A biography for Lee Isaac Chunghasn’t been written yet.
“I wanted to make something that transcends borders and gets beyond this feeling of national identity.”
“The attention and all the interviews and all that, it has been wild and something that I'm not used to.”
“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.”
“Even my parents felt like, 'My son finally made it working with Youn Yuh-jung.'”
“I know, it's disturbing that gentle looking people have such violence, but I believe we all have a penchant for violence in us.”
“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.”
“I grew up watching films of predominantly white families speaking in English, and that this represented the American experience.”
“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.”
“We grew up in rural Arkansas without any Koreans close by, and when I go to Korea feel out of place.”
“I didn't grow up breathing cinema. I had to figure it all out in public.”
“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.”
“My daughter was five when I was writing 'Minari,' very much close to the age of David. And I was about to turn 40, which was the age my dad was when he decided he was going to start this farm in Arkansas.”
“I had to stop taking myself and the craft that seriously. Somehow I saw the bigger context of life. It's just a movie. What I wanted was to entertain and delight and put the audience on a nice ride.”
“Part of the fabric of America is that we have people from different countries who've come here and they are American, and yet they embrace their home ancestral culture. And this is their new home. And that's part of what makes this country unique in the history of human beings on this earth.”
“I wonder what things will be like for my daughter; she seems so comfortable growing up with an international identity.”
“I thought I would go into philosophy and political science.”
“If you're in the rural South, you don't get Korean TV, unless you can find a Korean grocery guy who has been taping Korean programs and then offering them.”
“A lot of people have had good discussions about what it means to be American, and we need to broaden our definition.”
“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.”
“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.”