How Sean Wang Used His Google Experience to Revive Early Internet in DiDi

Remember MySpace? If the memory proves to be a bit hazy, don’t fret. Filmmaker Sean Wang vividly brings the user experience to life on the big screen (angst feelings and all) through his coming-of-age film, DiDi.

DiDi marks Wang’s first feature-length directorial debut, first making waves at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast. The film immerses viewers into what he calls the “pre-technology technology era,” capturing the original screen experience from the 2000s that has yet to be portrayed in movies. Before Wang went on to become a filmmaker, stacking up accolades that include Academy Award nominations and film festival sweeps, he was a Google Creative Lab 5 alum and USC grad. He credits his work at Google Creative Lab, as well as experiences with his mentors in the ad agency world, with learning how to bring screens and stories to life.

Wang sat down with ADWEEK to discuss the inspiration for the film, including skate culture, his creative work at Google, and what he sees as the biggest shift in user behavior when it comes to the internet.

The era of playground summers

I grew up skating. It was something I kind of picked up and fell in love with. Never stopped skating since I was in seventh grade. And through skating, I got into photography and video, making or filming stuff. I discovered people like Spike Jonze, who I knew through skating. But then I discovered his commercials. And then through Spike, I discovered people like [directors] Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham. [They were] the sort of directors of the ‘90s who also had a foot in the advertising world, like [David] Fincher. And one thing led to another. But, if we’re tracing one thing from my upbringing to this moment (the making of DiDi), I would say skating played a really big part in it.

The way I described the era in which our movie takes place is the “pre-technology technology era” where kids like me were still going outside and having playground summers. They would go out and have the type of summers that you see in The Sandlot or Stand By Me like messing around with your friends. But then you would come home and go on the internet. You would talk to your crush at night on AIM or go on MySpace or go watch stupid videos on YouTube.

I hope [the viewers] feel something. Whatever it is they feel, I hope they’re moved in however the movie speaks to them. That’s what I always want to get out of movies. I want to be moved in some way, whether it’s to laugh or cry or think about things. Hopefully, they’re moved.

A detour that wasn’t really a detour

[My work at] Google kind of came out of nowhere, in a way. They have a one-year residency program called Creative Lab Five.

[Google] came to the USC career fair, where I was going to school. I knew a little bit about [the program] because of this filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty, who also worked at Google. He left because he sold a pitch for his first feature film, Searching, which takes place entirely on screens. I asked him about the Google thing, and he was like, “If you can get it, you should do it because worst-case scenario is [still] pretty good.” You move to New York and get paid to be a filmmaker and make stuff that the world gets to see and you’re 22 years old. He’s become a great friend and mentor figure.

I applied and the Google team saw this random travel video I had made of 10 days I spent in Taiwan, and they were drawn to that. I interviewed over a couple of months, got the job, and I moved from LA to New York.

All the early Google commercials they made—it wasn’t like selling toothpaste. It was very storytelling-driven. It was taking a very human story but telling it in a way that was different and unconventional at the time, and that was interesting to me. It felt like a unique opportunity that, at the time, felt like a detour. But I was like—this one-year detour of working in New York at Google is not the worst detour. But it ended up not being a detour. It ended up being the bedrock of everything I’ve built since then. It was supposed to be a one-year job. I ended up staying in New York for on and off six years.

From a more holistic perspective, everyone I worked with kind of came from the agency world like 72andSunny, Wieden & Kennedy, and Droga 5. Those were all my bosses, and they made a lot of the seminal ads that I grew up seeing and that I thought [to myself] “Oh, there’s something you can do—interesting things in the advertising space.” A lot of the people who worked on those ads that shaped me were my creative directors and my bosses, so I got to learn directly from them and pick their brains.

It was my first job out of college. So, I learned a lot about how to be an adult there and navigate a professional workplace. But I also learned from a technical level—a lot of the screen stuff that I ended up implementing into DiDi like how to tell a story via screens, how to take these cold interfaces and infuse them with humanity and emotion, what different buttons mean when you put them in the right context.

The internet—a little mundane and extremely emotional

I wanted to portray [the internet] in a way that felt honest to how I remember using the internet, and how I think people use the internet even today.

There’s a lot of emotion to mine through a screen and all these interfaces that we use every day. I wanted to revisit this period that I felt hadn’t been captured accurately in movies because we never knew as filmmakers how to integrate our screens into like stories until the technology completely changed.

And so, it felt like a unique opportunity to try to showcase the internet in a way that was how this kid would have used it. It’s him sitting in front of his computer typing and [it’s] kind of boring. You can hear him breathe. It’s a little mundane and extremely emotional. Friendships are being forged and broken. You’re talking to your crush and it can feel very high stakes. But you zoom out and what is the actual action? He’s sitting at his computer screen hunched over. If you put the camera on the screen where all the action is taking place, then it becomes its canvas. I wanted to put the camera on the computer and make that all come to life and it feel just as human and emotional as an incredible performance on an actor’s face.

The biggest difference is back then, you could sign off of the internet and then go live your life. You didn’t have gnawing anxiety of “Is anybody talking to me? Is anybody liking my photos? Is anybody paying attention to me?” You were not on the internet. But now your internet is just always on. It’s in your pocket. If you are not on Instagram, it’s still there. People can message you, people can like your stuff, and people can comment on it. So, you’re never really offline. You’re chronically online. That is the shift that has happened for a decade and a half.