‘I was truly torn between my family and what I felt to be unethical’
Director Lulu Wang tells Laura Harding about the true story behind her hit film The Farewell
Do 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, Us-raised 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 her 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 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 the podcast and then producers came to me after hearing it on the radio saying, ‘Have you ever considered making this a film?’”
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 much 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.”
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 Wang is the first to admit she wasn’t always keen on her for the part, until she saw her audition tape.
Wang was also nervous because Awkwafina did not speak a great deal of Mandarin.
“Atfirstitwasnotamarkin her favour. The fact that her Chinese wasn’t so good, I felt was not true to reality because I 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,” Wang replies. “Even more so now there is a film.”
“I was not able to find producers or financiers”