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Instead of the warriors journey, brandished with bloodlust, why not the basket weaver who gathers oats?
On Oscar nominations morning,Minarireceived six nods, including screenplay and directing nominations for Chung.
Have you been able to take some time for yourself?Everything is still busy.
Im working on trying to see if we can film this projectYour Namethis year.
I dont know if anyone should be adapting it, but I am, but Im doing it.
I have fears if were doing it the right way.
I like the idea of doing a transformation that happens when you do animation to live action.
They wanted me to do a very American take on it.
They want to see how the work can be transformed to an American film.
Thats the way they communicated it to me.
Im wanting to play within that space.
I do have red flags that go off on projects like this.
I dont know if you ever feel that way.
It feels like thats a good place to be, that liminal space.
I dont think of it as a disadvantage; I dont think of it as a tragedy.
I feel like its an important place to stake your being or to accept and to see from.
I liked that space.
Well, congratulations on all of the Oscar nominations.
How do you feel?It was unreal, and I still find it unreal.
We didnt have a long time to celebrate, because the events in Atlanta unfolded immediately after the news.
I think my mind was with that for much of the week.
There is an aspect in which I really feel the ephemeral nature of it all.
Im not crying about it or anything.
My understanding is that the script forMinaribegan with a writing exercise during which you wrote down 80 visual memories.
My grandmother was already living with us at that point.
I had already gone through that road before.
I made a film,Lucky Life, that adapted a poem.
It doesnt really have much of a dramatic structure to it.
With this I wanted to give a shot to go back to the idea of a classical structure.
I ended up studying a lot of films for that to figure out what the story beats might be.
Rossellinis filmsStromboliandVoyage to Italywere two that I quite looked at a lot.
I knew it would need to come near the end because of what it is.
Thats what I wanted this film to end up doing with that fire.
Theres also a toughness or tensile strength in OConnors prose.
Was that something that you were thinking about?Yeah.
She has the most incredible quotes.
I respond a lot to that.
I see it as a very private thing.
Im not an Evangelical, but Ill go to Evangelical churches.
Im a member of a church thats Episcopal.
I havent been really talking too much about it.
Is that part of why Flannery OConnor also resonates with you?Oh, definitely.
My grandmother, her life never really recovered from that moment after the stroke.
What space is that?She still haunts me in a way.
I still feel her love.
My mom has always known this, and my mom was always wanting to dream about my grandma.
I guess its the same with anyone who loves someone who has passed.
You still feel their presence.
Im kind of an agnostic when it comes to the American Dream.
I dont deny that Ive benefited from the idea of it, at least.
They reconcile and then the movies over.
Youre just left with that image of that reconciliation and thats it, thats all that matters.
So how did you want the ending to read?I wanted to be pretty spare with it.
Its a very subtle sort of detail, but I just wanted people to feel it.
I didnt want that to draw attention to itself.
Its a very masculine story.
What if that really is the story?That resonated with me a lot.
I wanted that image of two men, basically, putting away the spear and gathering.
That ending kind of came out of that, this desire to be a gatherer for my family.
Did moving to Korea to teach feel like relinquishing the spear, so to speak?Yeah.
I wanted to embrace that and see that as a good thing.
I see that in my grandma now.
I see what she did as being something completely heroic.
Did you ever feel like your parents when you were making the film and the conditions were hard?
Your parents were making something, and you were too.
Was there a parallel for you there?A weird thing happened.
We were filming on our practical farm location.
Theres a location that we used for the actual farm.
That farm was started by Hmong immigrants.
They also had a grandmother who was living in a trailer home.
It felt like a parallel to how I had grown up.
They showed me this giant pile of rocks there that the dad had made to make the soil farmable.
They told me that he basically did that all by hand.
He picked up all these rocks and stacked them up.
Honestly, that moment just made me think that making this film is a lot easier than that life.
How did that space function for you?That place was therapeutic.
This was my first time making a film of this budget range, to be honest.
Everything Id done was more art house and lower budget.
Sometimes I would hear people saying, Isaacs a first-time filmmaker.
I always felt very controlled and measured, which is just a natural tendency that I have.
When I would go to the Airbnb, that was the place where I could just be myself.
All the people in that house believed in me 100 percent.
We could talk about anything.
I felt a lot of love and support there and thats why I went there a lot.
There is something of an immigrant narrative there, of having to prove yourself.I think that too.
The budget level is a reflection of the risk.
We were trying to prove ourselves with fewer resources, just like immigrants have in the past.
Is it fair to say that there wasnt much of a margin for error?Yeah, definitely.
Youn Yuh-jung saved our ass a lot.
She has a belief in always nailing the first take, and thats true.
Her first take is always impeccable.
She always jokes that if I nail it on my first take, then I can go home earlier.
There was no way we could have done this without her ability to do that.
Has your daughter watched the film?
That was a year and a half ago.
She thinks Alan is hilarious.
Honestly, she was at the snack table eating lots of salami for most of that screening.
