Jon M. Chu might have never made his first movie if it weren’t for his mom. Five years after graduating from the USC School of Cinematic Arts—where he racked up prestigious film honors that recognized his short film work like the Jack Nicholson Award and the Princess Grace Award, and where he was famously discovered by Steven Spielberg—the chance to direct his very own film finally arrived. The opportunity was for a Step Up sequel, something initially presented to him as a direct-to-DVD movie. “I was hesitant to even take it at first,” Chu says, “but my mom told me, ‘If you’re a real storyteller, you can tell any story in any medium. And you have not even proven yourself, so what makes you think you’re too good for DVD?’ ”
Chu took the sequel, and he went on to direct the third Step Up installment, too. Both films ended up having theatrical releases, in 2008 and 2010, respectively, and were definitive successes at the box office. They also proved to be early testing grounds for the Palo Alto, California native’s nascent directorial vision, a grounded approach to plot salted with scenes of grandeur and whimsy, elements that would ultimately become a cornerstone of his blockbuster hits to come.
“When you get success that young, you don’t necessarily know exactly what you’re doing,” says the 44-year-old director. “It took many years and many movies—many successful movies, actually—before I knew exactly what I was doing.”
Chu recalls this formative anecdote to me from London, where he is taking a break from locking in visual effects work in the Wicked edit room. As the person currently pulling the levers behind the curtains for arguably the most anticipated Broadway film adaptation ever, Chu very clearly knows what he’s doing now.
But that confidence was hard-won. There was a time—before he took on Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and In the Heights (2021), two films that shook up an industry that had long dismissed the appeal of majority non-white casts—when Chu had to convince himself he belonged in the room in the first place. “I felt like I got lucky,” he explains. It took him a decade, years full of moviemaking with major studios and collaborating with stars like Morgan Freeman and Mark Ruffalo (both appeared in Chu’s Now You See Me 2), to feel comfortable in this space. “That changes everything,” Chu says. “When you have the confidence of, ‘I deserve to be here,’ then you have to ask yourself the more difficult question, which is: ‘Okay, what are you trying to say? What are you doing here now?’ ”
Chu was questioning his artistic direction at the same time Hollywood was facing its own existential crisis. Criticism over the industry’s lack of diversity exploded into the mainstream in 2015, with the kindling of social media’s #OscarsSoWhite movement fueling Chu’s desire to embrace stories that look like his. As a child of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants, he once resisted the idea of his work being solely distinguished by his identity. “At that time, if you were labeled as an ‘Asian director,’ then Hollywood would sort of put you in this box and say, ‘Well, only send them the Asian stuff,’ ” Chu says. “I just wanted to be known as the director.”
By no means has Hollywood fully rectified its whiteness problem in the years that ensued, but Chu has nonetheless put those fears to bed. Crazy Rich Asians made history as the first major Hollywood production with an all-Asian cast since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club, and—besides being a critically acclaimed and box office success that breathed new life into the flagging rom-com genre—it also reoriented how he carried the weight of responsibility as a director. “You can’t close your eyes after a moment like that,” he says.
Chu’s parents instilled in him and his four other siblings a sense of reverence for the country they raised their family in, a devotion to the American dream that still fascinates him to this day. “My stories all revolve around, ‘How do you redefine what the American dream is?’ ” he says. “What does a hero look like? What does beauty look like? What does a villain look like? I think in all my work, I try to give a new view of what those can be.”
The pull of these everlasting symbols of Americana is partially what makes Chu so well-equipped to take on Wicked, which, upon its release this Thanksgiving, will feature Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the starring roles. The story (which has been split into two films, with the second set for release next year) is a meta take on one of the country’s most well-known tales. The movies are adapted from the beloved Stephen Schwartz Broadway musical, which was based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the classic 1939 Wizard of Oz movie and preceding L. Frank Baum novel. Chu calls his iteration of Oz a “rewrite” of a “classic fairy tale.”
“Not just any fairy tale—the most American fairy tale that’s ever been written,” he adds. “It is the most iconic fairy tale in the most iconic American medium, which is cinema, and in the most American genre, which is the musical. And we deconstruct that with a woman who’s green, who isn’t what everyone expects as the hero of the story.”
Theater fans have been clamoring for a big-screen adaptation of Wicked since Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth originated the protagonist roles onstage in 2003, but, in some ways, there was never a better time to make the Wicked movies than 2024. Truth, propaganda, and power are more than likely all-too-familiar themes to modern audiences. “The Wizard even says, ‘Truth is what we all believe in,’ ” Chu says. “Of course, that’s always been around and propaganda has always been around, but it’s really come into focus now, because of the power of technology and how fast the information can spread and who’s in control of that information.”
In conversation, Chu’s obsession with the movie musical is compelling, the director nimbly synthesizing the story’s grandiose and nuanced themes with rapid-fire sound bites. This is the fruit of a mind constantly at work. But, beyond the finish line for Wicked, Chu’s future is less clear—and he kind of likes it that way.
“I’m excited because I don’t know what’s next. I’m excited to discover what makes me tick enough to make my next movie,” he tells me, weeks before the news that he’s set to direct Britney Spears’s biopic will break the Internet. “I always wait for the moment that I feel like the universe or God tells me, ‘This is what you're supposed to do.’ ” This moment, he adds, is defined by two questions. One is personal: “What’s a story that only I can make? That—without me—this story will never be made?” And the other is more metaphysical: “What, spiritually, am I being led to?” He considers his own question for a fraction of a second. “That can come from anything.”
Hair: Ali Pirzadeh for Björn Axén; makeup: Bea Sweet for Charlotte Tilbury; manicures: Julia Babbage; production: Block Productions; set design: Thomas Bird.
