Filmmaker Spotlight: Lee Isaac Chung

April 22, 2021 | Cat Elliott
Photo Credit: True Touch Lifestyle / Shutterstock.com

With the Oscars right around the corner, we’re featuring someone in this installment of Filmmaker Spotlight who is up for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Besides earning him those nods, Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical Minari is also contending for the highly coveted Best Picture accolade. As with most Hollywood success stories, though, the filmmaker’s journey to the spotlight did not happen overnight.

Chung’s debut feature film, Munyurangabo, received a warm reception at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and he’s also the auteur behind titles such as Lucky Life and Abigail Harm. But during a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Chung shared that he almost switched careers. “I had some early success with my first film and since then it’s been a grind,” he asserted. “It’s clearly a craft that I love and a craft that I work on constantly, but after so many years I didn’t feel like I had much to show for that.” 

Chung elaborated during an interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah how close he was going to transition into a new line of work. “I told myself that by the time I hit 40 if nothing’s happening, I have to really grow up and take on a responsible job,” the now 42-year-old filmmaker shared. Chung added that he’d taken the steps to secure a position as a professor and only had a few months to write the Minari script, which he called “my last swing at it.” 

One of the influences that catalyzed him was Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia, which reflects her own childhood growing up on the Nebraska prairie. “I felt inspired to sit back and try to remember what it was like to be a child,” Chung recalled during an A24 interview with Steven Yeun and J.J. Abrams. He ended up jotting down roughly 80 memories, in which he saw “the semblance of the story.” 

Minari follows a Korean-American family whose members are uprooted from the West Coast to rural Arkansas so that the father, Jacob, can pursue his American dream of running a successful farming business. Since Chung drew from his own upbringing to write the film, crafting its central characters came with a strong creative choice. The filmmaker made it clear during a Variety interview with Bong Joon-ho that the Yi family depicted in Minari is meant to be separate from his own family. “I knew Steven [Yeun] would do something really incredible with this, something very new,” Chung recalled of the casting choice. “And also with Yeri [Han] and with Yuh-Jung Youn, I knew that they would make them feel alive in a new way… I didn’t even tell them what my family is like.”

Yeun received a Best Actor nomination for his performance as Jacob, and Youn is up for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Soonja, the children’s maternal grandmother who comes to stay with the family. Chung recalled during an emotional NPR interview how his own grandmother left everything she had in Korea for “a life of anonymity” in America so that she could help care for him and his sister. “I guess I just hope that this film would somehow capture who she was, someone who is invisible,” he added. “I would hope that she would be seen, if that makes sense.” 

You’ll have to wait until the Academy Awards air on April 25 to find out if Chung or his nominated cast members take home any wins for Minari. But, in the meantime, we think the filmmaker has certainly earned his spotlight with it. Abrams may have summarized it best during his conversation with Chung, praising the rarity of a film “that is so involving and almost hypnotic in its subject matter and still as funny and as unexpected and colorful and suspenseful and beautifully done.” 

 

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