In “Dìdi,” writer/director Sean Wang returns to his suburban Northern California hometown of Fremont to tell a semi-autobiographical story of life as a 13-year-old Taiwanese American growing up there in 2008.
For Wang, part of this meant capturing the huge role the late-aughts internet played in his early teenage years, from the early social media experiences of Myspace to texting with AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and putting his skateboard videos up on an old-school YouTube page. While on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Wang talked about how he’d never seen this done well in movies.
“When I think about the movies that were made in the late 2000s, they never depicted the internet right, because I think as filmmakers we just didn’t know how to do that,” said Wang.
For “Dìdi,” Wang assembled a team of four animators and graphic artists, working off screenshots, to recreate the now-defunct 2008 internet from scratch. It was a surprisingly painstaking and time-consuming task to bring back to life a world so ubiquitous not that long ago.
“One of my favorite things, when I watch [“Dìdi”] with an audience, is every time you see that first desktop screen,” said Wang. “I can just feel the audience being like, ‘Whoa, OK. I have not seen all of that in so long.’ And then you hear the AIM notifications, and it’s just this dopamine hit. Everyone knows these user interfaces (UIs), but I don’t think they’ve just been shown in this way in this storytelling context.”
NOTE: PODCAST EMBED NEEDS TO BE ADDED
For Wang, this goes beyond getting the period recreation details right and tapping into millennial nostalgia for their early internet life. He wanted to embrace the storytelling potential of something a vast majority of filmmakers try to avoid.
“You’ve heard filmmakers say screens aren’t cinematic, and every time you cut to a screen or a phone it just ruins the movie,” said Wang. “But for me, that was one of the things I was most excited by [in making] this movie.”
Wang believes the problem isn’t that our modern-day screen lives aren’t cinematic, it’s that filmmakers aren’t taught to think about the storytelling language of the technology we all use every day. In his 20s, Wang worked for six years at the Google Creative Lab, where a cross-section of programmers and filmmakers collaborate on how to communicate Google’s innovations in a way that makes them more useful to people.
“We were telling a lot of stories on screens and devices and tablets,” said Wang. “What I learned there as a filmmaker really was: ‘How do you take these cold interfaces that we use every day [and] put them in a storytelling container, and make them feel not just cinematic, but emotional and human and familiar?’”
This work experience forced Wang to constantly think about what it meant to put these user interfaces in the right context as a storyteller. A big turning point in connecting the lessons of his day job to his dreams of being a filmmaker came when his co-worker Aneesh Chaganty left the Google Creative Labs to make his groundbreaking screenlife film “Searching.” The success of that film crystalized for Wang that what he was learning at Google was a new language of filmmaking.
One example of how Wang deployed this filmmaking language in “Dìdi” comes in scenes when his painfully awkward protagonist Chris (Izaac Wang) messages Madi (Mahaela Park), a girl he likes.
“Our movie’s all about shame, so like, what does ‘delete’ mean, how does that communicate shame? How does a blinking cursor convey butterflies when you’re talking to your crush? I think all of those little things I learned at Google,” said Wang. “The nuances of a blinking cursor, micro mouse movements, deleting stuff and then typing it and deleting it again, that’s his internal monologue. And so it was like, ‘OK, how do we use all these tools for storytelling?’”
Wang believed so strongly in his ability to capture Chris’ emotions with the purposeful use of the 2008 UI that he avoided cutting from the screen to his character’s reaction shot.
“I think you see versions of this where you show a screen and then you cut to someone’s face and they’re big-eyed like, ‘Oh my God,’ [but] that’s not how people use the internet,” said Wang. “The bet I really wanted to take with this movie was that every time we cut to a screen, I don’t want to cut back to the character’s face unless we absolutely have to. I think we can just hold on screens and the entire UI screen — we spent half the movie on this kid’s face, we know who’s using the computer.”
In a lot of ways, Wang’s approach is an extension of the same storytelling problem-solving solving every filmmaker faces: How to translate the internal state of characters to the audience. The problem is when it comes to screens, filmmakers avoid the actual scenario.
“He’s sitting in his room, and it is quiet. You can hear his breathing and hear the mouse pads. You didn’t have to cover it with, like, ‘Social Network’ hacker music” said Wang. “This sort of daily quotidian rhythm of being on the internet is inherently life and death for a 13-year-old boy.”
It’s something the audience can relate to. We experience it in our lives countless times a day on our phones and computers, but a rare movie like “Dìdi” is just starting to translate that experience to the big screen.
“Dìdi” opens from Focus Features Friday, July 26.
