No./18 Buckle up for a road trip with a difference
JOY RIDE’S director on bringing a new kind of raucous comedy to the screen
FEW PEOPLE CAN say that they’ve followed up a Disney animated feature with a buddy comedy that involves, amongst other things, “going to China to get laid by the Chinese basketball team”. But for Adele Lim, co-writer of Raya And The Last Dragon and before that the box-office smash Crazy Rich Asians, no other film would do for her directorial debut. “My natural proclivities are nasty and ratchet, and my friends are that way too,” Lim cheerfully tells Empire. Those inclinations have led to Joy Ride, an R-rated comedy about four best friends who travel from America to Asia so that Audrey (Ashley Park) can track down her birth mother in order to close a big business deal.
The film is written by Lim’s longterm pals Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong. United by a common desire to make a comedy about Asian-american women like themselves growing up in their twenties, Lim says, “We got together on my couch every Thursday, and we started [writing down] all of these stories inspired by our lives and our friends’ lives.” The plot, the director explains, is a thinly veiled excuse “to have this ridiculous romp about these four messy friends”, in this case Audrey, her childhood friend Lolo (comedian Sherry Cola), Lolo’s oddball cousin Deadeye (newcomer Sabrina Wu) and college-friend-turned-chinesesoap-star Kat (Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu).
It’s also a way for Lim to pay homage to the films she loves. It’s no coincidence that
Joy Ride is co-produced by Seth Rogen and his creative partner Evan Goldberg, whose brand of adult comedies have been a huge influence on the film. “[The] 40-Year-old Virgin and The Hangover, those are the movies that we loved and that we were screaming at in the theatre,” Lim says. “But we never got to see ourselves in those roles.”
Now, not only has Lim made her risqué dream a feature-length reality, she’s doing it with an Oscar-recognised actor in her midst, with Hsu coasting in off her EEAAO success. “Selfishly, I’m glad we nabbed her before [that film] came out,” laughs Lim. “I don’t know if she’d have done our strange movie now she’s got Ryan Gosling knocking at her door.” Regardless, Lim is grateful for what EEAAO has brought to her community. “Besides being this brilliant, insane, ridiculously creative movie, it platformed Asian-american actors in a way that the world hadn’t seen before,” she says, before expressing hope that the other women in her film will go on to receive that same kind of platform. If you can win over the Chinese basketball team, the rest of the world shouldn’t be a problem.
JOY RIDE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 23 JUNE