S1:E3 Justin Chon and the Blue Bayou

In this episode we’re going to feature a true triple threat, Justin Chon. Justin Chon is a writer, director and actor who also produced (he’s technically a quadruple threat!) the film “Blue Bayou,” a moving and timely story of a uniquely American family fighting for their future.

A Story that Matters: Speaking to Issues of Today

Blue Bayou Logline: As a Korean-American man raised in the Louisiana bayou works hard to make a life for his family, he must confront the ghosts of his past as he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home.

Blue Bayou is a moving and timely story of a uniquely American family fighting for their future. Antonio LeBlanc (Chon), a Korean adoptee raised in a small town in the Louisiana bayou, he is married to the love of his life Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and he is the step-dad to their beloved daughter Jessie. Struggling to make a better life for his family, he must confront the ghosts of his past when he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home.

Justin Chon is known for his '90s LA Riots drama Gook (2017), which won the NEXT category of the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win him the Independent Spirit award for "someone to watch" in 2018. He followed up with a contemporary Koreatown sibling drama MS. PURPLE (2019), which also premiered at Sundance.

Duane Fernandez: I'm very excited about today's episode. As I get to share with you an amazing conversation I had with the actor, writer, director, Justin Chon. We'll be talking about his film Blue Bayou, which comes out this week and I'm very excited for you all to see it so we can talk about it. So please see it, let me know, let's discuss.

Blue Bayou is an official selection of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It's a moving and timely story of a uniquely American family fighting for their future, Antonio LeBlanc played by Justin Chon, is a Korean adoptee raising a small town in the Louisiana Bayou. He's married to the love of his life, Kathy who's played by Alicia Vikander and is the stepdad to their beloved daughter, Jessie. Struggling to make a better life for his family, he must confront the ghost of his past when he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home. I had a chance to see the Blue Bayou and it's absolutely 100% one of the most incredible films I've ever seen. It's astonishing, it's mind boggling to me and incredibly frustrating at the same time that Justin Chon is so damn talented. I find it personally offensive and slightly unfair.

After seeing the film, I sat in silence for over an hour just thinking about the story, the world, the characters that Chon had so thoughtfully created, the cast, those exceptional performances, but I kept coming back to Chon and how he did this. How did he do this? I was very grateful that I was going to be able to have a conversation with him, so I could learn a little bit about how he was able to pull this off. What happened for the following days in a couple weeks leading into three weeks is that I sat with this film and I kept thinking about it, whether I was in the car, I was at home or I was working, I kept coming back to this film because there's so many different elements of this movie that I'm blown away by. He wrote an incredible script, then he directed a beautiful film that has a clear point of view, then as an actor, he gave us an absolutely sensational performance and when it was all said and done surprise with his meticulous approach and thoughtfulness, he created an absolute masterpiece.

So let's talk to him about it. So I watched this movie on Wednesday, I text one of the publicists after a watching this movie and I said, I've never had a reaction to any movie, like I did watching this movie, like ever. I honestly spent the next 24 hours really just thinking about life. I think about my circumstances and then I spent the next few days, damn how did this guy do this? We've got 30 minutes to just dive right on into it. So how did the story come to you?

Justin Chon: I started writing this five years ago and I started hearing through the adoption community that there was this issue of adoptees being deported, trough these of loopholes and paperwork. Then I read a string of news articles and watched some videos about it and I found out that nobody really was talking about this or knew about this and it was really being glanced over in the whole immigration policy of it all. It was shocking, I just couldn't believe that a child or a baby can grow up from a different country by Americans and then the US government allows that and then 30 years later decide that they're not American citizens because their parents didn't file the proper paperwork. When you're child, how could you have possibly known that this is an issue? You don't know to look for this.

It's the adults responsibilities that this stuff gets taken care of. You can't put that on the adult like it's just, I don't know. Being born the US, I don't know what kind of paperwork happened when I was born, birth certificates and I've lost my birth certificate a few times. It's just ludicrous to me that this was happening, so I realized that no one was even knew that this was happening, I felt this deep need to share this issue on film. That's where it came from and there's this long process of finding a way to tell this story in an effective manner, but not making it feel like propaganda and just bringing empathy to somebody that was actually going through an experience like this. That was my main goal.

Duane Fernandez: Well, you did it. Every single conversation I've had in the last five days has been around just so many things around you, I could sit here and have a conversation with you for 30 minutes about acting in this movie, I could have a conversation with you directing this movie, I could have a conversation writing this movie. I just don't know how you accomplished it. So you find this story, you find something that it really resonates with you and you're like, I want to try to put a light on this and to your point, that's not propaganda, I want to tell through the human elements of it. Why Louisiana? There's so many elements, what made you pick the Bayou? Was it an idea that you already had that you're kind of marrying or was it all kind of coming together?

Justin Chon: I think the big thing for me was we've seen the Asian American story from New York and Los Angeles and the coasts. What I haven't seen is representation for my community in other places, whether it be Louisiana or I have family friends from South Dakota and someone like Steven Unice from Michigan. We're all over and for me another thing was specifically Asian American stories are very limited to one ethnicity, so one film can only handle within one ethnicity. So it has to be like a Chinese story or a Korean story and rarely do I see just two ethnicities in one film and how they relate and are similar and are different. So New Orleans specifically, there's a huge Vietnamese community there, they came there, a lot of them were relocated there as refugees after the Vietnam war,

I dated somebody from New Orleans, so I had an intimate understanding of Louisiana and I always was like, the film needs to be filmed here about Asian Americans. Then as an adoptee, not me but is the adoptee experience, there's a whole encompassing thing of what's it like to be placed somewhere where there's not a lot of people that look like you and what must that be like? That is the experience for some adoptees and rather than being adoptee in LA or New York, I think it's a little different. So the representation of that I think is quite interesting, seeing an Asian American with a Louisiana accent could be off putting it first and then I put it right in your face in the first scene and then by 10 minutes in, you forget about it.

That's how I think things become normalized, is you just have to expose it and then make it not make this huge deal about it and people just accept it and I think that was a big goal of mine. Then New Orleans as a whole is such a resilient place, they just dealt with a hurricane and yet they carry on and that's how I felt Antonio was, he's a survivor and New Orleans is also very diverse, but very diverse in a different way that Los Angeles is. Those are all factors in placing it in the south and specifically in new Orleans.

Duane Fernandez: Well you talked about representation and how when you put these things on screen they normalize those experiences to the audience but the key is when they're done correctly and you layered in so many elements, just so seamlessly. Louisiana was such a beautiful backdrop for the creative tone that you had, the textures, the colors, the tone of the film visually, like, I almost wanted to go back and watch it without any sound because there was the pacing of the camera, the film, along with the performances that you and everybody had came together perfectly and then it felt normal. This movie gives me goosebumps and whenever I think about it. How long did you write the first draft, when you finally felt like you wanted to take it out and share it with somebody in a real business manner, how long did it take for you to get there?

Justin Chon: Me personally, I'm not scared to just put it out there and get feedback right away and every script is different, but this particular one... the first draft doesn't resemble this film whatsoever. I just had to get something out that was just whatever my subconscious and then the ideas and sort of my subconscious elements are in this film but in terms of the structure a lot of it you wouldn't even recognize it. I just had to get something out and just be like, this is what's in my heart and these are the things that turn me on right now. Then it was about, okay, what are actually the elements that are important in this film and with the things you were talking about, the layering of it all and getting all these myriad of themes and characters, how do I make this all coalesce into something that's cohesive and feels like a film and not just like, just things that excite me? That's through the rewrites.

First and foremost, it was about this experience of an adoptee and what is that like? So to your point about it being in the south and the colors, and there's something that I have felt that's melancholic when I've spent time alone in the south being Asian American, that really resonated with me. Just by you being next to these really peaceful beautiful places that I feel like, speaking to a lot of adoptees, there's a sense of, who does understand you, who shares the same experience as you, and that melancholy loneliness that I found the south has at times. So it was just about finding those sort of things and then just finding the spine of, okay, this is about bringing empathy and the process of what would it be like to find out the government doesn't recognize you as American and dealing with that? That's the spine and then layering everything else on to help you deal with that internally, I think was how I layered everything.

Duane Fernandez: Getting that into an outline and into a first draft, did you feel it was a six months to a year or was that pretty quick to a point that you're not afraid to share stuff quickly, was it like three months? How long did it take to get you there?

Justin Chon: I think three months is right around where I started really sharing it but I got opinions early on just to get certain... but I did work with a few adoptees very hand in hand and I was sharing stuff with them very early on, just is this authentic? Does this ring true to you? What was your experience? Because that authenticity was very important to me because this is their story and I'm just the conduit in making sure that I can service them. I spoke with the Macro, the production company about this early on, I said, "I don't want to do a treatment or an outline for this." I will do as many drafts as you want. I'll do 20 drafts, if that's what it takes for you guys to be satisfied, but don't make me do these step processes, because it's going stunt my creativity of what this could be and the free association and flow of the way I work.

If you make me categorize this and vet this for you in that way, I think it's going to limit what I can make this from just an emotional standpoint because then you're making me think about it very logically and one thing leads to another, and this is breaken to act two. Can you just let me explore and find this in a untraditional way and thankfully they were open to that and let me do it, which is why I think this film is what it is. It's kind of the way I have to approach each film, each script, is it can't be this process of okay, usually last time I did it like this, so this time it must work for this. It's like, okay, I don't know where this is going to go, I don't know how this is going to end up and that fear of it being shitty, I think it's a really great motivator for me to think deeper.

Duane Fernandez: Well, that makes sense, I love your approach because if you go through that step process and you start with a treatment and an outline, it starts feeling very formulaic and then it starts getting in your own head where you're like, oh, I need to figure out what I'm going to do the second character before the second act. You're finding it in the story and letting the story dictate it and if you're down to do a bunch of drafts, that's awesome, that's amazing.

Justin Chon: I think you get into the mode of professional writer mode, Hey, I'm going to give you a draft and I'll give you a rewrite, that's like the Hollywood way, but I'm not doing it for that reason, I'm doing it to shine a light on this issue. So I'm not concerned with doing 20 drafts because I want it to be good and why wouldn't I do that? I'm not doing this as a job. So I think it shows in the film that, at some point it needs to resemble somewhere, so you have some form of a script at some point, and you're like, okay, I need to make this into a film. It does need to have structure and these characters do need to serve their purposes, but I don't want to start doing that till, like you're saying, the story starts to lead and tell me what it needs to be in order to do that spine of bringing empathy.

Duane Fernandez: Did you continue to tweak the script while you're in production or was it locked for more or less when you started filming?

Justin Chon: For all my films I do, I will make changes but for this film, not so much, there's things I cut out for sure, there are scenes that it was so painful to cut out, there's are two particular scenes that I wished I could have kept. One was Parker, you're seeing kind of maybe behind a curtain of how she's dealing with her demise, her death and she on this bridge of this freeway overpass, and she sits on the edge of this overpass. She's inconsolable, she's crying like crazy and you can tell she's thinking about maybe I should just end it now and there was this serendipitous thing where all of a sudden fireworks started going off in real life.

I didn't plan that and I just looked at the [inaudible 00:15:59] I was like, is this for real, is this really happening? It was so bright and she was bawling her eyes out and these fireworks were going off and I was just like, this is a gift from God and I just had to cut it. As emotional as it was, we didn't serve the sequence and it felt like tangential and there was another scene like that towards the end with Ace and Kathy, that was you beautifully acted between Alicia Vikander and Marco Bryan, it was just an Oscar level scene in terms of the acting. It just the pacing of the film. So those scenes were written and I had to cut and just painful, but in terms of the structure and what's on the screen, I'd say is relatively what's written.

Duane Fernandez: Wow. That's incredible. Well, I look forward to the director's cut so I can see those scenes. I can't imagine how hard it's to cut all that out, especially on the bridge, that sounds like a beautiful moment. I think one of the things I kept going back to was the pacing of this film and I think that, again, your ability to be the writer, director and the actor in it really just pulls you through this story. I couldn't tell if this movie was 15 minutes long or 40 minutes long or two hours long, because I was so enthralled with every little detail and it just kept me engaged and the pacing of it was so perfect. It never felt fast, it never felt slow, really well done, sir.

Justin Chon: Oh, thank you.

Duane Fernandez: How did you? How do you approach being in it because I think that just your acting performance alone, is one of the most incredible things I've seen in the last few years. How did you approach the day? You'd wake up in the morning and your director taking care of business decisions and creative decisions, how did you find the time to get into these incredibly powerful roles, when you're having to answer questions and take care of business?

Justin Chon: Specifically for that, I'm trying to take care of everything that's within my power beforehand. Anything that I could possibly address before the day I'm doing it, so like planning and preparation is super important to me if I'm going to act in the thing. I did a lot of rehearsal with my daughter in the film and with the other characters, Alicia we talked in depth about everything and discussed everything we could beforehand so that when we were on the day, we weren't debating or trying to figure things out, it's let's go, let's do this. So that helps a lot and then I did all the preparation for the acting part, I did all the emotional in preparation beforehand and the acting org, so that I wasn't thinking about that. When you're acting and directing in something, you kind of as a performer come last.

So, because of all that preparation, when I come to set I'm in service to everybody else, I am not thinking about what I'm doing as a performer, I'm like, I need for the actors to feel taken care of and confident in my vision and also what I need from them. So that comes first and then I step in and then because of the preparation, I just engage and I know where I am in the script and then I'm present. So for example, that scene, the one with Alicia where we had a big fight in the kitchen, my biggest thing I told myself for that scene is, okay, I've done the work, let's block the scene out, let's see where we need to move the camera and what's going to make sense logistically.

Then it was, okay I know the DPs are going to have my back in terms of making sure the composition and all that's going to be good and then I was like, okay, I'm here to be present and be completely available to Alicia and let's see where this takes us. So I was completely open to whatever would happen or whatever mistakes. The one rule was don't break, no matter what happens, we have to keep going. So what you're seeing in the filming I think is the third take. I think the actors really appreciated that because I'm in it with them. So if I'm asking them to stand under a freezing rain, I'm doing it with them, so there was this sort of trust and camaraderie where I'm not asking them to do anything that I wouldn't do and I think that in itself creates this collective energy that maybe you wouldn't have if you weren't also acting and directing.

Duane Fernandez: With your trust and your DP, when you said that you would roll these takes was the idea that you would do a scene and then just run it right back and just go back to your first mark and do it again?

Justin Chon: I just go again, I never watch playback. I never watch playback, especially if I'm in it, because if there's any doubt, let's just do it again. Let's not waste of time. If watching a take is the same amount of time that it takes to do a take and let's just go again. The other thing is any adjustments we need to make, we make the adjustments right away go, Hey maybe you came a little too far here, how did that look, could you get both of us in the frame or then maybe I should just move a little bit forward in this moment. Then we go again, we just like, okay let's keep this momentum going. I'm a big advocate of momentum while shooting. I don't want things to get stale, I don't want to feel overplayed, I call it riding the lightning and you got to stay in the moment.

Alicia really feels that actors are like thoroughbreds, you have a window, especially for these emotional scenes, you can, but it's probably not the best thing to do is run these emotional scenes for hours. You have like the sweet spot. So you're trying to ride that sort of wave. So like the Mo the momentum is important, so I'm not trying to over intellectualize things, I'm trying to really feel it out and then we just go. There are other times when you're watching daily's with your DP, I do rolling edits where I'm editing as I'm directing, those are times where we can reflect but if you've done your preparation and you have common understanding with everybody that's making the film with you, let's just go like. Let's trust that we've done the work and trust ourselves.

Duane Fernandez: You have a very confident point of view that it's the right point of view. Have you always had that confidence with these decisions or did that take time for you to craft?

Justin Chon: Oh, absolutely time to craft and it's just ultimately comes down to what matters to me in storytelling. So I'll always take performance over technical or composition and that drives my DP fucking crazy because I'll just be like, let's go. He knows that if a performance is really great in a certain take, I'm going to use it even if part of it is soft and that drives him absolutely nuts, which makes him sometimes feel like, not let me roll. Then ultimately what's the purpose of the thing is what are we watching? Of course all that stuff is important and I am also get completely fixated on certain things but I think it comes down to what matters to me. Generally the movie feel like it has direction and is intentional and has a color palette and is directed and not an accident and are we delivering on what the script promised and all that stuff and then at the same time is it effective? If it's just technically sound, no one will care.

Duane Fernandez: When you look back at this experience, especially on set, what was the hardest day? Was it from the actor point of view or is it from a directing point of view?

Justin Chon: I'd say every day of this production was pretty hard but we lost day because of weather, there was this rain and water levels rose that we couldn't get to the Bayou that we were shooting at. So we lost a day, so you have to truncate stuff. So we were under some time pressure and there was a scene where we're trying to get all this stuff and I'm on a motorcycle and it's raining on me and the water that we were a reservoir that we were using was from the actual Bayou and it was absolutely freezing. So basically the water was so cold that I was getting brain freeze, but we didn't have time to try to warm it up, we just had to go, so I can't feel my hands and I'm trying to rev this motorcycle, it's quite dangerous and I'm trying to have control of this motorcycle and then we have a stunt guy who's also having trouble.

That day was quite difficult and it was night time and there was visibility issues and the lighting to adjust it, it's a condo, so it takes time to move. All those factors were quite difficult in that moment and the whole limit of time was challenging. The amount of stuff that we had to get at that Bayou was really hard in terms of how limited we were. The era of margin was so small already as it was because it's not this big budget film, so I think that particular day was probably one of the most challenging.

Then the party, the Vietnamese party by the end of it, I was just moving stuff myself and cheating stuff moving people around because we just ran at a time, we only had that house for really a day, a day and a half. I don't know what it was that I forget but by the end of it, I was hauling ass and we also had to get Alicia singing and want to get that right. It was-

Duane Fernandez: On some movies the party would be three nights and you'd film the singing one night and you'd film the first half of the party one day and so that was all in a day?

Justin Chon: Yeah and like I said, you're riding the lightning and I want to get the outdoor, the partying in golden hour and you have a window there and you're trying to time all of that.

Duane Fernandez: There's a lot of times where I'm watching the natural light and I'm like, they nailed that, how did they get that? That's incredible. So without getting any spoilers, I don't want to share the end of it but was that a day? Was that final scene was that one day?

Justin Chon: That's one day.

Duane Fernandez: Unbelievable man. I don't understand, we're just going to need two more hours to discuss this and we don't have it. So I can't believe that. So I can't wait for the listeners to see this movie and imagine that last scene in one day. So what do you want people to feel when they leave the theater and they see this movie, what is the thing you want them to feel when they walk away?

Justin Chon: Just like you're saying in the beginning, it's always all these things and I think the reason why it's so emotional is there is... we were at Ken and you get the reviews and some people feel it can be dramatic at times. Well, that's intentional because the whole purpose of this is I want people to feel something and I want people to just align themselves with somebody who's actually going through something like this. So it's intentional, they're supposed to feel, it's not supposed to be just slice of life. I don't want to let people off the hook and I want people to walk away from this film and think twice. They could be laying in bed and think twice about these characters, what happened to Antonio? What happened to Kathy? How did they end up? What happened with them?

I want there to be questions and to think twice, because then I think you think twice about this issue, which is this is happening to real people and it doesn't let them off the hook. I think if the ending is tied it up into a neat bow, it lets people kind of forget about it and they can go about their lives and just kind of like, oh, that was cute but that's not real life. I think that talking to real adoptees that have been deported that I've screened this film for, they're very appreciative of that aspect of the ending of this film because they feel it represents what it really feels like for their experiences and that's the most important thing for me, because I made this film for them.

Duane Fernandez: I love it. I have one last question for you. What's your comfort food when you're having a bad day and you're just thinking about, I can't wait to get home and make this. What is your comfort food?

Justin Chon: Pasta with a stick of butter. Basically I'll boil the pasta, I'll melt a stick of butter in a pan, and then I'll take all the pasta and just throw it in the pan of butter and then I'll make the sauce on the side and I'll just use a shit load of chili floats and just destroy my stomach.

Duane Fernandez: Justin, I wish you the best of luck. This has been such an amazing conversation, I still have so many more questions, but I will listen to every interview you do to uncover all the answers. So I appreciate your time, I know you're a busy dude.

Justin Chon: Thank you so much. Surely appreciate your time.

Duane Fernandez: Thank you man, bye.

I'll include a link to the trailer in the show notes, as well as a link to the official blue by your website. You can follow Justin Chon on Instagram at Justin Chon, C-H-O-N and you can find us on Instagram as well at the Smith's Society pod. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, you're awesome.

Blue Bayou
Focus Features in association with MACRO and eOne presents Blue Bayou
Written and Directed by: Justin Chon
Produced by: Charles D. King, Kim Roth, Poppy Hanks, Justin Chon
Starring: Justin Chon, Alicia Vikander, Mark O’Brien, Linh Dan Pham, Emory Cohen

Blue Bayou Trailer:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh59H_d19Kg

Official Website for Blue Bayou:
www.focusfeatures.com/blue-bayou

Get tickets for Blue Bayou:
www.focusfeatures.com/blue-bayou/watch/

Find us on Instagram:
www.instagram.com/thesmithsocietypod/

Host: Duane Fernandez
Email and ask a question or share a thought: info@voksee.com

The Smith Society theme song by: Steady Cadence
Steady Cadence is a brilliant father daughter duo out of North Carolina. There is an episode later this season about the theme song, their unique sound which blends together analog and digital, their inspiration, creative approach and how Cadence, who is currently in middle school, has so much soul.

Edited by: Marshall Baker

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