Jon M. Chu, the directorial force behind some of Hollywood’s biggest movies over the past decade, recently admitted there was a time when he was struggling to find his place in the industry.
Chu recalled that time in his career while discussing how he chooses film projects during the Canva Create 2026’s Building Worlds: From Script to Spectacle panel at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
“And it either sparks me or not, or I have to go on some journey to find if I connect with it. Other times I’m like, ‘I have to tell this story,’ ” the Wicked director said about how imagination guides him.
Chu continued, “That’s how I start. Because without that, I can’t tell you what colors. I can’t tell you what we should build for and it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He also pointed out that “every project’s different” and that he remembers “in what I realized, as I had done this over and over again, you are so conscious of… doing it because you’re not like the greats, but the greats are the ones that inspired you. You want to be like that so badly you don’t have quite the language or the tools or the ability of the craftsmanship yet, how to express that.”
At the beginning of creating any movie, Chu usually asks himself, “Why am I the person to tell the story?” However, sometimes he hasn’t felt sure that he “deserved” to be the person doing so.
“When you said my list of movies, it lit up and you said Crazy Rich Asians. That was a big point in my life. I didn’t think I deserved to be in Hollywood,” he said. “I was discovered and I got very lucky. And when you win the lottery, you think you actually don’t know how you got there. So, you actually can’t win the lottery again.”
Additionally, his team “believed” in both him and “this Asian culture, diaspora from all around the world,” Jon M. Chu trusted himself and “knew that audience, whether you were Asian or not, would fall in love with the things that I fall in love with my family, the meals that we eat, the conversations we had, we could make fun of ourselves and how we are, and we had all walks of life in there.”
