Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Lee Isaac Chung
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director Lee Isaac Chung.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I was just making movies to make movies. I was so full of anxiety about becoming a filmmaker that I kind of lost the idea of why I was doing it.
I'm not much of a visionary guy when it comes to figuring out how to go about my career.
I was on this weird, wild goose chase where I thought I might try to adapt a Willa Cather book. And if you don't know Willa Cather, she was an author in the early 1900s. And for a while, she wrote these books about New York high society.
I didn't have much of a taste for Korean food growing up: I was over the moon about Mexican food.
I thought I would go into philosophy and political science.
Most of my friends were white. I grew up really the only minority in my school, along with my sister.
I think we just have to be mindful of what that definition of an American dream is. I think we are faced with a lot of definitions of that that are, frankly, unhealthy.
When I look back now, as an adult, I'm able to see my mom and grandmother in a different way that I didn't understand as a kid.
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 couldn't speak English so didn't have many friends. I think of her any time I think of the word 'sacrifice.'
For many years, I was trying to catch up and fit in a little bit more with that New York artsy intellectual space.
Ingrid Bergman in 'Journey to Italy' just goes off and looks at things for most of the film.
But I kind of reframed my thinking, where I don't feel like filmmaking is what defines me anymore. Like, I feel like I'm much more defined by my family and other things in life that, that I feel are much deeper to me.
For us, church was kind of the way that we found our first entry into community in Arkansas. My parents would drop us off at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln so that we would make friends and we would learn English.
My daughter was five when I was writing 'Minari,' very much close to the age of David. And I was about to turn 40, which was the age my dad was when he decided he was going to start this farm in Arkansas.
There's a lot of regret that I have about not showing my proper gratitude to my grandmother.
My dad told me that he came to the U.S. because of watching Hollywood movies. So the American Dream for him was based on what you see in films.
I think one of the things that I had to establish for myself quite early on was the rule that this is not my parents and this is not me or my family, that somehow this has to become a family that exists solely in the film of 'Minari.'
I modeled my work after contemporary masters of art house cinema but felt my voice was missing.
I began my filmmaking career by shooting a feature length documentary in China in 2004, the year I graduated from film school.
I like the idea of all of us looking at the world with less of an emphasis on national borders and with more of an emphasis on shared humanity.
I was hitting 40, and I realized I needed to just move on in life and do something practical.
After having struggled through some close friends' and family members' battles with cancer, I wanted to create an American drama about the experience of tragedy and memory.
I thought about quitting filmmaking, just because it was becoming so difficult for me.
Having parents who are chicken sexers - I had trouble explaining that to kids at school!
My father came to America believing in the romantic dream of what he saw in films like 'Big Country' and 'Giant' - this fertile land able to yield so much promise.
As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family's arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother's shock at learning that this would be our new home.
I remember my roommate was watching 'Seven Samurai,' and I just couldn't fathom why anybody would watch it.
What I noticed is that the lens from which people want to look at 'Minari' is just from that Asian-American angle. And I think that can end up being very frustrating. Because the craft of the film, and this film itself, is meant to embody a lot of different things.
I had some early success with my first film and since then it's been a grind. 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.
I filmed my first narrative feature in 2006, a story set in Rwanda called 'Munyurangabo.'
I remember hearing my mom saying so many times we should never have left Korea. She would see the way that I was growing up and the fact that I was speaking English and not speaking Korean as well, and she would fear the things that we were forgetting.
These days I love watching Billy Wilder. I'm not saying the arthouse stuff is self-serious, but I needed to get out of my head a little bit and not treat films so seriously.
For a struggling filmmaker running low on ideas, public domain is all we have for adapting books.
My dad started to watch westerns at dollar cinemas in Seoul and felt like America was a miraculous place. His family had lost a lot of land during the Korean War and the Japanese occupation. That affected him a lot as a kid. He always felt like he needed to come to the U.S. and get land.
I grew up feeling like the main obstacles that we were trying to overcome had more to do with how we survive together as a family, and less to do with external relationships that we had with the community.
I was used to always having a stack of Korean television VHS tapes growing up.
It's hard to say, 'I demand a seat at a table for best picture.'
I know a lot of people in my old town in Arkansas are big Trump supporters, and in a way I try to understand them. I try not to judge them for that.
The attention and all the interviews and all that, it has been wild and something that I'm not used to.
I always loved Flannery O'Conner, and how she's not trying to create sympathetic characters.
Early on... I did notice that a lot of people had the tendency to do their own story starting out. I felt like I was never interested in that, and I wanted to tell stories of people who are very different.
'Lucky Life' is my second narrative film. I worked on the idea for 'Lucky Life' while in Rwanda for my first film.
If you're in the rural South, you don't get Korean TV, unless you can find a Korean grocery guy who has been taping Korean programs and then offering them.
There are a lot of Korean films that will show marital strife, but I'm not sure I've seen so many that will show it in the interest of showing a real marriage - one that ultimately succeeds.
I was an art house guy, making little, not-much-happening films.
My mom grew up without a father because he died in the Korean War. And my grandmother, her life was completely upended because of that.
I always tend to gravitate toward the idea of things being human: that this isolation I feel as an Asian American, even though it's real, other people have it too in their own way.
Insecurities and missteps can plague writers and artists who come from rural places. We worry that our provincial life experiences won't gain the approval of urban curators, so we assimilate ourselves to other, more sophisticated voices.
I've never felt completely American.
I do care what my daughter thinks and what the future generation of whoever is down the line will think.
Growing up where I was, there were no Asians, no minorities, and there was always something to remind me of what I'm not. And when I go to Korea it's the same thing. I'm constantly reminded that I'm not Korean.
Among Korean immigrants the majority tends to be Christian, because that was the way they immigrated to America - through the support network of churches. I grew up with faith being an important fabric of my life. That comes with my life in the South - it was just a given that you believe.
Many filmmakers start off with an autobiographical film from childhood, and that's kind of what I was thinking I would do, but other projects would just present themselves naturally in the beginning.
A lot of times we have these categories that maybe don't fit the reality of human experience and human identity. I'm completely sympathetic to what a lot of people in my community are saying - that often as Asian Americans we're made to feel more foreign than we internally feel ourselves.
I wanted to make something that transcends borders and gets beyond this feeling of national identity.
There's a constant level of risk in farming that so few movies let you feel. I wanted to show some of that, but also, by contrast, reflect on how nature so often offers grace.
After everything my parents were teaching us about Korean culture, about being respectful and all these things, you know, here came my grandmother, who is very crass and wanted to teach us how to gamble.
As a kid... there's a veil of separation between you and your dad, especially when you have a dad who's under a lot of stress.
I have always loved comedies.
I was so excited when 'Parasite' won the Oscar last year, and part of that was the shared Korean heritage and also it was just knowing that Bong Joon Ho made an incredible film and it didn't matter what language they were speaking, what country it was from, audiences all around the world responded to it.
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