Lee Isaac Chung Quotes

Lee Isaac Chung

Profession : Director

Birth : October 19, 1978

My dad told me that he came to the U.S. because of watching Hollywood movies. So the American Dream for him was based on what you see in films.

Lee Isaac Chung

I remember hearing my mom saying so many times we should never have left Korea. She would see the way that I was growing up and the fact that I was speaking English and not speaking Korean as well, and she would fear the things that we were forgetting.

Lee Isaac Chung

I thought I would go into philosophy and political science.

Lee Isaac Chung

I have always loved comedies.

Lee Isaac Chung

I'm not much of a visionary guy when it comes to figuring out how to go about my career.

Lee Isaac Chung

These days I love watching Billy Wilder. I'm not saying the arthouse stuff is self-serious, but I needed to get out of my head a little bit and not treat films so seriously.

Lee Isaac Chung

I grew up feeling like the main obstacles that we were trying to overcome had more to do with how we survive together as a family, and less to do with external relationships that we had with the community.

Lee Isaac Chung

A lot of times we have these categories that maybe don't fit the reality of human experience and human identity. I'm completely sympathetic to what a lot of people in my community are saying - that often as Asian Americans we're made to feel more foreign than we internally feel ourselves.

Lee Isaac Chung

Having parents who are chicken sexers - I had trouble explaining that to kids at school!

Lee Isaac Chung

I always tend to gravitate toward the idea of things being human: that this isolation I feel as an Asian American, even though it's real, other people have it too in their own way.

Lee Isaac Chung

I didn't have much of a taste for Korean food growing up: I was over the moon about Mexican food.

Lee Isaac Chung

Many filmmakers start off with an autobiographical film from childhood, and that's kind of what I was thinking I would do, but other projects would just present themselves naturally in the beginning.

Lee Isaac Chung

I think we just have to be mindful of what that definition of an American dream is. I think we are faced with a lot of definitions of that that are, frankly, unhealthy.

Lee Isaac Chung

I was hitting 40, and I realized I needed to just move on in life and do something practical.

Lee Isaac Chung

It's hard to say, 'I demand a seat at a table for best picture.'

Lee Isaac Chung

Ingrid Bergman in 'Journey to Italy' just goes off and looks at things for most of the film.

Lee Isaac Chung

I always loved Flannery O'Conner, and how she's not trying to create sympathetic characters.

Lee Isaac Chung

Among Korean immigrants the majority tends to be Christian, because that was the way they immigrated to America - through the support network of churches. I grew up with faith being an important fabric of my life. That comes with my life in the South - it was just a given that you believe.

Lee Isaac Chung

For us, church was kind of the way that we found our first entry into community in Arkansas. My parents would drop us off at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln so that we would make friends and we would learn English.

Lee Isaac Chung

I think one of the things that I had to establish for myself quite early on was the rule that this is not my parents and this is not me or my family, that somehow this has to become a family that exists solely in the film of 'Minari.'

Lee Isaac Chung