Jon M. Chu

Jon M. Chu (born 1979) grew up in Los Altos, California, above and around Chef Chu’s, his family’s Chinese restaurant on the edge of Silicon Valley. Tech-industry regulars who heard the owner’s son wanted to make movies handed him computers, video cards and software; he went to USC and became the director of Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and the two-part adaptation of Wicked. He told that story in his 2024 memoir Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen.

The Silicon Valley kid who reads the fine print

That upbringing left Chu unusually comfortable arguing about technology with the people who build it. Asked by WIRED in July 2024 how he felt about AI in entertainment — the question hanging over Hollywood after the writers’ and actors’ strikes — he answered as an optimist with homework to do, saying the industry needed people young and curious enough to learn the technology well enough to write the right policies.

“I could never forgive that”

The optimism has a hard edge to it. Speaking at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April 2025, Chu said generative AI was born with what he called an initial sin — the wholesale ingestion of Hollywood’s scripts and films as training data — and that the studios who owned that copyrighted material had not fought back hard enough. It felt to him, he said, as though the industry was being told to move on, and he added that he could “never forgive that.”

At the same panel he called generative AI “freaking scary” for the entertainment business while insisting it would never take over the judgment that makes something worth watching: the robots, he said, do not choose what we decide is valuable — we do, and he found that empowering. By December 2025, at WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco, he was describing himself as fascinated by AI’s potential for gathering and organizing information and said he had put real work into learning to use it, the better to understand what it could do.

His own films, though, stayed on the other side of the line. Promoting Wicked: For Good in The Guardian in November 2025, Chu said flatly that no generative AI was used on the picture, and made the handmade imperfections — an off-tempo string, a dancer a half-beat late — part of the pitch.