Hong Chau

“I think one in five Americans has a disability of some sort. That's 20% of the population, and yet we rarely ever see people with disabilities on-screen, and their stories and their resilience and their zest for life and their humor and their humanity.”

“I grew up around Vietnamese refugees, around people who don't speak English as a first language.”

“I grew up speaking Vietnamese - that was my first language because my parents didn't speak any English, and I didn't learn English until I started school.”

“When you see something that needs to be done, you do it.”

“When British or Australian actors perform American characters, we laud them and talk about how great it is they are able to do this other accent that is not their own. Americans have different relationships with other accents.”

“In life, we are all more than one thing, but for some reason in movies, you're either this or that. It reduces the complexity of a human being in so many ways.”

“My first job out of college was at PBS as an administrative assistant. I thought I would be on the production side of things.”

“My parents speak with an accent. A lot of people that I know speak with an accent. I have friends who speak with an accent. Accents in a vacuum aren't a problem; it's how you portray those characters and how well they're served in a script.”

“In Hollywood, there's not a ton of roles for Asian people. So a lot of it is waiting and waiting and waiting.”

“If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.”

“I'm never concerned about being first or on trend. I only want to feel like my most rad 'me.'”

“For me, I do my best work when I feel completely relaxed and not being judged.”

“I grew out of the habit of thinking or worrying about being seen as the typical Asian. I don't even know what that means anymore. I'm not really concerned with it.”

“I never like to sit and discuss my character, the other character, our relationship, or anything like that. I feel like if I did my job and I trust that the other person has done theirs, you just go on set, play around with it, chew the scene for a little bit; then we roll, and that's it.”

“Giving people the opportunity to sit in a dark theater together and have emotions in public, whether they're laughing or crying - that's what makes me happy.”

“We are surrounded by people with accents because America is a nation of immigrants. Beyond that, the people who made your iPhone and the shirt on your back are probably Asians, and we're really not that disconnected from each other; we have very intimate relationships with the world, whether or not we realize it.”

“I walk on eggshells, and I care too much about what people think, and I'm afraid to ask for things.”

“My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.”

“That's what I want to continue to do: really odd films, with interesting filmmakers.”

“Asian-Americans, we're not a monolithic group. There might be some Asians who are second-generation, third-generation, who may not speak the language that their parents or their grandparents spoke.”