Making the film gave me compassion for my family’s decision not to tell grandma she was
Director Lulu Wang’s new film, The Farewell, is a deeply personal story. She tells how making a movie about her own experiences changed how she felt about her family O YOU mind if I film a little bit?”
The director Lulu Wang has propped up a sparkly new iPhone and is pointing the lens right at me.
“I’m doing a short film with this new Apple phone so I decided to document some of my press,” she explains.
She has been doing a lot of press of late, as she rides the huge wave of success with her new film The Farewell, which was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival.
It follows Chinese-born, US-raised Billi (played by Crazy Rich Asians star Awkwafina) who learns her grandmother or ‘Nai Nai’ is terminally ill and is horrified when her family in China say they have no plans to tell her about her diagnosis.
Also written by Lulu, it is based on her own family experiences when her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and her family decided to keep the diagnosis from her.
“I was truly torn between my family and respecting their decision, and what I felt to be unethical,” Lulu says.
“In the exploration of making the film and examining both sides of it, I think I came out with a much more balanced view of the two sides.”
When Billi, who lives in New York, finds out Nai Nai has been given weeks to live, the whole family reunite in Changchun to see the matriarch. The guise of a rushed family wedding gives them an excuse to gather round her, without alerting her to the fatal illness.
One of the most poignant scenes recreates a real conversation Lulu had – Billi’s uncle explains to her it is the duty of the family to carry the emotional burden of the news, and to tell her grandmother would be a selfish act to alleviate her own guilt.
“I always felt like the selfish factor line was something that everyone felt towards the west and towards me as a westerner,” Lulu remembers.
“They felt like that was an influence of being westernised because it is a more ‘selfish’, individualistic culture.
“I talked to my uncle and he said those specific words to me about carrying the burden.”
She pauses. “Making the film gave me a lot more compassion for their decision, because throughout the process I had to interview them and ask them questions and really come to have a greater understanding.
“I think that is what was so great about this process, that it wasn’t just like I knew the story, I knew the film I had to make, and I knew what I wanted to say – it was a true exploration.”
The exploration actually started before the story was heading for the big screen, when Lulu recounted it on an episode of the hit podcast This American Life.
“I always wanted it to be a film, as a filmmaker that is my natural inclination, but I pitched it around town and was not able to find producers or financiers and that is when I set it aside for quite a while.
“When I met a producer from This American Life it was always in the back of my head, trying to find a way to tell this story so I brought it up with him and we ended up doing it for This American Life and then producers came to me after hearing it on the radio saying, ‘Have you ever considered making this a film?”’
She laughs. “Funny you should say that!”
Making the film gave her the opportunity to return to China and even cast her grandmother’s sister, Lu Hong (known as Little Nai Nai), as herself.
“In the beginning we just didn’t know if she could act, as much as I loved her,” she laughs.
“I initially thought about casting her to play Nai Nai herself but because she doesn’t act, it’s harder for her to play a different character.
“So then I thought she should just play herself, instead of her playing her sister and an actress playing her.
“It took a few auditions before I could realise that she could do it because she kept trying to act and then when I said, ‘Just be yourself, just talk to me like you would normally’, and when she did that all of the emotions came out, because she was talking about her real life, her real experiences.”
She showed the tape to the film’s producers, who were blown away by her performance but worried being in the film would be traumatic for the older woman.
“They asked, ‘Is this unethical for us to put her through this because she has to revisit and relive these experiences?’ but she said, ‘No, I think it’s actually really therapeutic to talk about it’.”
Starring opposite Little Nai Nai is the actress and rapper Awkwafina, best known for her comedic roles in Crazy Rich Asians and Ocean’s 8 and her viral YouTube videos.
She has already won critical acclaim for the role but Lulu is the first to admit she wasn’t always keen on her for the part.
“We cast her before Crazy Rich Asians came out, Ocean’s 8, she was not famous, I knew her from her rap videos on YouTube and I knew she did some comedic acting but I hadn’t really paid that much attention.
“I hadn’t seen a lot of those films when I met her so it was really just that I was worried that my producers only wanted her because she’s an influencer but her audition tape is what really convinced me.
“I saw her performance on the tape and realised she has tremendous Zhao Shuzhen, centre, as Nai Nai and Awkwafina, second left, as Billi Wang, pose for a family portrait. Right, writerdirector Lulu Wang, who drew on her own family story for the film
range.”
Lulu was also nervous because Awkwafina did not speak great Mandarin.
“At first it was not a mark in her favour. The fact that her Chinese wasn’t so good, I felt was not true to reality because I actually did speak it and I was worried about the connection she would be able to form with the grandmother if she spoke such little Chinese.
“But we realised that she spoke enough that she could say the basic things and have that connection but not so much that she felt she was more native like I am, or like I can seem, and it just made it that much clearer that her awful Chinese makes her much more foreign, much more a fish out of water.”
Are her family still convinced they did the right thing in not telling Nai Nai? “Yes, absolutely,” Lulu replies. “Even more so now there is a film.”