A transplant puts down roots
February 13, 2021
Director Lee Isaac Chung speaks to Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba about his new film, Minari, an autobiographical story about the immigrant experience.
Congratulations on your film Minari’s Golden Globe nomination for best foreign language film. You also won the dramatic grand jury prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho says once audiences get past the subtitle barrier at the bottom of the screen a world of cinema will open up for them. How do you feel about that idea?
When all this news broke, one thing that I was thinking about was that my grandma would be really proud to see what I did. Any time we were speaking English in the home, my grandmother would yell at us: “That’s a foreign language.” She’s the real reason I stuck to speaking Korean and learned Korean and was able to direct a movie in two different languages — English and Korean. She would be proud of me for getting this kind of recognition. We made sure to stay as authentic to the experience as possible and to me that’s what this film is about — this family that isn’t defined by the outside world but is really creating a new reality for themselves. So I leave all those categories and definitions to everyone else to figure out. Yuh-jung Youn (who plays Soonja, the grandmother) said to me: “This is a good time, the work of making films and touching people’s lives and telling stories. That’s why we’re doing this.” We’re living life because of all those relationships and all those beautiful things and not the exterior stuff. Not the glory.
The film stars Steven Yeun, Yeri Han and Will Patton, and is about a Korean family moving to Arkansas. What does the title, Minari, mean and to what extent is the movie autobiographical? I did grow up in Arkansas on a farm. Minari is a plant that my grandmother really did plant on the farm and it grows well in any condition, particularly in these muddy, terrible places where nothing else is going to grow. My grandmother grew it along this pond and she would take me there. I would sing songs and try to stay away from snakes. That all comes from real life.
Before becoming a director you studied ecology at Yale. What did you want to convey metaphorically about the relationship between plants, people and the environment? The symbolic stuff started to come to mind as I was researching the plant and I was doing my writing. I read one farmer was saying that minari will help purify the water and the soil. I found that to be incredibly poetic and beautiful. Another farmer was writing that typically you don’t eat the first crop. You cut it down and then you eat the second. So there’s this aspect of the second generation really benefiting and that first one being there just to establish the roots. It grows like a weed because you can put it anywhere, and honestly, it’ll grow well without much effort and always provide. Whereas up on the higher level where the actual farming is going on is heartache, toil and pain. And that stuff is not growing very well. So there’s somehow a dichotomy in the way in which we can approach life: there’s one way of toil, and then there’s one way that comes through a kind of submission and yielding to something that’s different. This film deals with the challenges of difference. Can you tell us about the first time you felt you were an outsider?My first day of school is when I kept hearing the question, “Why is your face so flat?” I heard it so many times that I realised it’s not just one crazy kid but really everybody sees me as different. I wanted to show it in that way because all the people who said that to me, we became best friends and we traipsed through the woods together. And it was just that initial like, “Hey, you’re different.” Tell me why you’re different. The way that we experience everything as a family was that our community was other to us because my parents’ frame of reference is Korea. We spoke Korean at home, we ate Korean food. Even though I was born in the US, we kept things very Korean and everybody outside of us was foreign. They were speaking a foreign language that’s called English.
In accepting an award on behalf of his director, actor Ethan Hawke joked: “I’m not Richard Linklater, I just play him in movies.” Is Yeun — who plays Jacob, the father in Minari — drawing on his own experiences or yours?
We’ve shared a lot of experiences. Even though we grew up many states apart we could understand each other on a very deep level. I really wanted him to have free rein to shape and create this character. I tried to tell him, “Don’t imitate my parents or try to stay true to my experience but really make this your own.” Whenever Steven felt like “I want to take Jacob in this direction”, I was honestly very excited; I was just watching him create as an artist. That’s wonderful when you’re seeing that you’re working together on something and you’re each adding your own thing to it. I felt more like a maestro in a way. And this was a musician in front of me. And I’m able to balance you to everybody else and bring out the best in you.
Minari is released nationally in cinemas on February 18.