Focus Features’ Dìdi is now playing in theaters and is continuing its nationwide expansion this week. ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Dìdi director Sean Wang, plus stars Izaac Wang and Joan Chen, about the hilarious comedy-of-age movie.
“In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Congrats on Dìdi. This is one of my favorite films of the year. Sean, I love so many of the little touches, referencing shock sites, venting to SmarterChild, and buying a ringtone to impress the girl. It’s such a human element. Did that come from a lot of revisions or was that always in the script?
Sean Wang: Both. I think it was always in the script that a lot of the internet of the time was gonna be a part of it. So the ringtones and that, that was very story-driven. Like the ringtones changing to shape his identity. Like when does he have Hellogoodbye? When does he have a normal ringtone? When does he have the ringtone that he puts on for the skaters? But some of it was figured out in post because we created that all in post, we could change jokes and change lines. So, some of the shock value sites that you were talking about, that was a line and a joke that we kind of auditioned different versions of in post to see what would get the best reaction.
Izaac, this is referencing a time that you were just a baby for, but it’s also this very universal coming-of-age tale. So how was it kind of getting to experience the mid-2000s in a way through Dìdi?
Izaac Wang: It was pretty cool. I definitely say that experiencing things, like kind of learning more about the pop culture overall from the movie, was a little bit more difficult because it was basically I had to learn an entirely different generation. That was the harder part, especially things like technological. But I mean, besides that, it was mostly just kind of getting along with my friends again and just like being myself was like good enough. I think that’s something that you can see as a similarity between now and then, is that there’s really no difference in how we act. It’s mostly just the change in media and culture that’s really impacted us.
Joan, you’ve had such a lovely film career, but I assume this is the first time that a director has had you sniff your own fart in a movie. It’s inherently gross, but it’s also this really sweet scene in context. Can you speak to filming that scene in the car?
Joan Chen: It was actually hard. I think that was one of the hardest.
Izaac: It was a pretty hard shot.
Chen: It was one of the harder scenes to do. I loved it because it is humorous and real, and I think it came from [Sean’s] real experience or something.
Sean: Throwing my mom under the bus, not me. I was farting in the car when we shot it, trying to give her some real things to react. No, I’m kidding.
Izaac: He’s just in the backseat farting himself [laughs].
Sean: I did think about that.
Chen: I loved it because I do think that she doesn’t appear all the time, but every time she appears, it’s a different facet, you know? That sniffing my own fart is one facet of the character. She is sincere when she wants to sniff it out so that the son doesn’t suffer as much [laughs].
Sean, your maternal grandmother plays Nai Nai in Dìdi. She was also in the documentary you did. How special was it having her involved?
Sean: It was amazing. Part of trying to make this movie is what choices can we make that only we could make on this movie that will give it a sort of unique spin. That will hopefully set it apart from other movies of this kind. Having her come into the fold and knock it out of the park opposite Joan. I think it made the set a lot more fun.
Chen: She was great. She was quite a match.
