🍕🎥 Pizza Film School S2 recap: 5 ways to pack your film with emotion from Justin Chon 

By: AGBO Staff

Filmmaker and actor Justin Chon blew audiences away with his 2021 drama Blue Bayou, where he stars opposite Oscar winner Alicia Vikander in an intimate, complex story about identity, deportation, and the unitive power of family and human connection. The film follows Korean-born, Bayou-raised tattoo artist Antonio LeBlanc (played by Chon) – an undocumented adoptee – amid the looming threat of deportation. To create the film, Chon worked with an Asian American crew that drew from their own personal perspectives to add depth, texture, and feeling to the film. 

In a recent episode of the Pizza Film School podcast, Joe and Anthony Russo sat down with Chon to discuss the highly collaborative directorial process behind the film – and broke down the details and best practices that helped Chon to fill the film with key themes tied to adoption and identity.

During the interview, Chon told the Russo Brothers that as a director, his process flows from the ambition to create an emotional response in viewers with each scene. 

“I want it to make it look beautiful, of course, but if people aren’t feeling anything and we miss the moment, I don’t know what we’re doing there,” he told the brothers. 

Chon, who began his film career as an actor, starred in The Twilight Saga and popular TV shows like House and New Girl. In 2017, he made his directorial debut with Gook, which won the Next Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. He went on to serve as director and executive producer for Pachinko starring Yuh-Jung Youn and Lee Minho. Now, Chon has a new project in the works: The upcoming film adaptation of Wonder Boy, a biography about late Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Zappos CEO Tony Hseih.

Keep reading below for the best advice from Chon on crafting a film that’s infused with emotion. 

Catch up on all the episodes of Pizza Film School Season 2 here.

Chances are your best take is an early one. 

Actors are like thoroughbreds. Some people have different levels of stamina. But in my experience, they’re not gonna get better as time goes on. Within the first five takes is probably where [the best performance] is gonna be. Other directors prefer to do an insane amount of takes. Maybe they see something I don’t, but to me, you wanna catch 'em right in that pocket.

‍Film the extremely emotional takes first. 

You want to make sure that you’re all set up [and] ready to go. Sometimes even the way I cover a scene, I’ll see who has the most difficult emotional weight to carry, and I’ll start with their single and not do the wide. That may annoy some people because they wanna work big to small, or whatever their process [usually] is. But I’m catered very much to the performance, so I’ll set up the camera [and] not waste any time to make sure that I get that performance. Then, I’ll start covering the rest of the scene.

Give your actors everything they need to feel confident.

Every actor has such a different process, and I respect all the different disciplines. The biggest thing I’m trying to do [is to] instill confidence in the performer. I don’t want them to feel like they're making mistakes, or that there’s a right or a wrong way to do it. [For] all of my films, I’ve had some sort of rehearsal process. For Blue Bayou, I had to find that time with the young actor, Sydney Kalki, who plays my stepdaughter in the film. I knew from the audition [that] she was the one. The whole process with kids is a little bit different. The parents are very much a partner, and I asked the parents to go through the script, but not run the lines – just talk them through each scene and why it exists and how it made them feel. And then, when we [would] get together, we’d kind of improv, and I would just make suggestions. I’d go, ‘Hey, what if you did this?’ And I would make it seem like it was her idea. She had ownership of it, and it allowed her to be very confident – which is why you see her being very open and free in the film.

When casting, look for potential instead of mastery.

As you guys know, auditioning is also a skill. I try not to be wooed by that room. I try to take a step back and really see them. I’m not really focusing on that performance. I’m seeing the potential of what can be. I’m really looking for potential rather than out-of-the-box [talent], because sometimes there’s things to be mined. Like the little girl – she’d only done one other little thing, but I could tell if I just had a little bit of time that there was something really special [there]. Also, sometimes I bring my DP into the auditions and we’ll move with the actor. Is this person a little intuitive? Can they understand how to move with the camera and kind of dance with us?

Explore the use of colors in your scenes to enhance emotion.

Everything that I’m doing in these films is to bring empathy towards [undocumented] adoptees. I think color can make you feel something and it can be a very powerful tool. For example when Antonio is doing the motorcycle heist, you notice there’s a lot of red, a lot of vibrancy. Once he goes into the chop shop, we had the quintessential orange and blues, but there are a lot of neons and, and we use that low frame rate. The red for me was like he’s bleeding for it, he’s bleeding to get that money. And he’s really sacrificing a lot of his ethics and morality [in that scene].

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