When Jon M. Chu jumped on the phone to discuss his new movie “Crazy Rich Asians” last week the director was admittedly breathing a bit easier than he was a few weeks before. The highly-anticipated adaptation of Kevin Kwan‘s bestseller was getting fantastic responses from early audience screenings, a huge relief after months of pre-release hype. Days later the first reviews would come in and we’ll assume Chu was even happier. At publication the Warner Bros. release has a very good 77 grade on Metacritic and 97% on Rotten Tomatoes off 39 reviews. But despite the critical acclaim, Chu believes that moviegoers won’t be waiting another 25 years for a Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast.
READ MORE: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ turned down gigantic Netflix payday for theatrical release
“That this is part of a growing trend that if it works will continue to move the dial,” Chu says. “And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean it stops. I mean, it’s kind of inevitable any way, but it will just not be as fast.”
A rare romantic comedy in 2018, “Crazy Rich Asians” follows Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) as she travels to Singapore to attend a wedding and meet the family of her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding). A boyfriend that turns out to be one of the heirs of a wealthy Asian construction company. In so doing she comes into conflict with Nick’s mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), who despite the fact Rachel is a professor at NYU thinks she’s somehow beneath dating her only son. Along the way she gets advice from her former college buddy who now lives in Singapore, Goh Peik Lin (another scene stealing role for Awkwafina) and faces all sorts of jealous skepticism of Singapore’s old money establishment.
Chu, who is best known for the “Step Up” movies, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” and “Now You See Me 2,” weighed on the pressure of helming the first all-Asian studio release since “The Joy Luck Club,” how he fought for the role and that impressive showdown between Wu and Yeoh toward the end of the film.
Please note: There are minor spoilers ahead.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on the movie!
Jon Chu: Thank you so much.
I’ve read about you had to do a presentation to win this gig. Can you talk about that process and had you read the book beforehand?
Yeah, I had. I was working on another movie, and my sister emailed me saying, “Hey, you gotta read this book. It’s hilarious.” So, I read it, but I was literally shooting so I didn’t do anything about it. But I loved it and it was maybe a year later that I was looking for something more personal. Something that I could really push myself for and it was my cultural identity. Something that I had never dealt with in any of my films, except one little student film that I never showed anybody, ’cause it was just too hard to show. So, my sister emailed me again being like, “Why aren’t you doing this movie again?” And it totally reminded me of it and I remembered loving it. So I called my agent. He said that Nina [Jacobson] and Brad [Simpson] were producers on it which I knew was a good sign, ’cause I knew [they would protect the material]. And then I basically forced them to let me direct the movie. I made a big presentation showing all the pictures of my family. I loved the book, it’s called, “Crazy Rich Asians”, but it wasn’t the crazy rich asian part that attracted me to it. I barely know labels, and fashion things It was Rachel Chu’s journey, an Asian-American going to Asia for the first time fascinated me, because that’s what I went through when I went to Taiwan. The sense of home, but also the sense of not at all home and then coming back and feeling like you have to choose. Growing up I always thought that nobody ever felt that except for me. I was in this weird position. But the exact opposite happened. There was a whole generation of us who felt all these things. So, to me, it was a great way to dive into my story without doing my exact story and told in a really fun, fluffy way so I could have both sides of that. And so that’s what I did in my presentation. I really zeroed in on what I thought the story should be. This was not a story about a couple. This was a story about Rachel Chu [Constance Wu] and finding her self worth and coming out stronger when she could embrace both of her sides. That it wasn’t a choice she had to make and knowing that sacrifice and happiness can come together. Those are the things that really I think, pushed the pitch. I showed personal pictures of my family. And walked them through the imagery that they hadn’t seen about Asia. The contemporary Asia that I knew, the old money, the new money of the stylish Asia that I knew, that I experienced, and seen through my own family, through my own discovery. And even the music. Playing stuff they hadn’t heard. Even my parents freaked out saying, “Oh my gosh, we used to dance to this music in China. We used to do the jitterbug to this.” And I’d never seen them light up before like that. So, I knew that there was something to share with the world that a big part of the world knew, but a large part of the world that I lived in did not understand.
It seems like stylistically, at least for the first two thirds of the movie, you’re going in this very sort of old Hollywood style with the music and aesthetic. Is that a correct assumption?
Yeah, I mean I think that there’s a lot of hints of those things from movies from the past showing that we have stars that could have started any of those things. They’re just stars, just as high trash and just as suave as any class Hollywood movie could have been. And I just love that style. Those are movies that I grew up on too so and we’re playing in sort of the old rich, the new rich money. I also was inspired by those songs that existed before the cultural revolution that actually had this very interesting style that I just hadn’t seen [in Hollywood movies]. And Singapore itself has this colonial, tropical, deco feel that was very unique. And when you go there you go to the black and white houses and you go to the restaurants. It felt like an old Hollywood move in the things that we saw there.
Some of the incredible production design of Crazy Rich Asians
You got to film in at least two major architectural landmarks in Singapore. How hard was it to secure them? I won’t give away the context, but that building with the final shot of the movie is fantastic. Was that tougher to confirm than it might seem or were people just excited that you guys were there?
They were very difficult to get. And not just a lot of money because you had to have government O.K.s. We’re flying a drone around. We had synchronized swimmers. We had a marching band. We had 500 extras up there. It was massive to rent out the whole top was pretty amazing. We were up there at three in the morning, sun coming up. It was a lot of things that had to align for us to get it. We didn’t even get guarantees we were getting it until a week before and we had been planing for it for eight months. So, the amount of red tape to get it was pretty epic.