Josh Leong on Chicken

Courtesy of Josh Leong

Josh Leong’s Chicken is a film that shows the inner feelings of humanity as the film’s physical elements impose signs of separation. It follows Shrue entering into a prison when he loses custody of his child and learns what it means to be a father after participating in the prison’s chicken hatching program. As he displays courteousness and care to the chicken, he needs to follow “the unsaid code” of acting tough to his fellow counterparts. He needs to navigate when he can show emotion and abide by their regulations of fitting in.

Leong is a rising filmmaker after graduating from NYU. His upcoming feature debut Lost Boys was a semifinalist at the 2021 Sundance Creative Producing Lab and 2022 Development Track. Currently, he’s a selected writer with the MACRO x The Blacklist Feature Screenplay Incubator and spotlight director with NBCUniversal’s Scene in Color Film Series, among other achievements.

Chicken made its World Premiere at Tribeca 2022. I got to speak to Leong virtually before its screenings about filming with baby chicks and the themes of masculinity, family and the prison industrial complex.

— Note: This conversation is condensed and edited for clarity and has some spoilers. — 

EF: In the director's note that I read for Chicken, you said that you volunteered at the Juvenile Justice Ministry of Detention. What led you to volunteer there?

JL: That summer, I was really looking to get involved in my community, I was kind of honestly burnt out from a lot of film stuff and I was looking for other things to do in the city. I knew that my church had just started a very, very early program and it's just started getting access to government facilities in the Bronx and in Brooklyn. I thought that was a really cool way to get involved with communities that I wasn't even very familiar with. [I’m] kind of inside our bubble of Manhattan. So it was a really cool opportunity to just kind of go out and see what they were doing up there and hopefully lend a hand. It started off very, very innocently. I think I was just there to lend a hand, help move equipment, set up chairs and stuff like that. But eventually, after a couple of visits, you know, it [the place and the kids] started to stick with you. You want to come back.

EF: What got you interested in seeing the development of their chick hatching program with Sprout by Design? 

JL: To be honest, I didn't see much of it happening in person. I had learned about this program off of the testimony of some other r people in the program. But when I first arrived, I did hear someone mention that there's a chick hatching program. We were all just like, “what that is really absurd.” I just think the idea of raising chickens in a prison is very strange to a lot of people until you start learning about why they do it and the chicks are there to teach responsibility. But it's part of a lot of initiatives that actually exist in the prisons, such as housing checks, planting gardens. [They’re] teaching kids to f put their energy into something productive that can also benefit the rest of the group. So they actually use the eggs from the chickens that they hatch, and they harvest produce from the plants that they grow. So it's a good opportunity to create responsibility and a sense of purpose for the work that these kids are doing.

EF: We love to hear that. After this volunteering experience, how did you get the film together?

[Chicken] was my final film at NYU. So we were kind of required to do a project and this was just something that was on my heart at the time. I was on the plane to whip together an outline. I started throwing things to the wall, and not a lot of stuff [was] sticking but I knew that there was going to be a story set in this world that integrated these chickens. At the moment, it was just a concept. It was not quite a story yet. It took a lot of workshopping with others in our production classes at NYU to really flush something out. Most of the cast and crew are all students. So it was really a grassroots effort from the New York community, from NYU. We'd like to say that this is a New York story. It's created by New York residents, New York students, and it's told in New York about real issues in our own backyard. So we're really proud of how everything kind of stayed at home. I think there are a lot of aspects of this because it was such a local story, it was really easy for us to integrate with some of the real organizations that do work in these facilities [such as the] Juvenile Justice Ministry of Detention and Sprout By Design. We were able to work with both of them to help get some of the logistics together and get some of the authenticity together.

EF: There are community advisors in the credits and lso the chicken hands. This is the first time I believe that everyone on screen interacted with a little chicken in that way. What was it like to interact with the chickens?

JL: Absolutely. That was the first time I'd ever interacted with chickens on set. It was kind of wild because we actually had to hatch the chicks. We had to time the hatching of the chicks with the start of the movie. So apparently chicks develop quite dramatically in the first couple of days they're alive. So what we associate with baby chicks really is just the first three or four days that they're alive. After that, they started getting big really fast. So there's a very small window of time that you can actually film with chicks. With Sprout by Design, we actually ran through the same program that the kids do. We incubated and hatched our own chicks. We timed them, and they hatch like 28 days after you start the incubator and the timing all worked out. It came down to the wire. We weren't sure [about filming]. We're two days from shooting and we didn't have chicks yet because they weren't born. So what you see in the movie are real two day old chicks and that is wild just being able to kind of handle them, and they were jumping around by the end of the set. By the end of that week, they could jump out of the boxes that we were putting them in. They grew really fast. So it was just really cool to be able to have some of the staff from strap by design that actually teaches kids how to handle these chicks in real life and essentially teach us how we also take care of them. 

EF: Do you ever have to worry that you have to have multiple substitutes of chickens because of the continuity involved with the setup?

JL: To be honest, we only use two chicks in the whole movie. Maybe you guys can catch it, but there are some scenes with fake chicks. So we also bought stuffed miniature chicks that people use for Easter or something like that and attached long, wooden sticks to it. We would move the chick so they can breathe. Some of the scenes, for example, the chicks are supposed to be sleeping. It's impossible to time or tell a real chick to sleep. So those are scenes in that we use a fake chick. But everything else, they're real. They are totally real. They're totally hopping around. They have to be kept in climate controlled environments. You have to time them. They get loud and they start chirping everywhere. It was kind of a mix of using real chicks whenever we could and then these fake chicks when it was obviously too difficult to corral certain chicks to do certain things.

EF: I want to get on the themes of the film. The film has moments of sports. At times, it's supposed to be a unifying thing to watch. But it doesn't as people get competitive against each other like as we see later in the film. How do you use sports such as basketball in Chicken? 

JL: I think the basketball component was there because most of the activities [that the residents do] are held in the gymnasium. The kids are allowed to play and you can play with them as well. I think that's a lot of the excitement of their free time. If kids are on good behavior, they're allowed to play basketball on the court under supervision. Another really cool thing that was from real life is that when we had gone probably around this time last year, it was around the NBA Finals and the residents were so captivated by this. They would talk about the game. We chat about who they had going for the title and you can listen to the games’ play by play on the radio. Sometimes we would hear that they would play the game for the kids so that they could watch it if they're on good behavior as well. So it just kind of fit the time period [and] a part of the film, just because it was something that I saw.

EF: That's cool. The film, as well as your previous film The Other Side. explore masculinity In the communities you depict in those films. [The characters] can’t easily get along together. There's always a little minor thing that escalates to a bigger thing.

JL: I think that's just a human part of the kind of stories I like to tell. They tend to be coming of age stories of younger people. But I think at the end of the day, we are looking for people that have been overlooked by society written out of history, the untold stories, just not just in our backyard, but around the world that are important to share. I think a lot of them tend to be from disenfranchised individuals from disenfranchised communities and I think there's a strong narrative of hope that we like to thread into these stories. [They] are a call to action that we want to have, because I believe that film doesn't just exist in a bubble. We have to remember that what we're watching is also a real thing and that's the case for both Chicken and The Other Side. Both of these were attached to these real issues that are ongoing and so I would just love audiences to remember when they watch that there is actually a much bigger topic that's going on in the world, behind the screen and that's kind of why we make ourselves

EF: And it does tie into expressing vulnerability where Shrue (the main character) can finally get along with his cellmate Mel. Unlike earlier in the movie.

JL: That is correct. I think what you notice is that in a lot of these facilities, it's not even like a level of toxic masculinity. But it's this idea that you have to act tough around everybody. We don't show fear. We don't show emotion but you also have to remember that a lot of these kids grew up without strong and present father figures in their life. They don't even know how to act. So when you are raised in one way, and you were not given the love, and you were not given that affirmation when you reflect this extension of what you believed was how you were raised. So I think one of the themes throughout the film is this idea of generational fatherhood. [For instance,] Shrue’s father affected him, and that impacts the way that he treats his own son. I think in that way, it's an inescapable cycle and I think that's something hopefully a lot of people can relate to thinking about how they're raised and their own parenting styles. But I think that's a lot of that ties into kind of the mask that these kids end up putting up when they're inside these facilities.

EF: In the opening scene, while it is implied, with Shrue being in jail for child abuse, but he never explicitly say that. When we introduce people, there are backstories. Was there a reason that you didn't explicitly say why Shrue’s in jail?

I think it's because it's not important. Because once you know why these kids are in here, we pass judgments on them. So it was the same thing in real life. When you walked into these facilities, you would never go up to one of the residents and ask them, “why are you here?“ You would learn that a lot of these kids are in here from petty crimes to murder. It's really across the spectrum and it shouldn't actually matter. Because at the end of the day, all of these kids are kids and that's kind of the way that I wanted to approach this. Any of the characters [like] Mel and Shrue could have been in there for any number of reasons they could be. They could be unjustly incarcerated. They could be getting what they’re due, but it doesn't really matter because at the core, they’re children, and we need to treat them like that. 

EF: Many movies and documentaries [around this subject matter] always say everything. I love that you leave some stuff out of it. To go on with the loss of innocence, the saying “boys will be boys” primarily applies to White men.

JL: There's a lot of undercurrents that go with a topic like this and I think it's unfortunate, to be honest, that pretty much every single kid that we saw in these facilities are Black and Brown. That's a reflection of the system and also it's reflective of the kind of the communities around these prisons. You actually learned that many of the children inside of the facilities are actually from the surrounding neighborhoods and so it's kind of reflective of the population in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but it is also disproportionate to kind of like the way that the justice system treats children across the board. So I do think that there's a lot of stigmas that these kids face and a lot of hills that they have to climb. So I think that's a lot of what we're trying to address here with this film. We're trying to shed light on this issue, and say, “Why are these kids here in the first place and what keeps them coming back?” There's a scary statistic that 84% of the kids that go through juvenile detention will be re-incarcerated within five years. That is shocking. So many of these kids who get out will eventually come back in and that's something that we want to stop. We think there's a lot of things, stigmas and community societal issues that prevent these kids from really turning a new leaf. I think that's what programs like Sprout by Design provide inside these prisons.

EF: In this film, Chicken and The Other Side, you also have social workers. What’s the theme of these moral compasses of sorts?

JL: They’re less of a messiah like figure and more of a guidepost. Our protagonists don't always react positively to these kinds of characters. I also would like to think that these mentors or guides, or social workers are also flawed characters themselves. They are imperfect and they don't know what to do. But I think that it has been part of a way that I've tried to insert myself into this story. That's the way that I saw myself sometimes. That's a way that I see that the community can kind of get behind and interact with these kids.I think it's a point of empathy that we can have with “the outside world” interacting with these kids inside. Just trying to live very selflessly and give their time and their patience to these children. We see through the lens of Monica when she works inside these facilities as some of these youth development specialists, which are very common. For example, the New York City Administration for Children's Services is trying to recruit more of these volunteers and YTS to come in and work with these kids. It's not a desirable job. It's something that has tough hours and can be very, very emotionally taxing, but it's a level of consistency that these kids need. What you don't want is people coming in and out on a short term basis and sometimes that's a big pitfall of short term volunteering. But what these kids need is consistency and that's what these mentors provide: someone that's able to be with them and help them to act like a parent. To teach them the way or to build trust instead of just coming in and out.

EF: It's great to see these threads [in your work] especially with the families involved, whether it's present in [Leong’s film] Jackie, or abandoned for a lack of a better term in Chicken and The Other Side.

JL: I hope that there's there's threads through the work that I do. It's something that I want to continue. [I’m] currently working on a feature film version of The Other Side. That's a story about the Ethiopian abandoned children crisis that we think is a really, really important story to share with the world. But I do think a lot of my work kind of centers around those kinds of themes and I'm really happy that Chicken is resonating with a lot of people as well.