Top 70 Lee Isaac Chung Quotes

What I noticed is that the lens from which people want to look at ‘Minari’ is just from that Asian-American angle. And I think that can end up being very frustrating. Because the craft of the film, and this film itself, is meant to embody a lot of different things.

There’s a constant level of risk in farming that so few movies let you feel. I wanted to show some of that, but also, by contrast, reflect on how nature so often offers grace.

‘Minari’ was only eligible for the best foreign language film category due to the HFPA rules on language, so the film was submitted to meet these rules; there was no choice involved in the matter.

My mom grew up without a father because he died in the Korean War. And my grandmother, her life was completely upended because of that.

A lot of times we have these categories that maybe don’t fit the reality of human experience and human identity. I’m completely sympathetic to what a lot of people in my community are saying – that often as Asian Americans we’re made to feel more foreign than we internally feel ourselves.

I try not to be someone who’s preaching a message with my films or anything like that.

I was on this weird, wild goose chase where I thought I might try to adapt a Willa Cather book. And if you don’t know Willa Cather, she was an author in the early 1900s. And for a while, she wrote these books about New York high society.

When I was thinking of giving up, I was very dissatisfied with the idea that the films that I’ve made are the ones my daughter might see in the future and would represent what was very personal to me.

It’s always about agency – that’s the goal, always, to give agency to people. I think that’s always got to be the priority.

I’ve never felt completely American.

I remember hearing my mom saying so many times we should never have left Korea. She would see the way that I was growing up and the fact that I was speaking English and not speaking Korean as well, and she would fear the things that we were forgetting.

Film shoots generally don’t smell good.

I felt like I was growing up with two different churches, in a sense. And that’s always stayed with me – not just the religion of it – but the day-to-day understanding that these beliefs, that faith itself, is something that I need as something to sustain me.

I know, it’s disturbing that gentle looking people have such violence, but I believe we all have a penchant for violence in us.

My parents, they grew up in a time when there was war in Korea. And my grandmother, her husband, my grandfather, was a soldier and he died in the war. A lot of people in that generation, they didn’t go to schools. My grandmother couldn’t read; she didn’t finish beyond elementary school.

After having struggled through some close friends’ and family members’ battles with cancer, I wanted to create an American drama about the experience of tragedy and memory.

I think one of the things that I had to establish for myself quite early on was the rule that this is not my parents and this is not me or my family, that somehow this has to become a family that exists solely in the film of ‘Minari.’

I began my filmmaking career by shooting a feature length documentary in China in 2004, the year I graduated from film school.

Growing up, the question of faith and the question of God, specifically with Christianity, has been something that’s informed me quite a lot, but it’s also very loaded. The way that it’s often expressed in America is very different from the way that I view things.

It’s hard to say, ‘I demand a seat at a table for best picture.’

As a kid… there’s a veil of separation between you and your dad, especially when you have a dad who’s under a lot of stress.

I want people to know that I am not an overnight success, if only to encourage the people who don’t feel that they are being successful.

I didn’t have much of a taste for Korean food growing up: I was over the moon about Mexican food.

She died when I was 16 and I just think no history books, nothing is ever going to talk about my grandmother. She was kind of invisible. She couldn’t speak English so didn’t have many friends. I think of her any time I think of the word ‘sacrifice.’

I was just making movies to make movies. I was so full of anxiety about becoming a filmmaker that I kind of lost the idea of why I was doing it.

I do care what my daughter thinks and what the future generation of whoever is down the line will think.

There was never a point where I thought, ‘I’m going to do something Asian American.’

Having parents who are chicken sexers – I had trouble explaining that to kids at school!

I was hitting 40, and I realized I needed to just move on in life and do something practical.

Growing up where I was, there were no Asians, no minorities, and there was always something to remind me of what I’m not. And when I go to Korea it’s the same thing. I’m constantly reminded that I’m not Korean.

Among Korean immigrants the majority tends to be Christian, because that was the way they immigrated to America – through the support network of churches. I grew up with faith being an important fabric of my life. That comes with my life in the South – it was just a given that you believe.

These days I love watching Billy Wilder. I’m not saying the arthouse stuff is self-serious, but I needed to get out of my head a little bit and not treat films so seriously.

But I kind of reframed my thinking, where I don’t feel like filmmaking is what defines me anymore. Like, I feel like I’m much more defined by my family and other things in life that, that I feel are much deeper to me.

Even my parents felt like, ‘My son finally made it working with Youn Yuh-jung.’

I don’t diminish the idea of being American, but what I embrace is the idea of being human.

As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family’s arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother’s shock at learning that this would be our new home.

I went to Rwanda with my wife who had been going for the past three summers. She is an art therapist who works with survivors of the genocide. I decided to become a volunteer also, and to teach filmmaking. But thinking about how to approach a class, it made sense to start making a movie there, with the kids.

Early on… I did notice that a lot of people had the tendency to do their own story starting out. I felt like I was never interested in that, and I wanted to tell stories of people who are very different.

I didn’t set out to win an Oscar, of course, but to be in this conversation, it’s somehow an honour and a strange life experience as well.

We grew up in rural Arkansas without any Koreans close by, and when I go to Korea feel out of place.

I took time off and realized that what I was lacking was the discipline in trying to write a script.

I like the idea of all of us looking at the world with less of an emphasis on national borders and with more of an emphasis on shared humanity.

The attention and all the interviews and all that, it has been wild and something that I’m not used to.

I thought about quitting filmmaking, just because it was becoming so difficult for me.

But for me, at one point I was like, ‘Why do I want to make films that people want to walk out of?’ What if I actually want people to engage and have a good time?

There’s a lot of regret that I have about not showing my proper gratitude to my grandmother.

‘Lucky Life’ is my second narrative film. I worked on the idea for ‘Lucky Life’ while in Rwanda for my first film.

Because growing up as an Asian-American and growing up as someone who is not white, oftentimes in this country you can feel as though you’re a foreigner, or you’re reminded of being a foreigner, even though you’re not. Even though inside, internally, you feel completely American.

I just feel like the garden is a place where you can explore humanity quite deeply.

I just hope that in some ways, ‘Minari’ can pave the way for other filmmakers, other actors, other projects that maybe don’t fit within traditional boxes – if it helps those films get made in the future, I’d be so thrilled.

Ingrid Bergman in ‘Journey to Italy’ just goes off and looks at things for most of the film.

Insecurities and missteps can plague writers and artists who come from rural places. We worry that our provincial life experiences won’t gain the approval of urban curators, so we assimilate ourselves to other, more sophisticated voices.

When I look back now, as an adult, I’m able to see my mom and grandmother in a different way that I didn’t understand as a kid.

Any time there is a film in a ‘foreign language,’ in Spanish or Korean or whatever language, it’s usually not an American film. It’s usually from another country.

There are a lot of Korean films that will show marital strife, but I’m not sure I’ve seen so many that will show it in the interest of showing a real marriage – one that ultimately succeeds.

I remember my roommate was watching ‘Seven Samurai,’ and I just couldn’t fathom why anybody would watch it.