His dream hits the big screen

When 28-year-old director Jon Chu was in pre-production on “Step Up 2 the Streets,” which opened in theaters Thursday, he and his team used to walk across the Disney’s Burbank lot at 3 a.m. to visit the statue of Walt Disney. The studio’s patriarch has his arm extended in front of him, and Chu and his colleagues would put their tired heads underneath his sculpted hand.

“It’s kind of crazy, but it’s just a superstitious thing we did,” Chu recalled. “He would bless us every night.”

Quirky rituals aside, it does seem like someone has been watching over Chu’s charmed career. The youngest of five children of immigrant parents, Chu was raised tap dancing, drawing and playing piano, drums, saxophone, violin and guitar. In high school, he filmed weddings and bar mitzvahs and convinced his teachers to let him turn in video reports instead of papers.

As an undergraduate at USC, he made three well-received musical shorts, “Silent Beats,” “Gwai Lo” and “When the Kids Are Away,” which led to him signing with the William Morris Agency. After just a few short months, he’d been hired to direct an $80-million remake of the classic 1963 musical “Bye Bye Birdie.”

It was a remarkable turn of events for someone barely out of school, but Chu said that he learned from a very young age to relentlessly pursue his goals from his father, who founded Chef Chu’s, a staple of Chinese cuisine in Palo Alto. “That’s why [my parents] always said to us kids, that America’s the greatest place because if you work hard, you can do anything you want,” Chu said.

Chu’s shorts also demonstrated his facility with large-scale projects. “My short musical was a big production,” says Chu. “We did it for $20,000. It’s period. We have a 50-piece orchestra, 20-piece vocal choir, 150 actors and dancers in it. And I think people could say, ‘At least he can handle doing something a little flashy that has heart to it.’ ”

But the remake never materialized. Chu spent two years in pre-production on “Birdie” before Sony pulled the plug after a string of box office underperformers, including “Bewitched” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”

Around the same time, though, Steven Spielberg saw “When the Kids Are Away” and asked to meet Chu. “We had, like, a three-hour meeting talking about musicals, about the movies. He invited me back the next week, and then he invited me to his set. It was ‘The Terminal’ at the time. I think that just having Steven say ‘I like you’ helped everything around me.”

Spielberg also bought Chu’s pitch for an angsty teen musical set in San Francisco, but that project fell by the wayside with the DreamWorks sale to Paramount in 2005. “The Prom,” a romantic comedy that Chu was attached to direct for Lionsgate, also failed to move into production when star Shia LaBeouf left to do “Disturbia” and “Transformers” -- both of which, incidentally, were produced by DreamWorks.

That’s when Chu received the offer to direct “Step Up 2.” “It was a really bad script, and it was direct-to-DVD too,” says Chu. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ Then [producer] Adam Shankman called me, and he said, ‘Jon, you can do anything you want.’ It had been five years, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, ‘Jon, if you are a true storyteller, if they’re saying you can do whatever you want, then you have to do this.’ ”

Chu tripled the dance numbers, wrote a 15-page treatment and put together a brief sample dance video. “When he came in and did his pitch, he did this extraordinary visual presentation,” recalls Shankman. “Jon’s vision was so big and clear and complete, and we realized that we could never do the movie as Jon wanted to make it for the $5 million that it would take to go straight to video. And then my sister [and producing partner Jennifer Gibgot] and I started saying, ‘Well, [‘Step Up’] was such a big success for Disney, why don’t we just bring it in and give them the opportunity to get involved again?”

The young filmmaker met with the executives at the studio, and within 20 minutes, they offered him the Valentine’s Day slot for his revamped story of a street dancer (Briana Evigan) who joins forces with the Maryland School of the Arts’ top student (Robert Hoffman) to form her own crew.

“The most remarkable thing for me about Jon is just all the ideas he’s always coming up with for how to tell a story better,” says Hoffman.

Adds Evigan: “Jon just has a different way with people than a lot of others do. He’s really, really good at communicating what he wants. He was there to hang out and talk about whatever else was going on in our lives and try to tie some of that into the movie so it would come off better on screen.”

Chu wanted the dance in “Step Up 2” to have an almost superhuman quality to it. Taking his inspiration from such things as “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Matrix” and YouTube and MySpace videos, he added a battle involving trampolines, a subway scene inspired by online dance pranks and a finale using two blocks of rain machines. Then he hired three of the world’s best choreographers -- Nadine “Hi Hat” Ruffin, Jamal Sims and Dave Scott.

“I’m just excited that after all these years, I finally got to make a movie,” says Chu. “I got to prove to my parents that it’s for real, that it’s not just some fantasy thing that I’m making up in my mind. They get to see the posters in their hometown. They get to watch it in the theater. There’s definitely a trust that they believed in me, and I wanted to show that they were believing in the right thing.”