Lucky Lu is Lloyd Lee Choi’s first-time feature as a director.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
A raw and nerve-jangling cross between Vittorio De Sica’s classic neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves and the Safdie brothers’ pressure-cooker drama Uncut Gems, the new film Lucky Lu follows an Uber Eats-like bike courier in Manhattan over the course of 48 anxiety-inducing hours.
While the film’s conceit and its near-epic scope – the lead character, Lu (Chang Chen), dashes from one end of the city to the next as he searches for his stolen e-bike – would be noteworthy for a director of any experience, the project is all the more remarkable given it’s a first-time feature, with Canadian director Lloyd Lee Choi proving himself to be a wildly ambitious, resourceful filmmaker right out of the gate.
As the film makes its way along the festival circuit from Cannes to this week’s Toronto International Film Festival, The Globe and Mail caught up with Choi to talk about pounding the pavement.
What has the journey been like for you, taking this film from Cannes to TIFF?
It’s been a dream come true, but also a long, arduous journey. And I would say the cut you saw at Cannes was just about 95 per cent done. The version that we’re screening at TIFF, I’d consider the final film. Because we just wrapped at the end of January of this year, and had only about three months to finish it before Cannes. It’s just little things, some finessing, but it plays much tighter now.
Can you walk me through your journey from growing up in Scarborough, Ont., to now making films in New York?
It was never intentional to come to the U.S. for my career. I ended up going to Vancouver for university, and I just kind of fell into filmmaking: music videos, commercials. And I followed that momentum and curiosity. I never really explored the Canadian film system, because I simply wasn’t in that world. Then in New York, where I’ve always dreamed of living, I joined a filmmaking collective and made my first short film, and I really stepped into the world of narrative filmmaking.
The obvious influences I felt while watching Lucky Lu were Bicycle Thieves, Uncut Gems. But what inspirations went into it for you?
It’s definitely Bicycle Thieves – any movie with a bike, it’s going to be equated to that. And it’s a very conscious thing to me. So there’s similarities, but how do I subvert those expectations and modernize it to the current invisible working class? But other references that were top of mine were the movies of the Dardenne brothers, Ken Loach, those kind of filmmakers who tackle marginalized communities with an empathetic and realistic eye.
This is an incredibly ambitious film, with so many real-world set-ups in a busy city that is presented in a truly gritty, soaking-wet, damp kind of environment that I can’t recall seeing like this before. How did you pull it off?
We had 25 days, and it was in 50 locations, so it was a crazy challenge. We tried to blend into the city as much as possible, we didn’t want to take over any streets. All the locations are real places, and it helped that we essentially had, like, the godmother of Chinatown who helped us gain access to a lot of these places that have never been filmed before. These are real people’s homes and spaces, and we wanted to respect that. But we were running around in multiple locations every single day.
Asher Goldstein, Nina Yang Bongiovi, Tony Yang, Lloyd Lee Choi, Norm Li and Ron Najor of Lucky Lu at the Toronto International Film Festival.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
These are two wildly different movies, but I couldn’t help but think of your film when I watched another TIFF premiere, Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune, which also takes on the gig economy, although in a far lighter and comedic fashion.
It’s funny you mention Good Fortune, because I actually spoke with Alan Yang, one of that film’s producers, the other night when he came to watch Lucky Lu. We were joking we should do a double feature, because they are tackling the same worlds and same struggles. The same capitalistic thematics in so many ways, though that’s a much more high-concept comedy. But we have the same message, which is quite beautiful. It’s of the times. We made our short film about this in 2021, inspired by the pandemic, when delivery couriers were considered essential workers, which was a big shift.
You might not have gone through the Canadian system, but you did participate in a TIFF-CBC screenwriter lab for emerging filmmakers. What was that like?
Yeah, and that was great, back in 2023. It’s actually where I developed my next film, which is a golf movie. It’s a little more personal, as it’s a world I know very well, and I’m very curious to explore the sports movie, but not part of the golf-movie canon. There’s Caddyshack, Happy Gilmore, heart-warming stories like Tin Cup. I’m more interested in the psychological torture of the game.
Lucky Lu screens Sept. 13 at TIFF (tiff.net).
