Charles Yu on turning his novel Interior Chinatown into a Hulu series

Unsurprisingly, Hulu saw cinematic potential in the premise and 10-episode adaptation of the Jimmy O. novel. Young in the main role (“Silicon Valley») in the main role. The premiere will take place on November 19. Yu, a novelist and longtime television writer who has worked on series including “Westworld,” “Lodge 49” and “American Born Chinese,” adapted his own novel and took on the role of showrunner for the first time. But the novel’s scripted origins made it surprisingly difficult to turn into a show, he said.

“Writing about television is one thing, but trying to make this show within a show, the first thing that comes up is, does (Willis) know? What does he think about his reality?” Yu said. “In a book, your reader is your cinematographer. In the show, we had to make things palpable and concrete and more understandable without being too specific, where we wanted to continue to have some mystery or ambiguity about what was going on.”

Yoo was inspired by shows like Law & Order, and the series pokes fun at the stereotypes of how police officers behave on television. But it also contains darker questions about the hierarchy of such shows and who leads them. Willis Wu works in a Chinese restaurant with his friend Fatty (comedian Ronnie Chiangproving very amusingly that diners will put up with truly terrible service if they consider it “authentic”). But after meeting a mixed-race police detective (Chloe Bennet, “SHIELD agents“), Willis becomes obsessed with the idea of ​​getting his own place at the police station and solving the disappearance of his beloved older brother.

Yu spoke with the Globe about the challenges and opportunities of telling the story of “Interior Chinatown” as a TV show.

Did adapting the novel for television give you more opportunities to portray Willis’ world?

You can’t use the infinite budget of someone’s imagination, but you can use Hulu’s large budget and tools like images, sound, and music to create the idea that we’re meeting Willis Wu, who is the main character, but he’s not in world. He’s basically a sort of NPC (non-player character) if you play video games, or a non-speaking character in a TV show. But for him it’s just reality. It’s just that his reality is very similar to a 90s police procedural. How do you create a believable, textured, rich world through cinematography, lighting, sound, and music, and separate it from what’s outside of that frame, where Willis lives? Lives in the fields. He lives in the background and we enter the world through his perspective.

Writing a novel is a fairly solitary task, but television is by its very nature a collaborative medium. What was it like bringing all these other voices into the project?

I remember early on, Ronnie Chieng, who plays Fat Choi in the show, was doing a fitting on the lot. He tried on hoodies and clothes and practiced things like how he would hold a joint because the character is described in the pilot as a stoner and he talks about smoking weed. And I could see that he had already started preparing for his character. And it was a few months before the shooting began. And I thought, oh yeah, this is going to be a recurring thing that we’re going to do together. He brings his talent, his face, his body, his voice, all his abilities and his comic persona. And then I can have words on the page. So I feel like it was so educational for me.

Detectives Greene and Turner, the “protagonists” of the series within the series, do not see Willis because he is a supporting character. This is both a comment about race and a figurative image of an invisible person. What techniques did you use to portray it?

Because of the framing and exclusion of the story, there is no role for him. So how do you literally describe such an absence? What does it look like? And it was difficult because sometimes it can be as literal as the door not opening and he can’t get in somewhere. And sometimes it was because of the way the footage was shot. A lot of people thought that a cop show should look a certain way. You can have fun with the fact that Willis literally cannot get into the frame. Partly because Lisa (Gilroy) and Sullivan (Jones), who play Green and Turner, are so tall that it’s easy to frame Jimmy in certain shots.

How would you like to see Chinatown in the series? It is not in a specific city.

Not a real Chinatown, but something that people can identify with emotionally and visually. There is some visual inspiration from San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. We shot a bit in Los Angeles. Many cities in America and around the world have Chinatowns. It is a place that contains many, many physical places. It is a refuge and support for communities and for recent immigrants in many places, and historically it has served many functions. It is also a place in our imagination. If you are a tourist, you might want to go there for good food, good shopping, or just for the adventure, to get a tourist experience. And if you live there, that’s where you live and work and where your family is from. And I wanted to play with the dual nature of that.

“Interior Chinatown” premieres on Hulu on November 19.

Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @LisaWeidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.