Being on the ground in Mongolia and traveling with the horse culture and sleeping in yurts, I was able to pick up a lot of detail. But I brought in advisors to work with our horse master to make sure the fighting strategies both on the Chinese and Mongolian sides were very accurate.
I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.
In 'Crazy Rich Asians,' Singapore will be seen as it should be seen, without CGI, without the altering of the images to be more Chinese - a representation of Singapore as we know it and love it.
I grew up in L.A., and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between.
I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
But I'd say 'How to Make It in America' is the most accurate depiction of the New York hipster community on television for sure.
It's got to feel, the pulse has to feel like this part of the world, the instrumentation has to be true to that, and so, between him, [composer] Mark Mancina and myself, we really chased that, while serving our story Moana].
If you are playing a Hispanic character who has to speak in dialect or in an accent, nail that dialect or accent. When I hear a character that's supposed to be Cuban speaking with a Mexican accent or vice versa, it grates on me and immediately pulls me out of the story.
The biggest secret weapon we had in regards to really being true to this part of the world, and making sure this part of the world could see themselves in this film [Moana] in a way that felt positive and accurate, was Opetaia, my co-writer, Opetaia Foa'i, who has a great band called Te Vaka and is an amazing musical and cultural ambassador.
Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.
It's not possible to present an accurate picture of our culture without all the voices of the people in the culture. So at the emerging level, you can't have a good survey art show without women and artists of color.
My opinion is that the movie business should show an accurate picture, but I think the responsibility lies in the educational system. Most of the educational material I've seen on the Native American does not portray an actual picture.
Anytime you start doing a comic book with mythology attached, people are like, "Are you going to get it right? It's important to me."
Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set.
I don't think people are going to come down to Texas and see every person riding in a candy car or every person sipping syrup. But, for the most part, people got a lot of the stuff right, talking about the screwed music scene.
We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.
I'm from outside most of these worlds I'm focusing on, and I feel there's an ethical approach to making these kinds of films. My biggest fear is that if you paint your characters in, you could be doing them wrong.
