Based on early memories
Filmmaker’s childhood inspires story of Korean family in ’80s Arkansas
“Minari” is so deeply autobiographical that writerdirector Lee Isaac Chung admits that while filming in the summer of 2019, on farmland outside Tulsa, Okla., he often got overly meticulous on set trying to recreate the look and feel of his own Southern childhood, from the family’s sparsely furnished trailer home to their mid’80s clothing and expressions.
But since he wasn’t making a documentary, and instead a work of fiction with his own Korean immigrant family’s life as inspiration, Chung found it was helpful when his production designer, Yong Ok
Lee, reminded him at one point, “‘This isn’t your family anymore. It’s the Yi family. It’s their story,’ ” he says in a recent interview with The Chronicle over Zoom from Los Angeles.
“It helped me a lot hearing that reminder because I needed the separation between my own past and this story,” he adds. “Once that happened, I felt like it unlocked this to be a film and not just memoir.”
As “Minari” begins, the Yi family has just relocated from California, where land ownership was out of reach, to a tiny farm of their own in rural Arkansas — just as Chung’s own family did when he was 6 years old.
The Yis are played by an exceptional ensemble of actors: Steven Yeun (“The Walking Dead”) and Yeri Han as parents Jacob and Monica Li, legendary Korean actress Youn Yuhjung (in her first American feature role) as the irreverent grandmother Soonja, and Noel Cho and Alan Kim (a delightful, impish David) as the Yi children.
Yeun, who gives one of the year’s best, most touching screen performances as the patriarch Jacob Yi, said his own childhood experiences, moving from Seoul to suburban Michigan, helped him connect with Chung and understand the specificity of his ambition.
“Isaac and I meet at a lot of crossroads, and I think the biggest one we talk a lot about is isolation,” says Yuen via Zoom from Los Angeles. “Perhaps we’re all isolated, if we would allow ourselves to see it, but at least for me, it was very obvious to me.”
Chung describes “Minari,” his fourth feature film, as being less about assimilating to American culture, “and more about assimilation to each other.”
“I feel like it speaks to the fantasy involved in the desire to move to America, that it’s going to offer some sort of salvation,” Chung says. “I was more interested in what happens after you realize that was a fantasy and you’re grappling with the hard, cold reality of this place. To me, this whole film is actually a love story and a marriage story.”
Jacob and Monica work monotonous jobs at a commercial hatchery as chicken sexers — as Chung’s parents did — but they dream of growing and selling enough produce — peppers, radishes and the bitter herb minari, which, as a perfect metaphor, thrives in Southern creek beds — to feed the growing Korean immigrant population and sustain a comfortable agrarian life.
Inspired by Willa Cather’s novel of remembrance “My Ántonia,” Chung began by conjuring his most vivid childhood memories — the Korean card games and swear words he learned from his salty grandmother, his father’s unlikely friendship with an evangelical Christian farmhand (played by Will Patton) who carried a wooden cross on his back on Sundays, and also the smalltown racist taunts. (“Why’s your face so flat?” a white boy asks David at church.)
Chung always had an autobiographical story like this in the back of his mind, even though he strayed far from his own roots to make his first film, the Rwandan family drama “Munyurangabo,” which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
“People encouraged me to revisit my past, but I had an inner barrier of feeling like maybe this story wouldn’t be interesting to people because it’s such a strange experience,” he says.
But it’s the experience of an intergenerational family struggling to connect in a new land that struck early audiences and critics as universal.
That’s because unlike most Hollywood depictions of the Asian American experience, “the relatable humanity of these characters come before any sense of a narrow identity,” Yeun says.
That’s what attracted him to the project after his enormous success on seven seasons of AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” Yeun said his character, Glenn, was “an Asian American character trying to not be explicitly defined by stereotypes, (and) I had no desire to go back into any of those stereotypes.”
“A lot of scripts in my opinion factor in an oppression from the majority gaze that defines these people. I didn’t want that either,” he says. “What attracted me to (“Minari”) was that it didn’t want to be defined by anything other than this family in and of itself. It had the confidence and boldness to proclaim that this story of this family is worthy of being told. Period.”
Ever since “Minari” premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, winning both grand jury and audience awards, it’s been lauded as one of that year’s best films. This year, the film is up for a Golden Globe (though controversially only in the foreign language category as most of the dialogue is in Korean) and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. When Oscar nominations are announced on March 15, Chung stands a chance of being in the running for a best picture prize — and Yeun could become the first Asian American actor to be nominated for the best actor award.
“I’ve been floored by the reaction,” says Chung, who admits he was ready to give up directing and “eke out a more stable life for my family” with a teaching position when he decided in 2018, “I need to take this gamble and believe in myself.”