'Wicked' Director Jon M. Chu On The Hard Work Of Creativity

Fresh Air

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Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Chu takes his inspiration from his dad, a Chinese immigrant who worked both the front room and the kitchen of their family-run restaurant: "The guy that in the back of the kitchen, that was my hero." The director of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights talks with Terry Gross about growing up in Silicon Valley, seeing Wicked for the first time, and learning to be adaptable.

Maureen Corrigan reviews Dinaw Mengestu's new novel, Someone Like Us.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial.
0:04.6	When your celebration of life is prepaid today, your family is protected tomorrow.
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0:13.7	For additional information visit dignity memorial.com.
0:18.0	This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. After making the hit film Crazy Rich Asians and the film adaptation of Lynn Manuel Miranda's Tony Award winning Broadway musical In The Heights,
0:29.0	my guest John M. Chu is now adapting Crazy Rich Asians into a Broadway musical.
0:35.0	He's directing a film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Wicked,
0:39.0	which is expected to open in November.
0:41.0	He loves musicals, and his first feature film was supposed to be an updated
0:46.2	version of the musical by by Birdie. Why that never happened is one of the disappointments he writes about in his new memoir.
0:54.0	The memoir is part prequel to his career,
0:58.0	but it's also about making movies.
1:00.0	Chuger up in Silicon Valley at a time when Apple was getting started, lots of startups
1:05.5	were starting up, and his friend's father was also the father of GPS navigation.
1:11.6	Chu was an early adapter to as much new digital tech as he could get his hands on.
1:16.3	His tech know-how served him well in his film career, but he soured on the tech industry's
1:21.2	impact on how movies are seen, mostly at home and not in theaters.
1:26.2	His parents are immigrants, his mother from Taiwan, his father from China.
1:30.4	They own a Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley that they opened in 1970.
1:35.0	Chu says, it started as a lunch counter restaurant in a nothing special strip mall,
1:40.0	but by the time he was born in 1979, it had become a local institution.
1:45.0	Steve Jobs was an early customer.
	...

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