After pooping his pants at a world-leaders’ conference dinner, the first Asian-American President of the United States must escape the situation undetected.

Director’s Vision for ‘The American’

What does it mean to be an American?

As a Malaysian-American who was born in Oklahoma, had spent second to fourth grade in Texas, but spent most of my life in a British school in China, I never really had an answer.

Being a kid growing up in an Asian family, I was raised on Asian customs and traditions; Being an international student, I was raised on American media; Being in a British school, my friends and I made British jokes that most Americans would find strange; And being a kid who spent some of my most formative elementary school years in Texas, I had always wondered if I qualified as being American.

When I started college in New York City, I found myself wondering about this even more: “Surely I’m an American by now, right? I mean, I was born here. I have an American accent. I watch mostly American movies, and most of my friends were born and raised in America. I mean, I even love McDonald’s!”

As the excuses would pile up over time in my head, I found myself feeling less and less confident in my identity and where I truly belonged. And even now, at twenty-two, I have no idea who I really am culturally.

This is the feeling that I tried to capture in this film: a grating feeling that is created from the fact that everyday, Asian people are still being abused on the streets, are still being bullied into caricatures and stereotypes, and are still being looked over in various jobs and opportunities. A feeling that is created from my elementary school years, where as an Asian kid, I struggled to fit in in a predominantly white Texas classroom. A feeling that is created from hearing about the hardships my Asian-American friends deal with everyday for no reason other than the color of their skin.

The anger I felt from all of these little realizations was what led me to write and rewrite the script over the course of a couple months, until I felt that I found an ending that perfectly captured the irony I experienced as a citizen of the “Land of the Free.”

Aware that there were a lot of Asian-American films about racism already, I wanted to tell this story through a more unique and daring lens: through the deconstruction of an action-comedy film that slowly morphs into a horror-comedy. Taking inspiration from the angry and idiosyncratic styles of Park-Chan Wook and Jordan Peele, as well as from comedic directing techniques from Edgar Wright and Stephen Chow along with other filmmakers I had long admired, I seeked to convey a vision that felt refreshing and effectively critical of the trauma that is still being inflicted upon myself and many other minorities living in the United States today.

Even though this project was very much a genre film, with echoes to mainstream blockbusters like The Dark Knight, The Interview, and Get Out, I took a larger amount of my directing inspiration from art house films, such as the works of Tsai Ming Liang, Lars von Trier, Agnes Varda, and Chantal Ackerman. I wanted to retain the action/comedy/thriller aspects of the project while also making sure that every frame could hold its own as a visual piece. And of course, I also found myself inevitably being influenced by Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove when figuring out the satirical nature of the politically-themed visuals.

My cinematographer, Jason Wang, and I also took inspiration from the campy, “moonlight” lighting style of the Park-Chan Wook films, The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave, to convey the heightened nature of the narrative. Furthermore, I also utilized expressive camera zooms and movements from traditional martial arts films, such as Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon as well as slick modern action-comedies helmed by Steven Soderbergh and Guy Ritchie.

The heightened feeling of the resulting film was also achieved through my cast. I was lucky enough to cast Leo Joo, a long-time veteran in the acting world, who had worked with directors such as The Wachowskis (The Matrix), to capture the agony of an Asian man who had struggled to overcome his childhood trauma of racism. Along with Leo, the rest of the cast, including actress Holly Cinnamon, who had acted in the hit show Succession, were invaluable to the surreal feeling of the project. It was famously said in the industry that “directing is 90% casting,” and this project is a testament to that statement, especially for a project as stylized and carefully tonally-engineered as this one. The result is a film with an infused sensibility that I feel will offer a unique, cinematic experience that both casual movie-goers and art-film enthusiasts can enjoy.

Though I’m still not quite sure how much of an “American” I am even after making this project, I do know this: after making this project, I realized that maybe being a so-called “American” isn’t as glorious as it seems. Maybe, sometimes, it’s okay to be confused, to be unsure of where you belong. Maybe it’s this relentless longing for belonging, and this endless questioning of one’s identity, that drives one to meet so many amazing people in the first place, to make so many life-long friends and connections, to bring to life a story and a vision that captures the very frustrations one has as a minority living in America.