HE’S CALLING ALL THE SHOTS
After the scars of ‘Fresh Off the Boat,’ Eddie Huang took control on the film ‘Boogie’
Eddie Huang, the author, restaurateur and TV host whose memoir chronicling life as an immigrant kid in the ’90s was adapted into the hit ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” would’ve taken the fast lane to moviemaking had such a path existed. Instead, after minoring in film in college and hustling in and out of careers in law, streetwear and assorted other pursuits, he started knocking down walls his way.
“It was never a viable thing to tell Asian American stories until I broke through with [the Taiwanese bun shop] Baohaus,” said Huang, 39, making his writing and feature directorial debut with recent release “Boogie,” a New York City-set tale of a Chinese American hoop star with NBA dreams. “You can’t walk in with an Asian American memoir or movie. No one believes in it, no one wants to do it — but they do believe that we’re good at cooking and kung fu.”
He started telling the story of his own cultural roots by serving up Taiwanese bao to New Yorkers, “but the goal was always to leverage the success and intention into film in some way.” His 2013 book, “Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir” — loosely adapted into a historic ABC sitcom that debuted in 2015 and that starred Hudson Yang as a young Eddie, with Randall Park and Constance Wu as his parents — opened a new door. “People came to me for recipe books, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to write a recipe book. I don’t even have an interest in being a chef,’ ” said Huang. “I did it because that was the only place I felt as an Asian American you could tell your story without somebody standing over you.”
“Boogie,” written during a time of self-doubt after a public split with the network show, a self-described heartbreak and behindthe-scenes friction on his Vice travel series “Huang’s World,” tells the coming-of-age story of Alfred “Boogie” Chin (played by newcomer Taylor
Takahashi), a high school basketball phenom struggling to chart his own destiny amid a volatile home life, a romance with a classmate (Taylour Paige) and the often-conflicting pressures of his bicultural identity.
It wasn’t easy for Huang to push “Boogie” to the finish line. Only weeks before filming began, he persuaded producers to cast Takahashi, his assistant, as the lead. When another actor dropped out during production, rising rapper Bashar “Pop Smoke” Jackson nailed an on-thecourt audition and came aboard to play Boogie’s rival, Monk, just four months before Jackson’s death at age 20.
Like Takahashi, Jackson had no previous acting experience, but the two brought authentic emotion to a world seldom seen on-screen, said Huang, whose next focus is a slate of film and TV projects “telling stories from the margins” through his production company, Color Correct. “I hope that other people are inspired to do that so we don’t see the same faces all the time and give people a chance.”
Huang spoke via video chat ahead of the release of “Boogie,” which is now in theaters and will be available on PVOD on Friday. This conversation took place before the Atlanta-area shootings March 16 that left eight people dead, mostly Asian women, increasing the national conversation about violence against Asian Americans.
“Boogie” is fictional but contains shades of your own experiences. What made you want to tell this story about a basketball player and his relationships?
I always felt like one of the best ways to get to know people was to watch them play basketball, so basketball has always been this thing within which I’ve studied humanity. Even when I wasn’t getting along with my father, basketball was something we could do. I would never really yell back at my dad. I never raised my hand back to my dad despite a lot of crazy stuff going on in my house. But I could take it out on him playing basketball.
I couldn’t beat him until I was 18, and he still remembers it: It’s one of his best and also worst memories. I didn’t go to class much in college; I would just play ball, then I came home and I washed up my dad. I remember beating him and just leaving the ball on the floor and walking away. I think he could tell I was really mad at him for a long time, and because of Asian values and respect and the things that I respect and believe in, I was never going to raise a hand to him. But if I had a chance to beat him at something, I was going to do it and do it pretty mercilessly. And that was our relationship.
If you can tell a lot about a person by the way they play, what kind of player are you on the court?
I’m gonna go with Taylor Takahashi’s description: I’m a high-IQ player and very unselfish on offense . ... I’m our enforcer. I’m the smallest guy on the floor, but I’m the toughest one. If another team is picking on us or pushing us around, I’m usually the first one to push them back. That’s just me. I don’t like being picked on, and as an Asian playing basketball, people always come for you first.
You started writing this five years ago, in 2016. Where were you at in life that Boogie was the character that materialized out of your experiences and your imagination?
When I was writing “Fresh Off the Boat” [the memoir], I was much more brash and extremely confident — it was like, “Nothing’s going to stop me,” and that’s kind of what got me here. But my experience on “Fresh Off the Boat” [the television series] really beat me down, Hollywood beat me down, and even “Huang’s World” … when Vice became a TV channel, there was a lot of friction and politics with taking this beautiful thing that was very real and honest and insane on the internet without the pressure of making television.
There were executives from goofy shows coming in, telling us what to do, and I was probably the most vocal person, per usual, about it. I got arrested shooting our Sicily episode, which ended up being one of our best episodes, but when we were in jail, the producer of that episode wanted us to give up the footage. I was like, “I refuse.” And the rest of the crew agreed with me. That was the chasm between the new guys coming into Vice and the old ones.
We had a bit of a mutiny. Once we got out of jail, we were like, “We don’t want to work with this producer anymore.” I took over the shoot, but I got home and I was suspended. I thought I lost that show, and that show meant the world to me. It meant more than “Fresh Off the Boat” ever did. I remember crying at work . ... And I went home that day and I started writing “Boogie.”
I think Boogie is a much more complex and interesting character, because I wrote it in that moment of sadness and questioning myself, not so confident that I was actually going to bounce back. I think a lot of those emotions are in the film.
What were you questioning at that time?
I was questioning if I’d ever get the boulder up the mountain. If I was ever going to get to tell this Asian American immigrant story in the medium of film or television and have it be as real and truthful and genuine as “Fresh Off the Boat” [the memoir] or as Baohaus was. It felt like this chasm I could not close. You fight for something for so long, and you get so close and it gets taken away, or you feel hoodwinked like I did on “Fresh Off the Boat” [the TV series], and it just wears on you. I think I finally learned to be more vulnerable. I was able to tell people, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get this done.” And I think that humanity I found in myself really changed me and the way I tell stories.
Most people don’t experience those kinds of revelations as publicly as you have. How do you reflect on how you have changed over the years?
As an immigrant in this country, especially as an Asian man, we’re pretty emasculated. You want to be tough, and you don’t want to show weakness. So I think when you see Baohaus and “Fresh Off the Boat” [the memoir], it’s very defiant. It’s very, “I’m gonna run through that wall.” Because we don’t get to make stuff and still be vulnerable and be weaker, you know? Criterion’s filled with stories of white people that get to be weak and tell their story, but we’ve pretty much got “Minari.”
When you say weak, do you mean emotionally vulnerable?
Yeah, emotionally vulnerable. I think I was always like, “Nah, block it out. You’ve got to run through that wall.” And a lot of people I looked up to were like that too; they kept that toughness up. I had a heartbreak. A relationship went wrong around the same time. Everything in my life crashed down in that period, and I realized it wasn’t about pushing the boulder up the mountain or winning or accomplishing this stuff. It was about being honest with myself about how I felt: “I don’t care if this gets made or doesn’t get made; f— it, I’m just going to write how I feel.” I think I learned to tap into that vulnerability. It was a big change.
What were the challenges of getting this movie made? Not just to bring Focus on board but to get your first film as a writer and director greenlighted?
Focus believed in it from the beginning. They were the only ones that believed in it. We went all around town. Nobody raised their hand. Everyone was like, “We’re interested in you. We love what you did with ‘Fresh Off the Boat.’ This feels a little less easy.” It was like, “You want to come back with something with an all-Asian cast? You want to give Awkwafina a call?” Nobody wanted this. I fought to get somebody to sign on to this, but once I was at Focus, there wasn’t that much fighting.
I do a lot of explaining about my culture and a lot of explaining about downtown New York culture, or Black or Latino culture, and I end up having to explain stuff. But that’s part of the job, and I accept that. And to be honest, I don’t complain about that. That is my journey and that is my experience. I had a lot of good partners at Focus who wanted to understand my journey and wanted to get in my head, and once I allowed them into my head and I wasn’t scared of explaining, things really took off.
Let’s talk about cultural specificity. Boogie is written as a Chinese Taiwanese American kid. How important was it to portray this specific identity?
It’s important so people know that the way we do things is not just Asian American, it’s specific to Chinese Taiwanese people. Taylor’s Japanese, but he was my assistant for eight months and he picked up a lot of those values and customs, because if you come to my house, we’re going to do it my way. He lived with me for a while, and he’s seen how I do things, like pouring the tea [for elders]. He was around when I would cook for my parents. So he knew it and he was able to represent that. It’s like how Bruce Lee was able to teach Kareem AbdulJabbar Chinese culture and kung fu. I was able to teach our specific stuff to Taylor, and Taylor was able to represent that, and I thought that was very beautiful.
Before casting Taylor, did you try to cast the character of Boogie authentically?
I think I did cast authentically. I’m going to honestly say that. I did. There’s also a part of me that is uniquely my value system and culture that I formulated in America that’s very inspired and influenced by participating in Black culture and Latino culture and Caribbean culture and people I grew up with. And Taylor lives that as well, because so many of his friends he knows from playing basketball in Oakland.
We saw a lot of the Taiwanese Chinese kids that auditioned. You could tell they were more “Boba Asian.” They weren’t living that intersectional life that brought me and Taylor to these neighborhoods, and it’s hard to teach that to people. The scene I had a lot of kids audition for was the gym scene, where the Boogie character is pulling up on [Paige’s character] Eleanor for the first time. If you don’t do it correctly, it feels like it’s a bad AAVE [African American vernacular English] voice. I saw a lot of those auditions and thought, “Nah, this kid doesn’t have friends like Richie [played by Jorge Lendeborg Jr.], and he’s never pulled up on a girl like Eleanor.” No matter what I tell him, this is going to feel wrong.
“Boogie” is your first move into filmmaking. What’s the vision behind your production company, Color Correct, and the projects you’re focused on next?
My feeling post-“Fresh Off the Boat” was there were all these things that were “Representation, representation, representation,” but it’s different than representation; we need the correct representation. And more than representation, I want us to put humanity first. I think what’s drawn people to projects like “Boogie” are race, identity, social issues, but I hope what keeps them is our humanity, and in watching these stories, seeing a reflection of themselves as well, even if they’re of a different race than the main character or supporting characters.
I want to produce with the people I know that are 10 toes down. There’s a lot of money to be made in representation now, and I’m like, “Who’s for real?” Because I’ve seen some people that are Asian, but 10 years ago, they had no interest in making Asian stuff. I’m going to stick to the people I know that have been fighting and trying to do this.