Like the romance novels with which its heroine is obsessed, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is practically picture perfect. Lara Jean Song Covey (Lana Condor) writes a love letter to each crush she has, and keeps them in a hatbox left to her by her late mother. When, one day, the hatbox turns up empty and the letters reach the boys they’re written to, Lara Jean’s life gets turned on its head, as her past crushes come back to haunt her.
The film, which directed by Susan Johnson, is an utter charm. Adapted from Jenny Han’s novel of the same name, it’s the perfect romantic comedy. It’s funny, it’s relatable, and it’s compelling. And it just so happens that its all-American heroine is Asian-American.
Ahead of the film’s release on Netflix on August 17, we spoke to Han about the ups and downs of getting the movie made, Lara Jean’s sense of fashion, and food as cultural connective tissue.
Teen Vogue: The book To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was first optioned as a movie adaptation four years ago; what has the road from page to screen been like for you?
Jenny Han: It’s definitely been a long road. Four years isn’t that long if you think about it in terms of how long it takes to get a movie made; I think once the team was in place, then things moved very fast. But up until that point, it was always kind of up in the air. It’s fairly common to get something optioned, but really rare to actually see it become a movie. It took casting to begin and for them to be doing stuff on location for me to actually believe that it was happening.
TV: Did you ever doubt that it was going to get made?
JH: I did. I think that one of the biggest struggles with it was to find the right partners who would agree to cast an Asian-American family, and to have Lara Jean, specifically, be Asian. That was the biggest challenge. I think that oftentimes what people say is, “We need an actress who’ll be able to greenlight a movie,” and my counterargument to that is always that, when it comes to a teen movie, you have very few people who can greenlight a movie. It’s not going to be Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts — those are the people who greenlight movies, and in terms of young talent, it’s going to be a gamble no matter what you do. Even if it’s somebody with a really big social media following, you just don’t know if that’s going to translate into the movie getting made.
With Asian-Americans actors, specifically, there’s been fewer opportunities for them in TV and film, and fewer that have the ability to actually make a career out of it. It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where they’re like, “Oh, but they’re not famous names,” but they haven’t had a chance to be in anything yet, either. You want to give people a chance to grow and evolve as well.
