Writer Charles Yu has seen his career transform from law, to book author and now to television. That latter shift will be further proven when “Interior Chinatown” – his award-winning book – airs on Hulu and Disney Plus on Nov. 19.
Produced by Taika Waititi, with a pilot that is also directed by Waititi, the edgy, fast-paced show tackles weighty themes of race, class, and immigration with a sense of humor that left the audience at the recent screening at the Boston Asian American Film Festival, laughing throughout the episode. The tagline of the show on the promotional materials encourages viewers to “Break out of your role.”
Yu, who has written two books and released short story collections, recently pivoted his career to showrunner.
Sampan recently sat down with Yu and had a conversation about his work. He explained that as showrunner he participates in the writer’s room for “Interior Chinatown”’ where scripts were written. He was there every day for filming, and during post-production he was able to “oversee the process of finalizing the cuts and laying in the music, and doing the color, and visual effects.” He noted that as showrunner that he was involved with “basically, all of it.”
Yu had previously worked in the writer’s room on shows such as “Westworld,” “Legion,” and 2023’s “American Born Chinese.”
When asked how he ended up as showrunner, Yu responded: “I think because I wrote the book and because I think I had been in enough roles that I guess Hulu entrusted me with the responsibility.”
“It is such an important part of this medium to get to see all of it, which I think is an important part of the training pipeline that the Writers Guild has fought for, which is if you get to see it get shot and even maybe get edited, you understand better at the front end how to write it. It all kind of feeds into itself. And, in fact, you’re continuing to write through production, that is a big part of it. I guess they were crazy enough to let me run the show, literally.”
He spoke about how the role challenges his confidence.
“It’s playing its own kind of role; I’m here pretending I know what I’m doing, and I’m probably not fooling anyone. They know I haven’t done it. But I have to pretend that I have conviction, which I do have conviction creatively on some level. But when every choice starts to get questioned, or when there’s just a genuine choice, you don’t know which one’s right — that’s the really scary part. That’s where the magic happens. It doesn’t always turn out into the right decision. Sometimes you go, ‘Oh, we did it wrong. We’re gonna go back and fix it or fix it in post.’ But that’s what makes it exciting.”
Yu says his ideas came painfully and slowly while writing the book. It took six or seven years for him to write “Interior Chinatown,” because of several false stats. He ended up throwing away two versions of the book, meaning hundreds of pages, before settling on a structure that worked. “Interior Chinatown” is unique because the book uses the narrative structure of the screenplay format to tell the story of the protagonist, Willis Wu.
“I really wanted to tell this story this way, because I felt like it unlocked a lot of things for me personally. And I also hoped it would resonate kind of from this Asian American perspective of like, ‘What does it feel like to be marginalized, to be not part of the main story or to feel that way anyway?’ And so, to me, that kind of metaphor carried through enough that it felt like this is definitely worth writing a novel about.”
Yu worked on the pilot during the first year and a half of the Covid pandemic.
“As sad as everything was, it was a good time to throw myself into work, in a way, and of course then watch. That was a year of many attacks on Asian Americans. And so I think it just felt particularly resonant to be trying to tell this story and thinking about how to tell the story through this lens. … The challenge there was, How do you translate something that works one way,” he said, referring to the book versus the audio book.
“I feel like on the page it’s one thing, but you can carry it in your head as an audio book or a book-book. But up there, (on screen) you have to literalize things in a way that you don’t. So that was really hard.”
In 2020, Yu wrote an essay in which he said that when he was growing up, he never saw himself represented on television, and said that he hopes “Interior Chinatown” will help create that very opportunity now for others.
“There are many more projects now that do seem to feature Asian American or Pacific Islander performers and, or people behind the camera. There’s many more that are in executive roles or in other roles that, that kind of are roles that allow people to empower other people to tell those stories. So, I think hopefully there’s not like only this show to put that pressure on. But I do think because of the subject matter, it feels hopefully uniquely positioned in a way to be like part of a conversation. And what I really hope it shows is that these characters are full dimensional people. I think to me the best way into people’s hearts is through a story. And that, that’s how you kind of humanize people, is you just show them, living their lives and being who they are. And rather than any specific sort of message or thematic, sort of abstract theme, I hope people just are entertained and feel like this story makes them feel something. Maybe laugh a little bit.”
Yu’s transition from lawyer, to writer, to showrunner came about slowly. Yu attended law school to provide financial security for his family and minored in creative writing. He wrote short stories in his spare time and eventually published a few books. He started seeing some interest from Hollywood for the rights to his work. Eventually, he got a few meetings with producers and executives and got hired onto a show. That’s when he switched out of law, keeping his license current for several years in case the television gig didn’t pan out. His job as the showrunner happened through that exposure to Hollywood and working his way up the ladder. Yu described it as “a huge opportunity and very scary.”
Yu addressed aspiring writers and said “I hate to sound like a ‘Successories’ poster, but I also feel like, drop the aspiring label, like if you’re writing, you’re writing. I’m not writing most of the time, I don’t feel like a writer a lot of days. But besides the obvious, read a lot, put the time in, I think it’s that to me, I started out writing some really sort of strange, very idiosyncratic personal things that I didn’t think anybody would want. And at first nobody wanted them. But what I learned sort of through trial and error and through just a lot of rejection was that it worked best when I stayed true to my voice. And that when I was trying to dilute it or be something I wasn’t, people could tell, or they just didn’t want it as much. And it’s sort of like the most raw or the bits that feel like they’re coming from a real place are often scary and often like the things that I’m like, ‘that’s not even writing. That’s just. I don’t know what that is.’ Those seem to break through in ways, including this book, honestly. “
