Director Lulu Wang relates a deeply personal story in her new film The Farewell. She tells Laura Harding 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 is seated at a boardroom table and has propped up a sparkly new iPhone using a takeaway coffee cup, a water glass and a hardback book and is pointing the lens right at me.
The phone keeps slipping down out of its makeshift holder but Wang is not deterred, constantly re-positioning her props to keep the camera in place.
“I’m doing a short film with this new Apple phone so I decided to document some of my press.”
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 and is based on her family experiences.
It follows Chinese-born, USraised Billi (played by Crazy Rich Asians star Awkwafina) who learns her grandmother Nai-Nai is terminally ill and is horrified when her family in China say they have no plans to tell her about her diagnosis.
“I was truly torn between my family and respecting their decision, and what I felt to be unethical,” Wang 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 Wang had, when 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,” Wang 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 headed for the big screen, when Wang 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 to 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,