‘Wicked’ Director Jon M. Chu on ‘What Makes Art Beautiful’ in the AI Era

Manisha Krishnan: OK. So it sounds like you’re potentially open. You’re not closing the door on working with AI basically?

Jon Chu: I don’t know.

Manisha Krishnan: OK. That’s fair. I do want to talk a little bit about Crazy Rich Asians because I love that movie, but also I sort of wonder, did you have concerns about being typecast for doing Asian projects? That movie meant so much for representation. Did you also feel a lot of responsibility when you undertook that project?

Jon Chu: Yeah. I mean, there’s a reason why I did it because I was so scared of talking about being an Asian American. Because one, as soon as you sort of label yourself, “Oh, you’re the Asian American director,” and I feel like, “Oh, they’re just going to just, ‘Send him all the Asian scripts.'” And I was scared of that. I just wanted to be seen as a director and also I don’t have all the answers about my cultural identity crisis.

And so at that moment, in whatever year it was, I was doing Now You See Me 2. I’d had a decade of making movies and I was working with these big actors, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson. And I realized I was like, “Oh, I can hang with these people. Oh, I think I deserve to be here now after a decade of doing it.” And then I looked around and I was like, “Oh, anyone can make this movie.” And I had to go back to my student self of like, “Well, what do I want to say with this thing that I now know how to utilize?”

And it was about my cultural identity crisis, something that being in the Chef Chu’s, at the restaurant, I thought about a lot. My parents, when I would see people come in and they treat servers however you want to treat them, but they would treat my parents poorly, sometimes, not all the customers, but just sometimes I’d see it. And I get really angry at my dad like, “Kick them out, dude. What are you doing?” And my parents sat me down and they said, “Listen, we are ambassadors here. We are the first Chinese family maybe this family has ever seen. And so they think we’re a certain way and they treat us a certain way. But one, we’re taking their money …”