Lee Isaac Chung refuses to make the film his career predicts

Lee Isaac Chung

Photo: Voice of America / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 19, 1978 Denver, Colorado
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Minari, Twisters
Awards	Golden Globe · 2 Academy Award (nomination) · Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize · Sundance Film Festival Audience

Every time Lee Isaac Chung finishes a film, the industry decides what he will do next. Every time, he does something else. After Munyurangabo — a debut shot in Rwanda in Kinyarwanda with non-professional actors — critics expected a career of austere international drama. After Minari, which gathered six Oscar nominations and sparked a genuine argument about who counts as American in Hollywood’s imagination, studios expected another small personal prestige film. What came next was Twisters, a summer disaster spectacle for Universal that became one of 2024’s most commercially successful films.

The pattern is not accidental. Chung was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of Korean immigrants who moved the family briefly to Atlanta before settling on a small farm in northwest Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border. Growing up farming in a community where Korean faces were rare, where tornadoes were a seasonal fear not an abstraction, gave him a sensory vocabulary that runs beneath everything he makes — the specific weight of land that does not belong to you yet, the distance between what parents sacrifice and what children manage to understand. He attended Yale University intending to study biology and go to medical school. A senior-year filmmaking class taught by the documentary pioneer Michael Roemer changed his direction.

His MFA from the University of Utah in 2004 came after a period spent teaching filmmaking in Rwanda, an experience that would crystallize into his debut feature. Munyurangabo was shot in Kinyarwanda — the national language of Rwanda — using entirely non-professional actors, and premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The film followed a young man seeking revenge for his father’s murder during the genocide, asking what happens when private grief collides with national trauma. Roger Ebert called it a masterpiece. What it announced was a filmmaker willing to work in territories where he had no natural advantage.

Lucky Life (2010) and Abigail Harm (2012) followed — smaller, quieter films that established his emotional precision but reached narrower audiences. By 2019, Chung had largely stepped back from filmmaking. Instead of a follow-up, he wrote a list of memories from his Arkansas childhood: a particular Korean herb his grandmother grew in the garden, the fear in his father’s face each season the farm threatened to fail, the impossible gap between his parents’ ambitions and the children who watched them. That list became Minari.

The film, set in the early 1980s and centered on a Korean-American family who move to an Arkansas farm to grow vegetables for Korean grocers, drew directly on his parents’ experience. Steven Yeun plays a father who believes he can build something; Yuh-Jung Youn, who won the Academy Award for her performance as the grandmother, carries the film’s most morally complicated presence. Minari premiered at Sundance in 2020, winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, and went on to receive six Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.

What happened to Minari at the Golden Globes is one of the more instructive episodes in recent American film culture. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association classified the film — made by an American director, about American characters, set on American soil, in a language spoken by many American families — as a foreign-language film, because more than half its dialogue was in Korean. The category distinction put it in competition for a different award than films like Nomadland. Chung said little publicly; the film won Best Foreign Language Film. But the episode crystallized something that runs beneath his entire career: the question of who gets to claim a story as American, and who is positioned to decide.

His move into franchise television and large-scale commercial production followed the same path other indie directors have taken since streaming restructured the industry. He directed an episode of The Mandalorian for Disney+, then an episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. The experience appeared to function as an extended audition: Universal hired him to direct Twisters, the sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell, the film performed well beyond industry expectations, becoming one of the biggest domestic hits of summer 2024. That result, as much as Minari’s six Oscar nominations, explains why studios keep pursuing him for major productions.

In January 2025, Chung announced The Traveler for Skydance, a science fiction family drama adapted from Joseph Eckert’s novel about a 47-year-old man who begins experiencing involuntary time travel. In March 2026, he exited the Ocean’s Eleven prequel for Warner Bros. — a film that would have starred Margot Robbie and Bradley Cooper — citing creative differences; he was the second director to leave the project. The Traveler remains his confirmed next film.

He is married to Valerie Chu, a Yale classmate. They have one daughter.

The question his career has raised since Munyurangabo is whether range signals versatility or an ongoing search. What Minari and Twisters share — besides the Arkansas landscape that surfaces in both — is a fascination with people who have arrived somewhere that has not fully decided whether to take them in. The Traveler will be his first science fiction feature. It is also, in the most literal sense, about a man who cannot stay in any one time.

Tags: Steven Yeun, Korean-American cinema, Minari, Lee Isaac Chung, Munyurangabo, Twisters

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