INTERVIEWS

Ken Cheng Celebrates “Easter Sunday”

share:

We’re seeing it more and more now. Stories from writers of color about their unique experiences are finding homes on an increasing number of platforms. And in the case of Easter Sunday, that platform is the big screen.

The first major studio film to center around a Filipino-American family, Easter Sunday is written by Ken Cheng and stars comedian Jo Koy as a single dad trying to make it as an actor in LA. Heading home to Daly City for holiday family obligations, he takes his teenage son along and they soon find themselves immersed in layer upon layer of family drama. 

The story is a blending of both Koy’s and Cheng’s own lives and writing the screenplay was something of a reflective experience for Cheng. We spoke about how he connected with Jo and the importance of revisiting the past to pass on the stories of our families.

Tell me about how you became involved with the project to begin with and your work with Jo to craft this story.

I became involved in the project after I was introduced to Jo at a dinner that I was co-hosting along with my friends (and now business partners), Jimmy O. Yang and Jessica Gao. Over the last several years, the three of us have hosted this dinner party called Crab Club, which began just as a means to assemble friends in the entertainment business.

Originally Asian American creatives, because there are so few of us writers, directors, actors… the club has since grown to include all our friends of color in the business. It originally began as just a means to gather and commiserate, and frankly privately and within a cone of silence. To talk about the number of toxic people we have encountered in this business.

Creative Screenwriting Magazine

Ken Cheng

That grew intense, very organically and naturally into what was essentially a creative incubator where ideas would just inevitably spring from this dinner. Dan Lin, producer of our movie, among many others, kindly offered to host one of the dinners one night at his beautiful campus in LA and we happily accepted. And at that dinner, Dan invited Jo, whom he had met not long before and had begun early discussions on working together with.

Over that dinner, Jo sat right across from me and Jessica and Jimmy and we all just hit it off. He mentioned that they had been discussing a project; the working title was Easter Sunday. They were trying to hatch up a starring vehicle for Jo and what would be his feature film debut.

So that was the early genesis. During the course of the conversation, one of the things Jo and I bonded over very quickly was our shared Filipino heritage. I’m ethnically Chinese, but my grandparents went to the Philippines during the war and raised my parents there. I spent my first eight years in Asia, many of which were spent in Manila… and so the Filipino culture is very deeply embedded in my upbringing and in my cultural fabric. In fact, Tagalog was among my first languages, before I even spoke English.

Sharing that with Jo was obviously very important and, a few weeks after that dinner, Dan reached out and asked me if I would be interested in coming on board to write this movie. To which I said “yes, of course”. And then I asked “what do you guys have so far?” and Dan laughed and said “we have a title and we have Jo.” They knew they wanted to mine the themes and anecdotes and stories in Jo’s stand-up, which I was already a fan of. I think we get to see our own families and relatives reflected in it, so I thought it was a smart way to frame a starring vehicle for him.

Then the work of crafting a story around it began. Figuring out what the movie was and that’s where I came in. And that’s where I luckily had Jessica and Jimmy, two other incredible writers who were my closest friends who were now my business partners as well, my creative sounding boards.

The movie that was really important to Jo as a template was Friday. And a movie that was important to me growing up was It’s a Wonderful Life. So the conversation was, could we figure out a way to meld the comedic sensibilities, and one day the structure of, Friday, with the importance of home and family and community in a struggling person’s life. The goal was to blend those two together, and that was what we pitched to Amblin.

I walked them verbally through what I saw for the movie, and fortunately they were eager to get involved… I think a lot of that was because of Jo’s charisma and everyone’s belief that he was a leading man. Soon after I came on, I was commissioned to take my verbal pitch and translate it onto the page. 

That happened just before March of 2020, which we all know marked the beginning of a worldwide global pandemic…so yeah, so all the actual writing took place in lockdown, while my wife and I shared the dining table as workstations. We had an infant child and no childcare to help us. So it’s been a really wild journey to get there… wild because of all the obvious external global circumstances involved, but also because of the excitement that has surrounded the project and the speed of it. From the day I started working on my outline on Microsoft Word to the day we started day one of shooting I think was less than 14 months.

Jo has this amazing Steven Spielberg story… he saw Jo’s stand-up special on Netflix and essentially became such a big fan that he mandated the folks at Amblin to bring him in for a meeting to figure out something that they could do together. That was really the origin of Easter Sunday, long before I was involved in it.

I think we turned in the first draft of my screenplay on a Thursday in October. And the following Tuesday morning, we hopped on a Zoom call with Holly Bario, the president of Amblin. She expressed her enthusiasm for the script that I turned in (while here I was thinking I might be fired that day), and then told us that nothing would happen unless Mr. Spielberg approved. So they were going to send it to him as soon as we hung up. He was on vacation at the time, they had just wrapped West Side Story. So Holly said she didn’t know how long it would take… it could be 3 weeks or it could be 3 months. I figured I’d focus on the other projects that I had on the back burner and try not to think about it. The stakes and anticipation of one of my cinematic idols reading something I wrote were too high.

So we hung up and that was around 11:45. At 4:30 that afternoon, Dan called me. I have to make it clear that he never calls me… it’s always his assistant who reaches out. But he called me personally from his cell along with Jonathan Eirich, one of our other producers. He said “Ken, I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never had a call like the one I just had.” And I thought “OK, now I’m getting fired.”

But he said he had just gotten off the phone with Amblin and that Mr. Spielberg had diverted his vacation and read the script already, that afternoon, in a single sitting. Two hours later, he called and said “We’re going on this movie.”

Creative Screenwriting Magazine

Joe Valencia (Jo Koy) and Marvin Ma (Jimmy O. Yang) Photo by Ed Araquel/ Universal Pictures

That was in October and we were shooting in May. I didn’t even go back into the script to start revisions until January or February. The entirety of the initial pre-production went off my first draft. So as you can imagine, it was a career changing experience. But that was, again, I think all due to the excitement and enthusiasm that everyone involved had for Jo as a performer and as a leading man. I tried to do my best, obviously, in imbuing the screenplay with enough circumstances for Jo to shine in to highlight that leading man quality…but you never know until you start shooting it.

And then we saw him on screen Day One of shooting and it was like “Oh yeah, we were right.”

Speaking of the Crab Club, at first I thought I was on the wrong website when I went to check it out!

That’s on purpose! Our running joke was that if we had to create a website, we would just build one with an RSS feed of global crab news… and crab recipes, because that is the ethos. So that’s what we did.

Is it challenging to write for a stand-up comedian who has an established fanbase already so familiar with his persona through his material? I noticed that you incorporated opportunities for stand-up into the script as well.

I actually welcomed the opportunity as a chance to sort of unearth the stories behind the bits.

Early on, after I signed on to write the movie, Jo and I would hang out – and the goal of those sessions was for me to just get to know him better and find out what goal was important to him. And what stories were key to his upbringing because I knew that the character he would play on screen was going to essentially be a fictional proxy of Jo Koy, the stand-up comedian. The real stand-up comedian.

So I tried to glean as much as I could from him, in terms of what was important to him in his journey. Then the opportunity arose for me to include elements from my own life. The movie is set in Daly City, California, which is the first place my family landed in the United States. Daly City is a very important place to me and it’s the reason the movie is set there. When my family immigrated to the US, finding a vibrant Filipino community culturally and, generally speaking, a vibrant Asian American community, was really important. We needed to be near good Filipino food!

So we landed in Daly City, and being in that place and in that environment was so pivotal to my upbringing and the shaping of my creative mind. I just felt like it was the best, most logical setting, and it would ultimately prove to be the most functional, from a story perspective, place to locate the movie. And a lot of the characters in the movie are named after my relatives.

Being able to melt those Joe stories with some of mine… it goes back to that notion that I think a lot of people see their families in Jo’s and in his stand-up. It certainly proved to be the case in the process of writing Easter Sunday, because I got to use so much of my own biography and it melded pretty seamlessly with Jo’s.

I think all those things were a welcome opportunity for me as a writer. It’s not something I’ve ever been able to do in my previous work. Putting Serramonte mall in a Hollywood movie? I still can’t fully process that.

As a child of South Asian immigrants myself, I noticed that the film also highlights some of the existing generational gaps and the differences in attitudes towards one’s cultural history, from grandparent to parent to child.

I think that’s an important aspect, certainly of the Pan Asian immigrant experience, right? That intergenerational quality I think is so right for storytelling. I didn’t grow up knowing all my parents’ stories, and certainly not my grandparents’ stories. I think that’s a lot of people in our shoes, as the children of immigrants, because let’s face it, the process of immigrating to a different country is a traumatic one. No matter how positively it may end up. It’s an act that requires so much bravery and courage and, frankly, a little bit of repression of the things that make you who you are until that point. And part of that repression is passed on, unfortunately, and can be inherited by us, the children of immigrants. We can be a little bit closed off to the stories that made our parents and our grandparents who they were; at least I was, until I was much older.

So I wanted that to be part of the narrative of the movie… this idea of a disconnected teenage son returning to a place where his grandmother and his father made their life in America. That’s probably the second or third most important relationship in the movie. Jo and his mom and Jo and his son are two sides of the same coin. And that “coming home” story is an important theme in the movie. For Jo and his son.

The industry seems to be more open to these sorts of stories now. Can you speak to any changes you might have seen? Are there still barriers that need to come down?

There is no doubt that we, as an industry or as a consuming public, have come quite a long way, even in the last five years, in terms of the types of stories we are willing to tell. And the types of stories that we, as audiences, are willing to support financially.

I think there has always been an appetite for these stories. I feel like I’ve been screaming this from the top of my lungs since I started to pursue this career ten years ago. I do think economic power is meaningful, because if people don’t watch and if people don’t spend money to watch, the industry is not going to put these sorts of stories in front of an audience.

I myself have been the lucky recipient of something of a shift in the paradigm of storytelling that has taken place in Hollywood, both from a television standpoint and from a feature film standpoint. I think a lot of this is creditable to the plethora of platforms that are available. Because “niche” storytelling often leads to higher quality shows. I think we’ve been able to see the vast range of material and art that specifically creatives of color have been able to put together and put out there for the world to see.

From a career perspective, I’ve seen a benefit to my own crew. I began ten years ago, writing television in the very early stages of the group. Cable programming at the very beginning of what was called the “golden era of peak TV”. But I definitely was always the only Asian American writer in the writers’ room, oftentimes, the only writer of color, period. That shift in my career, being able to start off in that place, led to what was frankly a dilution of my own creative output.

My very first script that I ever wrote, essentially my first sample, was a comedy pilot, inspired by the ups and downs of my early 20s, which I spent living with friends in San Francisco. So not exactly groundbreaking! But the script was fun and sincere and it really became my first calling card. It won me a writing competition and landed me some general meetings with Hollywood executives… and it eventually got me my first job.

I think a piece of advice that every writer hears at one point is to “write what you know”, and that was certainly what I was trying to do. The lead character in the script was me in almost every respect; I gave him my personality, he was insecure like me…I even gave him my own knack of making jokes at my own expense. All of these personality traits that were autobiographical, I gave to the lead character of Danny.

The one thing that I’m embarrassed about in retrospect was that Danny’s last name was Jones. In the first character introduction, I think the line was “early 20s, good looking-to-his-mom, Mark Ruffalo type.” I actually whitewashed myself preemptively because I thought that’s what I needed to do at the time. And frankly, it is what I needed to do, because that script did get me my first job. A white showrunner saw something in the character and script that he related to. Would he have felt the same if his last name was Danny Cheng? I don’t know. Maybe, but maybe not. So that’s something that I believe and certainly try to advise younger writers who ask, that it’s not something that people have to do anymore. Especially among writers of color today, there is a greater sense of empowerment and ownership over their own stories. To me, that’s the best byproduct of the last five to ten years of this paradigm shift that’s taking place in Hollywood.

Of course there are still obstacles for all of the good intentions that Hollywood as an industry has put forward in the last few years towards telling more diverse stories. It is still, for the most part, run by a certain demographic that is very much led by things like cost awareness and return on investment. We are beholden to corporate interests and so is there a fear that stories are perhaps too specific? Sometimes, yes. My favorite euphemism is “How will this play in Iowa?” I don’t think anybody is necessarily malicious in that intent. It really comes down to financial interests, so I hope that those unconscious biases continue to fall by the wayside because there are so many people who want to make good material, both for television and feature films.

There’s this saying “representation matters” but it’s more than what it’s reduced to. It matters for people who are on screen certainly but definitely for those behind the scenes too. There are hundreds of people involved in making a movie, most of whom only see their names flash by in a millisecond during the end credits. My hope is that you’re interviewing more writers of color every day than you were five years ago. I’ve gotten to know a lot of them in this town, and they’re all incredibly talented people. I got a bit lucky with this experience, but I know that that is an exception; hopefully it becomes less and less so for my colleagues and my friends in the business.

share:

image

Movie aficionado, television devotee, music disciple, world traveller. Based in Toronto, Canada.

Improve Your Craft