Like the romance novels with which its heroine is obsessed, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is practically picture perfect. Lara Jean Song Covey (Lana Condor) writes a love letter to each crush she has, and keeps them in a hatbox left to her by her late mother. When, one day, the hatbox turns up empty and the letters reach the boys they’re written to, Lara Jean’s life gets turned on its head, as her past crushes come back to haunt her.
The film, which directed by Susan Johnson, is an utter charm. Adapted from Jenny Han’s novel of the same name, it’s the perfect romantic comedy. It’s funny, it’s relatable, and it’s compelling. And it just so happens that its all-American heroine is Asian-American.
Ahead of the film’s release on Netflix on August 17, we spoke to Han about the ups and downs of getting the movie made, Lara Jean’s sense of fashion, and food as cultural connective tissue.
Teen Vogue: The book To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was first optioned as a movie adaptation four years ago; what has the road from page to screen been like for you?
Jenny Han: It’s definitely been a long road. Four years isn’t that long if you think about it in terms of how long it takes to get a movie made; I think once the team was in place, then things moved very fast. But up until that point, it was always kind of up in the air. It’s fairly common to get something optioned, but really rare to actually see it become a movie. It took casting to begin and for them to be doing stuff on location for me to actually believe that it was happening.
TV: Did you ever doubt that it was going to get made?
JH: I did. I think that one of the biggest struggles with it was to find the right partners who would agree to cast an Asian-American family, and to have Lara Jean, specifically, be Asian. That was the biggest challenge. I think that oftentimes what people say is, “We need an actress who’ll be able to greenlight a movie,” and my counterargument to that is always that, when it comes to a teen movie, you have very few people who can greenlight a movie. It’s not going to be Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts — those are the people who greenlight movies, and in terms of young talent, it’s going to be a gamble no matter what you do. Even if it’s somebody with a really big social media following, you just don’t know if that’s going to translate into the movie getting made.
With Asian-Americans actors, specifically, there’s been fewer opportunities for them in TV and film, and fewer that have the ability to actually make a career out of it. It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where they’re like, “Oh, but they’re not famous names,” but they haven’t had a chance to be in anything yet, either. You want to give people a chance to grow and evolve as well.
TV: That’s definitely something I was curious about with this film; on the Crazy Rich Asians press tour, author Kevin Kwan was talking about how a producer suggested that he change the lead to a white woman. Did that ever come up in the casting for this?
JH: Yes. Not with the people I ended up working with, but early on, the same thing happened. To me, the more alarming part of it was that people didn’t understand why that was an issue.
TV: How involved were you in the film’s adaptation process?
JH: I gave notes on the script a couple of times, and made mood boards for the director and for the producers, just to acquaint them with Lara Jean’s aesthetic, like her bedroom. I did her sense of fashion, her style, I made Pinterest boards for all those things, because I felt that it was really important that that part get done right. Oftentimes with a contemporary realistic story, there’s not as much stuff that goes into the costumes as there is for something like fantasy, but in this story, it’s really crucial to get it right, because she is an introverted character, and the way that she expresses herself is through her personal.
TV: I know you had posted to social media in support of Lana Condor’s work before she was even cast in the movie. What did you first see her in, and what made you think she would be perfect for the role of Lara Jean?
JH: She posted a picture of herself at a soda fountain, a ‘50s-style soda fountain counter, and the picture was really pastel and all sherbet-y colors, and she was wearing a headband, and she just looks so sweet and charming, and I wanted people to have that image.
TV: Did you talk to her or any of the cast while the film was in production?
JH: I talked to Lana quite a bit; we would text each other. She’s really professional. She had read the book and had notes, and was really thoughtful in the way that she approached the character. When I knew that she was shooting a big scene, I would text her the night before. For instance, the hot tub scene, which is one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie, I said, “Just remember, you’re really inexperienced and you’re nervous.” I think that when you think of a hookup scene in a hot tub, you’re imagining it’s going to be a little more on the steamy side, so it was important to me that it would still feel charming and more innocent.
TV: With regards to her wardrobe and that picture of Lana that you mentioned, what about that particular aesthetic speaks to you?
JH: I think that she’s a throwback kind of a character. She likes vintage, she’s romantic, she likes Americana. When it came down to making the moodboard, I said that her style is like ‘60s meets ‘90s meets Asian streetwear. She’s someone who goes to the vintage store to look for clothes; she’s also somebody who’s looking at Asian streetwear blogs of people just walking around Tokyo or Seoul or Hong Kong.
TV: How much of Lara Jean’s story would you say is autobiographical?
JH: There’s a lot of me in the story, in that I love to bake, I’m very close to my sister, and I’m from Virginia. And my little sister is in Kitty, for sure. I would consider myself to be a Lara Jean with Margot rising, because I’m a big sister, and your birth order definitely orients you in the world.
TV: Is there anything that had to be cut from the film that you were sad to see go?
JH: I was hoping to see the Halloween scene, where she’s dressed up as Cho Chang and Peter’s dressed up as Spider-Man, but I think that Spider-Man was a rights issue with him being allowed to wear that costume in the movie. I’m fine with that not being in there; I’d rather it be as it was, or not at all.
TV: You’ve spoken about how hard it can sometimes be to feel connected to your heritage as a biracial or second-generation kid. Is that something you’ve personally found easier or harder as time has gone on, if at all?
JH: I think that for me, as a writer, that dual identity is really instrumental to my process. I think it’s existing in two different worlds and having to go back and forth between them, where you speak one language at home, then you’re speaking a different language with your friends; there’s different cultural rules and norms. Having that facility for moving through different worlds really impacts me as a storyteller, because I think it teaches you empathy, and also how to just be aware of your surroundings, because you’re constantly switching codes.
TV: You’ve also talked about food as connective tissue in that sort of sense.
JH: In the movie there’s also a scene with bo ssäm, too. [laughs] I think that for a lot of people who can’t speak the language of their parents, food is a really big way to connect to culture, because you can taste something and feel like you’re at home. I know that for a lot of my friends, they don’t speak Korean, but when they eat the food, it feels like home to them. It can sometimes be hard to be a second-generation person and feel like you don’t really fully belong to either world, so I’ve always seen food as that connective tissue.
TV: As a Korean-American, I loved the little details in the movie like Lara Jean’s fondness for Yakult. Cultural identity in the book and in the movie is something that’s just a natural part of the story instead of an anomaly or something that’s being exoticized. Is that something you were conscious of while writing?
JH: To me, it was important that that be a part of her identity, but it’s not the whole of her identity. I think oftentimes when you see a person of color be the main character, then usually the thrust of the story is all about the struggle of being a person of color, and this movie is not about that.
TV: Do you find that balance at all difficult to strike in storytelling?
JH: The way I conceived of Lara Jean was to be a modern day children’s book heroine, the same kind of heroine I grew up reading, except I never really saw an Asian-American girl be the heroine. She’s bright, she’s optimistic, she’s really romantic, she’s very much an American girl. The American girl doesn’t look just one kind of way, not in 2018, not ever. That’s what I wanted to showcase for the girls who don’t fit that mold of what people think an American girl looks like, but also for the girls who do fit that mold, because I think that representation is good for everybody.
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