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For the Director of Wicked, There’s No Place Like Silicon Valley
Six years after Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu prepares to release his adaptation of one of Broadway’s biggest musicals. From a table at his family’s famous Chinese restaurant, he opens up about his childhood among the titans of tech—and why filmmakers shouldn’t be afraid of AI.
Chef Chu is telling me about how he created a menu that’s at once authentic and popular when I see Jon point to a small table and say, “That’s where I used to do my homework.” He addresses the comment to his assistant, but it seems like he is politely signaling to me—without interrupting his father—that he, the interviewee, has arrived. Viewfinder chronicles Chu’s journey from tech-savvy Silicon Valley kid to Hollywood heavyweight, via the University of Southern California, where he earned accolades and the notice of one of his childhood heroes, Steven Spielberg. Though these movies received middling reviews, they raked in enough at the box office that Warner Bros. was willing to sign off on another—an adaptation of the novel Crazy Rich Asians, which Chu pitched with its author, Kevin Kwan.
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