Writer and director
Lee Isaac Chung wrote in the Los Angeles Times about how he came to write Minari. He was about to start teaching full time for the sake of his family and thought he would write one final script in the few months before the job began. Desperate for inspiration, he closed his eyes at his regular coffee shop and the words "
Willa Cather" rang in his ears. Looking her up, he saw she was a novelist who wrote about life on the Great Plains, and he fell in love with her novel "My Antonia". He learned that Cather initially imitated famous novelists who wrote about city life, thinking her own rural experience wouldn't be accepted. She felt unfulfilled and then wrote successful rural stories that were true to herself. She said, "Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember." Reflecting on this, Chung said, "I wondered if the voice was leading me to these words, so that I would begin to trust in my own. As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family's arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother's shock at learning that this would be our new home. I recalled the smell of freshly plowed soil and the way the color of it pleased my father. I remembered the creek where I threw rocks at snakes while my grandmother planted a Korean vegetable that grew without effort. With each memory, I saw my life anew, as though the clouds had shifted over a field I had seen every day. After writing 80 memories, I sketched a narrative arc with themes about family, failure and rebirth. That's how I got the idea to write 'Minari'; it began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember."
