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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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The settings of “Interior Chinatown,” like the restaurant at the center of the story, are designed to function as both physical and mental spaces. Charles Yu’s novel “Interior Chinatown” is about stories. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell about others. Stories where only certain people get to be the main characters while others, like the protagonist Willis Wu, are relegated to playing bit parts. Yu structured the novel in the format of a screenplay. The title follows the scriptwriting convention of scene headings, which specify where the action is taking place (for example, INT. UNMARKED POLICE CAR). Scene headings are peppered throughout the book, and in Hulu’s series adaptation, which premiered on Tuesday, the settings are just as essential, and more tangible, to the overall concept. “Willis has this world that he lives in, this Chinatown which is both physical and psychological,” said Yu, the show’s creator and showrunner, in a video interview. “When you write a book, you get to use the reader as your ultimate collaborator. You’re leveraging off someone else’s imagination.” “You can’t really film that, unfortunately,” he added. So in constructing the sets of the show, he said, “it was like, how do you build a place that feels real and lived in — and at the same time can feel subjective and evocative of the Chinatown that comes from the novel, which is an interior Chinatown that functions as a place where people work and live but also as a mental space?” Here’s a look at four of the key settings in “Interior Chinatown” and how they bring the story to three-dimensional life. Int. Golden Palace Restaurant Willis Wu, the protagonist, spends much of his time waiting tables in the dining room of the Golden Palace Restaurant. In many ways, the restaurant is the central location for the story. It’s where Willis (played by Jimmy O. Yang) and his best friend, Fatty Choy (Ronny Chieng), work as waiters, serving Chinatown locals and tourists. Willis spends much of his time gazing out at the wider world or watching television and wondering when a more […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
