Sean Wang is jet-lagged. He has been up since 4am after arriving in London late the night before. When he couldn’t get back to sleep, the film-maker headed to the Southbank Centre. Surrounded by the deserted streets of the city, it was just him and his skateboard as he tried out tricks. He has been obsessed with skateboarding since his early teens. “Everything that I love now, whether it’s the music I listen to or the way I dress, it all traces back to skating.”
Wang, 30, has channelled this passion into his debut feature film, Dìdi (弟弟), which means “little brother” in Chinese. The semi-autobiographical tale of Chris (Izaac Wang), an awkward and angst-ridden 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy who starts shooting skating videos one summer, is a tender and astute coming-of-age movie packed with moments of cringe-inducing humour. Chris is growing apart from his childhood friends while dealing with a new crush and trying to impress a group of older, cooler skater kids. Then there is the family drama at home; things are tense between his mother (Joan Chen) and grandmother (Wang’s own grandmother, Chang Li Hua), he is bickering non-stop with his older sister (Shirley Chen) and his dad is away working in Taiwan.
While Dìdi was inspired by his own life, don’t expect a memoir, Wang says as we grab a quiet moment in between his speaking engagements at the Sundance London festival (the film won the prestigious dramatic audience award at Sundance US). “The container is autobiographical; I was 13 in 2008, I’m Taiwanese, I grew up in the Bay Area [in San Francisco], I grew up skating, I still skate. But everything within that container is fictional or modified.”
Dìdi lovingly recreates the late 00s, especially the rudimentary social media of the times, with scenes showing tentative AIM chats, the fraught significance of Myspace’s top friends, and YouTube clips of silly pranks. It captures the growing pains of the teenage years with warmth and sensitivity; as Chris steps out of the comfort zone of childhood, he is stuck between the innocence of youth and the desire to experiment. Despite his faked confidence, he is a bundle of insecurities. Filming skateboard tricks is an escape, a way to be treated like a peer by boys older than him.
The way Dìdi deals with adolescence and teen friendships with such open-hearted sincerity harks back to Stand By Me, which was a huge influence on Wang. “I always loved movies about adolescence,” he says. “The quote at the end of Stand By Me where you don’t have any friends like the friends you made when you were 12 – I do think the friendships I made during that time were so strong and heartfelt.” Watching films such as The 400 Blows, This Is England and Ratcatcher, he realised something important. “In all those movies about childhood that didn’t pander to kids, I never saw one that starred someone who looked like me or my friends. It felt like there was an opportunity there to contribute something new to a genre that I really love.”
Wang grew up with his older sister, in Fremont, California, an area of multicultural diversity. His mother is a painter and his father is an engineer. He went on to study at the University of Southern California’s film school before a stint at Google Creative Lab. During the writing process for Dìdi, he wanted to unpack the feeling that had haunted him in his 20s, namely, “what does it feel like to be an outsider among outsiders, in a place where everybody shares a similar culture as you, yet you still don’t feel like you belong?”
Most of all, he wanted to create a film about shame, a corrosive feeling that crept into his life when he was made painfully aware of the stereotypes others placed on him due to his race. He recalls the times when he was growing up when he was told he was “cute for an Asian” – a line that makes it into the film – or: “You’re the coolest Asian I know.” “I didn’t realise how those things affected me and how I looked at the world and myself until I was in my 20s,” Wang says.
Casting Chen, star of The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks and, more recently, Disney+’s A Murder at the End of the World, was a major coup. The 63-year-old Chinese American actor is a revelation in the role of Chungsing, a woman who has sacrificed her own ambitions to raise a family but still dreams of being a painter. (Wang’s mother, he says, made all of the paintings in the film.) Chen gives an astonishing performance that is achingly gentle as a weary mother watching her artistic hopes slowly fade away.
Initially, Chen was worried that she was too old for the role, he says, and even offered to screen test for the part so Wang could be sure of his decision to cast her (he turned down her offer). “One thing I wanted to do with that character was to show a different side of Asian motherhood that you never saw in the media.” He rails against the well-worn tiger mum cliche that is often shown on screen. “My mum and a lot of other mums I knew growing up were sensitive, tender, emotional, empathetic and artistic.”
There are not many directors who have already garnered Oscar nominations before their first feature films have been released, but Wang achieved that accolade earlier this year when his short film, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was up for best documentary short film. The idea for the short came about after Wang created a Christmas video card with his two grandmothers, Yi Yan Fuei (Nai Nai, Mandarin for paternal grandmother) and Chang (Wài Pó, his maternal grandmother), in 2018. The clip shows the pair trying to feed him blueberries: when he refuses to eat them, they tie him up and spank him. It is hilarious and goofy and makes you think dinners at their house must be a riot.
The short is similarly endearing as it documents the relationship between Yi and Chang, best friends who sleep in the same bed. Oscar night was a surreal experience spent pushing his grandmothers around in their wheelchairs, both wearing sunglasses, bright lipstick and Rodarte black and red suits as they charmed celebrities such as Jamie Lee Curtis.
The experience, he says, was “very surreal, very special. I still get emotional thinking about it. Sam, one of our producers on the short, texted me just a few days ago and said, out of nowhere: “Remember when we went to the Oscars with your grandmas?” I’m like, how is that a real sentence? It still feels like a fairytale. Even now that it’s over, looking back, I’m like, how did that happen?”
He created the short as a reaction to the Asian hate crimes that were spreading across the US during the pandemic. In 2021, Wang had moved back to live with his family temporarily. “My relationship with [my grandmothers] is so full of joy and lighthearted fun. So I would feel that with them and then I would go on the internet and read these headlines about someone who looked like them getting attacked in the streets.” Wang talks about how angry and helpless he felt, but then he would walk into the kitchen and see Yi and Chang dancing around, oblivious to what was happening. “I was like: ‘I feel like there’s something here.’ I want to humanise people like them who are being victimised.”
Representation clearly matters to Wang, but he wants it to unfold naturally in his work and to create stories that transcend race and immigrant identity, as it does in Dìdi. “It has a very specific portrait of a Taiwanese boy, but people can still see themselves in our movie, even if you don’t demographically align with the protagonist,” he says. “Those feelings of loneliness, shame, joy, belonging are universal, no matter what culture you come from.”
• Dìdi is released in the UK on 2 August
