Minari director Lee Isaac Chung: ‘We can not rely on institutions or awards to really make progress for us’

a Minari, a young Korean couple working as chicken sex workers in Arkansas. They sit in the dark under an overhead lamp, handling hundreds of yellow chirping cotton balls daily, turning them upside down and based on what they see, and sorting them into two plastic bowls. Red or blue; girl or boy. It’s everyday work, the writer and director of the film Lee Isaac Chung knows it. “Who wants to watch a movie about farmers who are chicken sex workers?” he asked seriously. A movie that many audiences will have to watch with subtitles. Chung smiles knowing that the answer to his question is actually: many people.

When Minari took home the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year, the awards season began under the feet of the filmmaker and it has not stopped since. In the hours before we speak, Minari is nominated for six Baftas. In the days to come, it will take another six nods – this time for the Oscars. Over zooming, Chung is silent in ecstasy. There is a penetrating calmness to his voice that rarely deviates in the octave. But underneath it is the fascinating satisfaction of hard-earned, though unexpected, success.

Awards were never the plan. They were not even the target. Minari began in 2018 as a ‘creative exercise’, says Chung, who at the time had already decided to end filmmaking and pursue a professorship at the University of Utah’s South Korean campus in Incheon. His first show, which he quickly touched on – the 2007 drama Munyurangabo, which took place 15 years after the genocide in Rwanda and which he was still in his twenties, turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan. He walked empty. Its follow-up functions Lucky Life (2010) and Abigail Harm (2012) were more avant-garde and less well known.

“One afternoon I started writing down childhood memories and after a few hours I was on the floor to see that I had a list of about 80.” Some – like being lifted by his father to enter their new home on wheels, are a yellow single-track trailer that looks like a plate of butter – apparently straight from Chung’s brain to his movie set as if by magic. Or rather, as he explains, by a shrewd production designer with the skill of coloring old photos.

Minari tells the story of a South Korean-American immigrant family through the eyes of seven-year-old David (played by Alan Kim and modeled on Chung himself). Patriarch Jacob (whose pioneering zeal is underscored by a subdued rage in Steven Yeun’s performance) is sick of working as a chicken sex worker, and moves the family from the city to the heartland of 1980s Arkansas, where he plans to build large farms and sell products to the Korean immigrants arriving in the US. Monica, his wife (an astonishingly subtle Yeri Han), is worried about the costly effort. She also has homesickness – if it does not go to South Korea, then it is at least the Asian bubble in Los Angeles to which she has been previously attributed.

Chung, now 42, remembers how the memory-writing exercise came about. He was one of ten or fifteen children from his rural high school in Arkansas who went to college, but when he got there, Yale realized he was a “terrible writer,” and he was trumped by troops of preschoolers. . “I’ve been trying for years to fit in a little more with the New York artistic intellectual space,” he says. Chung modeled his follow-up models Munyurangabo at artouse cinema, thus avoiding its rural background. He forgot about the Ozark meadow, where as a child he threw snakes at the creek and listened to the uplifting harmonies of Christian pop star Michael W Smith in the cafeteria of his small-town church on long Sundays.

When Chung’s memories finally resurfaced, he told his family about the film. “My parents are very private, and I did not want to do the project, and I just did not say it,” he says. When the film is funded and recorded for production, Chung begins to really feel the fear. He laughs and recalls his sister’s reaction when he first tells her (“Yes, they are going to kill you”). When he finally mustered the courage to tell his mom and dad, he acted so “stressed and uncomfortable” about it that they thought he was writing an outline about all their worst moments. The reality is far from over. “After watching the movie, they said I grabbed the beauty of what we went through,” he says. “It made me cry when they put it that way, because that’s what I was hoping for.”

Reading the premise of Minari – an Asian family moving into an overwhelming white town in the rural south – I kept my watch for racist scenes. Even in their most authentic and meaningful repetitions, they are emotionally taxable to watch. But while there are moments of racial discomfort – in a scene a child in church asks David why his face is so flat (something that happened to Chung as a boy) – they are fleeting. In Minari, characters have characteristics and concerns that are more noticeable than their minority status. Identity politics plays the second fiddle in a more intimate story of a family, who happen to be Asian immigrants, learning to love each other and build a house.

“It’s just not a movie about race,” Chung says. “The family does not think about the external statements on a daily basis. They are more worrying. He laughs and points to the camera with an open palm: “I mean, I’m sure you feel it too – you do not wake up and think about how people experience your Asia every day.” He’s right. I do not.

“For Yeun, who starred in the Oscar-nominated film, Chung’s screenplay with the majority of Korean cast and cast had a 100-pound feel,” he tells me about Zoom. He exhales deeply, lifts and shrugs his shoulders to illustrate his point.The actor starred in films by Korean director Bong Joon Ho (Okja) and Lee Chang-dong (Brandend) but is best known among Western audiences as ‘the hot Asian guy’ in AMC’s hit zombie show The Walking Dead. He was also the only Asian period.

Shoot Minari “I felt like there was this whole weight that I didn’t have to handle,” he says. “There was such a shared understanding between all of us that there was no need to explain race.” Through the obligation to unpack ‘what’ it means to be Asian-American ‘in relation to whiteness, the characters had the opportunity to meet each other as fathers and children, men and women. “For me, these are the connections that are accessible to everyone,” says Yeun. Chung was more than portraying a ‘true Asian-American experience’, but he wanted to manage the small things of farming life so as not to be stopped by his friends back home in the South.

The intergenerational dynamics of the film are magnified when Monica’s mother Soon-ja (wrong and bad Young Yuh-jung) arrives from South Korea to help look after the two children who rebel against her strangeness. David is especially indignant about his new staple partner – her herbal medicine, her fragrance (“she smells like Korea!”) And the excessive consumption of his favorite Mountain Dew soda. Youn, a doyenne of South Korean film and TV, is irresistible as Soon-ja. Everyone on the set called her ‘Old Foxy Lady’. At age 73, she is excited for her first Oscar nomination. The role was inspired by Chung’s own grandmother, but the portrayal of Youn is not limited by his memories; “To all our grandmothers,” reads Minaris slot dedication.

When he talks about his own halmeoni (Korean for grandma), it seems that Chung is fading. He takes long breaks to gather himself quietly and throws his eyes down where his earphone wires hang near his collar. His family ended up “good” in the end. His father started a herbal medicine business and his mother became the fastest chicken meat in Northwest Arkansas; Chung and his sister both went to university and pursued good careers. ‘It’s my grandmother who could never see any of it. She left everything in Korea to come and see us. “She had no interest in becoming American, she just knew my mother was having a hard time,” he says. ‘She died when I was 16 and I just think no history books, nothing is ever going to talk about my grandmother. She was kind of invisible. She could not speak English and therefore did not have many friends. I think of her every time I think of the word sacrifice. ‘

I tell him that the moment on screen between Soon-ja and David was the hardest to watch because David’s initial rejection of her tapped into a source of guilt that made me do my own thing. popo (Cantonese for Grandma), for my adolescent indifference to building a loving relationship with her. He nodded. ‘I am very sorry that I did not show my great gratitude to my grandmother. There are fictional moments in the film, the scene of David running after Soon-ja and holding her hand does not happen, but it was my way of dealing with the past and wanting to talk about what I wish I had done. “He takes a short break before looking up and offering a comforting word: ‘But your popo, I’m sure she loves you and is completely understanding because that’s how grandparents are, they’re so loving.

Last month’s Golden Globes visited thousands of people Minari‘s defense after probably not being eligible for the best picture, presumably because it’s in Korean – 2009 winner infamous hybrid but also does not meet the 50 percent English language requirement. Now, Minari found himself in the same predicament as the Baftas. “It fills me in a sense with anxiety because I feel like the collective Asian American is complaining about it,” Chung says. A moan that not only makes up for the wave of tweets that protested against the decision at the time, but also the implicit appearance he and I are now discussing, as if to say, “Can you believe it?”

But, he adds, “there seem to be a lot of allies who question this and say, ‘Isn’t this categorization a bit arbitrary? Are we not beyond this at this point?’ And I just feel that we are not. can rely on institutions or awards to really make progress for us. ”While Chung is true, it is a small triumph that recognizes an award as stale as the Oscars. Minari in the category best picture. Perhaps future so-called ‘strange’ films will be seen as such.

MinariThe five-week recording made the filmmaker feel nostalgic. On the first day of filming, he and Yeun drove through his old town and went to the farm where he grew up. “We started talking about buying a place out there and actually living there,” he grinned excitedly. Although the couple’s brokerage dreams were shattered by a grueling recording with a broken AC unit, lots of ticks and too many snakes, and Chung switched to an adaptation of the Japanese anime trailer. Your name, and he’s also writing a rom-com in Utah, but he plans to return later this year for his 25th high school reunion. “It’s time to go back.”