he says. “That’s what the whole show’s about: truth in this relationship, truth in what you do when you know the truth, and how reflective could that be about what we’re going through right now? All of it felt urgent.”
What I’ve realized is worrying or stressing about worry is misused imagination, that artists often worry because we have a huge imagination. It’s not just about embracing the past, but the present and the future. Wicked looks very different from the Broadway musical and the original Wizard of Oz and yet the familiar story thrives in its new iteration. “I love that we have the diversity in Wicked, but it’s not the thing about Wicked. It’s just normalized. If we’re making a timeless tale, it’s not just movements of classic dance that you have to take years and years of ballet in Russia to understand — this is the new language of dance, which yes, includes popping and, yes, includes flexing, because that is the language of dance now and from now on. So I love that we get to crystallize these cultural things in a timeless tale that has nothing to do with this world but has sort of everything to do with where we’re at.”
As for Chu’s portfolio, Wicked belongs in a sort of spiritual trilogy alongside Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights. “I always saw it as a trilogy of my frame of mind at that moment, which is like the New View trilogy — three stories that are classic Americana and yet sort of evoke what America looks like now and what the new ideals are — and that was Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and I didn’t know at the time of Wicked, but I had to find the third thing of this New View, and for me, Wicked was that because it is of the Wizard of Oz world, it is of the Wicked world, it was the American fairy tale.” Wicked is in theaters or available now on VOD.
