Quotes from Lee Isaac Chung

I always tend to gravitate toward the idea of things being human: that this isolation I feel as an Asian American, even though it's real, other people have it too in their own way.

After having struggled through some close friends' and family members' battles with cancer, I wanted to create an American drama about the experience of tragedy and memory.

As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family's arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother's shock at learning that this would be our new home.

I wanted to make something that transcends borders and gets beyond this feeling of national identity.

The attention and all the interviews and all that, it has been wild and something that I'm not used to.

She died when I was 16 and I just think no history books, nothing is ever going to talk about my grandmother. She was kind of invisible. She couldn't speak English so didn't have many friends. I think of her any time I think of the word 'sacrifice.'

Ingrid Bergman in 'Journey to Italy' just goes off and looks at things for most of the film.

My father came to America believing in the romantic dream of what he saw in films like 'Big Country' and 'Giant' - this fertile land able to yield so much promise.

Film shoots generally don't smell good.

I had some early success with my first film and since then it's been a grind. It's clearly a craft that I love, and a craft that I work on constantly, but after so many years, I didn't feel like I had much to show for that.

After everything my parents were teaching us about Korean culture, about being respectful and all these things, you know, here came my grandmother, who is very crass and wanted to teach us how to gamble.

My grandmother, if she were still alive, she'd be very proud that I held through and did a film in Korean and didn't compromise and then start using that foreign language of English.

I remember hearing my mom saying so many times we should never have left Korea. She would see the way that I was growing up and the fact that I was speaking English and not speaking Korean as well, and she would fear the things that we were forgetting.

My mom grew up without a father because he died in the Korean War. And my grandmother, her life was completely upended because of that.

We grew up in rural Arkansas without any Koreans close by, and when I go to Korea feel out of place.

My parents, they grew up in a time when there was war in Korea. And my grandmother, her husband, my grandfather, was a soldier and he died in the war. A lot of people in that generation, they didn't go to schools. My grandmother couldn't read; she didn't finish beyond elementary school.

I think one of the things that I had to establish for myself quite early on was the rule that this is not my parents and this is not me or my family, that somehow this has to become a family that exists solely in the film of 'Minari.'

I took time off and realized that what I was lacking was the discipline in trying to write a script.

Most of my friends were white. I grew up really the only minority in my school, along with my sister.

I modeled my work after contemporary masters of art house cinema but felt my voice was missing.

I didn't have much of a taste for Korean food growing up: I was over the moon about Mexican food.

There are a lot of Korean films that will show marital strife, but I'm not sure I've seen so many that will show it in the interest of showing a real marriage - one that ultimately succeeds.

Any time there is a film in a 'foreign language,' in Spanish or Korean or whatever language, it's usually not an American film. It's usually from another country.

Growing up, the question of faith and the question of God, specifically with Christianity, has been something that's informed me quite a lot, but it's also very loaded. The way that it's often expressed in America is very different from the way that I view things.