The Black List Interview: Lulu Wang on THE FAREWELL
Lulu Wang’s second feature THE FAREWELL arrives in cinemas today following an unconventional path to the screen. First performed as a This American Life piece by Wang, THE FAREWELL tells the true story of the unique way Wang’s Chinese family dealt with a frightening diagnosis for Wang’s grandmother (as played by Zhao Shuzhen in the film.) In telling her family’s own story, Wang creates a rich character drama, equally filled with laughter and tears — and pulls off one of the most surprising endings of the year in the process. I spoke to Wang as a part of a roundtable conversation with critics Carla Renata and Thuc Doan Nguyen. Our collective conversation, which touches on THE FAREWELL’s big Sundance premiere, how she cast actors to play her own family, and much more, is below.
Carla Renata: We were talking about filmmaking before you got here, and I was saying that I’m hoping that we get to a day where we don’t have to have the “female filmmaker/male filmmaker” conversation — it’s just about filmmakers. How do you feel about this disparity in the world of filmmaking, especially as it pertains to female film critics and female filmmakers?
Lulu Wang: I agree with you completely — I think craft is colorblind. When I’m approaching a film, I look at all kinds of films as references. And films that are interesting more in terms of style, right? I don’t necessarily look at a film based on culture — it’s more about how to frame a shot, what are some of the family films that inspired me, how do I do comedy in a way that hasn’t been done before, how do I show pathos and humor in the same frame. I draw from all sorts of inspiration. And it’s not about, how do you make Asian-American family drama — to me, “Asian-American” isn’t a genre of filmmaking!
CR: It’s human!
LW: It’s human! Like, what does a white drama look like? [laughs] Those filmmakers don’t go into telling a story thinking about identity. In many ways, when I was approaching this film about my family, I just set out to tell a story about a granddaughter and a grandmother, and make a film about family and about loss, grief, and guilt. We don’t look at ourselves everyday and go, “Oh my gosh, I’m Asian,” you know?
CR: I understand — it’s not like I’m looking in the mirror and saying “Oh, a black girl!”
LW: Exactly, or, “How do I do something really ASIAN today!” [laughs] I think about Hannah Gadsby’s NANETTE all the time — I watched it recently and I love it so much. She talks about when people ask her why there’s not enough lesbian content in her shows, and she goes, “I’m confused, I was onstage the entire time!” You know?! The story is about an Asian-American family because that is the texture of my life, that is who I am. Every story I tell is an Asian-American story because that is my voice, I can’t escape it.
Kate Hagen: There’s such an authentic sense of camaraderie in the central family in THE FAREWELL. I was wondering if there was anything special you did to create that environment on or off set in terms of getting your cast to bond with each other — when we’re hanging out with the family in this film, it’s like we’re peering into a window on their actual life.
LW: Everybody in my cast came from a different part of the world — the mother (Diana Lin) came from Australia, the grandmother and Little Nai Nai (Lu Hong) are all from China, Haibin (Jian Yongbo) is from the states, Awkwafina is from the states…I wanted them to really bond as a family. Mike Leigh is a huge reference for me — I’m very inspired by his films, but he gets like, 40 days to have the characters live together in a house, and then he turns the camera on them. I was not afforded that much time — I asked my producers “I wanna do Mike Leigh! Can I get 40 days?” and they were like, “You can get one dinner.” So that’s what I got.
I got everyone together, we ordered a bunch of food, everyone sat around the table, and we worked out some blocking with camera. It helped, definitely to introduce people. I encouraged everyone to meet up on their own outside of the set, outside of production. The woman who plays Nai Nai met up with my great-aunt, who plays herself in the movie, and they would walk through the park and call each other sister and really got to know each other as real sisters. You feel that chemistry! And I mean, hopefully on the next one, I’ll get even more time!
Thuc Doan Nguyen: When you started writing, did you know that 75% of the script would be in Mandarin?
LW: I think it was supposed to be more, actually. My parents and I speak Chinglish — we speak a lot of Chinese with English words thrown in there. In order to balance it out a little more, I felt like it was okay to have Billi (Awkwafina) and her parents speak primarily in English — I think it helps better to illustrate the juxtaposition of her relationship with her family in America, and then her relationship with them in China.
CR: Everyone feels caught between China — or the China that they left — and America in this film, which really captures that sense of in-between-ness. How does that fit into the movie as well as your own life?
LW: The interesting thing for me every time I go back to China is that it’s this interesting marriage of the familiar and the foreign. The familiar being memories and nostalgia and dreams, and photos and stories that you’ve heard from family; the foreign being that it’s a foreign country. I go back there and I don’t really speak the language enough to understand the news, to understand all the conversations — I miss out on a lot of culture because I don’t understand jokes and then everyone just laughs at me. And, you’re bombarded with sensory overload — there’s all of these sights and sounds and smells, and so I wanted to bring all of that into the movie. Because I sometimes yearn to go back home — whatever that means, right? To my childhood, to my idea of a place…and that place doesn’t exist anymore. And maybe never really existed.
KH: I was at the premiere of THE FAREWELL at Sundance, which was full of rapturous applause and sniffles. Sundance is such a landmark achievement for independent filmmakers — what was it like to premiere the film in Park City, and how was it watching the movie with an audience for the first time?
LW: Just getting in was so surreal and such a dream. [Sundance] is such a loving atmosphere — it’s all film lovers, it’s a very special place, it’s like a winter camp for cinephiles! And I was there the year before with my production company and just loved it, you know? I didn’t expect to be there, but everybody kept saying, “You’ll be coming back,” but I didn’t want to think about it. So actually being there and seeing the reactions…it was really surreal. You’re so loved and so well taken care of by Sundance, they’re like a family too — they’re people who love movies, and they get this kind of a movie. But you wonder if it’s going to work in the rest of the world, so that was always in the back of my mind — enjoy this moment, because it may not be the same when we’re out of Sundance, and you need to be prepared for that.
TDN: How long did the first draft take you to write? Did you use the notecard method?
LW: I used notecards at some points, but I spent really only about a year and a half developing this script, because I knew the story so well, I had many different versions of it already. By the time we were developing the movie, it was more about throwing everything up on a board and seeing which scenes could be combined, what could be trimmed down, and what could be cut out entirely. But the heart of the movie was always there, and it very much follows the emotions dynamics and arcs of my real family.
KH: Since we’re talking about the script, I was curious to know what the most challenging part of writing this screenplay was, especially as compared to crafting this story as a This American Life episode first. What was that like, the transition from story to This American Life to script to finished film?
LW: With This American Life, they’re journalists so they have a very investigative approach — I sort of wrote the story down, but they encouraged me to go deeper. They said: “We need to situate YOU in the scene,” because so often I was writing about a scene based on what I was observing, but I’m not observing myself, right? So, they’re the ones that really got me to ask: “Where are you in this scene? How are you feeling?” And even if you’re not directly interacting with the family and you’re observing, we need to feel that too. And so we went through the entire story and really crafted my presence in all of the scenes.
In terms of the challenges in adapting the story for the screen…movies always come with a market thing — instead of going “Tell me what happened, this is so interesting,” it was like, “Well, who is this story for?” Luckily, once I did This American Life, those questions weren’t being asked anymore. But the challenge then became well, this is a very intimate story that works for radio, but how do you get it to work on a bigger scale? And I didn’t always have the answers to certain questions — in the radio story, the protagonist is not very active. And in my real life, the protagonist is not active. [laughs]
That is the challenge: Billi cannot be an active protagonist because her very presence in the movie is to be inactive, to not talk, to not do anything crazy. There was a push to go, “Well, that’s not gonna work for a movie” because for a movie the protagonist has to be doing something, you can’t just have her sitting around. But then, anything that I made her do felt very artificial. So, I was trying to balance that tension, as well as the question of “How do you make a film visually interesting when you don’t have an active protagonist?” How do you carry that tension from scene to scene without people feeling that it gets repetitive, how do you do that visually? How do you do humor visually when you’re telling a joke? And I didn’t want to rely on characters doing a schtick or telling a joke.
KH: Everyone’s just spouting one-liners…
LW: Exactly, or like falling down the stairs. [laughs]
CR: Of all the stories you could’ve written about your family, why did you choose this particular story about Nai Nai, grief, and acceptance?
LW: When it happened, I immediately thought “This is what I’ve been saying all along, my family is ridiculous!” [laughs] It sort of summed it up in that way only my family could have done this — my life is filled with so many screwball set-ups! I think this particular scenario brought all of the things I love about my family — this story brought that range of emotions into one place in a very short period of time. All the fights my mother and I have always had about my career and my life and my choices, all the bad grades I got — all of that came out during this week.
My parents are storytellers: My mother was a writer, my father was a diplomat in the Soviet Union, and so he’s very open. We just had a dinner — The New York Times was photographing us and writing a story about the dinner. The reporter came up to me halfway through and was like, “I love your dad, he’s awesome!” and I said “It’s because he’s a diplomat!” and she was like “Yeah in the Soviet Union, he told me the whole thing!” and I was just like…oh my god. She would sometimes ask him questions and he would start to answer and I’d be like, “Dad, dad — I know you’ve had a few drinks, keep in mind this is gonna be in The New York Times next week.”
TDN: What’s next for you?
LW: I’m working on a couple of things! Since I cut my brother out of this movie (he was working at the time and he didn’t come to the wedding) and I made Billi an only child, I’m doing a TV show that I just set up around him. He’s a young Chinese-American chef working in a very interesting industry that’s filled with toxic masculinity — as well as racism, sexism, and appropriation. So the show is about what it’s like being the child of a first-generation immigrant family working in this “fine dining” restaurant industry. Then the other project is a feature film that is based on a short story, and it’s a very grounded sci-fi story. It still explores, continues to explore the dynamics of family, but in a near-future setting.
