By Richard Park
When it came time to take the Step Up franchise to a whole new level, they called in Jon M. Chu.
Although Step Up 2 was originally slated to be a direct-to-DVD movie with a measly $7 million budget, director Jonathan Murray Chu stepped in to make the sequel to Step Up a bigger, better update. Unsatisfied with the original script and the shortage of dance numbers, he upped the dance scenes by almost three times as many and even increased the necessary budget to that of the original, $22 million.
Chu loved the first Step Up, but he knew his version needed something different. "It's about a crew, and being a family in this crew, and what takes to be a family," says Chu. "We also wanted to take it out of the dance studio and bring it out back to the outside -- bring it back to the city -- so we could bring in all types of dance and all types of people."
Hence, the addition of "The Streets" to the title of the film. However, Chu did want to keep a few elements from the first movie.
"We definitely wanted Channing (the lead actor in Step Up) to be a part of this," says Chu, "but we didn't want him to just come in and say hello and leave. We wanted him to do a dance number. So it was fun that we got to give him a good goodbye with a big dance number. But then once we ended that, I wanted this movie to be on its own."
It was nice of Step Up 2 to remind us of its predecessor, but the difference was noticeable. Instead of focusing on a love story, with ballet moves incorporated into all of the choreography, Chu emphasized breaking and pop locking in his new movie, shining a spotlight on the dance as its main objective.
Watching Disney cartoons and filming vacation videos for his family elevated Jon Chu's interest in filmmaking, and after graduating from USC film school, he gathered wide esteem with his musical short When the Kids are Away. He was soon being signed to many projects, such as a high budget remake of Bye Bye Birdie.
The great Steven Spielberg even met with Chu, giving him sound pieces of advice on his career. Chu remembers that Spielberg advised him to "get comfortable shoes on set."
"I think it means: surround yourself with good people," explains Chu, "people you trust no matter what's going on. As long as you know what the goal is, which is to make a good movie and tell a good story... it's just communicating an emotion."
Chu also said that Spielberg told him: "It's not how much you miss. It's how much you catch."
"When I was making the movie, it really helped because you could always say 'I wish I got that, I wish I got that' but the movie is still going, and you still have to make your movie. So it is whatever you can [catch] from then on which is the most important thing."
The advice he took from Spielberg is apparent in Step Up 2 the Streets where Chu tries to tell the most basic of stories, but in a different and exciting way. He reveals that his new film is basically a fairytale, along the lines of Snow White or Cinderella.
"You have a prince, and you have a princess, both being in kingdoms that are falling apart," explains Chu. "And they don't know the power that they have to change it, so they need each other. And they have the seven dwarves; we have the dragon, which is like the dragon club that they have to overcome; the fairy godmother that they don't listen to…. [And] even though it's called The Streets, it's not a hard movie. It's a fantasy fairytale. Nobody dies, nobody gets shot, there are no drugs, we wanted to make it about dance giving hope and giving light."
To make dance the focus of the movie, Chu found three world renowned choreographers in Hi-Hat, Dave Scott, and Jamal Sims. To further enhance the dance sequences, Chu put trampolines in the club, created a routine in a subway car, and for the final scene, made it rain for two blocks. According to Chu, the rain scene was an especially tiring shoot because it lasted three days, and people were actually getting hurt during the dancing. It was so cold that they even had a hot tub warm up in during breaks.
Chu remembers that some of the actors did not even want to get out of the hot tub because they were so tired and cold, but he constantly told them that nothing great ever came easily. "Film is forever," he would say. "When you're ninety years old, you're going to look back, and you're going to wish you did that take over again because you're going to hit it this time, and we're going to use it, and it's going to be awesome. So you can sit in here for ten minutes and feel good for ten minutes, or you can get out and make history."
Chu's resiliency and work ethic can be attributed to his parents. His father is the owner of a Chinese restaurant called Chef Chu's in Palo Alto, California.
"They came here with nothing," says Chu. "They didn't speak any English, they started a business and worked really hard and gave the kids all the opportunities. They never let us work at the restaurant, and they said 'You can always work here if you want, but do everything we couldn't do.'
"So they put us in dance classes, in music classes, in sports camps. We took a lot of instruments. They always gave everything to us, and said 'America's the greatest place in the world because you can not know the language, you can not know anything, but if you work hard, and you know what you want, then you can make it.'"
His parents' influence has humbled Chu, and he does not even resent any of his film projects that failed to materialize during his last five years in Hollywood. (According to an interview with New York Times, plans for a Bye Bye Birdie remake, Moxie musical, The Prom romantic comedy, and a children's version of Kung Fu Hustle all fell through.)
"When you see someone like me who has no connections in the Hollywood business and got to make his first movie at 28 years old, it's not me," says Chu. "It's my parents, the people who led the way first. I got really blessed on certain things that other people aren't blessed in, in terms of opportunities. Because there are twenty thousand more people who are more talented than I am, but for some reason I got those opportunities.
"For me I'm just continuing what they set up and not complaining about 'Oh these people are trying to tear me down and be racist and this and that,' which -- there is that, there's that everywhere -- but my parents always taught me that you could always talk back to them, or you could prove them wrong by being different. So we always used actions as our words. Saying an Asian guy could never make a movie in Hollywood… it's a different day. It's a different generation, and I think there's a voice of the Asian American. The people who are born here: that's a whole new generation of young Asian people that I think need a voice."
Chu is currently working on a modern version of The Great Gatsby, and you can check out his MySpace here (http: //profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=13059981).
Published: Friday, February 22, 2008
