The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with Sean Wang, the director of
Dìdi
, at SXSW 2024.

Dìdi
is set in 2008 and focuses on Chris Wang, a.k.a Wang-Wang, a 13-year-old first-generation, Asian American, child of immigrants.
Focus Feature will release
Dìdi
in theaters on July 26th.

First-time feature filmmaker Sean Wang was determined to make a movie that felt “homegrown,” and that’s exactly what he achieved with Dìdi, both on screen and behind the scenes.

The film is set in 2008 when Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a.k.a Wang-Wang, is 13 years old. It’s the last month of summer before he starts high school and he’s eager to have a thriving social life — even if it means pretending to be what he thinks others want, not who he truly is. That experience comes with a significant amount of coming-of-age learning curves, including “how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.”

Hot off attending the Academy Awards as a nominee for his short film, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, Wang arrived in Austin for SXSW where he’d continue to celebrate his debut feature, Dìdi, after its Sundance world premiere. While there, Wang took the time to swing by the Collider interview studio for a chat about making the pivot from shorts to his first feature, how the Dìdi script evolved along the way, how he scored Motion City Soundtrack’s first new song in years for the film, and loads more.

Is ‘Dìdi’ the Next ‘Stand By Me’?
Image via Columbia Pictures
 

When Wang first started working on Dìdi, he aimed to make a coming-of-age film like the ones he loves, films like Stand By Me and 400 Blows. He explained:

“I love movies about adolescents, especially that age, being 13. I think there’s so much to mine in that age. And in all the movies that I love, those coming of age classics that I resonate with, that I see a version of myself in, I realized that none of them actually starred people who look like me or my friends. And when I think about my own adolescence and the emotions that those protagonists go through, I sort of realized, ‘Oh, this world that I lived in, I think there are specifics about that that are hopefully universal, but are not versions that I’ve seen in the movies that I love.’ So it was almost that. It was,
what if you took Stand By Me but set it in a place that I know and had it star people who looked and talked and felt like me and my friends?
”

While Dìdi does certainly boast Stand By Me vibes, the script gained an unexpected layer during the development process. Wang continued:

“Before it was much more in the vein of Stand By Me and Superbad, where it was much more about the friendships and a world where it was kind of a suburban adolescent wasteland where you never saw the parents, you never saw the family. It was like this Cow and Chicken kind of thing where it was just no family. And I just realized that something was missing. I didn’t really know what it was.
For the first time as a filmmaker, I was like, ‘Oh, I think the story is telling me what it wants to be.’
And I really wanted to write about my family and I really wanted to write about my relationship with my mom, or some version of it. And once I sort of allowed myself to go in that direction and realize, ‘Oh, this is a mother-son relationship story kind of encased in the trappings of a movie like Stand By me,’ that’s when it kind of really came along.”

How to Get a Movie Green Lit When You’ve Never Directed a Movie Before
Image via Collider

Related ‘Sew Torn’ Review: This Tangled, Twisty Thriller Is a Dark Delight | SXSW 2024 This film is like a real-life choose-your-own-adventure in which all options are bad.

Making a movie at any stage of one’s career is a true feat, but one of the greatest challenges in this industry is proving your worth as a first-time feature filmmaker.

How does one get that coveted green light without previous feature work to back you up? In Wang’s case, he wrote a script that, without a shadow of a doubt, could only be directed by one person — himself. Here’s how he put it:

“This was conceived in a way where obviously I wanted to explore adolescence and boyhood and write something very personal, but I think it was also reverse engineered in a way where I was like, ‘I think this is small enough to be able to actually make as a first feature film. It’s not some $40 million sci-fi movie that no one’s ever gonna let me make.’ It’s like, I had never made a feature before, and just the catch-22 of that. It was like,
if you liked the script, I’m clearly the right director for it, even though I’ve never made a movie before
.”

‘Dìdi’s Star Was the Ideal Balance of Punk and Actor
Image via Sundance

Wang’s next challenge in bringing Dìdi to screen was finding the perfect Chris, and he struck gold big time with Izaac Wang who effortlessly enhances the film’s atmosphere and grounded charm.

“I say all of this with heart and as a compliment, but
he’s the perfect balance of, to me, an actor and a punk
. Almost every cast member who is in the 13-year-old adolescent world is a first time non-actor, and that’s kind of the energy we were looking for with this movie was the sort of raw, unfiltered, adolescent energy that’s just bursting at the seams, and we didn’t want these kids who were very proper and trained. We wanted kids who felt like me and my friends and who are kind of irreverent and crass and they felt like real kids. I thought the kids who are probably right for this movie have maybe never thought about acting. Izaac does come from an acting background. He was a young child actor and had been in movies like Raya and the Last Dragon and Clifford, but I think we also found him at a time when he was really craving, I think, to spend the summer biking and being with his friends and, again, being a real kid and not having to spend a summer on set surrounded by a bunch of adults and not have other kids around. But he does really love acting, and so I think we were able to kind of bring him into this world that is familiar to him, but then also be like,
‘Forget all the rules that you’ve learned about acting and just be a kid.’
And so I think being around all these untrained actors, I think he got to really just tap into this side of himself where he was like, ‘I get to do what I love, but also I get to just be a kid and be a punk,’ and that’s what we wanted for this movie.”

Lulu Wang’s Directing Tip for ‘Dìdi’s Sean Wang
Image via Photagonist at the at Collider TIFF Media Studio

Further contributing to how wildly natural all the performances from Dìdi’s young stars are? A tip Wang received from The Farewell director, Lulu Wang:

“So many of the lines in this script or the movie, and I got this advice from Lulu Wong, where she was like, ‘I would always give my actors one take,’ or something where
she tells them, ‘Break the script.’ Basically, do it wrong, do it differently.
That’s kind of what I did, especially with the young actors. We would do a few takes and we’d get somewhere that was really exciting, and then I would say, ‘Okay, now, break it. Do anything. Make it your own. Do something wildly different. It can be wrong. It just has to be different.’ And they would come and surprise me.
Most of the takes in the movie are probably those takes of just like, break this, do it differently, make it your own.
”

Yet another highlight of Dìdi? Its impeccable soundtrack which is bursting at the seams with 2000s punk rock nostalgia.

“Going back to both the specific and the personal, I think so many of the subcultures that I was inspired by, that really shaped me were that sort of Warped Tour pop, punk, emo world, but also skate culture. So much of those two worlds shaped me and I really felt permission to just lean on all those influences in a way that was very shameless, and in a way that was sort of a love letter to those kinds of communities. And so a lot of the soundtrack of the movie and a lot of the world of the movie is pulling from those kinds of cultures.
I really like seeing this movie as a movie that takes place in the late 2000s, but feels like it was made now
, as opposed to a movie that was made in the late 2000s that is using, you know, M.I.A., MGMT. I love those bands, but they’ve been used in movies before and so, so much of our music choices were, ‘Okay, I am a part of these worlds and it’s what kind of shaped me. What tracks feel personal, and maybe are less recognized, but do have a feeling that is both nostalgic but also meaningful to me?’ It was Atmosphere, it was Hellogoodbye, it was Motion City Soundtrack.”

Given Motion City Soundtrack is a personal favorite, there was no way I was letting this conversation wind down without asking Wang how he got the band to write their first new song in over 10 years for the film.

“There’s that big emo fest now that happens in Vegas every year. It’s fun. Carlos [López Estrada] and I, our producer, you know, we’ve kind of made it a tradition now. We’ve only been twice because they’ve only done it, I think, two or three times, but the last time we were there, I think we were maybe — we did shoot the movie. We went to When We Were Young fest, Motion City Soundtrack was playing the main stage, and we were there watching them. Carlos was sitting on the ground, I filmed a video of him and Motion City was just playing in the background.
I posted it to my Instagram story, someone saw it and sent it to Justin from Motion City Soundtrack, and he reached out to us, or to Carlos, and then we all got looped in, and he’s just become such an incredible champion of the movie.
First it started as, ‘Can we use a Motion City Soundtrack song? We love you guys.’ And then it became, ‘Do you guys want an original?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah. Of course!’ So, you know, that’s kind of how a lot of this movie, too — we’ve had so many little guardian angels kind of come into the orbit of this tiny little independent film, and I think that’s what really helped it shine and brought it to life.”

Sean Wang Offers a Peek Behind the Curtain of Selling a Film at a Festival
Image via Sundance 

Wang’s Dìdi journey began by being inspired by his own youth. During filming, he encouraged his cast to let loose, break the rules, and be real kids. They even filmed the movie in his hometown. The “homegrown” feeling of the production didn’t end there. After Dìdi was showered with praise during its Sundance World Premiere, Wang was determined to hold tight to that quality while selecting the right distributor for the movie. Here’s how he decided Focus Features was the right home for the film:

“I think the word that I keep saying to myself, the word that was the ethos of making the movie was homegrown. It was like, we want to keep this movie feeling homegrown. We shot it in my hometown, too, and it was always this thing where it could never feel like — sometimes when you jump to features, everyone thinks you have to do everything differently. There is much more of an apparatus, but I always wanted to try and retain this feeling that we’re just making something with our friends. And that was something that was really important to us when selling the movie, too.
We didn’t want to just hand the movie off to a distributor who was just gonna then take it and do something differently. When we talked to Focus, they really understood the movie and really understood so many of those guardian angels that have helped our movie
. Like Stephanie Hsu is a big champion of the movie. She has a cameo in the movie. And that only happened, I think, because of how small and personal the film was, and she really saw that. And there’s so many people like that, that came in and supported our movie. In selling the movie, it was like, who kind of understands that ethos and is like, this homegrown feeling is something that is so important to us to maintain in the release of the movie and how the movie is interacting with the communities that it comes from? And so, if you guys understand that, it made the conversations a lot easier, to be honest.”

Looking for more on Dìdi? Be sure to check out my full chat with Wang in the video at the top of this article.

Dìdi arrives in theaters on July 26th.

Didi A 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy discovers skating, flirting, and the true essence of maternal love beyond his family’s teachings.Release Date January 19, 2024 Director Sean Wang Cast Izaac Wang , Joan Chen , Shirley Chen , Chang Li Hua Runtime 91 minutes