Filmmaker Justin Chon needed money for his first movie, a gritty drama set in a Los Angeles convenience store during the Rodney King riots, and one of “the suits” made a suggestion.
“They wanted a Caucasian officer to be part of the story,” Chon said of his film, “G- - -,” whose title is a slur against Asian-Americans that Chon aimed to reclaim. “They wanted some kind of savior character in the middle of the film. The fact of the matter was, if you were in the L.A. riots, there were no white people.”
Chon, a Korean-American actor-turned-filmmaker who played a high-school nerd in the “Twilight” series, found independent financing in which he “made sure I had control in terms of the creative,” he said.