As the old adage goes, never meet your heroes—but if you do, and that hero is Spike Jonze, cast him in your debut feature film as the voice of a dead squirrel hallucinated by an inebriated thirteen-year-old at a house party.

At least, that’s what Sean Wang did with Dìdi (弟弟), his nostalgic yet emotionally piercing coming-of-ager that rewinds the clock back to 2008 Fremont, California. The cameo is a fitting full-circle moment, given how Jonze first inspired Wang around the same time in his own adolescence, thanks to the pair’s shared skateboarding roots. “I watching so many clips of MTV Scarred. I don’t know if you that show—it’s just people, like, eating shit,” the writer-director tells me with a laugh. “I had a big community of skater friends at that time. It was just something I picked up and never really stopped.”

Through filming his friends, the Fremont native discovered a love for cameras and started putting his own spin on the style of skate videos he saw online: vibrant, kinetic and full of fisheye. But his wheels started grinding over new possibilities after he saw Jonze’s Lakai - Fully Flared, a 90-minute street skateboarding video directed alongside Ty Evans and Cory Weincheque. Kicking off with ‘Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun’ by M83 before leading into Arcade Fire’s ‘No Cars Go’, the explosion-filled, slow-motion opening sequence struck Wang to his core, moving him in a way that he had only before associated with cinema. He wanted to do the same.

When Where the Wild Things Are came out during Wang’s early high school years, he only knew of Jonze from the skate world. As Max and Carol t-shirts and boards took over mall shops and his school halls, the sudden popularity of Girl Skateboards, the skating company that Jonze co-owns, initially felt a little strange. Then, everything fell into place. “I love that movie. There’s a lot of homage to that movie in our movie,” Wang says. “In a way, that’s the movie that made me feel like I could do it. Because I was like, ‘Wait, he did this little skate video and a $100 million Warner [Bros picture]—what?’ It didn’t make sense to me. All the boxes I put myself in, I was like, ‘Oh, they don’t have to be there. You can do everything.’ The dam broke.”

Or, to provide another visual metaphor as captured in the first minutes of Dìdi (弟弟), a mailbox rigged by prank-minded teenage boys burst open. For thirteen-year-old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang, no relation to the filmmaker), the summer days stretch long and languid, full of pool parties and knees scraped and AOL Instant Messenger chimes. To his Taiwanese American family, he’s dìdi, an affectionate term for “little brother” in Mandarin. To his friends, he’s Wang Wang. Somewhere in between lies Chris. As high school looms on the horizon, he feels more in flux than ever, performing a false bravado for his peers and lashing out at his mother Chungsing (a moving Joan Chen), who shoulders the household duties alone.

When I catch up with the 29-year-old filmmaker in March, he’s at the tail end of a whirlwind two months. In January, Dìdi (弟弟) premiered at Sundance to a rapturous standing ovation. Since his short documentary about his two grandmothers, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, had been gathering buzz, Wang flew to Fremont during the fest for Oscars nomination day, keen to celebrate any positive news with loved ones (the joyous reaction went viral). Then, he immediately went back to Park City, where Dìdi (弟弟) snagged a US Dramatic Audience Award, the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast and a theatrical distribution deal via Focus Features. 

A flurry of award season press and events followed, and scarcely 48 hours after his grandmothers rocked the Oscars red carpet in custom Rodarte and earned some best dressed shout-outs (obviously), Wang s me for coffee in downtown Austin amid the SXSW hubbub—almost exactly one year since Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó premiered here in 2023 and also took home a Grand Jury Award and Audience Award. Behind sunglasses, Wang its exhaustion—a beach trip is in his near future—but effuses gratitude all the same.

On my way to the interview, my rideshare driver Hicham shares that he’s from Fremont, and soon we’re chatting Live 105 and Golfland, Mission Peak and Lake Elizabeth. He’s beside himself hearing about a filmmaker from Fremont making a film set in Fremont, and grows wistful, telling me that he’s lived in Texas for years now but still deeply misses the Bay Area. Before I hop out, I write down “Dìdi by Sean Wang” for him.

“We shot it at parks I used to go to, places I ed, places that were very vivid to me,” Wang says. “I felt by rooting it there, hopefully the love for the place was shining through, as opposed to needing these montages of how beautiful Fremont is. It needed to be baked into the texture of the movie without it being the movie.” While he wrote most of the initial screenplay drafts in New York with certain locations in mind, a move back home to the Bay Area in 2021 brought more memories to the surface. “Driving by all these places that I grew up just felt very Lady Bird, like, oh, my god, the elementary school,” he says, laughing. “Driving by the park and the sun’s setting, you’re like, ‘Oh, this feels like being fourteen again.’”

Almost a proof of concept for Dìdi (弟弟), 2021’s digital scrapbook-esque H.A.G.S. (Have a Good Summer) started with Wang flipping through a middle school yearbook for research, then deciding to ring up old classmates for a short film project. “I was really weird back then. I was always trying to put on for people,” one friend in the film says over the phone. “Yeah, but it’s also like… we were thirteen,” Wang replies.

The exchange doubles as a thesis statement for Dìdi (弟弟), but as the filmmaker notes, his debut feature is personal, not autobiographical. Given the many on-the-surface parallels between his real childhood and Chris’s fictionalized one—not to mention, his own Wài Pó playing Chris’s Nǎi Nai—it’s a distinction worth observing, but not necessarily one he makes out of a need to protect himself. Instead, the filmmaker drew inspiration from a certain canon of personal storytelling: titles like 20th Century Women, Beginners, Lady Bird, The 400 Blows and the Hulu series Ramy.

“To me, there’s something really exciting about knowing that comes from a true place, but then using writing and filmmaking and seeing how they’re modifying everything and telling the story,” Wang explains. “The fun part of watching shows like Ramy where he does explore things that are a little morally gray, I’m like, ‘Oh, did he really do that?’”

The adolescence in Dìdi (弟弟) is not necessarily a “correct” one. The MySpace Top 8s and YouTube prank videos of what Wang the “pre-technology technology era” and the Warped Tour-reminiscent playlist featuring Motion City Soundtrack and Hellogoodbye might induce charm (and some level of cringe), but he doesn’t dwell in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Instead, he uses the specificity of the setting to consider how shame can manifest across personal, cultural and societal levels—especially at this age, when everything feels like so, so much; especially as Chris navigates the nuances of his Asian identity; especially as he grapples with fully understanding, let alone articulating, all of his emotions.

“A lot of the personal shame comes from what it means to be a man at that time, and what it means to be accepted in your friend group. You see the way that these kids talk and what was accepted back then, and how that trickles into every aspect of [Chris’s] life,” the filmmaker says. “The masculinity informs the cultural stuff, and the cultural stuff informs the societal stuff: how society is saying [to] Asian Americans [what] their worth [is] at that time, but also Asian American men especially. When the girl says, like, ‘Oh, you’re cute for an Asian,’ how does he process something like that?”

Dìdi (弟弟) doesn’t offer Chris a way out, but it does point toward the way through. “The only relationship that is an unconditional love—[in which] he doesn’t need to be anyone except the version that he is in all of [his] messiness and complexity—is the one with his mom,” Wang says. After opening with the “loudest, most in-your-face thirteen-year-old, brimming with energy”, he wanted to end the film on the quietest note between parent and child. “For a lot of the movie, they’re talking past one another and talking at each other. There are a lot of scenes where she’s looking at him, and he’s not reciprocating that attention. It’s a quiet attention, but it is attention. That last scene, to me, is [him] for the first time really seeing her. They don’t need to fill the silence with words or music on the car radio.”

“Both actors have that magic that you hope for, where a glance, a look, is so much more powerful than pages of dialogue,” Wang adds. “There were [originally] so many scenes with Joan where she had a lot more dialogue, and it was a lot more maybe on the nose. You could just hold the camera on her face and see an entire life. Anytime we could do that anywhere in the movie, we did that.”

Throughout our conversation, Wang refers to Dìdi (弟弟) as “our movie.” The possessive contains a lot of helping hands and collaborators—and his own mom, Cynthia Lee. His 2021 move also re-initiated the filmmaker to the rhythms of his family as an adult. “So much of this movie is me understanding my mom a lot more, and living with her [again] was like, ‘Oh, I see her day-to-day life,’” he explains. Lee is credited as an associate producer for the film: she read drafts of the script, translated English to Chinese, and helped scout locations in Fremont. Chungsing’s paintings in the film even come from her own hands. “She was a ive mom on the film in the sense that she was just like, ‘How’s everyone, how’s everything going?’ She was just kind of there for us.

“She would come with us to supermarkets, because so much of it was shot in places I grew up going to, but when I talked to [the owners], they’re like, ‘Okay... who’s this kid?’ But if my mom’s talking to them, they’re like, ‘Oh, okay, you shop here.’” Wang smiles. Never has there been a better reminder to pick up your phone and call home.