San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Race to raunchiness is a victory lap
Adele Lim is as surprised as anyone else is that her feature film debut actually exists.
The director of “Joy Ride” — a studio-backed, R-rated comedy centered on an ensemble of Asian American female and nonbinary stars, with a script by two Asian American women and a first-time director — knew that all those factors meant the chances they could result in a Hollywood movie were slim.
And, yet, when Lim, who co-wrote the script to the 2018 hit “Crazy Rich Asians,” and co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao shopped the script around, they were, incredibly enough, met only with support. Lim spoke to The Chronicle by Zoom about her film, the Asian American female gaze and the future of Hollywood amid the writers strike.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: This movie feels like a first of its kind as a raunchy comedy about Asian American women. Where did that conceit come from?
A: Cherry, Teresa and I, we all came from TV writing. We’ve been friends for a long time and we spent our whole careers writing for other people, people who did not look like us, and our favorite thing to do was to go out to dinner and crack each other up with all these disgusting, insane stories about our own dating lives or the messy, disgusting, thirsty lives of our friends. And we thought, you know what, why not us? Let’s write this movie for us. So we didn’t develop it. We didn’t pitch it, we broke the story in my living room every Thursday. Cherry and Teresa wrote it, and we did it to make ourselves happy.
Q: Was it a battle to get it made the way you wanted?
A: We were prepared for it to be a battle. We were prepared for it to be difficult. And here’s the secret: It really wasn’t. I think it was at the right time and place. We met with Point Grey, which is Seth Rogen’s company, and they read it. R-rated comedies are their bread and butter, and they were like, we want to do this. We see your vision and we want to lean into it.
And then we thought, well,
it’s going to get sold to Lionsgate. Is Lionsgate going to be cool? At some point are grownups going to step in and be like, no, you can’t have a big vagina tattoo? And that never happened. They laughed their asses off and said, go with God, lean harder.
Q: For better or worse, this movie will be seen through the lens of representational politics — I imagine it can be a proud achievement, but also reductive for your film to be perceived first and foremost as a “first” of sorts. What is your relationship to that lens?
A: This is my hope and dream for all of us: that we
wake up in the morning and we don’t think about, do I have to break a barrier? I don’t want to have to break a barrier. I want to just be able to tell an insane, ridiculous romp of a story and have it be celebrated. I don’t want to have to deal with the “is it going to be a first of its kind?”
I am so proud of our movie that it does break barriers, that it is the first of its kind, but I don’t want us to be. I want us to be the first of a hundred disgusting, nasty stories from the AAPI community (laughs). Q: The tone of the film, a raunchy, balls-to-the-wall comedy, specifically pushes up against stereotypes around Asian femininity.
Were you consciously responding to those perceptions?
A: Listen, I’m an Asian woman who came up in the entertainment industry. You cannot help but be cognizant of the reality of how Asian women are portrayed in TV and film — that you’re fetishized, exoticized in ways that are gross, especially if that’s one of very few depictions of yourself in media.
At the same time, you don’t want it to be a prison. You don’t want it to be something that you have to consciously work against. So, really, as much as we could, Cherry, Teresa and I set out to make
this movie, and it was with a f—-it attitude of: These are the stories we find really entertaining, but we’re going to tell it exactly how it is, and we are aware of the fact that Asian women have been sexualized a certain way. But it was from somebody else’s point of view.
We knew the chances of us experiencing those same pitfalls was close to nil because we were the ones behind the camera. It was going to be with a strong female gaze and with a strong Asian female gaze. When we’re shooting the sex montage, at no point in this movie is the Asian female body shot for titillating purposes. I can’t say the same for the Asian male body (in the movie). I’ll just cop to it: Please be titillated by the Asian male body. I want people getting real thirsty about that. But for the women, it’s the same way men get to be sexually gross and weird in their own R-rated comedies — that’s the space I wanted us to have.
Q: What was your process of putting together this ensemble
cast?
A: We started with the character of Audrey because Audrey is the character you are following and has to hold the heart of the movie. And we were looking for a unicorn, somebody who could do amazing comedy and still be able to have the chops and relatability to get the audience to fall in love with them. And Ashley Park was that person. I don’t think there was anyone else we even considered.
Sherry Cola opened for (Ronnie Chieng, who stars in the film) and I had met her socially. I was just like, oh, my God, here she is just walking onstage like she owns the damn place — that’s obviously Lolo. With the character of Kat, we looked at a lot of people, but at the end of the day, Steph Hsu just had it.
Sabrina Wu we basically snatched from the cradle of college. They had done some stand-up, and our casting director had found these YouTube videos and sent it to us and we’re like, who is this magical creature? With every single one of them, even though Hollywood wasn’t necessarily aware of them,
they had been honing their craft.
Q: Amid the writers strike and growing uncertainty in Hollywood , do you think it’ll become harder for a film like yours to get made in the near future?
A: Whenever there is a big adjustment in the industry, one of the first casualties are projects that are minority-led. Because when times are easy, it’s easy for people to say, oh, we believe in diverse storytelling. When times are tough, people are like, we need movies to do well and make money.
My big hope for our community in entertainment is that we are given opportunities to fail like everybody else. If an action movie doesn’t do well, we don’t say like, oh, well, people are tired of seeing white guys in action movies. Whereas if we had an Asian star of an action movie, chances are our otherness would be blamed. We can’t change that overnight. It has to come with us just fearlessly telling our stories and fully expecting we should have some flops. We should be able to swing and miss a few times.