The Half of It director Alice Wu says her Netflix hit — imagine an '80s teen comedy with a gay Chinese-American girl as the hero — came from her college relationship with a straight guy.

"In best friendships, there is kind of a romance in it," she says. Her effort to understand the complicated feelings around that dynamic were the first seeds of the film.

Wu, who enrolled in MIT at age 16, talks about growing up in the Bay Area before it was a tech Mecca, red states and blue states, and the years she spent attending a Mormon church even though she wasn't Mormon. She also explains why she didn't set the film in the past.

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