June 7th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
Chris Appelhans is the writer and director of the animated adventure Wish Dragon. It’s about Din, a young man who looks to reconnect with an old friend with the help of a special genie dragon named Long. Wish Dragon is a Sony Pictures Animation feature that will be on Netflix this Friday June 11th. Appelhans goes into the thought process behind the film’s story and what he hopes will enchant, surprise and inspire audiences.
Jackson Murphy: I have to imagine that one of your big wishes is coming true: the fact that this film is finally coming out on Friday.
Chris Appelhans: Yes. It’s the type of wish you wonder, “Will it ever come true?” And it finally made it. We finally got here. And it’s pretty cool to get to do it on a platform like Netflix. The number of people who can see the movie is crazy. So huge. As a storyteller, honestly at the end of the day that’s kind of your biggest dream: the most people can see the movie. That’s pretty cool.
JM: Yeah. You’ve got a powerhouse duo of studios, Sony and Netflix, on your first feature film. Did you feel a certain amount of pressure to make this as good as it could possibly be – your first movie?
CA: Yeah – it’s interesting because it’s been such a strange origin story. The film started out from such a personal place. It was something inspired by my traveling to China 15 years ago by a personal friendship I made over there that was the genesis of what an interesting place, time and setting this could be for kind of the Aladdin story. It started this long journey that involved finding a partner in China and building a studio out of talent almost entirely from China. Having a partner like Sony join us and having a partner like Netflix join almost at the [very] end was almost like a perfect escalation. To be honest, I feel the most pressure to my crew and to all my collaborators on the China side. I always felt like if they love the movie – if it felt authentic to them – if it moved them – then I could die happy. (laughs) And if everybody else in the world loves it, that’s great too.
JM: It moved me… especially in the opening section. You’ve got Din and Li Na, and there’s this whole moving away portion, which got me because of some personal reasons and stories I’ve heard for years. How emotional did that storyline feel for you, incorporating that right at the beginning of the movie?
CA: One of the things you discover when you get to know China is the speed of change. The country has transformed, especially starting in the late ’80s / early ’90s – at a pace that’s hard to understand for any of us. Within a matter of four or five years, whole neighborhoods would be replaced by skyscrapers. If I go back to my childhood home, it’s different but it’s not that different. In China, everyone who grew up in that era… the childhood that they remember (the landscape, the feel of the place, the community) is completely gone. There’s a level of nostalgia, not just on a character level of these two characters who had a really deep friendship, but essentially a whole set of communities and a big shared set of values have also completely changed.
To your point, we all have these personal stories of memories in our life when we were children. It often means a lot to us and feels like a thing we can’t ever get back. And I feel like that’s what’s really interesting about that aspect of China: it’s that turned up to 10… turned up to full volume. It has extra weight to everything.
JM: I feel like a lot of us want to look back on our lives when we were young and try to capture that magic again. And it’s interesting how you incorporate that storyline into the film. Din wants that again with Li Na and seeing them 10 years later and those scenes… which I think are the highlights of the movie in terms of emotion and story power… how was it for you in terms of crafting those scenes?
CA: What was a really important revelation when we were writing the film was that Din as a character… we often compared him to Michael J. Fox’s character in Back to the Future. He doesn’t change a lot. He goes in a big circle. He starts the movie with a set of values about what’s important in life. He’s so optimistic and life’s so simple. But that’s all projection and cover for an insecurity he has, which is, “Am I crazy? Is the world too complicated for those things to matter anymore? Am I a fool for thinking the people and the relationships in my life are the most important thing?”
Li Na was his friend at a time when he felt like all that was really simple. She is both a friend and a person that means a lot to him. And she’s also living proof that maybe there’s someone else out there in the world who still agrees with me. It’s sort of a philosophical soulmate, not just a childhood friend. His pursuit of her to try to get her back, despite the fact that in the present day they live in these totally different class worlds, is a way of him proving to himself that actually that… our relationship matters. It’s a friendship on one level, and on another level it’s a total test view of him as a character.
JM: Of course we have the dragon, Long. (Appelhans takes out a plush doll of Long.) Isn’t it amazing, first of all, the toys and merchandise that come from a world you’ve created?
CA: You know what’s funny? You spend so much time living with the characters. You spend so many years and they become real to you that by the time they’re made into a plushie, it seems like so, “Well yes of course. It’s Long.” It’s not like a toy, it’s “What would you like to know about this person? I can tell you everything.” (laughs)
Jackson Murphy (left) and Chris Appelhans (right)
JM: John Cho voices Long, and I like that he goes really deep with his voice. Was that one of the important things in working with him?
CA: Yeah. When you read old stories about genies and gods, one of my favorite things is… I like them when they’re selfish and out for themselves and tricking you. They have their own ambitions. We wanted to push our genie away from the, “Hey! I’m your best friend! How can I help you?” to somebody who’s very selfish – who had his own things he wanted right in the story. Long has to serve this last of his 10 masters and he’s finally free. His worldview is totally backwards. When working with John it was, “John, we want you… to be the most charming a**hole you know how to be. Embody that.” It’s also a chance to give the audience a sense of, “There’s a part of us that, given three wishes, I kinda wanna wish for a new Lamborghini too! That sounds great!” Can we craft a performance where [Long] was really fun to be around. He wasn’t a grump or a downer, but he was incredibly selfish and flawed. He’s like a car salesman. We always compared him to… Tony Stark or even a Han Solo type of character. Once you understand their motivations, they might not totally do the right thing. We’ve never seen a genie like that. And John completely delivered. He’s so funny and naturally able to improvise on top of that motivation.
JM: He’s very good in this. And speaking of cars and you mentioning Lamborghini, that made me think of Jaguar. Jaguar has a billboard at the beginning of this movie. You do a lot with billboards. Have billboards always stuck out to you?
CA: The most fascinating thing, visually, in China is the juxtaposition of old and new. All of the ’80s and before China sits right on top of modern China. When we were doing research, we would see this old, crumbling, dilapidated, kind of amazing communal neighborhood building. And then above it would be an electronic billboard bigger than anything in the States that would have some beautiful girl stepping out of a Jaguar. It’d be this reality vs. aspiration. Old China vs. New China everywhere. Where I lived in Shaman, which is where we made the movie – I lived there for two years. I lived in this big, fancy apartment building that was all glass. Skyscrapers had LED dolphins that would swim along the side of it. And then you’d walk across the street, and there’d be an old night market that was straight out of mid-century China. That contrast, we wanted to at least nod to that in the movie and use it as a way… to show the two worlds and the world that Din was from and the world he maybe didn’t feel like he belonged in.
Pre-Production Art
JM: And when you were there for two years, did you get stuck in traffic as much as what is depicted in the movie? I used to HATE traffic when I was young?
CA: Yeah. I thought L.A. traffic was bad, and then I lived in China for two years. I’m like, “Oh, [L.A. traffic] is nothing. This is nothing.” And our producer, Aron Warner… he’s amazing, but he can also be a little grumpy and a little impatient. We got stuck in a traffic jam trying to get to a really big meeting with Jackie Chan to talk about his voice performance [as Long in the Mandarin version] and to get him on board. We were already 20 minutes late and stuck in traffic, and our taxi driver realized that we were really stressed out and he said, “I know how I’ll un-stress you guys, I’m gonna honk every five seconds to make sure that we move traffic along.” And I was like, “I’m gonna die in this taxi. Aron’s gonna strangle me and just walk home.” Living in China and working on the movie there just filters into the movie.
JM: It felt very authentic. You mentioned Aron Warner, the first recipient of the Best Animated Feature Academy Award for the first Shrek. With this being your feature film directorial debut, what guidance did he give you on how to go into this animation world with a feature? (Though you have been in the animation world a long time before this.)
CA: I was probably 15 years into my career and I had developed a few projects right up to the greenlight stage and then they never made it fully into production. I had varied experience up to that point. But once you hit production and once you’re sitting there and as a director you’re responsible to make calls every day and to provide leadership and inspiration every day, the game changes. It’s a different set of responsibilities. He was amazing. It really annoys him, but we refer to him as our Gandalf because we’re all these earnest little Hobbits running around trying to do something really cool and he’s constantly foreshadowing [things]. His big insight was: he’s a very honest filmmaker. He won’t tell you he likes something if he doesn’t like it. He’s not gonna pretend it’s funny if it’s not funny. He also is willing to say, “Hey, this is really good. Relax. This is a good sequence. Let it go. Keep going. Move on to the next sequence.” And the other thing he did: he believes in a filmmaker’s vision. He supported me and backed me up. I never felt like he didn’t have my back.
JM: That’s great. You mentioned Jackie Chan as well. Obviously he was also [the voice of] Monkey in the Kung Fu Panda movies. What do you think attracted him to Wish Dragon?
CA: It was very gratifying. We met him in Beijing one time and he was like, “Okay, I’ll hear your story. I’ll hear your pitch. I had a great time doing the DreamWorks stuff but I don’t wanna do a ton of animation. But I’ll hear it.” So we pitched it to him and the first thing he said was, “Oh. This is a GOOD movie. You guys are trying to make a GOOD movie. Okay, that’s very hard. Do you know how hard that is?” And we’re like, “I think so.” And he’s like, “Okay, good. I’d like to help you do this, but you know it’s really hard to make a good one.” That was such a refreshing thing because I think Jackie got into the movie business purely out of the love of it. He comes from a genuine love of film and then [if] you make enough movies, you learn very quickly how hard it is to make a good one. He saw in the writing, pitch and artwork – the quality of the film we wanted to make.
JM: Is it true that a sequel to Wish Dragon is already in development?
CA: Yeah! It’s coming along. We’ve got a really cool concept. Early days but really exciting.
JM: Another wish coming true is not only one movie, but you get to build out a franchise! That’s great.
CA: Pretty fun.
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