How Rumors Spread in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hey, this is Jon M. Chu, director of “Crazy Rich Asians. " And this is in the beginning of the movie, where we get to meet Rachel Chu, played by the incredible Constance Wu, and Nick Young, played by Henry Golding, who, this is his first movie.

We found him from our accountant in Malaysia. He was a travel host there. Never done a movie before, so this is his first movie.

This is his second day shooting. And he really improved every day he was there. He’s an incredible actor, actually, and super natural.

And you’re going to see him a lot. And he plays the lead in our movie. And here, he’s inviting her to Singapore to meet his family.

What she doesn’t know is that his family is the richest in Singapore. And so she’s about to fly into a hornet’s nest, as they say. This is a very popular section in the book.

In our script, it’s about two sentences. So we had to design from the ground up. But in the book, they talk about how all the gossip spreads through Radio 1 Asia.

And you can see her slyly taking a cell phone pic there. And she’s going to pass it on to all the friends, socialites, ex-girlfriends, family members to destroy this American girl coming to Singapore to take their man. How did we communicate this stuff is through text message and social media.

And there’s so much and so many ways you can do it. We really didn’t want to shoot people’s screens. So we tried to come up with the most buoyant way that even the book describes of how information passes.

So we had these wispy, colorful things, sort of in the colors of the book covers, that spread through all the people throughout Singapore. And we had a great company, Aspect Ratio, to help design it. There’s my baby in the second there, screaming “no," that was born about two weeks after we finished shooting.

And then we really wanted to show that this information was spreading all around the world and ending up at this beautiful home, during this Bible study, where we meet Michelle Yeoh, who plays Nick Young’s mother and wants nothing to do with this American girl coming to Singapore, which is very relatable to my experience as an Asian-American going to Asia for the first time, where it feels sort of like home but not like home. And that’s really what our movie is about is this dual cultural identity that we all go through, especially in this generation of no matter where you’re from — whether you’re Asian or not — everyone’s figuring out who we want to be for the future. And so text messaging is a great way to show all the ways that those things spread.