Justin Chon is making movies about the Korean-American experience his own way.
The actor (Eric Yorkie in the “Twilight” films, TV’s “Deception,” “Dr. Ken,” “Just Jordan”), born and raised in Orange County, has followed up his highly praised second feature-directing effort with the new “Ms. Purple.”
Both films look at adult sibling tensions under pressure: His previous film is about two brothers trying to preserve their shoe store as the 1992 Los Angeles riots ignite around it, while “Ms. Purple” involves a young woman drawing her wastrel brother back to their modest Koreatown home to help care for their comatose father. And they’re both about economic survival in a manner that recent American movies tend not to address.
“ ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ was about the .001%, the extremely wealthy, right?” Chon says by phone from the Biloxi, Miss. location of his next directing effort, “Blue Bayou,” about a Korean adoptee who, 30 years after being brought to America as a child, is targeted for deportation. “I think that’s necessary and cool because we see our faces onscreen; it’s very good representation and there’s a lot of fun to be had.
“But I feel like where I serve the community and I find a lot of value is in telling the stories about the blue-collar, other 99%,” Chon, 38, adds. “Those are stories that need to be told because those people don’t have voices. If I don’t do it, especially in the Asian-American community, who is? We’re kind of known to be very studious and well-to-do, but that’s not all of us. A lot of us are just struggling to make ends meet.”
In “Ms. Purple,” which Chon co-wrote with Chris Dinh, Tiffany Chu plays a young woman named Kasie and Teddy Lee is her estranged brother Carey. He does little more than hang out at video arcades and she works nights as a doumi (a hostess paid to drink, chat and sing with businessmen) at the Koreatown karaoke bar Soopsok. Flashbacks show how, when they were children, their now-bedridden father lost his wife to a more financially successful man.
While not autobiographical, “Ms. Purple” is informed by some aspects of Chon’s youth in Irvine and observing friends in L.A.’s K-town, where his parents would bring him as a kid and where he’d hang out on his own starting in high school.
“I have a younger sister, and I’ve always found the brother-sister relationship quite interesting,” he says. “You know, brothers can kind of argue or fight it out and sisters can talk it out, but between brothers and sisters communication sometimes tend to get muddled. Some of my favorite films are Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘You Can Count on Me’ and Tamara Jenkins’ ‘The Savages.’ I wanted to explore that brother/sister dynamic in a deep way.
“As you know, Koreatown is becoming so much more gentrified than it was when I was born in the early ’80s,” Chon continues. “It’s become, actually, a destination, a nice place to go have drinks and eat food. But I always think about my friends who grew up there. As the world turns it almost feels like some of them, not all of them, are being left behind. As the community becomes more integrated, it feels like they’re just stuck. And that’s the story of these two, who’ve grown up in Los Angeles but never really ventured outside of their own community.”
Class and gender imbalance within that community swirls around Kasie’s job. Chon consulted female friends who’d worked as doumi to get an accurate idea of how things can get out of hand – emotionally, physically and psychologically.
“She’s doing a job that’s sort of compromising her soul, but it’s the only thing she knows to make that kind of money,” Chon says of the character. “That job, in that setting, is very much alive in Asia. One of the questions I’m posing to the audience is what kind of cultural things do we leave behind in the old country and what do we bring with us. That job is one form of it; is that necessary in life in America?
“Secondly is the dress,” he says of a traditional Korean hanbok that Kasey wears, both as a child and at the behest of a client-turned-lover, that informs the movie’s title. “I’m not saying that we don’t need the dress. It’s just a symbolic representation of bringing something from the old country and questioning if it’s necessary to generations born and assimilating to become more American.”
Justin’s dad Sang Chon, who is described as “the South Korean Macaulay Culkin” by his son, turned to sales after coming to America (though he did return to acting to play the liquor store owner in his son’s previous film). Justin studied business at USC, but following a Silicon Valley internship decided office work wasn’t for him and started taking acting classes as well. Dad didn’t exactly discourage him from pursuing his former profession, but he didn’t subsidize Justin either.
Fortunately, the roles started landing. But after a while, that wasn’t enough.
“I just got sick of the lack of opportunity,” Chon recalls. “I played the Tech Guy a number of times, and that’s not very interesting. Earlier on, it was things with accents and that type of stuff.
“One time, I was on this show and the director was having trouble blocking a scene, so I just made a suggestion. He stopped me right away and said, ‘Hey, hold on, what are you getting paid to do here?’ I said ‘act’ and he said, ‘Exactly, so shut the [expletive] up and let the director direct.’ All I was trying to do was make a suggestion, I wasn’t trying to take over the set or anything. It just made me feel like, you know what? I do have something to say, I have a perspective on the world, and specifically about the United States, that I want to offer up. I just wanted to have a little bit more control over that narrative.”
Chon made a few shorts, then co-wrote and directed his first feature, “Man Up,” in 2015. He describes that as pretty much a stoner comedy about two idiots, but with an underlying theme of taking parental responsibility. Family considerations run throughout his body of work, as well as in the next film he’s starring in, “Coming Home Again” by Wayne Wang, a pioneer of Asian-American cinema (“Chan Is Missing”) and now kind of a hero-turned mentor to Chon. “Coming Home Again” premieres this month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
As much fun as he finds acting, Chon gets more out of creating film stories he believes are necessary.
“Having that responsibility is fulfilling because it goes beyond just me, just my own narcissistic endeavors,” he reveals. “It’s really: What am I saying? How does it relate to people? And how does it affect people? I have a two-year-old daughter, and when my wife was pregnant with her it just really switched my mind as to, what’s the point, you know? Why am I doing any of it? I’d like for there to be a point.”
Chon and his wife, Sasha Egorova, call North Hollywood home. He says with a laugh, “My wife threatened to divorce me if we stayed in Irvine because it was so boring for her.” Mom, Dad and Sis still live in Orange County, and he finds returning there a nice respite when the Hollywood stuff gets too crazy.
“I really, really loved growing up in Irvine,” he says. “At the time, I didn’t really appreciate the safety and the peacefulness. Irvine Spectrum may just constantly be building on top of itself, but as a whole Irvine just feels very steady. Some people might think that’s boring, but for me, I still find huge comfort in that.”
