In the Heights director Jon M. Chu sat down with Town & Country to discuss his journey as a filmmaker, the importance of depicting cultural and racial identity through film, and how In the Heights got its start. Please see below for highlights from the interview.
On why he previously has shied away from discussing cultural and racial identity: “The two things I’m most scared to talk about are growing up in an immigrant community and having that conflict [how do I] move forward. Our parents came with these bags—what do we take forward in our bags now? What are we putting in there and what do we kick the tires on? … The thing that frightened me the most was my cultural identity crisis, the stuff I never wanted to talk about. I had done one short film in college called Gwai Lo: The Little Foreigner, [because] ‘the white devil’ is what they called me when I went to Hong Kong for the first time. It got a great reception, but I was so embarrassed by it. I was so self-conscious that I never put it into festivals. For 10 years, I was like, ‘I’m not going to be the Asian-American director. I’m going to be the director. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want think about it. I’m just going to blend.’ And it worked for me.”
On the similarities Chu saw between his upbringing and community in In the Heights: “I grew up not in Washington Heights, and I’m not Latino, obviously, but in a Chinese restaurant in the Bay Area, so I knew what it felt like to have your aunties and uncles take care of you,” he says. “I knew what it felt like to have [my grandmother] teach us how to fold wontons and do the books for the restaurant every night on her abacus. I remember the sound and these little details of smell, sight, and music, that were always around me. The show said everything that I could never say about what it felt like to grow up like that.”
On his vision for transforming In the Heights from Broadway to the big screen: “It didn’t hit me until when I read it that time. I was, at that moment, trying to figure out who I was as a filmmaker. I’d done all these movies, but what was I trying to say? When I read In the Heights again, I felt that same feeling as when I saw it on Broadway. I was like, this is what I’m looking for in terms of telling a unique story of a first-generation person in America. That’s an all-American story. That is who I am, and this is what I should be doing.”
On how In the Heights first got its start with the now disgraced Harvey Weinstein: “Harvey called Christmas Eve and was like, ‘Get back to the Peninsula, 7 AM tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’m in San Francisco. My family has this big…’ and he said, ‘You have to come. It’ll be a good story.’ So, I left, got there in the morning, had breakfast with him on the roof, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘How’s Star Trek going?’ He thought I was Justin Lin, the other Asian director. That’s how our relationship started.”
Chu pitched Weinstein his idea for In the Heights anyway, proposing a movie about what he calls “a neighborhood that you may pass through and never think twice about but made the center of a big musical that shows dreams bigger than any musical we’ve seen before.” It didn’t go over so well. “I pitched him the whole thing, and he was like, ‘I love it. Except for the dreams part,’” Chu says. “‘People don’t want to see movies that don’t take you somewhere else. They have to be transported to a mansion; they have to be transported to a golf course.’ I was like, ‘Oh, well, that’s my whole pitch.’”
Reflecting on the beauty in the message of In the Heights: “It has hit me that all the times I was in my bedroom, dreaming about being a filmmaker, dreaming about not being in the restaurant business, watching TV, imagining myself somewhere in Hollywood, that I was actually in Hollywood. I love the idea of a neighborhood that dreams big with hopes and aspirations were bigger than its walls. We wouldn’t take these characters to a mansion to dream about what it would feel like to be rich, it would be all in Washington Heights. That’s the way you dream when that’s all you know, because that’s the way I dreamed.”