Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu Is Inspired by Pandemic-Era Delivery Drivers

Lloyd Lee Choi’s inspiration for Lucky Lu was meeting Brooklyn delivery drivers during the pandemic. He says the movie, debuting today as part of the Cannes Film Festival's Directors Fortnight, explores their lives beyond being “nameless, faceless men in hefty jackets and beat-up helmets whipping through the streets on their e-bikes.”

He acknowledges the temptation to present a fictional story as if it were a documentary, especially when drawing inspiration from real people. He explains that approaching the writing from a character-first perspective helped keep Lucky Lu firmly rooted in fiction.

“The core of the movie is this character and what he's going through and how he's dealing with this problem,” says Choi. “That was really the engine for me: taking that intimate perspective of this normal guy, this invisible worker who just passes by us every single day.”

Lucky Lu centers on a single day in the life of Lu, a New York City delivery rider portrayed by a nearly unrecognizable Chang Chen, acclaimed for his roles in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Dune: Part One. 

When Lu suddenly loses his sole means of making a living — with his long-estranged family finally arriving from Asia — Lu must navigate the harsh realities of the city and fight to preserve the fragile existence he has spent years building.

Lucky Lu is based on Choi’s short film, “Same Old,” which premiered at the 75th Cannes Film Festival in the Main Competition. It went on to premiere at TIFF, where it received a Special Jury Mention, and played the New York Film Festival and Raindance, where it won Best Short. Lloyd’s recent short film, “Closing Dynasty,” won the Crystal Bear for Best Short Film at the 73rd Berlinale, the Audience Award at SXSW, and the Grand Jury Prize at AFI Fest, before arriving on Netflix. 

MovieMaker spoke with Lloyd Lee Choi ahead of Lucky Lu’s world premiere at Cannes. 

Joshua Encinias: I noticed a Nosferatu poster in a scene outside of a subway station. That means you must have been shooting last November? When was your shoot?

Lloyd Lee Choi: Yeah, good eye. We shot mid-December to the end of January, so we just wrapped at the end of January, and we just finished the movie like seven days ago. So, you know, it was a mad rush to get it here, and we're premiering in two days, so it was pretty insane.

Joshua Encinias: So how does Cannes work? Are they like, “You get a spot, so have a movie ready for us”? Because how do you get into the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight and your movie is not ready until seven days out? 

Lloyd Lee Choi: We submitted a rough cut, essentially. So we knew the deadline, it was always a goal to come here. I had our editor Brendan Mills already starting to edit as we were shooting, knowing we had this expedited process. Cannes’ watches a lot of rough cuts, so you just state at the very beginning, “work in progress,” so they don’t expect sound design or color. What we submitted is actually very close to what we ended up with. Even as a rough cut, I think they can see the potential and the soul of the film.

Joshua Encinias: When I was watching the movie, so many films about the New York immigrant experience in the 21st century came to mind. I think of Man Push Cart by Ramin Bahrani. I think of Sean Baker's Takeout and Heidi Ewing's I Carry You With Me. Were you thinking about where Lucky Lu fits in that genre? 

Lloyd Lee Choi: Obviously I'm inspired by those films, but I want to be very specific of this community, this experience. I also wanted to capture what post-Covid New York looks like as well. Yellow cabs are synonymous with New York City but I think delivery drivers are really the backdrop of every city street. I found that quite fascinating, something I want to explore. And it really just exploded in the last five years.

Joshua Encinias: How do you dramatize the experience of delivery drivers in such a way that's cinematic and not instructive or didactic?

Lloyd Lee Choi: The way we shot it observational. In terms of our style of shot-making and composition, I didn't want to manipulate the audience too much with push-ins and tight shots to push a certain emotion. I really just wanted to observe. I wanted to make close-ups count. That was a big thing with my DP, Norm Li. We really wanted to create this authenticity, this grounded feeling of just observing this guy and not pushing in emotion. There are a lot of long lens shots of this guy in the city amongst the crowd.

Lloyd Lee Choi on Shooting Lucky Lu on the Streets of NYC

Joshua Encinias: Did you do any classic New York run-and-gun filming?

Lloyd Lee Choi: Oh yeah. Like any filmmaker shooting in New York City will attest to, you just have to go with the flow. Things are going to change every single day. We just had to pivot things, whether locations falling through, people just staring at the camera. There's going to be so many things that will intrude on what you're trying to do. But there's a magic to it, and our approach was really just to leave as small a footprint as possible. I really wanted to blend into the city.

We had 50 locations over a 22-day shoot schedule. It was this insane behemoth of hitting all these scenes and locations. We just had the best team who was able to make it work over our schedule. Honestly, having a small crew and being nimble helped.

Joshua Encinias: Was the part of Lu written for Chang Chen? How did you cast him?

Lloyd Lee Choi: It was never written specifically for him, but he was definitely top of the list. I've been watching him for so many years. It took a Zoom meeting, and then I had to fly over there and meet him in person. We had this long meeting, and I think he was just curious about the project and also me making my first feature film. 

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I think he wanted to make sure this is a worthy project. But I think he saw a lot of himself in the story. He told me he wouldn't be ready for this role until recently, because he has a daughter who's about the same age as the character Queenie, and I think he could see himself actually doing this role justice. I think it was perfect timing among a lot of other things for him. 

Joshua Encinias: Did he make a physical transformation for the role? Because if you Google photos of him, you may not think they’re the same person.

Lloyd Lee Choi: He's such a handsome man and a striking actor. And it was definitely something I wanted to consider: how do we strip this guy and bring him down a little bit? A lot of it was cutting his hair and basically using no makeup on him, really. I think he lost a little weight for the role as well. 

In a previous movie, he lost a lot of weight, over 20 pounds, for a movie called The Soul. He looked so gaunt there and that was great for Lucky Lu, but I think he didn't want to go that far again for this. But during our shoot, he was minimizing his meals and really considering that physicality. A lot of it comes in his performance as well, that physicality of moving, walking, and running a certain way.

Joshua Encinias: How did Destin Daniel Cretton’s Hisako Films' help bring Lucky Lu to life?

Lloyd Lee Choi: After the short film premiered at Cannes in 2022, I took a string of meetings. I really wanted to expand the story into a feature because I felt there was more to mine. I met a bunch of companies, and Destin's company really stood out because I really love and respect him as a filmmaker. 

Destin's made some of my favorite indie films of all time. He has the mentality of how to make this film because he's done it before. He comes from that lower-budget indie film world. We were shooting on the streets, in the crowds of New York City, in the traffic. We didn’t have big street shutdowns, we just blended in. I felt Destin understood how to make the movie in the way I wanted to make it. 

Joshua Encinias: How did he help you expand the story?

Lloyd Lee Choi: For a year after we joined forces, we spent a long time developing the story, developing the script. How do you make this pretty simple concept that was the short film into something much more meaningful, much more emotional over 90-plus minutes? It was a long process. We wanted to shoot it in 2023, but then the strikes really killed a bit of that momentum. But in that time, it really let the idea sit and evolve and only made it better.

Joshua Encinias: Nina Yang Bongiovi has a knack for helping filmmakers make a strong first impression. [Bongiovi produced 2013’s Fruitvale Station by Ryan Coogler, 2015’s Dope by Rick Famuyiwa, and Songs My Brothers Taught Me by Chloe Zhao.] How did she contribute to your production?

Lloyd Lee Choi: She came on a year ago, and she was the spark that lit the spark to make this movie real. Especially the financing journey and her connections with Asia and her pedigree to get the script in front of actors. She's an incredible person and producer. She really started the engine that made this film possible. 

We got financing last year, and then six or seven months later, we're already in pre-pro, we're cast, and we're just going. It was a crazy fast process. We had lunch with her in LA, she read the script, and we had a really nice conversation. The next day, she's like, "I'm in." And then it just started from there.

Joshua Encinias: What was the most difficult thing you had to overcome in either pre-production, production, or post?

Lloyd Lee Choi: Oh man. I think the weather. Shooting a winter in New York is a beast. I have so much respect for anyone shooting a winter in New York because I know exactly what they went through. It's just really cold. The rain and snow threat is looming almost every single day. 

But at the same time, it's sort of like the film gods shined on us. We were very lucky. The title is not ironic for our experience. We were always running away from snow, I feel like, every single week, and we just kept missing it. Some days we moved locations and pivoted and made the right decision. 

Joshua Encinias: Did anything memorable come out of the winter shoot?

Lloyd Lee Choi: There's one moment I think I'll remember for the rest of my life: on the last day of shooting there was a forecast for five or six inches of snow, and we couldn't move the shoot because we already scheduled Carabelle Manna Wei, who plays our little girl character Queenie. 

We just had to shoot. We started at like four in the morning because we had to get some biking shots, and the snow was forecast, but it delayed an hour and just kept delaying an hour throughout the whole shoot day. We were expecting to shut down and not get the shots. 

We wrapped, got our last shot, and I just said, "That's a wrap," and then we walked back and it just started sprinkling snow. We went to grab wrap drinks right away, and I walked out two hours later and there were three inches of snow covering the entire city. That would have ruined continuity, that would have ruined everything. It was a very surreal experience, almost like the city's telling us, "You're done. You can't shoot anymore. You have no more options. You're done." I thought it was very beautiful and very fitting end for our shoot.

Lucky Lu’s world premiere is today at Directors’ Fortnight, an independent sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival.

Main image: Lucky Lu. Courtesy of the film.