Interview: Director Sean Wang on His Oscar-nominated Short Film ‘Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó’ and His Movie Star Grandmothers

Sean Wang (王湘聖) is having the time of his life and so are his grandmothers, Yi Yan Fuei and Zhang Li Hua, better known as Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó respectively, the titular stars of his Oscar-nominated documentary short film.

“They really are just enjoying every second and living their best lives,” says Wang, who learned of his Oscar nomination alongside his grandmothers and his producer and fellow nominee Sam Davis while watching the announcement on January 23. Their reaction (see below) went viral and was shared across thousands of social media accounts. And if that wasn’t enough, this happened on the day of his feature film directorial debut Dìdi, premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival later that night and was recently picked up by Focus Features for a summer release.

Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó Wang’s details Wang’s 96-year-old maternal grandmother and 80-year-old paternal grandmother, who became great friends when their respective children married (“We’re like sisters.”) The film chronicles their past, their present, living together (in the same bed, no less), navigating the height of COVID-19, their vibrant senses of humor and play, and farts. Lots of farts.

As the winner of the 2023 SXSW Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award and the 2023 AFI Grand Jury Prize, Wang isn’t a total stranger to accolades for his work but he’s taking it in stride. “It’s surreal and bonkers,” he says. “We’re going to the Oscars and I’m going with my grandmas,” he continued. “It’s just, like, a sentence I never thought I would say.” Recently, Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) introduced the film with a Q&A moderated by Lulu Wang (The Farewell) in Los Angeles, the latter of whom was Wang’s mentor for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival Screenwriters Lab.

I sat down with Wang, a Fremont native, where his grandmothers live and where the film was shot, in San Francisco just days after the Oscar luncheon and as a part of the film’s Bay Area screenings and Q&As to talk about his film and of course, his superstar grandmothers.

Erik Anderson: It’s been just a really insane 30 days for you. I can’t even imagine. Where’s your head at right now?

Sean Wang: I mean, it has been an insane 30 days, but it does feel like it’s been an insane year. I think not just 2024, but everything leading up to this culmination of a moment, I guess you would call it. We premiered the short film at SXSW 2023, and it was right around that in March too. That was March, I think. I don’t remember the day, but early March.

EA: Yeah.

SW: And right around then, everything that was all the preparation and development of my feature film, it went from zero to a hundred so fast. It went from not sure if we’re going to shoot the movie to, I think we’re shooting the movie. So it really feels like ever since March of 2023, things have just been this whirlwind of like, “Oh, shoot, everything’s happening all at once.” And then making the movie the feature and editing the feature with its own sprint, sort of very tunnel vision, and then getting to premiere that movie and celebrate it at Sundance in the middle of that, getting nominated for an Oscar, it all feels like there’s been so much happening all at once. But it’s all beautiful and special. I’m so grateful for all of it. It’s just a matter of making sure I’m getting to process all of it, which I don’t know if I will, but yeah.

EA: Are your grandmothers helping you keep you grounded through all of this? And also, how are they handling being really quick movie stars movies?

SW: I mean, they love it. They’re really, really loving it. And I think it’s amazing for me, not even selfishly speaking, but I think if they didn’t like the spotlight, they didn’t like what was happening and going to the red carpet, then it would be this strange experience. But they really are just enjoying every second and living their best lives. And so in that regard, I actually just feel so lucky and grateful because I feel like my job and all of this… Because I’ve never been through it before, so it feels very new, and that can be a little scary and it’s a little overwhelming. But I really feel like at the end of the day, if they’re enjoying this journey, then I’m enjoying this journey. And I think they’re having the best time in the world right now.

EA: At the Oscars’ luncheon the other day it was like you have all of these Margot Robbies and Ryan Goslings in the room, but everybody wants to meet Messi from Anatomy of the Fall, and Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó.

SW: Right?

EA: It’s the best.

SW: Yeah.

EA: I love that. You shot the film in 2021. So we’re quite a few years really removed from that, but it was also at a time of such a huge rise in anti-Asian violence and that’s a part of the film when your grandmothers were reading through the newspapers and feeling very nervous. What conversations did you have with them just from a point of what’s happening in that moment and just historically?

SW: I mean, we had a lot of conversations about just how… We didn’t want the movie to be about that. We wanted the movie to be about them, and their joy, and their humanity and their humor, and ultimately, their sort of infectious, youthful energy. We didn’t want it to necessarily be a political reaction to everything that was happening. But like you were saying, that the DNA of what was happening during that time with anti-Asian sentiments and COVID all being a part of it, I think that is sort of woven into the DNA and the context of why they’re living inside, and like they said in the film, not going outside, they’re scared. I think that is a thread in the movie, but it’s not the movie. I think we really wanted the movie to be about them.

And so I think the conversations we had were surrounding that,  they weren’t so pointed in our day-to-day life, but it was little things like they would see something and they’d be like, “Oh, how terrible is that? It’s terrifying.” And we never really go like an interview or anything, but it was certainly just within the DNA of what was happening at the time, living with them.

EA: What was the genesis and origin of utilizing them as subjects here, other than the fact that they’re freaking hilarious?

SW: I mean, they’re the best. They give me so much joy. And I think that is ultimately, the genesis. And the genesis really goes back years, and years, and years. I’m very much their filmmaker grandson. And so there’s over the years where I’m with them, I would just film them. And sometimes we do little skits here and there, 30-second videos we post on Instagram, or even when Vine was a thing. I remember making some vines with them. So that silliness of us being together and shooting a little video, that’s not new to them. I think the most heightened crazy version of this was in 2018, I made… I don’t know if you-

EA: The Christmas Card.

SW: Yeah, the Christmas Card. We made that together. And that really planted the seed of, there’s so much silliness and joy and a chaotic fun collaboration here in a way. We made that and that was like, “Oh, there’s something here. There’s something so special, unique, and fun about these two women in my life. I wonder if there’s something more to mine here.” And ultimately, that became this film. A few years later when I moved home from New York City, it was that it was, “Oh, let’s make a portrait of them and let’s combine that joy, that unbridled joy and silliness, and that collaboration that you feel with the three of us, with the sort of very grounded, mundane, quotidian rhythms of their life. And have that and not ignore what their life might be like when I’m not around and what it feels like to see your friends pass away and these sort of thoughts of mortality and aging. Let’s have the joy with the pain and see if we can make a container that contains all of their emotions. Not just the silly, but really create a three-dimensional human portrait of them.”

EA: I’m a big fan of your short films going back. I think 3,000 Miles is gorgeous.

SW: Wow, 3,000 Miles, a callback.

EA: I loved it. H.A.G.S. is really funny. I noticed all the way through this, and Dìdi as well, your films and your stories are told through the eyes of maybe not nostalgia exactly, but just your own history. What are you finding in your past that’s telling the story of your present and future?

SW: That’s a good question. I think you don’t really know the true line of something until you look back at it. Right? And I do see those films that you’re talking about now, like 3,000 Miles, H.A.G.S., this film with Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, those three. And then there was another film by me called Still Here, that was shot in Wai Pó’s village where she lived and grew up and where my mom grew up. I didn’t make all of these films as a trilogy. They certainly just came out of these sort of single moments and what I was feeling at the time. But looking back at all of them, they all feel very connected.

Discover Sean Wang’s previous short films on Vimeo

I think the common thread is, and we took this into Dìdi as well, and what I learned on Dìdi, which was there was so much about my childhood and adolescence that you don’t really realize how it affected you until you grow up and look back at it. And you have the vocabulary and the emotional maturity to actually dissect certain things and look at it with an objective point of view with a little bit of remove. So you have objectivity, but still this sort of emotional subjectivity. So you can actually process things in real time. I think ultimately, that’s what all these films have in common. It’s realizing certain things about childhood or process, and looking at the things I’ve experienced in the past or recent past, but in a different way with a little bit of remove that I can actually process it and make something out of it without it feeling like I’m too in it, if that makes sense.

EA: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to hear about working with [co-Oscar nominee] Sam [Davis], who’s your producer and cinematographer, and has been for a long time. And you’re very close friends. How did that all begin? And what in his role as your cinematographer, gives you insight to your own projects?

SW: I mean, well, Sam and I, we can call it love at first sight (laughs). We both transferred to USC Film School as juniors. And so it was this feeling of finding a new friend, finding a new community. And we transferred into film school where there were already people who had their cliques and friend groups. And we just hit it off right away. And before we ever collaborated, we became just really good friends. And the way that the curriculum worked was you didn’t really get to choose who you work with. And so we were always craving to work with one another and our collaboration started from that. It started from a friendship. And the thing with Sam that’s so great too, about working with him as a cinematographer is, well, it was two-fold. I went into film school thinking I wanted to be a cinematographer, but also a director, and I just like making things.

I met Sam and quickly realized, I knew that I got good enough as a cinematographer to know that I will never be good enough. I can’t light the way Sam lights. He just has this instinctual way of making things that shouldn’t be cinematic, cinematic. He has this gift of taking small things and making them feel larger than life, making them feel like a big screen experience. That’s what we did with Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó.

And so I was like, it’s so fun to work with someone and he makes my ideas better. And I think the thing with Sam too as a cinematographer is that he’s similar, where he is also a holistic filmmaker. He’s not just a cinematographer. He’s a filmmaker. And so when we work with him, even though he’s mostly thinking about the images and how to tell the story through visuals, we’re both thinking about the edit, and we’re both thinking about how sound is going to complement these images. And we’re both thinking about the larger picture. And so working with him, that has always been our collaboration, but in this sense, with him making this with me in a producer role as well, it was really looking at every edit together and thinking, he’s not just like, “We need to put that shot in because it’s beautiful.” Does it serve a story? And so I think we both approach it from that perspective as well.

EA: I like that. At 17 minutes, I think this is your longest short film.

SW: Longest short. (laughs)

EA: When you were mapping out this film, how did you decide what to leave in and what to leave out? And was there a marker for you of time or…

SW: Well, I guess it depends on who you ask whether this is a long-short or a short-short, because I always thought it was on the longer end. And now, we’re nominated for an Oscar and we’re the shortest shorts on the block.

EA: You are.

SW: But I’m always of the ethos that a movie should only be as long as a movie needs to be. So our first cut, our assembly rough cut, it was over 20 minutes. It was probably closer to 23, 24. And we just really started playing around with the pacing. And especially because this doesn’t really have a linear story to it, the arc is, to me, emotional. It’s what do we want the audience to feel at any given moment and creating a clothesline of emotions. So it doesn’t ever feel like tonal whiplash.

And so it was through that in the edit, trying to figure out how long is the right length for this movie. We didn’t want to make it long just to make it long. We didn’t want to shave off too much where it just doesn’t feel like the right experience. And ultimately, that’s where we landed, 17 minutes. And we cut out a lot of stuff. There’s some stuff in the credits that you see like, “Oh, those are proper scenes.” But we realized, those didn’t help. Those didn’t compliment the story in the way that we needed to.

EA: Speaking of time, let’s talk about farts.

SW: Yeah. (laughs)

EA: How many were left on the cutting room floor?

SW: That’s a good question actually. I do think, I might be… I mean, I do remember, I think Nǎi Nai farted while we were shooting something with Wai Po. She had loud farts. And so it was a small crew, but we were shooting something with Wai Po, and then we just hear from the other room this trumpet fart. And we’re like, “All right, well, the sound got killed on that one. Let’s go again.”

EA: That’s amazing. I know you probably met a lot of people at the luncheon, but who were you most excited to meet at the Oscars?

SW: At the luncheon I was really excited to meet Celine Song. And I got to meet her and she’s so cool and so sweet. I saw her movie at Sundance at her world premiere a year before we premiered our movie, so it was such an incredible emotional experience. I got to meet Greta [Gerwig], which again, her Lady Bird was a big influence on me and our movie. But who I haven’t met yet that I want to meet at The Oscars? That’s a good question. I didn’t get to meet the dog. Scorsese obviously. We want to get a picture of the grandmas and Scorsese.

EA: Absolutely.

SW: Grandmas, Scorsese, Miyazaki, and Thelma, the over 80 club.

EA: I love it. Try and get Messi in there too.

SW: Someone make that happen.

EA: I think someone’s going to want to make that happen.

Sean Wang is Oscar-nominated in the category of Documentary Short Film for Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, which is currently available to stream on Disney+.