When I first met Sean Wang—the 29-year-old filmmaker behind the new indie hit Dìdi—in the plush lobby of a Flatiron District hotel a couple of weeks back, there was one question I needed to ask before we could talk about anything else:
Were you an AbsolutePunk.net kid, or a PunkNews.org person?
Wang chortled knowingly. “I was an Alternative Press kid,” he replied, without missing a beat. “And a PureVolume kid, too.”
Great answers. I figured Wang would have a solid response to that query, because Dìdi, his debut film, is so clearly the work of someone who grew up listening to the exact same stuff I did: the kind of pop-punk, third-wave emo, and post-hardcore bands that regularly populated Warped Tour stage slots, Fuse TV video blocks, and Hot Topic T-shirt walls. The comedy-drama follows a 13-year-old Tawainese-American kid named Chris during the summer of 2008, as he struggles to figure out who he is in the lead up to high school—and music, naturally, plays an outsized role in that equation. There are Underoath and The Starting Line posters plastered on a bedroom wall in the film’s opening moments; songs by Hellogoodbye and Motion City Soundtrack play crucial roles in key scenes later on.
“This movie is about identity,” Wang told me, “and it's a moment in this boy's life where he doesn't have a sense of identity yet, but he has interests. And the interests that really shaped me were skating and that whole Warped Tour, pop-punk, emo [scene]. Those were the two subcultures that completely shaped my worldview. And I really felt permission to treat this movie as a love letter to not just my friends and family, but those cultures as well.”
But the film’s uncanny sense of time and place extends far beyond the music. Dìdi, in effect, does for the mid-to-late 2000s what Dazed & Confused did for the ’70s and Freaks and Geeks did for the ’80s. With all due respect to Lady Bird (and far less respect to the wildly anachronistic Saltburn), Dìdi is hands down the most accurate depiction of teenage life in the aughts ever committed to celluloid—insofar as so much of the drama unravels via AIM chats, Facebook wall posts, flip-phone text messages, and MySpace Top 8 placements. It’s at times so painfully accurate, in fact, that if the movie wasn’t also riotously funny, it’d be near impossible to stomach all of Chris’s all-too-real stumbles in his friendships, crushes, and family life. (Representation matters, sure, but watching Dìdi made me realize—as a still-awkward Asian emo kid who came of age in the ’00s—that there actually might be a limit to how much hyperspecific representation I can handle in a single sitting.)
That astonishing realism is largely the result of Wang pouring so much of his own life directly into Dìdi. Chris’s house is Wang’s actual childhood home in the Bay Area, complete with a period-accurate Jack’s Mannequin sticker still visible in his bedroom. (The band’s frontman Andrew McMahon DM’d Wang to thank him for the inclusion after a friend saw Dìdi at Sundance, where it won the coveted Audience Award. “That was so sick,” Wang said. “I was like, ‘Dude, Everything In Transit was my favorite album of all time.’”) Chris’s grandmother, meanwhile, is played by Wang’s real-life grandmother, Chang Li Hua, a first-time actress who also starred in his Oscar-nominated documentary short Năi Nai & Wài Pó.
“There's a scene in the short that always moves me,” Wang said, “and it's just Wài Pó sitting there rocking back and forth. There's so much pain in her eyes, but she's so youthful and charming. And that really planted the seeds of: Should we just cast one of them for the feature? It just started this joke with Wài Pó of, ‘Hey, would you consider playing the grandma in Dìdi?’ And she was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ And then eventually it got closer to it and she said, ‘Well, if you're that confident in me, I'll do it.’ It really felt like a swing that could have been a miss, but if it worked, it would be a home run.” (Spoiler alert: Wài Pó threatens to walk away with the entire movie.)
In order to nail the mechanics and vernacular of the movie’s era-specific social media, Wang was forced to venture into the primordial depths of his Facebook profile. “The same way you could play me a song by The Academy Is… 20 years from now and I’ll still know all the lyrics, that’s kind of how I am with AIM and MySpace and early Facebook—it’s all just kind of locked back here,” Wang said, tapping his temple. “If I see it and something doesn't look right, I’ll know it’s not quite the thing I remember. The good thing at least about Facebook is that you can literally just search—I would go on people’s walls and send my friends screenshots of their cringey statuses from 2007. They were like, Sean, can you stop?”
From there, Wang was able to paint a specific portrait of each character’s texting style: “How does Chris talk? Does he do a ‘U’ or ‘Y-O-U’? And for [Chris’s crush] Madi, the way that girls type was this big thing—they had a personality to it. Is she a backwards smiley face person? Does she misspell things or is she a grammar freak?”
And given the importance of music to the movie, Wang also compiled playlists to flesh out every character’s tastes. “Madi's probably this Fueled By Ramen scene girl,” he said. “Her favorite bands are Panic! At The Disco, Paramore, All Time Low, We The Kings, Dashboard. [Chris’s older sister] Vivian was a little bit more deep in the emo world, where she probably listens to Underoath, but also listens to Paramore, and maybe also listens to Chiodos.” (Vivian, Wang told me, was named after a close family friend who introduced him to cool music as a kid and helped source posters for Dìdi’s production design. “She was like, ‘You got to have an Underoath poster in there.’ And I remember we put it up and people on set were like, ‘That's a little scary looking. What is that?’ I was like, ‘Don't worry about it. People who know will know.’”)
An unexpected side effect of the film’s scene-kid soundtrack is that Wang has become friendly with so many of the musicians he grew up worshiping. Hellogoodbye—whose frontman Forrest Kline the director now calls “a homie"—performed at Dìdi’s Sundance premiere after-party. And not long before our interview, Wang got to direct the video for a new Motion City Soundtrack song, which plays over Dìdi’s end credits.
“It’s an homage, really, to Sum 41’s ‘Hell Song’ video,” Wang explained. The video stars three of the kids from Dìdi—Izaac Wang (no relation), Raul Dial, and Aaron Chang, who play Chris and his bawdy best friends Fahad and Soup—as they mess around with action figures and film their own Jackass-esque skate videos. “It’s been really special to see the kids become real best friends,” said Wang, who largely filled the movie’s adolescent roles with non-actors his casting directors discovered at skate parks, basketball camps, and middle schools. “It makes the video feel real, because they have a chemistry and shorthand now that’s just like watching me and my friends. It’s very weird.”
The most mind-boggling friendship Wang has struck up through Dìdi, however, is with his all-time cinematic hero Spike Jonze. The pair connected on Zoom after Jonze watched one of Wang’s early shorts, H.A.G.S (Have a Good Summer), which just so happens to feature a photo of a teenaged Wang with a speech bubble that reads, “I Love You Spike Jonze.” “I was like, ‘Did you see your shout-out?’” Wang recalled. “And he said, ‘I did, I was very flattered.’ It was so embarrassing."
Wang was in post-production on Dìdi during that first chat with Jonze. “We just talked about process and he was like, ‘Dude, if there's anything I learned in the last 30 years of making stuff, it’s that anything can be anything. A music video can be anything, a commercial can be anything, a feature can be anything.’ I remember going into the edit afterwards like, ‘Guys, anything can be anything! We should try everything!’ We threw so much at the wall, and then in the end we cut all of it,” Wang said with a laugh. That initial call eventually led to Jonze making a small but pivotal voice cameo in Dìdi, which I’ll let you piece together after seeing the movie.
Dìdi hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles last Friday; it’s set to expand nationwide on August 16. Thus far, the movie has been a smash success, garnering a 96% critics’ score and 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a vaunted New York Times Critic’s Pick designation, and a “nice” box office return in limited release, per Deadline. It’s no surprise that the movie is playing extremely well to people like me—nostalgic adults in their early 30s—but I was curious how it was being received by the demographic depicted in its story.
“We've had a couple screenings where it's for kids 12 to 17 years old, and they flip out,” Wang said. “They’re the best, loudest screenings. And the Q&As afterwards almost become more for me—I'm asking them questions. ‘What did you resonate with, since you don't know any of the technology?’ But they're like, ‘We still talk to our crushes. We’re still embarrassed by our parents. We still text.’ So I'm really happy that it resonates with that audience. Being 13 then and 13 now, the emotions are the same. It’s similar to how I watched Stand By Me as a kid and thought, I get that movie, even though I [didn’t grow up in the ’50s].”
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Mostly, Wang is just thrilled to see his long-gestating feature finally out in the world. The day before our interview, he was left awestruck by a massive Dìdi billboard above Penn Station. “When I first had the idea for this movie in 2017,” Wang said, “I remember Googling the posters for coming-of-age movies and not seeing a single Asian kid on any of them. I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ It really helped me understand there was an opportunity here to not just make an Asian version of a Stand By Me-like movie, but to hopefully make a time capsule of a generation. The internet of that era, MySpace, the music—I just didn’t think it’d been done right yet. There’s an entire group of people who have never seen that version of the story. So seeing that poster up there…it was a little nuts.”
Now, Wang is turning his attention to his next ambitious project. “I'm writing the next thing right now,” he told me. “It's early stages, but I'm really excited about it. It's kind of a musical…ish. I guess now that I said it on GQ, I have to do it.”
Is it an…emo musical? I asked Wang.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he replied, with a sly grin. Get your guyliner ready, folks.