Lee Isaac Chung

“The films that excite me most tend to be the films that seem like voices that we haven't heard of before.”

“I was a little bit anti-industry, anti-Hollywood.”

“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.”

“It's hard to say, 'I demand a seat at a table for best picture.'”

“I was so excited when 'Parasite' won the Oscar last year, and part of that was the shared Korean heritage and also it was just knowing that Bong Joon Ho made an incredible film and it didn't matter what language they were speaking, what country it was from, audiences all around the world responded to it.”

“I know a lot of people in my old town in Arkansas are big Trump supporters, and in a way I try to understand them. I try not to judge them for that.”

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

“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.”

“My sister and I thought my grandmother was not very grandmotherly compared to all of the church ladies that we knew. She was making sure we learned all the Korean swear words, just in case we needed them. Now I see what an awesome lady she was.”

“For us, church was kind of the way that we found our first entry into community in Arkansas. My parents would drop us off at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln so that we would make friends and we would learn English.”

“Film shoots generally don't smell good.”

“The single most eye-opening experience for me and what propelled me to become a filmmaker was that I started to see films from other countries.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My dad started to watch westerns at dollar cinemas in Seoul and felt like America was a miraculous place. His family had lost a lot of land during the Korean War and the Japanese occupation. That affected him a lot as a kid. He always felt like he needed to come to the U.S. and get land.”

“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.”

“After everything my parents were teaching us about Korean culture, about being respectful and all these things, you know, here came my grandmother, who is very crass and wanted to teach us how to gamble.”