Dìdi Is the First Great MySpace-Era Coming-of-Age Movie

That astonishing realism is largely the result of Wang pouring so much of his own life directly into Dìdi. Chris’s house is Wang’s actual childhood home in the Bay Area, complete with a period-accurate Jack’s Mannequin sticker still visible in his bedroom. (The band’s frontman Andrew McMahon DM’d Wang to thank him for the inclusion after a friend saw Dìdi at Sundance, where it won the coveted Audience Award. “That was so sick,” Wang said. “I was like, ‘Dude, Everything In Transit was my favorite album of all time.’”) Chris’s grandmother, meanwhile, is played by Wang’s real-life grandmother, Chang Li Hua, a first-time actress who also starred in his Oscar-nominated documentary short Năi Nai & Wài Pó.

“There’s a scene in the short that always moves me,” Wang said, “and it’s just Wài Pó sitting there rocking back and forth. There’s so much pain in her eyes, but she’s so youthful and charming. And that really planted the seeds of: Should we just cast one of them for the feature? It just started this joke with Wài Pó of, ‘Hey, would you consider playing the grandma in Dìdi?’ And she was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ And then eventually it got closer to it and she said, ‘Well, if you’re that confident in me, I’ll do it.’ It really felt like a swing that could have been a miss, but if it worked, it would be a home run.” (Spoiler alert: Wài Pó threatens to walk away with the entire movie.)

In order to nail the mechanics and vernacular of the movie’s era-specific social media, Wang was forced to venture into the primordial depths of his Facebook profile. “The same way you could play me a song by The Academy Is… 20 years from now and I’ll still know all the lyrics, that’s kind of how I am with AIM and MySpace and early Facebook—it’s all just kind of locked back here,” Wang said, tapping his temple. “If I see it and something doesn’t look right, I’ll know it’s not quite the thing I remember. The good thing at least about Facebook is that you can literally just search—I would go on people’s walls and send my friends screenshots of their cringey statuses from 2007. They were like, Sean, can you stop?”

From there, Wang was able to paint a specific portrait of each character’s texting style: “How does Chris talk? Does he do a ‘U’ or ‘Y-O-U’? And for [Chris’s crush] Madi, the way that girls type was this big thing—they had a personality to it. Is she a backwards smiley face person? Does she misspell things or is she a grammar freak?”

And given the importance of music to the movie, Wang also compiled playlists to flesh out every character’s tastes. “Madi’s probably this Fueled By Ramen scene girl,” he said. “Her favorite bands are Panic! At The Disco, Paramore, All Time Low, We The Kings, Dashboard. [Chris’s older sister] Vivian was a little bit more deep in the emo world, where she probably listens to Underoath, but also listens to Paramore, and maybe also listens to Chiodos.” (Vivian, Wang told me, was named after a close family friend who introduced him to cool music as a kid and helped source posters for Dìdi’s production design. “She was like, ‘You got to have an Underoath poster in there.’ And I remember we put it up and people on set were like, ‘That’s a little scary looking. What is that?’ I was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. People who know will know.’”)