Sean Wang set out to make a ‘Stand By Me’ for kids who look like him

NEW YORK — Even at 30, in a tasteful cashmere sweater he’s wearing for a day of press appearances, Sean Wang oozes skater kid energy. He bounces up the lobby steps of the fancy hotel where he’s promoting his first feature film — the coming-of-age story “Dìdi (弟弟)” — then stops before a mirror to stare up his nose.

“Gotta do a booger check. All good!”

As one of the most promising young American directors to emerge this year, Wang has more to be anxious about everything, including, yes, wayward snot. He recently did an entire BuzzFeed video interview, only to later discover the boogers were so not in check.

“Is it on the record that we’re talking about my boogers?”

Oh yeah, definitely.

It’s a topic that would fit right into his movie. “Dìdi (弟弟)” is set against the hyper-specific, laid-back, hella multicultural East Bay vibes of Fremont, Calif., in the summer of 2008 — after “Jackass” on MTV made inflicting bodily harm on oneself for the sake of comedy seem like a legitimate career path. It opens with shaky, self-filmed footage of 13-year-old protagonist Chris Wang (Izaac Wang, “Raya and the Last Dragon”) blowing up a mailbox and racing down a cul-de-sac, till the camera freeze frames on his delighted, metal-mouthed grin.

The title is an affectionate term, in Mandarin, for “little brother,” and the film, loosely based on the Taiwanese-American director’s experiences growing up, focuses on Chris, who spends all of his time attempting and failing to shoot skate videos or firing off hastily typed, curse-laden AIM messages to his best friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and the inexplicably nicknamed “Soup” (Aaron Chang) — under the handle “bigwang510.”

Critics have praised Wang’s ability to capture the rapid-fire messiness of the Myspace era, and the movie’s pinpoint accuracy of just “how miserable the netherworld between middle and high school can be,” as Vulture’s Alison Wilmore put it. But there’s a specificity to the Asian American aspects, too: the hilarious dinner-table fights with older generations shouting Mandarin and the kids shouting English; Chris’s reluctant attendance at summer tutoring sessions held in someone’s garage; his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen) and grandmother (played by Wang’s own grandmother, Chang Li Hua) arguing over who’s brought the most shame to the family.

“I think that it’s just a really honest perspective,” says Lulu Wang, director of “The Farewell” and a mentor to Sean at the Sundance screenwriters lab. “You’re trying to fit in with your friends, but you also have this huge responsibility to your family as an immigrant kid that we don’t see otherwise.”

It is, in other words, a rare film about Asian Americans who just get to be ordinary and fail, without having to be crazy-rich, or murderous honor roll students, or masters of a multiverse. “Ultimately, I think people resonate with his stories because he’s not trying to pander to any group,” says Shirley Chen, who plays Chris’s older sister, Vivian. “He just owns all of the unique parts of himself and tells that story honestly: he’s this cool, skater dude; Asian guy; kinda punk-rebel; film wiz kid from the Bay who didn’t get straight A’s and has a beautiful way of looking at the world.”

The idea to make a “Stand by Me” about kids like the ones he’d grown up with in the East Bay was something he’d been thinking about for years. He was 19 when he first saw the 1986 film, but something about the camaraderie of those four White boys in the woods felt true. More than “Goonies,” more than “The Sandlot,” more than anything by John Hughes.

“I just remember watching it and I was like, ‘That feels like me and my friends,’” he says. “It was the irreverence and how crass and loud those kids were, but also how emotional and vulnerable they were. The last line of the movie is, ‘You never have any friends like the friends you had when you were 12.’ And that just gutted me, because that moment in my life was such a formative time.”

It’s a time when kids are young enough to be impressionable but not old enough to care about much beyond goofing off, even as life starts throwing really adult things their way, like the death of a family member, or the nerves and excitement and awkwardness of a first kiss. One of his friends from middle school describes it as “the moment when you’re the worst version of yourself having the best time of your life,” Wang says.

Dìdi (弟弟)” wasn’t an obvious film to break out at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it quickly became the big word-of-mouth sensation (and won an audience award and a special jury prize for its ensemble cast). The excitement got a boost, too, when, the morning before its second screening, Wang was nominated for an Oscar for his short documentary, “Nai Nai & Wài Pó.”

The 17-minute short follows his paternal and maternal grandmothers, Yi Yan Fuei, 96, and Chang Li Hua, 86, who have been living together — doing tai chi and complaining about each other’s farts — since the deaths of both their husbands. Wang made it in response to the rash of hate and violence being perpetrated against elderly Asians during covid.

Making “Dìdi (弟弟),” Wang’s “north star” question, he says, was, “What does it feel like to not belong in a space where you actually feel like you should belong, when everyone kind of looks like you and shares a similar immigrant culture as you?”

In other words, what is it like to be, as he says, “an outsider among outsiders.”

He kept coming back to things he heard constantly growing up: “I remember people would be like, ‘You’re the cutest Asian I know, Sean,’ or ‘You’re the Whitest Asian,’” he says. “And at the time, it’s a compliment, right? But in my 20s, I started to look back and realize how those things shaped the way I look at myself, because if you do the mental math, it’s like, ‘Okay, it means I’m the best of the lower tier.’”

Like many kids of immigrants, Wang didn’t even know directing was a job someone could have. He got his early film education rifling through an uncle’s DVD collection in Taiwan. And well before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket, he began making skate videos with his friends. “We’d put it on YouTube and then my friends would watch it and they’d be like, ‘Cool! Awesome!’” he says.

Spike Jonze, the skater turned filmmaker (“Her,” “Being John Malkovich”), became an early idol, but Wang only knew him as a guy who made skate videos and “Jackass” episodes — that is, until he saw a skateboard deck with graphics from Jonze’s 2009 “Where the Wild Things Are” on it.

“Something about that — just, the dam broke for me,” Wang says. “I was like, ‘Wait, you can be a skater and do this no-budget, low-budget ‘Jackass’ stuff and make movies?!’” He started getting friends together to “make stuff that wasn’t skate videos.” And after USC’s undergrad film school, he got a job doing pretty much the same thing — spending four years in New York working for Google Creative Labs making artsy branded content.

But Wang found the job stifling (“every creative director had a creative director”) and short films about his family, made for zero dollars, became his outlet. He cut together a year’s worth of little human moments — kids at a playground, a man playing two trumpets — he’d shot around the city and overlaid them with voicemails from his mom in Mandarin, chronicling her worry for her son being away from home the same year Trump was elected president. Then he uploaded the five-minute short, “3,000 Miles,” to Vimeo, where it’s been seen almost 750,000 times. (He met Jonze, by the way, who now sends him sweet notes of encouragement; he also voices a dead squirrel in “Dìdi.”)

The first versions of the script for “Dìdi (弟弟)” all felt like homages to the White boy raunch comedy he’d grown up watching, like “Superbad.” He picked it up and put it down for years. But after the reception he got for “3,000 Miles,” he started leaning into the idea of making it not just about kids goofing off, or how shame manifests in those hormonal years, but also creating a love letter to his mom.

“I realized that the relationship I have and had with my mom is the most of every emotion in my life,” he says. “It’s the relationship that has the most love, the most shame, the most guilt, the most protection, but also the most embarrassment and the most regret.”

Wang held on to that Google job until 2023, diving into the unknown only when he was sure he and his producers had raised enough money for “Dìdi (弟弟).” His mom and sister were associate producers, knocking on doors around Fremont and asking for shooting locations free. Chris’s house is Wang’s family home, and the playground where he hangs out is where Wang went as a kid.

Other than Chris, all of the kids in the movie were streetcast from baseball camps, basketball camps and middle schools around the area, creating a rich tapestry that looks like the East Bay. For Wang, it was important to make the set feel like a summer camp where the kids could come and play. He wanted this to be an experience they would look back at when they were his age and love unequivocally. “I really wanted to make sure that … we captured this moment in their lives in amber,” he says.

He was, in a way, filming his actors’ coming of age — and the movie itself has become a moment of growth for everyone involved. Joan Chen says the set felt like family, as she shared big scenes with Wang’s grandmother and bonded with Wang’s mom in the backyard over being immigrants raising American kids. The actress brought her 21-year-old daughter onto the set as an intern, and playing someone else’s mom in front of her, Chen says, “helped us become closer. And we have since become closer,” Chen says. “It’s Sean’s gift to me, just like the film is a gift to his mom.”

Meanwhile, Wang has been working through how to present himself to the world as the movie comes out.

His whole life, Wang says, he’s pronounced his last name like it rhymes with bang, just as Chris does in the movie. (At one point, Chris tells his White skater friends that he’s only half-Asian.) The Americanization was a concession his father made when he crossed an ocean at 26 and was trying to assimilate. The “correct” pronunciation in Mandarin, though, is “Wong.”

All Lulu Wang could do was tell Sean her own experience; when “The Farewell” came out, she started saying her name like it rhymes with bong and correcting people when they got it wrong. “But it becomes a choice of, do you separate from your family?,” she says. “If he calls himself ‘Wong’ because he knows that’s the correct pronunciation, it’s embracing his cultural identity and his pride, but is it also going to shame his father by saying, ‘I’m not going to take your assimilated version of the name?’”

Before shooting the movie in the summer of 2023, he was Sean Wang (bang). But he’d asked his mom what pronunciation she preferred, and when he stepped onstage at the Sundance premiere in January, he introduced himself the Mandarin way. “And I’ve never looked back,” he says.