‘Interior Chinatown’ Showrunner Explains the Key to a Taika Waititi Collaboration

Adapting a book into a TV show can be a huge challenge — even if the showrunner also wrote the novel. With Hulu’s “Interior Chinatown,” Charles Yu does double duty as author of the source material and creator of the series, which he told IndieWire was “maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“It’s been really long and really rewarding,” Yu said in a Zoom interview ahead of the show’s premiere. “It started with a book that I started over 10 years ago, and now at the end of 2024 talking about the show that I made along with like 150 other people. So it’s been surprising and and really inspiring, but also all kinds of challenges and things pop up that I just never would have known about.”

Some of that was the usual production and scheduling challenges that every show faces, but what was especially daunting for Yu was turning essentially a solitary endeavor into a massive collaboration.

“It turns out it’s really hard to make a good TV show — or to make a TV show,” he said. “There’s so many more variables. There’s so many more people’s creative ideas and their own way of doing things. “From the writing phase already, I’m letting in more voices, and I’m trying to figure out how to use what they’re bringing and still make it gel, make the whole thing sound like it came from one unified place. Then when you get into production, you’re having 100 people read a script that you think is clear, and they bring all kinds of other ideas — good ideas, like, ‘Wait, we could do this.’ Because those are also just words on a page, so they necessarily have to interpret it.

There’s also the fact that “Interior Chinatown” is no ordinary novel; Yu’s 2020 National Book Award winner is part screenplay, part prose, part character study, much of it written in the second person and addressing both protagonist Willis Wu and the reader. Its world is something of a show-within-a-show, Willis’s (Jimmy O. Yang) personal odyssey as well as the crime procedural “Black and White,” in which he is an unimportant background character slowly working his way into the main story.

Below, Yu discussed the process of bringing his genre-jumping meta story to life on screen, transcending stereotypes, and what it was like working with pilot director and executive producer Taika Waititi.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did what you visualize change between the novel and the script for the show?

There’s a reality, a groundedness that is absolutely necessary, especially for Willis’s world. Where he lives is supposed to feel like a real place that’s really lived in, and it’s supposed to contrast with the world of the cop show that he wants to be a part of, that is kind of the larger world around him, but he’s not really officially a part of at the beginning. In my head — you can slip back and forth between that by just typing a few words, and I never really had to think about what the boundary would look like.

So it took people like Taika Waititi, the pilot director and our cinematographer, Mike Berlucchi — they were, like, visually this is what you want. You want this kind of lens. The color should be much colder and bluer for the cop show and warmer for Willis. That’s the kind of thing where I probably had some fuzzy idea in my head as a novelist, like, cinematic world/naturalistic world. But in reality, all of it is being filmed for a TV show, and so that has to look a certain way, and you can’t just toggle so easily.

And leads me to my next question about distinguishing those two worlds within the show. It has a lot of the same characters, costumes — but then it comes down to the camera work, the language of the director and the performances. How did you guys go about making those subtle distinctions?

The distinctions start on the page. I think most people above a certain age have seen a cop show, or have walked by a TV showing it, or, like me, have watched hundreds of hours of cop shows. You know what it looks like, you know what it feels like. You want that to feel very recognizable, just on this side of parody; you want it to be plausible and have humor that comes from it, but not be laughing at it. The humor, if anything comes from wrecking that; familiarity and hopefully homage.

In terms of actors, creating the characters is very collaborative, with Jimmy and Ronny (Chieng) and Chloe (Bennet) and Lisa (Gilroy) and Sullivan (Jones) and Diana (Lin), who plays Willis’s mom, Tzi Ma plays his dad. They’re just all bringing their own experience, and like they, in a way, are doing their own kind of authorship. From before we even started filming, I’m starting to have conversations with all of them about what this means, how to approach it. For instance, Chloe plays Lana Lee. She seems to be able to slip between the two worlds, so she had a ton of questions, which are great questions, which really were challenging for me. I had to think about them a lot; what does she know, and when did she know it? How much does she know? Taika is interpreting what a commercial looks like, what does it mean that they are in a commercial? Those are sort of things where it just feels like a very collaborative act to put them on their feet and then make them the best version they can. I don’t know if I actually answered your question. I think I talked around it.

Jimmy O. Yang and Ronny Chieng in ‘Interior Chinatown’Hulu

I did want to talk about the cast, so that’s a nice transition. What was your involvement in the casting process? Did you have people in mind before? It’s some of the best casting I’ve seen recently, for the archetypes that are written, but also for building those characters out as the show continues.

I love them. I’m biased, obviously. Taika was a part of that as well when we got to a certain stage. Overall, it was like, hire funny people. All of our leads have that. Because I think it is a drama, but dramas that have some levity and comedy are always, for me, kind of my favorite mashup of things. That ratio may vary for various people’s mileage, but I think I like where we landed. Overall it was people that bring a kind of authenticity or something surprising to them underneath what looks like obvious sort of stock parts that they could play. Their persona would indicate that they’re showing you layers underneath. That starts with Jimmy, obviously. Jimmy in his career is so interesting, how he has taken on gradually bigger and bigger parts — not just taking on, he’s earned those parts by constantly going up the ladder and outperforming and subverting the expectations, from background guy who’s kind of a stereotype all the way to a romantic lead in “Love Hard” and now in this, he’s doing it in this kind of meta way. I talk about Ronny and Chloe a lot — I want to talk about Lisa and Sullivan, who played Green and Turner.

Yes! I wanted to ask about them specifically, too.

Oh good! That was, that was one of the most fun parts of casting, those two, because they really are flat, two dimensional characters in the book — intentionally. This is Willis’s story, I don’t want to flesh them out. When it came time to do the show, they can’t be that. The show wants to be more of an ensemble where we’re exploring these characters’ lives. Willis is the lead, but as the season goes on, each character starts to reveal layers of themselves, and so with them I wanted two people who look plausibly like they could be on “NCIS” or something. They look like network stars, and they’re both so funny, and they have this relationship with each other, and they also have internal stuff going on. It was really fun.

I like how they sort of become self aware as it goes on again. The “Law & Order,” “NCIS”-side, feels very, very lived in, very established.

I remember they’re seeing their takes, because there are a lot of really talented people out there. Sullivan set it to music his tape, and he did a little bit of production with it, and then he turns around, and he just said this one line, and he opens his jacket at the same time to show his badge. The second he did that, I was like, “Oh, that’s him.” I remember Lisa ad libbed a line, she’s a very talented comic improv person. She ad-libbed a line in her or in her audition that, the second she did it, there’s something magical about someone who could take sort of a nothing line and turn it into that.

I think we develop a fondness for tropes and stereotypes, sometimes even when they’re working against us. My parents are from India, so I’ve seen all kinds of things on screen, but because I grew up with that I do have a soft spot for it. I think that you can’t pull off a show like this without having that appreciation before you go in and dismantle things. There’s not really a question here, I just wanted to know your thoughts I guess.

Absolutely. There’s not a question there, but there’s the heart of something really important. No, there’s better than a question to me because it’s the conversation that I really hope the show can engender, and that it would resonate with you and hopefully others. Whether your parents are immigrants or not, but I think especially if your parents are — the complex reality of yes, we are perceived this way. My parents have accents. From a young age, I’d go out in the world and see how other people were looking at them, and what that did to me to realize and also see how they were acting different in public, depending on who they were talking to, depending on the context.

The shifting roles of all of this very much goes to what I think went into the writing of the book and the show; how do we see ourselves? How do we internalize stereotypes? What does that do to us? And yet, is it all negative? Does it have to be negative? Is there truth in some of it? Is it all just as simple as stereotypes, but yjust the idea that we’re more than one thing and that you can’t reduce people based on their demographics or their physical appearance or any of that. And that all of these people are ultimately playing roles, and roles can be very limiting, but they can also be very defining at the same time. I didn’t answer anything, I just kind of give you an essay response.

That’s okay, I didn’t ask anything. We’re equal. I do want to ask about your working relationship with Taika and what he brought to the project, along with directing the first episode.

I have been a fan of his films for a long time, and to get to work with him was… you still can’t quite believe you’re sitting next to [him], or he’s directing the scene, I get to sit next to him in the chair, and he’ll turn and ask me something about the story. That was a dream come true, and also I learned a lot in terms of, like, what does a director do? I mean, I know, but to see it up close, and also see someone of his ability and his unique sensibility, [to] see how that sensibility starts to emerge.

I didn’t talk to him too much about what’s he thinking at any moment, but you watch it and you absorb that he pays attention to aesthetic details in a way that, as a writer, I don’t process things visually in the same way. But he’s got to take those words and turn them into images. Watching how he directed actors, especially because he’s an actor himself, was really cool. There’s a way to talk to them that felt like he understood how they might approach it in a language that was common. In general, he’s just a really funny, energetic, kind of untamable force. I was honestly intimidated at first, and then we got to know each other a bit better. I just feel lucky that we got him.

“Interior Chinatown” is now streaming on Hulu.