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THE MAN BEHIND JUSTIN BIEBER
"He's not as perfect as he says he is, and he's not as bad as the paparazzi portray him to be. He's a kid."
By Zachary Sniderma
When Jon M. Chu first got on Justin Bieber's tour bus in 2010, he was just a promising director who cut his teeth on two Step Up films and a Hulu-exclusive dance series called The LXD. But then Bieber happened, and Chu became something a little more than a director.
After directing Never Say Never, the first of Bieber's documentary-concert films, Chu's social profile soared and, thanks to some great reviews, so did his professional career. Now, after a year of intense tabloid scrutiny, Chu and Bieber have released this week's Believe, a kind-of sequel to Never Say Never that promises to show the "real" Bieber."He's not as perfect as he says he is," Chu says, over a coffee at the Bowery Hotel on a frigid day in December, "and he's not as bad as the paparazzi portray him to be. He's a kid." Chu was originally asked to creatively direct Bieber's tour and film it for posterity, but as more and more tabloid stories came out — from attacking a paparazzo in London, to peeing in a mop bucket in New York — the movie took shape. "By March, he had several more tattoos and I thought, 'Okay, that's interesting,' and then things started to happen. Stories started coming out."
On red carpets, Chu can come across as intense, laser-focused on his work and its intended impact. Away from the cameras, however, Chu is warm and exceedingly generous. He is simultaneously serious about the "work" of filmmaking and excited at his ability to actually, seriously make a living by doing it. Chu's first major gig was directing Step Up 2 the Streets, the kind of straight-to-DVD dance movie destined for a Razzie. Chu, straight out of college, turned it down until his mother called. "My mom was like, 'When did you become a snob? If you're a real storyteller, like you say, you can tell a story by a campfire, you can tell a story with a Hi8 camera and a cup,'" Chu recalls. "I was like, You're right, I'm going to make the best direct-to-DVD dance movie sequel of all time."
He didn't. Step Up 2 got a score of 27 percent on Rotten Tomatoes but it did set up his career in other ways. It paired him with Channing Tatum, with whom he later worked as director on G.I. Joe: Retaliation, another sequel. It also cemented his position in the dance world, one of the reasons he was called by Scooter Braun, Bieber's manager, to direct Never Say Never.
"I originally didn't want to hire him," Braun says, in a phone interview from L.A. "I said, 'Before we start I just want to let you know I'm not really trying to hire you. I'm not trying to make a concert dance movie and they want me to talk to you.'" Fortunately for Chu, he shared Braun's vision and Braun offered him the job by the end of the call. "Honestly, we created a format together, the kind of film we made? No one had ever made a film like that," Braun says. A lot of that had to do with Chu earning Bieber's trust. "When I was first introduced to [Bieber], they said, 'Hey, this is Jon, he'll be making the movie,' and he said, 'What movie?' That was his first reaction," Chu says.
"[Bieber] only invests his emotion in you if he knows you're going to be around because so many people come in and out... When he realized I'm not leaving, it was 2 a.m. in the morning, and he was like, 'Jon, come here,' and I was like, You know my name? He showed me this YouTube video so I was like, 'Check this one out,' and we went back and forth. From then on he knew my name and he trusted that we understood each other on a certain level."
The central "Bieber Paradox," however, is one of integrity. Optimists say Bieber really is just a kid in a tough position trying to do his best. Cynics say Bieber is a dick and his team is a bunch of dicks that are manipulating thousands of earnest fans that believe in Bieber's narrative.
The cynical extension is that Bieber is also playing Chu. Even more cynical is that Chu may be in on it as well. The thing is, odds are high that Bieber really is a good guy prone to public displays of stupidity. The closer you get in Bieber's circle, the easier it is to see. "I'm sure he would take back some of the things he's done, but I don't know how we can expect a rambunctious young boy to stay in his hotel watching a movie and eating room service every night," says Bill O'Dowd, who produced Believe as CEO of Dolphin Entertainment. "I just don't know what people expected."
Bieber is famous, but he is like a planet with a gravitational force of fame that draws in his closest collaborators and friends. "We'll be on stage and they'll be screaming our names as well as his," says Nick DeMoura, Bieber's choreographer and longtime collaborator. "Everyone's now asking me how Justin is and for me to leave the hotel is an issue. We don't have security so we gotta run from 13-year-olds as well."
People who have been with Bieber for that long can't really escape his orbit. Ryan Good, Scooter Braun, Bieber's dancers and backup band — everyone is included, even Chu. "[Jon] cares a lot about Justin, there's genuine friendship," O'Dowd says. "Scooter would be the uber-protective older brother. I think Jon would be the concerned friend."
Despite paving his own way, Chu's social feeds are borne back ceaselessly into Bieber's world. "I think I have somewhere over 600-and-something-thousand followers now and I would say most of them are Justin Bieber fans," Chu says matter-of-factly. In the Bowery hotel, Chu picks up his iPhone 5s from the table and starts scrolling through his Instagram feed for proof. He stops on a picture of a wind-up toy of two ping-pong players and shows it to me.
"So I wrote, 'What do you want for Christmas?' and I saw this stupid toy in this store," Chu says, both of us huddled over his phone. "Nobody wrote about that. They just wrote..."
"I want @JustinBieber for Christmas" —Sonitabun
"Justin yeh dats exactly what i want..." —yamini-belieber
"I want justiiiin" —leilajbfan
"I want Justin ,that would be awesome !" —laurauhljdb
That post has about 5,000 likes and 370 comments. Chu leans in. "That's what it is. Oh, look at this person: 'I want an iPad touch... and Justin Bieber.'"
This is now Chu's life. He's gone from "director" to "something more," wrapped up in the evolving career of a 19-year-old pop star. "These are my pictures on Instagram and this is just them tagging me and it's all Justin Bieber," Chu says without looking up from his Instagram feed. He pauses. "And that's all it is."It's not easy to enter Bieber's world. "In the very beginning it was shocking for [Jon]," Braun says. "You become part of that world and he's someone who is a very large contributor to deliver [Justin's] message. You have a lot of people hitting you up and you realize the power of that."
But the increased scrutiny has been a blessing, Chu says. "What Twitter did for me was make me not feel so isolated in filmmaking." From an early age, he was spending hours in editing rooms "missing the party, missing the dance. When it's dark and 2 a.m. in the morning I can say, 'Hey, someone tell me a joke,' and, like, thousands of people tell me a joke," Chu says. "It's like moral support that you're not alone in this. There are people on the other side waiting for [your work]." Nowhere is that stronger than with Bieber's Beliebers.
Social media has played a crucial role in keeping Bieber relevant during his tabloid lows, and those same mistakes gave Chu the film he wanted to make. "We got a movie out of it," he says, "We got a better movie out of it." But it can be difficult for someone in Bieber's position to really, actually understand if they're messing up. "You have this padding around you," Chu says of Bieber. "It's hard to know what you do and the consequences because they go outside of that bubble" — Chu traces his hand in a semi-circle, like a spaceship leaving orbit — "and they never get back in. You show up to a venue with a hundred thousand people yelling your name and it looks just as big as the other day."As part of the ramp-up to Believe, Bieber's camp has been more actively promoting his good deeds, including a trip to the Philippines, post-typhoon, to build a school, and a short video about giving back to a fan involved with Bieber's charity interests. This is the Bieber Paradox at work: Bieber has a legitimately good philanthropic track record, but it's also no accident these posts are popping up in the run-up to Believe. "The Philippines is a real problem," Braun says. "I saw 6 million people displaced. Me getting stressed out because people don't see we're doing it for the right reasons? You can't get locked into that... That's your bullshit, not mine."
The real question of the film is simple to ask but much more difficult to answer, says O'Dowd: "Does the pressure crack the kid, or does the kid crack the pressure?"
Chu insists Believe is not a damage-control movie, saying, "I'm not going to make a fluff piece. Otherwise what am I doing here?" But Braun disagrees: "You're damn right it's damage control. People have been talking shit for the past year." Braun claims he and Chu collaborated even more closely on Believe than they did on Never Say Never.
Chu may be on Team Bieber, but it at least seems that he comes by it honestly, learning to respect Bieber as a documentarian and independent filmmaker and not as a paid hand. Chu takes on projects that he feels push his skills to make anything good, to tell a story that needs to be told right. This has led to some crazy career pivots, so much so that Chu's choices can appear counterintuitive. He's been cussed out by his own fans for selling out, first with Bieber, then with G.I. Joe.
And yet, he's managed to win them back each time. "When someone says, 'This is impossible,' that's my trigger," Chu says. "I'm like, Oh yeah? Watch out."
Never say never? I venture. "Never say never," Chu responds automatically, then pauses. "Oh God." After months of documenting Bieber, staring at footage of the teenager in the edit room, becoming more and more a part of the star's world, that vernacular has — for better or worse — started to burn its way into his brain, even as he prepares for projects outside the Bieber orbit.
"Believe," Chu says, shaking his head. "Just believe."
SOURCE.
One day after Justin Bieber tweeted that he was “officially retiring” from the music business, a documentary about the work-weary 19-year-old landed in theaters with a thud.
