A Conversation with Director/Choreographer Jon Chu – HuffPost 8.19.10

Mike Ragogna: Beyond the Step Up movies, you’ve been working on webisodes for Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. Can you go into what those are?

Jon Chu: Yeah, we’ve met so many amazing dancers over the years since Step Up 2. Underground dancers that hadn’t really been seen — what they do is so incredible that it reminded me of super heroes, of things that human bodies just aren’t supposed to be doing. So, we were writing all these stories, and we started to shoot them as these origin stories of the dancers and how they discovered their super powers.

MR: How are they shot?

JC: It’s all shot in super-high quality. It’s like a super hero movie, but with dance. And there are no special effects. Everything they do is what they really do. It’s on Hulu, and it’s a really fun, crazy adventure.

MR: What inspired this?

JC: I think it was the dancers themselves. I think it was seeing these amazing heroes. I grew up with heroes like Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and even Michael Jackson, and when I watched them dance they made me believe in magic. For some reason, the dance hero has somewhat disappeared. It’s all gone to sports heroes. But the reality is that they haven’t disappeared. They’re actually here, and especially with the internet and YouTube, they’re growing, and dance is changing at an incredible rate. These heroes, I feel like, need to be seen because they can inspire a lot of kids, a lot of adults, and we’re here to show them off. It’s kind of like a Michael Jackson video every week that we show online, except all the little stories connect. These little, short films are like five to ten minutes long.

MR: How many of these LXD, super hero, dancing webisodes will there be?

JC: We have three seasons planned right now, and each season has about ten episodes. So, we’re six or seven episodes into this season with three or four more to go. Then we have another ten set to come out a few weeks after that, and another ten after that. So, we have a lot. We’re ready to tell the story. Each one builds on the adventure, and you can jump in at any time.

MR: When do you air them?

JC: They come out every Wednesday, all summer long. We have about six episodes that are out, and there are four more episodes this season. Each one, like I said, is like a short film with a different genre for each one as well. It’s on hulu.com/the-lxd but usually, if you go on hulu.com on Wednesdays, we’re on the front page right there.

MR: How’s the response been so far?

JC: The response has been amazing. The comments and stuff have been crazy…people are arguing, and it’s been really fun! What’s fun is that we’re going to a new audience that isn’t necessarily dancers. They are people who watch Hulu just to watch Hulu. So, you get a really wide range of people, and I think the debate is really good about how you can use dance in storytelling. We call ourselves dance adventurers, not a dance crew, because we’re trying to experiment with dance. Our whole purpose is to be a laboratory, to figure out how we can integrate dance and storytelling in a more organic way than has been done before. It’s not a music video, it’s not a dance movie, but it’s sort of a hybrid. We’re trying to find that line where it works best, and the more we play with it, the more people get active in it. They either love it or they hate it. It’s a really great conversation to have online.

MR: Are there any dancers that you have a desire to mentor further because you see their potential for greatness?

JC: Yeah, I mean they’re all so unique from each other. They don’t usually get hired to do choreography jobs because they just don’t blend in with everybody else, which is why we hire them. They’re so unique and fun to watch. People like Mad Chad. We have a robot guy who we call Specimen in our series, and we had this episode called “Robot Love Story” which was film noir. Since he was a robot guy, we played him as sort of a Frankenstein robot remembering his past life, and his past loves. As crazy as “the robot” seems — I mean you see it at every wedding or Bar Mitzvah — this guy is like the master of it. It’s compelling, and it’s really amazingly human in a weird way. People are drawn to him, and people like that, I think, are really, really interesting. We work with him a lot, and we also work with Harry Shum, Jr. from Glee who looks like he has no bones. So, we tell the story of the kid with no bones in our series, and he’s just magnetic as well. He’s really old-school style. He can do all different styles, and he plays it like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly; he has a magic about him that’s really cool. So, those guys, in particular, have a magnetism about them that we like to play with because our audience is drawn to them.

MR: Who’s the “we” when you say, “We hire them”? Is that your company?

JC: Yes. LXD (Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) has a bunch of choreographers — actually Harry Shum, Jr. is one of our choreographers, and Christopher Scott is another. So, we kind of figure it all out, and decide on the dancers and the music and stuff like that. We’re kind of the brain trust. We have multiple directors too — I don’t direct every single episode, so we’ve got some other directors that we’ve brought on board that are amazing, as well. And every one of them we’ve put to the test. We say, “These have to push creativity, push your storytelling skills. This has to do stuff different than other things.” This isn’t a movie, and it isn’t a TV show. And yes, it is online, but it’s not just a simple web series. We’re trying to do something really, really special. We’re trying to develop a new language of dance that people all around the U.S. can get used to and feel that, hopefully, takes dance to the next step.

MR: What music are you using?

JC: We’re using a lot of score, actually. We have a great composer, Nathan Lanier. Usually, what we do is develop the ideas of the dances, and then he’ll come in and see the story, read the script, and then he’ll start to write a full score. Sometimes, we’ll also find popular music from our friends. It’s always hard to clear music for this because we don’t have a huge budget for this show, but we always try to get music from our friends, and things that really inspire us. For the most part, though, it’s actually an original score.

MR: Let’s catch our readers up on your life and career before LXD. You’re a graduate of University of Southern California’s Cinema Television School, right?

JC: Uh huh.

MR: And you won the Princess Grace award, the Dore Schary award presented by the anti-defamation league, the Jack Nicholson direction award, and you also were recognized as an honoree for the IFP/West program Project: Involve. How did it feel about being an award-winning director and screenwriter right out of the box?

JC: It was fun. In school, I did a bunch of short films, and in each one I was playing with a lot of different ideas. When you’re in college you have a lot of anxiety, and a lot of things that you’re going through. So, I really plugged those things into my short films. I didn’t know what would happen, but it was fun because people started to respond to them when I would make them and send them out to film festivals and what-not. So, during my last couple of years at USC, I got a lot of attention because of those things. I think it showed that you can actually make an impact with some of your stuff. Even though my shorts were five or ten minutes long, they actually had a larger impact than that. And, that’s been really good for LXD now because that’s right around the length of our shorts, and short storytelling is very different from feature film storytelling.

MR: Your student short When The Kids Are Away secured your William Morris Agency deal, right?

JC: Yeah, it did. That’s the short that was kind of my calling card into the business. It was my last film at USC, and I showed a rough cut to an agent at William Morris and they signed me right there. I wasn’t even out of school yet. Then they sent it to Stephen Spielberg, and he saw it and called me up. So, we met a bunch of times, and he sort of became my mentor over the years. He was a really big help in the very beginning, and it’s all because of this little short film I did at USC, which was a musical about the secret lives of mothers. What do they do when the kids are at school? Sing and dance, of course!

MR: Speaking of singing and dancing, you were going to direct a Bye Bye Birdie remake until the plug was pulled.

JC: Yeah. So, as soon as all of that happened in the beginning, I got signed to do the remake of Bye Bye Birdie, and we worked with Tina Fey who wrote our draft. We worked on it for about two years, and it was an eighty million dollar musical for Sony with me directing at twenty-three years old at the time. Then, right at the last second, they pulled the plug. I think they got a little bit spooked by the idea. The musical hadn’t been proven yet.Chicago had come out, but there wasn’t any fun crazy musical. Hairspray hadn’t come out yet, and it was still really uncharted territory.

MR: You’re slated to direct an updated, sort of 2.0 version of The Great Gatsby, right?

JC: Yeah, that’s also at Sony. We set that up a little bit ago. There are a couple of rights issues we’re dealing with right now, so it may be a while, but that’s one of my favorite books. It’s so dense that it was never really meant to be a movie. So, I always hesitated, but the script that was written really encapsulated everything that I love about that book. It was young, it was contemporary, and I really wanted to express that through this movie. But we’re dealing with some rights issues right now, so who knows?

MR: Off the topic of film for just a moment, how does it feel to be the son of Lawrence Chu, famous chef?

JC: (laughs) It’s great. I get a lot of great food when I go home. I grew up in Palo Alto, and that restaurant has been there for forty years. It’s an establishment, I basically grew up in that restaurant. My dad worked super-hard, and he always told us kids — I’m the youngest of five kids — that we couldn’t work at the restaurant. He always said that America is the greatest place in the world and that you can do anything you want as long as you’re passionate about it; you love what you do, you work really hard. He said he didn’t want us to work at the restaurant because he didn’t want us to get used to fast cash. He wanted us to do everything that he couldn’t do growing up. So, my mom and my dad put us in dance classes and in music classes — I took drum, saxophone, violin, piano, and guitar. We traveled, we saw shows every weekend between musical season, opera season, and ballet season. So, they really engulfed us in the arts, and that’s how I grew up. I ate well, and I played well.

MR: Beautiful. What is your advice for up-and-coming directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers?

JC: I had a great piece of advice said to me a long time ago. I used to be one of those kids in film school who would always raise their hand and ask, “How do you become a director?” to the different directors that came in, and one of the best answers I ever got was, “You are what you do every day.” So, if you are a writer, then write every day, and you are a writer. If you are a director, then direct every day.

No one’s ever going to give you that label, and no one’s going to give you a gold star that tells you, “You are officially, now, a director.” I think that really changed my perspective on what I am because whether I was making money making feature films, doing web series’, just doing films for myself or doing wedding videos, I knew I would always be making movies. And I think that’s a really important mentality to go in with, especially in a crazy town like Hollywood. It’s been a fun ride so far, and I know, in the future, no matter what happens, I’ll continue to make these things, and I just hope people will continue to watch.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney