Jon M. Chu

“I get a lot of emotion from my family and my friends. I think it's just communicated in a different way. When my family feeds me, they're saying they love me. They pick me apart to show that they care. One look from my mother says so much.”

“Hollywood listens to money and to controversy.”

“When you're the only Asian in the room, the last thing you want to do is to point out you're Asian. And be the Asian dude.”

“I just feel so lucky to tell stories and make up stories and share them with people.”

“I took tap classes growing up.”

“It's time for storytellers to tell the stories that have not had the privilege of being shown to the world, and the audience will be there.”

“I think a lot of people, even if you're not Asian, you go to your place of origin where your family comes from, and you get this sense of, 'Wow - people look like me and talk like me and treat me like their son in the stores and like a cousin in the restaurants.'”

“The American culture is pursue your own happiness, follow your dreams. The Chinese side is sacrifice everything for your family; it's all about the group. Those conflicting ideas were always a battle in my head.”

“Maybe I'm not the right person to do it... but I've learned that I have some power to help stories be told the way they naturally need to be told.”

“Stephen Chow is one of my favorite filmmakers, and so groundbreaking.”

“'Black Panther' is a phenomenon - it is all right in its own thing.”

“I've gotten scholarships from the Asian-American Directors Guild of America society and things like that, and those things helped me, even if I didn't realize how much.”

“Fear is a destruction of creativity.”

“It's called 'Crazy Rich Asians,' but it's really not about crazy rich Asians. It's about Rachel Chu finding her identity and finding her self-worth through this journey back into her culture. Which, for me as a filmmaker, exploring my cultural identity is the scariest thing.”

“I don't understand why we're all connected wirelessly via a little machine that goes in our pocket, to everybody in the world, and you have to have reels for a movie.”

“When you are young, coming into this business, you're told how the business works, and you feel very lucky to be here and want to stick around, so you believe the data, and you believe the conversations you're having where they say, 'You can't have that kind of lead because they don't travel here,' or, 'People will think it's not for them.'”