Chatting with … Shane Chung ’24

Don’t even think about asking to split the bill. The two protagonists in Check Please, a short film by Shane Chung ’24, would, quite literally, rather die.  

During the fight for the right to pay, a credit card becomes a dagger, quarters become throwing stars and a bite of kimchi threatens a white shirt that has just been dry cleaned. But beyond the clink of tongs and thwack of punches, another story unfolds — one about belonging.  

Courtesy of Shane Chung ’24

The film is “my excuse to capitalize on my love of martial arts movies,” says Chung, but it’s also a chance to reflect on his Korean American identity.  

Chung made the film during his senior year at Northwestern, while taking the Directing for the Screen module. Everyone involved in Check Please, including the actors, fight choreographer and camera and production crews, is a Wildcat.  

A year after Chung completed the 10-minute film, Check Please has charmed audiences at Northwestern and beyond. It has screened at a long list of festivals, including the Palm Springs International ShortFest, the largest short film festival in the U.S. It won best comedy at the 2025 CineYouth Showcase in Chicago and the 2025 Chicago Southland International Film Festival, where it also was named Best of the Fest. The film has also received nods for directing, editing and audience favorite.  

Northwestern Magazine caught up with Chung to discuss the making of Check Please, its reception and what the future holds.  

What’s the plot of the film? 

Check Please is a martial arts action comedy about two Koreans who can’t agree on who’s treating whom to dinner. Neither will back down. … Then the confrontation becomes physical, and they start beating the shit out of each other. It’s an homage to ’90s Hong Kong action cinema and films starring guys like Jackie Chan and Steven Chow. It’s goofy and zany. These two characters in Check Please are dead serious, but to us, it’s funny.  

What inspired you to write Check Please? 

One time I went to dinner with my mom and her friends in Korea. They were chatting it up, but when it came time to pay the bill, the claws really came out. It got super serious, and I was like, “Wow, this is funny. I bet a lot of people would find this relatable, especially Asians.” This is such a central part of our culture. So I thought, “How far you could possibly take a conflict over the check?” 

One protagonist is Korean American, but he’s never been to Korea, while the other is a recent Korean immigrant to the U.S. Why did you choose to have them specifically be in conflict? 

This film — it’s dumb fun — but also I wanted to talk about something that’s personal to me: being Korean American and feeling between worlds — being too Korean for America and being too American for Korea, feeling like a perpetual foreigner. I felt this way a long time ago. … The way that I yearned to be in Korea and blend in there is kind of the opposite of how immigrants from Korea want to be more American and feel more assimilated. We’re both yearning for what the other person has. That was really the cornerstone — I wanted to put these two people from the diaspora in conversation with each other and highlight that they perhaps had more in common than they thought.

You’ve earned several audience choice awards at film festivals. Why do you think people are connecting with this film? 

Honestly, the response has been surprising to me. I think audiences are responding to the action and comedy — it is a crowd pleaser and meant to be watched with a rowdy crowd. But I also think comedy is a way to “Trojan horse” more complex thoughts and thorny emotions into a film and address subjects that people normally may not choose to engage with. And these topics of belonging or alienation or assimilation and nationality and identity perhaps surprise audiences with how close to home they hit. Some people come up to me afterward and say something like, “Hey, I’m a Mexican American, and I really felt seen by your film.” And I was like, “I made this for you.”  

Was there an influential experience or professor during your time at Northwestern? 

Extracurricular filmmaking at Northwestern is really robust. From quarter one, I was on as many film sets as I could get on — almost every weekend. That helped me hone my idea of what it takes to be a filmmaker. It also helped me to build up a Rolodex of people I could call upon when the time came to make my own thing. 

I made Check Please as part of the senior directing program. My adviser [professor] Spencer Parsons is part of the reason why this film is as good as it is. He nurtured my filmmaking passion and pushed me to make it the best it could be. I attribute decisions I made in the filmmaking process to his guidance and involvement. 

There are so many fight elements in just 10 minutes. How did those elements go from an idea to the final cut? 

One day I was like, “OK, we’re going to shoot this fight in a restaurant. I’m going to sit down and list every single thing that you could use as a weapon in a restaurant.” That started out as a long list, but then you whittle it down to the best stuff. The fight and stunt choreographer, Grace Wagner ’25, led these amazing rehearsals. We would say, “OK, how would you use a credit card as a dagger?” We would figure it out in rehearsal, and Grace would choreograph it with our actors. Then we would shoot it. There’s a lot on the cutting room floor. And we ended up excluding a lot of the dialogue, because why say words when you can punch?

Everyone who worked on this film was a Northwestern student, including the Foley team. (In filmmaking, Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to enhance the audio in postproduction.) Why was the extra work of doing Foley sound so important to you?  

Sound is 60% of a film. In the fight scenes, it makes the impact of the hits more punchy and cartoonish. We spent about 20 hours in Northwestern’s Foley pit doing footsteps and clothes rustling and punching raw chicken and breaking celery. One day I was in the booth making shirt noises for four hours, but that’s what it took to make this film sound as good as possible.  

I’m endlessly thankful for the incredible talent at Northwestern. This film would not have been possible without everyone who volunteered hundreds of hours to make it. 

What does the future hold for you? 

I’m working on the feature script for Check Please. The hope is to keep it goofy and silly, like a martial arts action comedy, because I feel like that genre was massively popular in the ’90s, and it kind of went away, but I feel like people still want to see it. So, that’s my pipe dream: to make Check Please: The Movie. 

Teresa Nowakowski ’23 is an internal communications editor in Northwestern’s Office of Global Marketing and Communications.