Opinion: 'Nationalist' Arises, With Myriad Connotations, As The Word Of 2018

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Sandi Tan says she knew it looked strange to outsiders when she was 18 and spending most of her time with a man more than twice her age. That man was her mentor, Georges Cardona. This story doesn't go in the direction you might think. He did not sexually assault her, but after she put her faith in him, he did steal her dream - literally stole it.

Tan's dream was to become a filmmaker, to make the kind of edgy films that she loved, the kind of films that weren't shown in Singapore where she's from because of government censorship. When she met Cardona, who was teaching a film workshop in Singapore, he became her friend and mentor. She describes him as a man of unplaceable age and origin who projected himself as an American filmmaker. He encouraged her to write a screenplay. When she completed her screenplay, which she called "Shirkers," he declared it a masterpiece. He knew how to get film and equipment, and he became the film's director. She played the leading role. One of her girlfriends served as producer, another as assistant director.

After they finished shooting, Georges had the footage. He disappeared and took the footage with him. Gone was the film, her dream, even her sense of identity. Making another film seemed out of reach. Instead, at the age of 22, Tan became a film critic for Singapore's largest newspaper and continued to write screenplays that never got made. She moved to America, kept writing about film, married film critic John Powers, who you may know as FRESH AIR's former film critic and current critic at large. And she wrote a novel.

In 2011, nearly 20 years after shooting her film "Shirkers," she got one of the biggest surprises of her life. Georges had died. His widow found 70 cans of footage labeled "Shirkers" and it was in perfect shape. She sent it to Tan. You can see some of that footage and how remarkable it looks because it's incorporated in Tan's new documentary. It's about her teenage years in Singapore, making "Shirkers," dealing with Georges' betrayal and unraveling the mystery of who Georges really was.

The new documentary has the same title as the original unfinished film, "Shirkers." She says, some call my film a punk rock fairytale. Some call it a ghost story. But all I'll say is, time can be a very strange friend. Sandi Tan won the World Cinema directing award at Sundance. "Shirkers" is now streaming on Netflix.

Sandi Tan, welcome to FRESH AIR. So when you made "Shirkers" in - when you were 19 and living in Singapore, it sounds like there was a pretty strict censorship code for pop culture, and a lot of the movies that you wanted to see weren't legal there. You had no access to them. So as a film lover turned filmmaker, what kind of system did you create in order to see the films that you wanted to see?

SANDI TAN: I developed this, I guess, clandestine video network with my cousin in Florida who had no interest in movies but happened to have access to VCRs. And I taught her how to kind of hook them together and go to Blockbuster and rent some movies and - you know, rent the movies that I've read about that I wanted to see that the grown-ups around me probably would be worried that I was trying to see.

And I had her rent these movies and send them to me in Singapore overnight. I became, like, this kind of strange video clerk of illegal movies in my high school and just infected the rest of the girls around me in my all-girls high school, and we got into movies that way - films like "Blue Velvet" and the Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple" - all these movies I've read about that couldn't be seen.

GROSS: So you were a film lover who basically started, like, an underground network for importing films that you wanted to see that weren't available in Singapore. When you were 18, in the year between high school and college, you met Georges, who you...

TAN: Yes, I did.

GROSS: ...Who you did not realize was a pathological liar. And he was teaching a film workshop. And he loved talking about movies, and you became - he became like a mentor to you. What did it mean to you to have somebody who was American - at least he said he was American - who knew so much about film? What did it mean to have a man like that in your life, an adult like that in your life?

TAN: You know, the grown-ups around me - this is the context of 19 - late 1980s, early 1990s Singapore. You know, they're completely conservative. The grown-ups around you are only concerned with making money, with scolding their children for not doing better at school. It was a very scoldy (ph) culture and Georges was the opposite of a scoldy grown-up. I went to a high school where we had this kind of specialized theater studies and drama program. This was the first of its kind in Singapore where the rules didn't quite apply. So that was the beginning of us being open to grown-ups who were not, like, the Singapore norm.

So when I met Georges - this was a man who actually knew movies and took me seriously as being, potentially, a filmmaker and a thinker and a creative person. And that was extremely intellectually seductive and also, like, that's why he became a mentor and then a close friend. And, you know, people always say now, like, the optics weren't right. But Georges was not somebody we were frightened of or thought of as other in that way. He was, in fact, the opposite. He was very much one of us. I felt like he was - I mean, it's strange to say, but I felt like he was like a teenage girl in disguise in his - you know, he just talked to me like an equal.

And he certainly knew how to talk to me and my friends, 18-year-old girls, so it just never was weird in the usual way. And he happened to be a grown-up, which was hugely useful because he could drive, he could do certain things - get us cameras without people looking askance at us and, you know, borrowing a camera and people trust him with it. And we would go around shooting video. We would not have been able to do the things that we wanted to do had there not been a Georges.

GROSS: You went on a road trip with Georges...

TAN: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Through parts of America, starting in New Orleans, where he had lived before going to Singapore. And you write, even back then, I knew how it looked - on the road with a married man more than twice my age, and I knew he had a wife and child.

And in your director's statement, you wrote, (reading) so what if Georges was 40 and, like, driving around late at night with us teenage girls? He was one of us, spiritually. Besides, we were only talking about movies - always movies. Georges and I sat in his Nissan on my driveway for hours, night after night. As they say now, the optics weren't great, but so what? People around me were limited. They watched terrible movies and thought in tawdry cliches. I pitied them.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: I think that's really funny. Did you ever think that there was a sexual subtext for him? You do write that he gave you strange signals and one night invited you to touch his belly and that you ignored him, and then you both pretended it never happened.

TAN: Yeah. You know, the...

GROSS: What did you make of that? How did you interpret it?

TAN: Yeah. I was actually really freaked out 'cause I did not interpret that as being necessarily sexual at the time, you know, 'cause in my mind was so - put him in a different category, and he wasn't pushing it. I mean, he wasn't creepy in that way. I don't know what that was. I mean, one can read into that, but I don't know. I cannot begin to speculate.

GROSS: So you and Georges decided to make a movie together, and you were going to write it. You did write it. He directed it. Your friend Jasmine was an associate producer and editor of the film.

TAN: My friend Jasmine was - she was supposed to edit the film, and she was an assistant director of the film - the original film.

GROSS: OK. There were...

TAN: She's associate producer of this one.

GROSS: Right. And another friend of yours was a producer of the original film - Sophie.

TAN: Yes.

GROSS: So describe the screenplay a little bit, just - not the whole plot, but just, like, you know - if you were pitching it, how would you describe it?

TAN: It's a road movie in the smallest country in the world. And I played S, the lead character in this. She's the 16-year-old - I guess she's - the road movie is an excuse for her to go around auditioning five people that she likes enough to take into the next world with her by killing them - I mean, a very metaphorical killing - with her handgun...

GROSS: Handgun meaning her hand.

TAN: Her hand being kind of used as an imaginary gun. And it's kind of left ambiguous. But basically, it was an excuse for me to collect together, you know, in a feature film all the kind of places that I knew were disappearing that we could shoot at and all these characters and faces of people that were maybe part of my life, like my grandmother who was getting on and my baby cousin who was an exceptionally adorable little kid.

And I just wanted to catch all these people and all these places before they vanished. So "Shirkers" was kind of an excuse for this caravan of disappearing faces and places back in 1992 when Singapore was really clearly at a crossroads where it was going to transform itself from a more laid-back, greener, you know, Southeast Asian city to something that had, like, huge global ambitions and was going to be filled with skyscrapers.

GROSS: There are remarkable colors in your movie. Like, in the original movie that you made that you incorporate into your documentary about the making of the movie, the colors are amazing. Like, there's a scene in a bowling alley, and usually, bowling balls are kind of black or speckled. And these are, like, pink and orange bowling balls. Like, did you color them, or were they really that way?

TAN: They were that way, but we spent a lot of effort on production design of making sure that the colors popped. It was so important to us because we were working on 16 mm. We got the film donated by Kodak. So it was cheap, but it was precious. And we just wanted these colors to pop. And Georges was very mindful of color. He was very inspired by the work of Robby Muller on Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas," which is a classic road movie. And I was coming from the direction of Tim Burton movies and "Heathers" and the use of primary colors in those films, those American independent films, to kind of pop and help the lack of money.

I think when you - when you don't have that much money for your production design, then you can add a lot of production value simply through, you know, a very strong use of color, say, and thinking about really framing your images in that interesting way. And also, I was very inspired by Douglas Sirk movies and his use of color. We aspired to something better than the usual, say, independent films that were being made in that part of the world, which is not many at all.

GROSS: So Georges was a con man - and we'll talk about some of the other bad things that he did - but do you also think he was really a talented and dedicated filmmaker?

TAN: Yes. I think he's extremely talented as a storyteller and extremely talented as a photographer and cinematographer. He happened to have a very good eye, so he could have been a very talented filmmaker except he had never actually completed anything in his life, as far as we know, that was a film. So this was going to be the closest thing to him completing a film, and he suddenly was a great consumer of movies. He was a - you know, I think of him as a kind of a vampire of cinema, where he - I wouldn't call him so much a con man.

I don't know. I think he's much more complicated than that. I think of him as, strangely enough, a kind of a very classic American archetype, a self-made man by turning himself into sort of his ideal fictional character. He's a storyteller of his own life where his personality is made up as a composite of all his favorite movie characters. They aren't necessarily heroic movie characters. I mean, I'm talking about the lead character in Eric Rohmer's "Claire's Knee" in which this kind of 40-something-year-old man played by Jean-Claude Brialy has the ambition of touching this 16-year-old girl's knee - and only touching it, nothing weirder than that. But that's very weird in itself. And that was one of Georges' heroes.

GROSS: So after the film was shot, you left for England for college, leaving Georges in Singapore to process the 70 cans of film. And you realize that none of you had seen a single frame that you'd shot. And then you waited and waited for word from Georges about how the film looked. And then you didn't - outside of a couple of oblique messages, you never heard from him again. So the film was basically stolen from you, and it wasn't until many years that you got it back.

How did you feel? How did you deal with it emotionally when you realized you weren't going to get the film - that this film that you poured your heart into, that you'd poured your dreams into - that it was literally stolen from you by your own director and friend?

TAN: It was a lot of anger and frustration at first before the disbelief set it. It was a lot of shame also. I felt like I had let myself be fooled or, you know, the people around me would be, I told you so; there was something creepy about that guy. You know, like, I just didn't want to hear that. And so for a long time, it was me keeping it a secret and not sharing this shame and this heartbreak. I mean, actually not sharing the heartbreak was probably the most devastating thing, that I had no one to tell except for Sophie and Jasmine, who were angry at me because they felt it was partially my fault.

But we all, the three of us, shared the burden of this heartbreak, which then became this kind of toxic force and we just couldn't even talk about, even though it was the one thing that linked the three of us. It was a lot of anger. It was a lot of frustration because also, it - the break did not come cleanly. You know, it wasn't like he just vanished and then the three of us were there to experience it, the whole thing, together.

GROSS: You kept - he led you to believe, just keep waiting.

TAN: Exactly.

GROSS: So you were in this...

TAN: He's going to send you something. He's going to send you something.

GROSS: Yes. So you...

TAN: And it was on and on.

GROSS: ...Were in this state of, like, suspension for a really long time, you know, expecting...

TAN: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Something to come. But it never did. And you say in the movie, we were no longer magical kids whom were making a movie. We were just kids.

TAN: Yeah.

GROSS: It must have, like, really changed your identity, both your self-identity and the identity you showed to the world, when you could no longer be the person who made that film because that film didn't exist.

TAN: Yep. And so now it was back to just my representation of my outside self, which was just a boring, bland, expressionless teenager, whereas, you know, if I had "Shirkers" to show, which was going to be an expression or rather an explosion of my inner self. I no longer had that to share with the world, and nobody would sort of understand and see the real me.

GROSS: My guest is Sandi Tan. Her new documentary, "Shirkers," is streaming on Netflix. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF WES MONTGOMERY'S "4 ON 6")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. If you're just joining us, my guest is Sandi Tan. Her new Netflix documentary, "Shirkers," is about the fiction film she made when she was 19 that she was never able to complete because her mentor Georges Cardona, who was directing the film, stole the footage and disappeared. Twenty years later, Tan received dramatic news. Georges had died. His widow found the footage.

You ended up getting the canisters of film, after Georges died, sent to you by his widow. And you didn't look at the film for three years. Why did you wait that long? You wanted it so badly for so long, and then you got it. And you just kind of kept it in, I don't know, a room or a closet.

TAN: Yeah. They came to me in seven boxes. There were 70 cans in all. And they were, to me, radioactive, these boxes. And I stacked them in the corner of my living room just, you know, out of the way so I didn't have to think about them. And you know, when - the boxes came to me over a series of maybe seven months, so they weren't all there at once. And so I kind of stacked them up, one by one. And eventually, they became this kind of tall stack of brown boxes - like some vertical coffin, I often say - just standing there. And this was in my living room for three years.

And finally, my husband said, we have to do something about this. You know, deal with it. I just knew that if I had opened them up and looked in them, they would suck me into some kind of crazy vortex of obsession, you know, and perhaps financial ruin and psychological damage and heartbreak again. You know, what if the footage was no good? Also it meant I had to get in touch with Sophie and Jasmine again and in touch with all these people again and to relive the heartbreak of everything again. Even though I wanted to kind of solve the mystery, as it were, the prospect of having my soul torn apart again was harrowing. I mean, I just - it was something I wanted to delay.

GROSS: Eventually you opened the boxes, and you watched the film. What was your reaction when you saw it, when you saw the footage that you had shot?

TAN: I was relieved. I was sitting with a technician in Burbank who had worked on some of the Criterion Blu-rays for Douglas Sirk movies. So he's very used to, you know, vivid colors and palettes of that sort of thing - lots of pinks and oranges and - vivid '50s palette. And his jaw dropped when he looked at the footage. And he had - he just thought it was amazing, mesmerizing footage. And I was extremely relieved that I was not exaggerating, that I wasn't insane. I had not misremembered. And I was relieved that I now had proof.

You know, I had to cast vanity aside and just not think about the horrible performance I was giving or how kind of chubby I looked or, you know - and just think about, like, the performances that all these other people were doing - like, all these grown-ups that we managed to convince to be part of the production and who could have had, like, you know futures as actresses - or the production designers. Like, my friends were getting our props together.

And Sophie, the producer, you know, getting these buses off the streets of Singapore and just hijacking them and using them in our film. And there was so much work and so much passion that something in me just kind of went on fire again. And I was just burning with a need to just kind of tell our story for all of us and not just me. It's no longer just about me.

GROSS: So once you decided to make the documentary about "Shirkers" and finally, after all those years, you had the footage, and you could watch it and you - obviously you really wanted to and needed to hold on to it, were you paranoid about all the things that could go wrong? That it could it could burn in a fire, the lab could lose it, it could get lost in the mail? I mean, there's just, like, an endless list of things that could go wrong.

TAN: Yeah, I completely was. Once we got it digitized, I think once the film began living its own, you know, life in a different form and could be contained in bytes and bits and on different hard drives and I - OK, so this is how paranoid I was. I had the footage transferred onto, like, maybe 10 different hard drives.

GROSS: (Laughter).

TAN: And put in 10 different places in - not just in my house, but in my friends' houses and in LA - but also sent to New York to my producer Jess Levin's house. So we had it scattered around the world so that they - it wouldn't all exist in one place and potentially could just vanish into a black hole again.

GROSS: Is the documentary, which is being so well received, opening doors for you to make other movies?

TAN: I hope so. I definitely hope so. I mean, I think one of the things that was so satisfying and - you know, in terms of closure for me in making this film - is that it completely rekindled my passion for filmmaking or, rather, my confidence in myself as a storyteller.

GROSS: Well, Sandi, I wish you great success with "Shirkers," your new documentary. And I really do hope that opens the doors to making other movies because I like "Shirkers" so much. So congratulations on that. And thank you so much for talking with us.

TAN: Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

GROSS: Sandi Tan directed the new film "Shirkers," which is now streaming on Netflix. After we take a short break, we'll hear from Steven Yeun who played Glenn on "The Walking Dead" and stars in the new film "Burning." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO'S "SEYMOUR READS THE CONSTITUTION")

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Actor Steven Yeun's big break was landing a role on the hugely popular zombie apocalypse show "The Walking Dead." Yeun played Glenn, a fan favorite. "The Walking Dead" is known for killing off its main characters. But Glenn did pretty well, lasting a full six seasons until his death, one of the show's more gruesome, in the premiere of Season 7.

Now Steven Yeun stars in the film "Burning," by Korean director Lee Chang-dong. Yeun plays Ben, a mysterious, upper-class playboy in South Korea's capital, Seoul. He may or may not be murdering his girlfriends. "Burning" is based on a short story by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

Our film critic Justin Chang called the new movie the most absorbing movie he's seen this year. Yeun has also had roles in the films "Okja" and "Sorry To Bother You." He spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger.

SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: Steven Yeun, welcome to FRESH AIR. So your character Ben in the movie "Burning," he's very mysterious. And, you know, he's open to the interpretation of the audience in a lot of ways. You can either read Ben as this kind of bored, rich guy who kind of uses people, or you can read him as a potentially murderous psychopath.

STEVEN YEUN: (Laughter).

BRIGER: And the film never explicitly says which one he is. How do you approach playing someone like that?

YEUN: I think the real key was that director Lee gave me a lot of my own freedom in approaching this character. But it really came down to - director Lee said to me one day, maybe halfway through production, because we kept talking about the last scene - and he was saying, you know, you have to make that choice as an actor. And you...

BRIGER: About which kind of person he is.

YEUN: Yeah, which kind of person he is.

BRIGER: Yeah.

YEUN: And you will make that choice. And when we were done filming, he was like, what choice did you make? And I told him that I wasn't going to tell him.

(LAUGHTER)

YEUN: And so even to this day, I am the only one that knows who Ben really is.

BRIGER: So Lee Chang-dong said that you're Americanness was an asset to this role even though your character is Korean. So what did he mean by that? And how do you understand that?

YEUN: Yeah. You know, when I first approached him, I was like, is Ben Korean-American? And he was like, no, he is a fully Korean person that lives in Korea. He might have traveled. He might know the Western world. He knows knowledge of the greater world, but he's not a Korean-American. And I was like, OK. So then I realized that I had a lot of work to do to...

(LAUGHTER)

YEUN: ...You know, really get and understand the encoding of the body of being a native currently-living-there Korean person. And for me as an immigrant, I know of Korea in kind of maybe images or eras. You know, my parents taught me Korea from the '80s to the '90s. That's their understanding of Korea. And that's how I grew up.

But Korea's changed and evolved just like any other nation. And you're not updated on, you know, colloquialisms and vernacular and people's way of, like, just being with each other. And so I really thought that I had to do a lot of work with that. But he then said, let's not mess with your Americana that's kind of embedded into your body. The food that you've eaten, the choices that you've made, the way that you think - don't alter those things. Instead, just - let's work on the language so that you can be unequivocally Korean. But let's leave these mysterious Western encodings in your body alone. And I think that created its inherent kind of, like, dissonance with that character where you don't know who or what and where he's from.

BRIGER: The movie is in Korean. What challenges did that present to you?

YEUN: Well, fortunately, my parents sacrificed their understanding of the English language by speaking only Korean at home so that I could maintain my Korean pronunciation. And so my pronunciation has always been pretty good. I wouldn't say great, but I would say it's good. I could probably pass for a native in Korea if I'm just talking to a cab driver. They wouldn't necessarily know from my voice. But it's missing the nuance and just the way that the specificities of how Korean natives speak. And so those were the things that I had to really get into. And also, my reading comprehension and my vocabulary is not very great. And so I had a lot of work to do just, like, really getting into the script, especially Ben. He speaks so, I guess, highbrow - very literarily.

BRIGER: When did you discover that you wanted to act?

YEUN: Oh, I don't know if there was, like, a specific moment, but I think it came in college when I had seen our school's improv group, called Monkapult, for our freshman orientation. And all I remember thinking was - I was like, that looks so fun. How do I do that? And I wish I could say that I made a conscious choice to pursue acting. But you know, in the rearview, it really just seemed like I was just going, like, I like this, so I'm going to do it. And then I kept liking and enjoying and growing. And I was like, I want to keep doing this. And then by the time I was done, I was all of a sudden moving to Chicago to try to get into Second City.

BRIGER: Which you did. So how old were you when you moved to LA?

YEUN: I was - 2009, I was 25.

BRIGER: So you started trying out for stuff. And I saw an early commercial of yours.

YEUN: (Laughter).

BRIGER: It's this Milky Way commercial...

YEUN: Oh, boy.

BRIGER: ...Where you're, like, a swimmer, and you're about to dive backwards into the pool. And then you dive in, and you hear this squishy sound. And you've actually dove into a giant pool of caramel.

YEUN: (Laughter).

BRIGER: And you're sort of - you look like a cockroach on your back, like, stuck in this...

YEUN: Yeah.

BRIGER: ...Caramel, like, squirming around. So first of all, that was all green screen, I'm assuming. Right? You didn't actually jump into caramel.

YEUN: We jumped in a actual pool, and then they actually put us in a outdoor pool filled with caramel-like substance.

BRIGER: Some gooey stuff.

YEUN: It was disgusting.

BRIGER: (Laughter).

YEUN: It was my welcome-to-Hollywood moment where it was like, this is going to pay for your bills. And this is going to pay for your life while you're trying to make ends meet and hopefully get a job. But while you're doing this, like, we're going to put you in this vat. And then afterwards, we're going to hose you down with a high-pressure hose in your Speedos in front of everybody. It was the most, like, self-ego check.

BRIGER: You look so uncomfortable.

YEUN: Oh, my God, yeah. The whole experience was uncomfortable. But when you're there and you're barely scrounging enough money to, like, live for the next day, you're like, spray me. Like, where do you need me to jump in?

BRIGER: Were there any auditions where the role you were trying out for was clearly a stereotype?

YEUN: I only did it one time, which was in Chicago. There was this thing called "Awesome 80s Prom." And I remember, going in, they asked people to prepare an '80s monologue. And so I prepared Ferris Bueller's opening monologue, and I did it. And then after I finished, they were like, can you do that with an Asian accent? And I, you know, was so nervous that I was just, like - I, like, half-assed a performance of speaking in broken English, and then I just walked out. And I remember...

BRIGER: Just kind of - you were in shock, kind of.

YEUN: Yeah. Well, you're also like - you know, back then, you know, nobody was really speaking up about this stuff. And so you're more like, is my agent going to be mad at me? Are these people never going to hire me? I don't even know what's possible for me, but I'm already going into a place where it's like, I have to be so brave. And I don't even have any credits to my actual name. I remember calling my agent back and just being like, listen, I don't - they actually wanted to hire me. And I was like, I don't want to do this. Like, I...

BRIGER: Did the agent know that that's what they wanted?

YEUN: Yes. Of course.

BRIGER: And hadn't told you.

YEUN: And hadn't told me.

BRIGER: Yeah.

YEUN: And I was like, I'm not doing it. And I remember the agent being really angry at me - being like, you know, this person is pissed off that you came in and wasted their time and did this audition when you aren't even going to do it. And I'm like, I - you know, that was just different times.

BRIGER: Well, your big breakthrough, obviously, was getting the role of Glenn on "The Walking Dead," the hugely popular zombie apocalypse TV show. You were on the show for seven years. Recently, you said that while you were, you know, super grateful to have that role, that as the years went on, you felt a bit cramped by Glenn as a character. And you described him as beige, like, kind of a...

YEUN: (Laughter).

BRIGER: ...Bland person. Can you explain that?

YEUN: Yeah. I wish I could always, you know, use better choice of words...

BRIGER: (Laughter).

YEUN: ...When describing things. And I - you know, I hope people that might've heard that didn't think I was hating or didn't like - but I think it was just, you know, a lot of factors. I think it was - you start at 25, 26. And then you grow to, you know, 32, 31. And you're not the same person that you were. When you embody a character for as long as you do, you tend to outgrow them, unless they're able to grow with you.

You know, the concept of even an Asian-American person and a man has morphed and changed even in the last decade by a lot. You know, there's moments where people were super psyched that an Asian man was in a relationship with a white woman. And that was, like, a big point of victory for a moment.

And then you evolve from there, and you go, oh. Like, that's also its own trap where you're not looking at these people like humans. You're instead justifying these identifiers, these ethnicity things that really shouldn't necessarily be celebrated in that way.

And so as you kind of process those ideas and grow as an individual, playing a character that seems like it's written in a specific way seems a little bit, you know, claustrophobic sometimes. So, you know, I think it was just a natural growing process of being the age that I was and the character and the show and a lot of things kind of coming together at the same time.

BRIGER: Well, I can't imagine that this is a spoiler at this point, but your character, Glenn, dies. It's a very gruesome death.

YEUN: (Laughter).

BRIGER: As most people know, the show is adapted from a comic book. And although the show didn't - doesn't exactly follow the comic, you know, there's a lot of similarities. There's some major plot points that come from the comic. And in the comic, your character, Glenn, was beaten to death by a baseball bat covered in barbed wire. And it's really horrifically depicted in the comic.

And so as you were playing Glenn, did you have in the back of your mind that this fate was some - at some point coming to you? Like, did they tell you early on that that was going to be your end or did you get a script one day that was like, this is your last script?

YEUN: I remember Scott Gimple, who's an incredible human...

BRIGER: Who's the showrunner.

YEUN: ...Showrunner at the time. He was gracious enough to sit me down, even a couple of years prior to - and, you know, we're friends. So we would just be like - I - you know, I'd just be like, Scott, you know, this death is going to come at some point. And, you know, I think it has to be me. It has to happen. And he's like, yeah. You know, you never know when it's going to happen. You never know if it'll happen or you never know who it's going to happen - I can't promise you that.

But then as we kept coming closer and closer, I kind of advocated it - advocated for it in that way, not because, you know, I wanted to be off the show but because it was the end. It's written. And so that's kind of how I approached it. And Scott was really gracious to give me that headway and that lead time. And yeah, it was not a shock. It was kind of just easing into that moment.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview our producer Sam Briger recorded with Steven Yeun, who played Glenn on "The Walking Dead" and stars in the new film "Burning." We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview our producer Sam Briger recorded with Steven Yeun, who played Glenn in "The Walking Dead" and stars in the new film "Burning." He was born in South Korea and moved with his family to the U.S. when he was 4.

BRIGER: You told your parents that you wanted to try to pursue an acting career. And they sounded like they were disappointed, but they were supportive and gave you, like, two years at it. Is that...

YEUN: Yeah. I think they knew who their son was. I mean, obviously, they do, which is like a hot-headed, like, really stubborn person. And so they knew that, you know, I was just going to do it whether they liked it or not. And so, you know, they reluctantly gave me their blessing (laughter) but not without, like, goading my...

BRIGER: An ultimatum.

YEUN: Yeah. They gave me two years. And they were like, you know, you got two years to try and do this. And then they made me get a job, which I miserably failed at while I was over there.

BRIGER: What was that?

YEUN: It was inside sales at a IT consulting firm.

BRIGER: That's good...

YEUN: That was horrible.

BRIGER: That's good experience...

YEUN: It was horrible.

BRIGER: ...For your role in "Sorry To Bother You."

YEUN: Yeah. Actually, yeah, very much so - again, my parents just doing a solid for me every time.

BRIGER: (Laughter).

YEUN: I really am going to owe them my entire career...

BRIGER: (Laughter).

YEUN: ...Which I do.

BRIGER: So was there a point when they were like, OK, you're an actor now?

YEUN: I think it really happened when I got "Walking Dead." Before then, they were happy to see me doing "Second City" and things like that. But they were always in the rearview like, you know, go to LA. Hurry up so you can just get this out of your system and come back and be a doctor. And I went to LA, and I booked this show. And, you know, my dad cried on the phone when I got it. You know, he was just, like, so relieved. Never did we know that it would turn into what it's turned into.

BRIGER: Did they watch "The Walking Dead?"

YEUN: Oh, yeah, they did.

BRIGER: Was it really horrifying for them to watch your death?

YEUN: I don't think my mom's watched my death, actually. My mom has still yet to watch my death. And then my dad, you know, he just thinks it's funny.

(LAUGHTER)

YEUN: He's just like...

BRIGER: There's nothing funny about that scene.

YEUN: Yeah. He's just like, what did you do?

(LAUGHTER)

YEUN: He's like, what did you make?

(LAUGHTER)

YEUN: He's like, what a wild show.

(LAUGHTER)

BRIGER: Well, there's something really interesting that you said about this - is that your parents took this huge risk to move to the United States. And so they're risk-takers, and so they sort of let you continue taking risks by accepting that you wanted to act. Can you talk about that a little bit?

YEUN: Yeah. You know, I met with K.W. Lee one time, who is the first Asian-American journalist to write for a major publication. I think when I met him, he was in his mid-90s - incredible human being, mouth of a sailor, hilarious. He told me, never forget; second generation sacrifices, too. And I was just, like, blown away because I was resting all my - of myself on my parents' sacrifice, to be like, oh, you guys did it; you guys were the risk-takers so that you could get me this chance to be here.

And when he said that, it made me really realize, like - and I was having my kid, and it was just like, OK, like, I have to risk, too. I have to put my neck out on the line. I have to sacrifice in that way, too, to give more semblance of freedom for my child. And so yeah, I think that extension of that, like, crazy decision to deconstruct a life that was fine - you know, we're not refugees. We're not forced out of our country. My dad just made a decision to leave because he took a business trip one time to Minnesota in the early '80s and thought that it was so great.

BRIGER: Must not have been in the wintertime.

YEUN: Yeah (laughter), right, exactly. I think he just saw land, and he was like, you can own land like this? And so he was like, I want to try it. And you know, I know the story that we get told oftentimes, which is true in the end - but what we get told is that it was all done as a sacrifice to us. But really, you know, it's just a human's way of, like, taking that risk to try to make something greater for themselves.

And my dad came over on his own ambitions with my mother and brought his kids, and then eventually it did become a sacrifice because, you know, the parameters by which he was able to succeed were all so limited because he's an immigrant. And so he succeeded as best as he could. And it would've been, I think, foolish and kind of wasteful of me to take that boldness and just bury it and say, I'm just going to be safe because you guys took the risk. And instead, I said, let me do what you did.

BRIGER: Well, Steven Yeun, thanks so much for coming on FRESH AIR.

YEUN: Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Steven Yeun stars in the new film "Burning." He spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger. After we take a short break, linguist Geoff Nunberg will tell us why he chose the word nationalism as his word of the year. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MICHAEL BISIO QUARTET AND RON SODERSTROM'S "A.M.")

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Donald Trump has revived a lot of old political phrases like enemy of the people and "America First." But according to our linguist Geoff Nunberg, Trump's most lasting contribution might be in introducing the word nationalist into our political discourse. That's why Geoff has made it his word of the year.

GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: Donald Trump has a penchant for breathing new life into expressions with troubled pasts, like "America First" and enemy of the people. It's not likely his uses of those phrases will survive his presidency, but he may have altered the political lexicon more enduringly at a Houston rally two weeks before the elections when he proclaimed himself a nationalist and urged his supporters to use the word.

Given Trump's policies on immigration, trade and foreign relations, future historians may very well label him a nationalist like a number of other presidents before him. But no sitting president before now has ever described himself with that term. Theodore Roosevelt did campaign briefly after he left office for strengthening the national government under what he called the new nationalism with an eight-hour workday, an inheritance tax and a ban on the sale of public lands. But over the following century, nationalism was indelibly tainted by the wars provoked by nationalist regimes in Europe and Asia.

You can still use the word in a neutral way for the aspirational nationalisms in the post-colonial world or secessionist movements in places like Catalonia and Scotland - peoples who are wishing for a nation, not exalting the one they already have. But when nationalism surfaces in developed states, it calls up images of militarism and xenophobia, jackboots and barbed wire, bombast and belligerence. It's all summed up by the disparaging adjective nationalistic, which is typically followed by words like propaganda and fanatic. The word's been rare in modern American politics. There were the black nationalists of the 60s and 70s, but theirs was an aspirational nationalism modeled on the wars of liberation in the developing world. The term white nationalism can sound aspirational, too. It conjures up separatist reveries of a nation reserved for persons of pallor. But it can slide into glorifying America itself as a white nation.

The phrase has been simmering for decades on the fringes, but it's become ubiquitous in the last few years. When you see a media story that mentions nationalism in America these days, the odds are 9 to 1 the word will be preceded by, white. So it wasn't surprising a lot of people heard Trump's avowal of nationalism as a shout-out to the white nationalists in his base, including a number of white nationalists themselves. David Duke tweeted that his nationalism and Trump's were fundamentally the same thing.

Trump denied that he had any such connection in mind when PBS's White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, who is African-American, asked him at his post-election press conference if his use of nationalism was emboldening white nationalists. He called the question itself racist. It's hard to know what he meant by that, maybe that Alcindor was one of those people who see race everywhere. But then to hear Trump tell it, nationalism is just an ardent kind of patriotism and nothing anyone who loves their country should object to.

As he explained it to Laura Ingraham, I'm proud of this country, and I call that nationalism. I don't see any other connotation than that. That's the kind of generic definition you get from a dictionary. It's useful when you want to suppress the historical associations of a word. You pluck it out of its context and pretend not to notice the dirt that's clinging to its roots.

Nationalism seems just another of the words whose dark histories Trump has casually cast aside. He has to know by now that enemy of the people evokes an all-star lineup of murderous despots like Stalin. That connection's been mentioned more than a dozen times on Fox News alone. And he's aware that "America First" is steeped in anti-Semitism. When Pat Buchanan used that slogan in his 1999 presidential campaign, Trump described him as a Hitler lover who was appealing to the wacko vote.

But Trump insists that he's using those phrases in a brand new way. It may infuriate some of his critics. But presumably, most of his supporters either don't know the word's history or don't really care about it. Trump's aware of the connotations of nationalist, too, which is why he's made a point of noting that we're not supposed to say the word. But unlike those other expressions, nationalism is haunted by multiple specters, all of them very present to the public's mind.

The word evokes echoes of white nationalism, which Trump's indignant denials don't manage to dispel. It evokes vivid memories of the genocidal wars caused by the strident nationalisms of the past. And it allies him with the antidemocratic and xenophobic regimes that have arisen in Russia, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and now Brazil. At the ceremonies in Paris marking the centenary of the end of World War I, in Trump's presence, French President Emmanuel Macron said that nationalism was a betrayal of patriotism and warned that old demons were resurfacing, ready to wreak chaos and death.

That's a lot of baggage for a word to bear, and it hasn't been lost on Trump's adversaries. Columnists and prominent Democrats have been throwing the word back at him. It's become a Twitter meme to describe the Republicans as the Nationalist Party, which is something we've never had before in America. If that catches on, Trump will have managed to make nationalist a key word in the American political vocabulary for the first time in history. That might or might not be to his advantage, but it's reason enough to make nationalist the word of the year.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley School of Information. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll talk about Russian disinformation with Adam Ellick of the New York Times. His new video series examines the Russian playbook for spreading conspiracy theories, exploiting tensions and sowing chaos, dating back to the 1980s when they started a conspiracy theory about the U.S. military creating the AIDS virus. Ellick has been the target of a conspiracy theory. I hope you'll join us.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for digital media as Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE ROB DIXON TRIO'S "WISHING WELL")

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