Sean Wang

Photographed by RYAN YOUNG

Styled by ASHLEY GUERZON

Interview by ERIKA HOULE

Assisted by GUSTAVO SORIANO

 

Who are your top eight friends? What does your favorite song say about you? When will you post that video? Where did you take that profile picture? Why — fuck, why — did you ever hit send on that message?

As Sean Wang knows and depicts so brilliantly in his striking directorial debut, Dìdi, turning the answers to these questions into an online existence in 2008 was a weighted task. How others perceived you and your interests while you were fumbling to get a grasp on yourself seemed both urgent and ever-important — a future was at stake, and filming skateboarding was imperative to finding a path forward.

Dìdi reminds its audience of all of the firsts they’ll never forget. Arguments. Embarrassments. Fixations. Kisses (see: “How To Kiss Like A Pro” on YouTube, and be sure to brush your teeth). Unlike some of the all-too-familiar and awkward coming-of-age moments featured in the film, Wang talks about the process of making it as if he was operating a perfectly smooth and well-oiled machine. He credits his cast and team, who he considers friends — Joan Chen, Izaac Wang, Mahaela Park, Carlos López Estrada, and many more — for making the atmosphere on set feel exactly right. His own grandmother (Nai Nai) warms hearts in all of her scenes, especially when she’s dancing. What Wang describes as a “playground summer,” which required logging off and looking at boredom as a catalyst for fun, also speaks to crushes, nerves, tenderness, and togetherness.   

On growing up in Fremont, California, Wang says he couldn’t articulate exactly what he appreciated so much about that period at the time. He was big into cameras, skateboarding, and experimenting with how to tie the two together to create content — long before it was ever referred to as “content” — on the internet. Though the characters and stories in Dìdi differ in ways from his real life experience, watching Wang’s take on connections to family, friends, Fremont, and the moments and spaces they move through could be compared to reading the most eloquent, illuminating, and moving love letters. “Jackass-inspired” kids will most definitely make you laugh, but everything feels less about what teenagers might currently consider “cringe,” and more about care and compassion.

Wang’s immense talent — as seen throughout his career and in his work for Google, The New York Times, and Academy Awards nominations — is now taking shape on Apple TV,  Disney+, and beyond. He’s already working on the next movie. But on a Monday afternoon in Monterey Park — a place that Wang describes as a nice “cousin” to Fremont — after skating in South Pasadena, he shared more about reminding himself how it felt to make things when he was 13.

 

What about skateboarding first drew you to filming and photographing?

I got into skating in 2006-2007. Jackass was big and cameras were becoming more accessible. I was watching a lot of YouTube skate videos, but also real skate videos. It was this time where they had tour DVDs, and my friend gifted me a Circa tour video. Being interested in skating automatically introduced me to photography and videos. There’s no culture of skateboarding without the culture of photography and filmmakers and videos. Girl, Chocolate, and Crail Couch videos — when I look back, I’m like, That’s my childhood, right there.

I never really thought of it as filmmaking, I just wanted to go film my friends and make videos. I was filming myself in my garage, too, the way that Jerry [Hsu] was. All my other friends hated filming, but I liked it. Figuring out the timeline, edit, or trying to recreate the feeling. It was Spike [Jonze] — when Fully Flared came out, I was like, Can we make skate videos that are more like that?

Were there other videos that stuck with you in a similar way?

Yeah Right!, Bag of Suck, Baker 3, This Is Skateboarding. In high school, Stay Gold, Ride the Sky, Pretty Sweet, the Flip videos, too — I was trying to figure out all of the scenes of everything. I remember I watched Antwuan Dixon’s part on YouTube, being like, let’s watch Baker 3, figuring things out until we could get our hands on a copy of the actual DVD.

We noticed the Jerry Hsu skate video song playing during the scene in Dìdi where Chris skates the same outledges in San Jose as he did in Bag of Suck. Were there any other Easter eggs we might have missed?

The opening song, when he blows up the mailbox — that’s Crail Couch, very much a Crailtap homage. On Wang Wang’s Myspace page, there was the “Who I’d Like to Meet” section, and I put Koston, Malto, Mike Mo…

Have you been able to get back into your own Myspace account?

I’ve tried to hack into it so many times [laughs]. I had a different email, it was hotmail — “Sheen,” from Jimmy Neutron, and my area code, “949,” and I don’t have access to it because I don’t remember the password.

 

What did your profile look like?

My song would change a lot. My Myspace name was “Seany Salami.” I don’t why, in elementary school a lot of people called me that. 

How has your perspective of the skate world evolved? Are you still as excited by it?

I’m a little less caught up on the skate media landscape, but I still feel like a kid when I step onto a skateboard. There was a time where I almost decided to go work in skateboarding as a filmer or videographer, but skating for me has always been so pure. It was always something where there was no reason I was doing it besides that it was fun, and pushing on a skateboard feels good and helps me center myself. Having little goals, too. Like, Today I’m going to land 10 frontside flips — there’s something about it that feels like play. That’s what skating is to me, and hopefully always will be. I don’t know, my body’s getting sore [laughs].

 

Did you have any role models or older friends you admired, and did you care a lot about seeming “cool” to them?

Not in the way that the movie does, but at that age, some kids that were three years older than me — it was like, Oh my god, you’re a senior, and you’re picking me up? Some of the stuff I tried to put into the movie was those older kids that took me under their wing, it was so nice. There was this shop in my hometown called Caliskatz, and the shop owner used to hook me and friends up all the time. They had a shop team, they sponsored all these dudes from the Bay area. I never knew them personally, but to us, we were like, They’re pros. Then there were actual pros, like Jerry…

What teenage memories did you find yourself spending the most time with while making the movie?

The movie started with the memories of me and my friends during that time. Every time we reminisce about our childhoods, it’s rarely about high school time—it was always seventh and eighth grade. We were such shitheads. 

The heart of the movie, and the stuff where I was like, Oh, I kind of forgot about that, and with an adult perspective, was the stuff with my family, and it’s obviously changed in the movie. But that made me look at my childhood in a different way, and understand certain dynamics differently.

What elements of relationships felt most important to convey?

I started with friendships. In the early drafts of the scripts, there wasn’t any family stuff. But then I sort of felt this urge. I wanted to write about this kid and his family — specifically, his relationship with his mom. I realized my relationship with my mom over my life was the most of every emotion in life. It’s the relationship that has the most love. The most shame. The most guilt. The most protection. The most joy. As a filmmaker, that’s so right for storytelling. I was like, Let me go down this rabbit hole and see what it would do to the movie. Initially when I had that urge, I was hesitant to follow it, but as soon as I was like, What if the mom and son were in this place in this scene together, it uncovered a lot of things for me. The movie felt alive for the first time. It’s a movie about adolescent boyhood and those friendships, but it has to be informed by his upbringing and the relationship he has with his family — who he is in what spaces, and how he changes from one space to another.

I remember pitching it, I was like, It’s about this kid, who he is with his family, who he is with his friends, and who he is with the people he wants to be his friends. With his family, he’s the worst version of himself. With the other groups, he’s figuring out who needs to be at any certain moment. And I was like, That’s interesting, that’s the movie. Let me get deeper, deeper, and deeper into that.

What role do you play within your own family?

I think in Asian culture, if you’re the only male child, you get this treatment of like, You’re the one that’s going to carry on our family name. I have an older sister. I was the son and the younger sibling growing up, and I think it forged this thing within me where I needed to be independent. It’s like, Eat, eat, eat, and I’m like, I’m 30. I realized all of those efforts are forms of love and affection. My natural inclination is to be like, I’m good.

To me, my sister is the glue in our family. She’s very type A, organized. I need to be independent and figure out my career. But because I’m not married and I don’t live near home, my mom’s always calling me, and my grandmas are always calling me and I’m always asking, “Do you call Jen every day?” And they’re like, “No, because Jen’s married and has kids and you’re all alone.” [Laughs]. The older I get, the more I realize they’re trying to take care of me. I feel like I’m their last link to this chapter of their lives, where I’m their baby boy.

 

Were your parents creative? What inspired Joan’s painting dreams?

My mom is a painter. She’s always had a very creative soul. She’s not a career painter, but she took an art class when I was in elementary school and fell in love with it. It was very healing, and she thought she was kind of good at it. All throughout my childhood in her free time she would be painting, and now I can’t really remember a time when she wasn’t. Before she cooked meals, she’d be painting. Over the course of months, I’d see a canvas become an incredible painting, and I was like, Woah, this is sick.

That trickled into my life because my mom’s process would start with photography. She would take a bunch of pictures, walk around the lake, take pictures on family vacations — mostly landscapes and still life, but she would look at the photos she took and pick one and paint it. When I got into skating, I got really obsessed. I took her camera, and I’d take pictures of my friends skating so that she could paint them. She would look at my photos and be like, “This photo sucks, there’s no rule of thirds, the composition is all messed up, you’re not following the leading lines, and it’s just not a pleasant image.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” It planted this seed of thoughtfulness to an image. What angle makes a trick look the best? 

In skating, there are certain rules. She didn’t get that. She never got to pursue a proper creative career, but she always had that passion for art. She’s very intuitive. Especially with film scores. I’ll send her a piece of music — she doesn’t speak very good English, it’s hard for her to watch rough cuts of anything, but for stuff that’s truly feeling-based and she might not understand what they’re talking about, I’m like, “How does this scene make you feel?” She’ll be like, “I think it’s making me feel a little lonely.” I’ll be like, “What does this song make you feel?” And she’ll be like, “It’s a meadow on a summer day and it’s very breezy…” It’s been really helpful in the last few films I’ve made.

What role do you think teenage friendships play in the long-term?

It’s the most formative time of your life. A lot of that stuff doesn’t really leave you. There are scenes in the movie where the seed of the idea happened when I was like, 26. Like, the scene when he’s filming his grandma in the backyard, that was me and my grandma when I was like, 27. That relationship felt so childlike and playful. 

Some of your first core memories — because you’re experiencing things for the first time — really, really shape you. Your first concert, your first skateboard… it’s this time when you’re starting to develop your own interests. Skating was the first thing where I was like, Oh, this is mine, and it’s really fun — I wasn’t trying to be like anyone else.

Those times when you were out of school and you could reinvent yourself entirely — did your summers feel that way?

I think there’s something about going into high school, and in the context of the story, it was like for the first time you’re starting to curate your sense of identity in a very outward-facing way. At least for me, in middle school, you could be a part of these clubs and extracurriculars, but no one really put a label on you until you’re in high school. What clubs are you a part of? What sports teams? You’re a wrestler, or a water polo kid, or a skater — I felt like those labels weren’t assigned to me or people in my life until we got to high school. It’s a period of life, that summer, where you’re still really impressionable. You’re starting to think, Who do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to be? I always thought that was really interesting.

What parts of Fremont do you hold closest to heart?

It’s that thing where you don’t realize how special something is until you leave. The boring, mundane, suburban nothingness. Fremont has a lot of dry grass. Those 3 AM nights hanging out at the park. Walking to Denny’s with your friends. Being like, There’s nothing to do, so we have to make stuff up. Going to someone’s house and playing video games. Walking to Carl’s Junior at two in the morning and knocking on the drive-thru window. Messing around. Loitering in parking lots. Skating business parks.

What are your thoughts on boredom in general? Is it a luxury?

I think when you’re young there’s always a negative connotation to it. As I get older, I think about those creative things my friends and I were doing when we were younger — Was it because of boredom? It was pre-social media, too. We had time to daydream. We would sit and talk, and those are some of my favorite memories. Talking, about nothing and everything. I find myself wanting to be more bored. In a way, it’s a luxury — if you’re bored it means you have time. What do I do with that extra time? I’m trying so hard to put my phone away and allow myself to daydream and be bored. What are the thoughts I’m conjuring if I’m not looking at stuff or trying to engage with the world? That time before I go to bed — What am I thinking about? I want to do that more throughout the day.

Being bored in that way can make room for more silliness.

My friends and I would be like, What if…we went over there and jumped off that thing?

What are your feelings on having an entire life archived online?

I’m sure the generation of kids growing up like that will have some very smart things to say about what it did to their brainwaves and upbringing. When Instagram first came out, it wasn’t a social media thing — I would put photos on there to put filters on them. Throughout high school, I didn’t really have social media. After college it became much more visceral, like, you’re engaging with the world all the time. 

On AIM, you could log off the internet. You could go skate and have playground summers. I wasn’t looking to see if anyone was liking my photos or talking to me while I was away. I was there. I’d come home and be on the internet. Now, it’s always on, even when you don’t want it to be. 

What about the movie do you want more people to be focusing on?

It’s really nice to talk to people like you about it, who are part of the subcultures that the movie is engaging with — the skate community, and skate culture, and for people to actually notice the Easter eggs. That’s enough. Getting to nerd out with certain people, that’s really fun. This movie’s for you, and you liked it, so that feels good. 

What are you most excited about working on next?

I’m starting to write the next movie, but knowing that it’s going to take years, I don’t want to rush it. I think for the first time in my life, Hollywood is interested in sending me scripts and being like, “Do you want to direct this?” I’m just trying to remind myself how I felt making stuff when I was 13. The ideas you’re excited by where you’re like, “I’ll put my own red envelope money into making something.” I’m always searching for that feeling.