Interview: Sean Wang on Applying Cinematic Language to the Internet in ‘Dìdi’

For a certain subset of very online younger millennials, a film like writer-director Sean Wang’s Dìdi ought to carry a trigger warning. The level of detail is so hyper-specific that the film feels unearthed from a time capsule. Be it through a bookmarked link to Addicting Games or an oversharing Facebook wall post, Wang’s film instantly conjures vivid imagery of being a teenager in the precise time frame of summer 2008.

Wang has glanced back at late-aughts culture nostalgically in his documentary projects like the 2021 short H.A.G.S. (Have a Good Summer), an inventive flip-through of his middle school yearbook. But his feature-length fictional debut, which arrives hot on the heels of his Oscar-nominated short “Nai Nai & Wài Pó,” has much more on its mind.

This coming-of-age story, set in Wang’s suburban northern California hometown of Fremont, follows Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old aggravated by the affectionate use of the titular nickname meaning “little brother” by his immigrant mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen). Like teens at any time or place, this budding skateboarding filmmaker struggles with shame and embarrassment as he tries to find the outward identity that expresses his true self.

Dìdi stands out in the genre because Wang imbues as much dramatic weight to scenes that take place in the digital realm as he does in the physical world. In a house full of women (his father is working in Taiwan to provide for the family), the internet offers Chris a tool for education and escape in addition to a method of engagement with his friends. Wang honors millennial youth by rendering an AIM chat on screen with the same sophisticated cinematic grammar as a confessional conversation in a car. Chris’s adolescent antics might seem familiar, but the dignity Wang grants every venue in which self-discovery takes place feels new.

I spoke with Wang over Zoom ahead of Dìdi’s theatrical opening. Our conversation covered whether he sought to cultivate a sense of immediacy or distance from its 2008 setting, how he approached using the language of filmmaking to depict scenes taking place on a computer screen, and what the Sundance Directors’ Lab taught him about the film’s toughest scene.

Do you think of Dìdi as a present-tense or past-tense film? Is it about the experience of being alive in August 2008 or remembering what it’s like today?

To me, at least, it’s more immediate than it is looking back. The hope was that you’re really seeing things through Chris’ perspective, so he doesn’t know it’s the past.

When Chris gets his braces off, there’s the line “that’s it,” which feels like someone older looking back on something that seemed monumental but is actually small. How were you thinking about the weight to give milestones like those?

That’s my real orthodontist! I think the things that have always interested me in life have been the moments in between what are supposed to be the big tent poles. Prom, for example, has never been the most exciting thing for me. I’m like, “Why is prom a big thing [in movies]?” It should be the moments before and after prom. Those are the things that are interesting. I don’t know if anyone actually notices this, but to me, you get your braces tightened once a month when you’re that age. So he gets his braces tightened at the beginning of the movie, and then, one month later, he gets his braces off. That’s a one-month time span. That, to me, was what the braces were. It was less of a milestone and more that a month went by!

What do you think about the ethics of deleting and how it relates to the film’s thematic concern with shame? It’s something Chris mulls over in the film, and it sounds like something that’s still present for you given that you mentioned scrubbing your old YouTube channel before this press tour.

I was interested in trying to capture the internet in a way that hadn’t really been seen before. I was working at Google for six years throughout my 20s, basically up until making this movie. What I learned there was when you take these user interfaces, buttons, and devices that we use every day and frame them in the right context, “Delete” can communicate shame. “Block” can communicate embarrassment. Changing a smiley face can communicate what it feels like to talk to your crush. “Oh my god, what do I say? How do I say it?” I wanted to show the internet of the late 2000s, [and] in a way that was [like] the way we use the internet. In that sense, it was 2024 eyes looking back and trying to infuse something new and different.

How do you approach cutting those scenes? I noticed on the second watch how infrequently you cut back to Chris’ reactions.

I feel like anytime people try to capture the internet, they shoot the screen and then cut back to the person for the emotional reaction. Their eyes always go “whoa,” or they’re talking out loud while typing. That’s not how I remember using the internet. I think we can get all of the emotion we need by staying on the screen, using the tools of cinematic language, like close-ups and dolly shots, and treating the computer screen as a big-screen experience. I know how to evoke emotion using just the screen. We should only cut back to someone’s face if it heightens the moment. We shouldn’t lean on it as a crutch. It should always be like a button, as opposed to, “Ah, the screen’s not working, we need someone’s reaction to give us the emotion.”

What were the considerations for the sound and score of the screen? There’s a delicate balance of the natural web sounds, but this pulsing score makes it feel more subjective than just aligning the audience with Chris’s POV on the screen.

[I asked myself], “How do we make this feel both mundane and huge at the same time?” That’s what I remember about being on the internet as a kid. You’re just sitting there, breathing. You’re not talking—you’re just, like, on the internet. But there’s so much emotion, and your life is being lived on it. So we were trying to combine the two. There’s a shot in the movie from the first computer screen scene where it cuts to Chris, and he’s just like this [Wang moves closer to the camera, puts his head in his hand]. That’s what the internet is, people just drooling while watching YouTube videos and talking to their crush. But it feels so alive.

Are people more performative or authentic online? We see both in Dìdi between Chris putting on airs of toughness while Vivian shows parts of herself in Facebook wall posts that are completely invisible to Chris and he wouldn’t see otherwise.

I think people were more authentic online back then. Today, people are more performative.

As you scaled up to make a feature film, was there anything difficult to relinquish from having to be a jack-of-all-trades as a short filmmaker?

I don’t want to say control, necessarily, but it was just a learning curve. The shorts were all pretty small, and I was directing, editing, and taking my time. In scaling up to a feature, I just had to learn to communicate more and trust my collaborators. That was just my job, to make sure we’re on the same page. Then, once we were on the same page, they would go off and collect a bunch of better ideas, and it would just make the movie better. It was really fun.

The Sundance Directors’ Lab required you to bring two scenes from the film you were most scared about, one of which was the dinner scene at the start. How did that process influence the way you wound up making the film? Was it more about technical discoveries or something more spiritual with the actors?

I think the family dinner scene was truly both. At the Directors’ Lab, their whole thing isn’t like, “Okay, you have to do these two scenes and treat it like it’s real [shoot] where have to make your day.” They’re like, “What scares you?” You learn something by doing that. If you don’t make your day, it’s okay. Part of the thing that scared me with that scene was that we had a million setups with all these different eyelines. I was scared that we were not gonna be able to get everything we needed with all those eyelines. We had a very tight schedule, and, obviously, we had child hours. We didn’t shoot day for night, so it was always at the tail end of Izaac’s hours. I was learning how we get the creativity on screen with the resources and the time that we have. With that scene in particular, [I learned] this is how I want the scene to be cut, and this is how I want to shoot it. Can we feasibly do this with, like, the time allotted?

Another tip you got along the way was Lulu Wang advising you to have the actors “break the script” by doing it wrong and finding the heart of the moment. Are there any particularly surprising revelations stemming from that in the final film?

The one that comes to mind is very silly. Izaac wrote the line in the family dinner scene, “Well, you were only born because of a broken condom.” That was his conjuring at the Sundance Directors’ Lab [after he was invited there by the festival], and it made it into the script. There’s a scene where they get to the pool party, and the character Hardeep [played by Tarnvir Kamboj] goes, “I fricked your mom.” Soup [played by Aaron Chang] goes, “She has cancer.” And Hardeep goes, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And then Soup goes, “She’s still alive.” That was them just riffing, which I love. I think that line is so funny.

You’re fond of smash cuts out of a scene at the moment when they’re reaching an emotional fever pitch. What attracts you to that style of transition?

This sounds like a hoity-toity, screenwriting 101 type thing, but I always think, “Get in late, get out early.” Sometimes when you get out early, and when it’s a smash cut in a surprising place, it’s just funny to me. What works for the scene? And can you have a cut that also gets a laugh?

You wound up finding the perfect amount of dialogue for a reticent millennial to speak. Was that a challenge to prune back, either in the writing or the editing?

A little bit. He’s not always shy, right? At home, he’s pretty loud. He talks a lot at the dinner table. It was more about how much we could do with just a glance sometimes. That’s something I’m always looking for. There are so many scenes in the movie where Izaac’s look gives us everything we need. It was kind of less about how much did he talk and more about how much can we show without having him say anything. Just off of his look, and more than any words, [he] gives us so much of how he’s taking in the situations around him and being like, “What is happening? Am I standing out?”

I was at a Q&A of yours last week, and I clocked that you brought out a camera to take a picture of the crowd. Are those just for a personal memento, or are you collecting material that can be leveraged in another multimedia-driven short?

Who knows? It’s personal for now, but you never know what ends up happening with those photos. They could [end up in] H.A.G.S. 2.