Director Sean Wang and cast Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen stop by The Hollywood Reporter's studio in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival to chat about their coming-of-age film about a Taiwanese American boy in Fremont, CA 2008 - which was inspired by 'Stand by Me.' Meaning "younger brother" in Mandarin, 'DìDi' (弟弟) is a story about 13-year-old Chris Wang who learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt and how to love your mom.
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00:00 It was definitely culture shock because I was like, I don't know, I was one year old when, you know, 2008 was around.
00:06 So I didn't know how to use a flip phone at all.
00:09 I didn't know I had to press the button three times to get to like a certain letter or something.
00:14 So I was really confused on how to type at first, which is funny because this guy gave us flip phones to practice typing with.
00:18 And the whole time I was just so confused and I was wondering why I was so slow all the time.
00:23 These two are the stars of our movie, Isaac, Shirley.
00:30 They are not first time actors.
00:32 They're amazing seasoned professionals and so fun to be around, so fun to work with.
00:37 I would I would say eh on profession.
00:40 And I'd say on fun opinion.
00:42 But I think it was that kind of balance that I wanted to try and straddle, which was, I think, the seed of this idea really was,
00:51 you know, I was really inspired by coming of age classics that I love, like Stand By Me, which I think to this day is one of the sort of the seminal
00:59 movie about adolescent boyhood that treats adolescent boyhood as crass and loud and raw and honest and vulnerable and emotional as kids really are.
01:08 And but have a movie like Stand By Me, but have it star people who looked and talked and felt like the kids that I grew up with, which, you know, were Asian-American kids, but Asian-American kids of sort of all different cultures, you know, Taiwanese-American, Korean-American, Vietnamese-American and even, you know, like Pakistani-American, Bangladeshi-American.
01:27 And so I knew I really wanted to cast hyper specifically to those cultures.
01:32 And just when I think of the landscape of the entertainment industry and and maybe I also don't know all of it, but I had this thought that, you know, I think a lot of the kids that, you know, who may be the right fit for this movie, maybe they aren't, you know, they're not at an agency.
01:52 They're maybe like at a skate park.
01:53 They haven't thought about acting.
01:55 You know, that's not except for this guy.
01:57 He's incredible.
01:58 And so and surely found her at a skate park.
02:01 Obviously.
02:04 But it was that sort of ethos that kind of drove the movie, which was trying to find kids that felt like real kids.
02:11 And so our casting directors, Natalie Lynn and Nafisa Kap-Tanwala, you know, they they did.
02:15 We kind of went the street casting route and we casted a lot of kids who had never acted before, who were just so electric and charismatic and undeniable and kind of brought them into our movie.
02:26 And I think I do strongly believe that even though our movie takes place in the late 2000s, you know, Isaac was saying this yesterday so eloquently in our Q&A that the experience of being a teenager, the experience of being 13 and 14 years old, that those insecurities, those anxieties, those feelings are the same.
02:46 They're just contextualized differently.
02:48 You know, we just brought in sort of real 13, 14 year olds.
02:52 I think every child or child, I think every young actor in the movie that isn't Isaac or Shirley are first time non-actors who are just incredibly, again, like undeniably charismatic, electric.
03:08 And all we have to do is just be like, hey, come here and play.
03:10 This is all for you.
03:12 And you mentioned that obviously a lot of the emotions of what it's like to be a teen are the same no matter what year it was.
03:19 But there's also some like really specific stuff to 2008 and the mid-aughts in this.
03:23 And I'm curious for you guys, what like struck you about that era and what was like shocking or surprising or funny to you?
03:31 I also imagine like the idea of like an AIM screen name and T9 texting and all of that was very foreign.
03:38 Do you?
03:39 I mean, I feel like not as much for me because I got a little taste of it.
03:44 But I definitely feel like for the kids on set, they were like, let's play around.
03:47 But we had this amazing thing where like production let us take photos with cameras and put those up on our on our bedroom walls.
03:55 And my favorite thing was Sean sent me a playlist of all these wonderful songs.
04:00 And so I would jam out to Misery Business by Paramore and Crush, Crush, Crush constantly before it takes.
04:05 It was weird pretending to use MySpace because I had no idea what MySpace was.
04:08 Right. Which is which is, I guess, sad kind of.
04:12 But yeah, MySpace.
04:16 For MySpace, Tom, shout out wherever you are.
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