The writer/director discusses her critically-acclaimed film
Opening today, The Farewell tells the story of a Chinese family dealing with the cancer diagnosis of their matriarch. They have decided to keep the news from her, causing consternation for American émigré Billi (played by Awkwafina). Writer/director Lulu Wang sat down to talk about this tale taken from her real life and “based on a lie.”
Rod Machen: I’d like to start in the worst possible way to do an interview, with me talking. The third most-spoken language in Texas is Vietnamese. My children go to a pubic school here in Austin that has a dual-language program with Vietnamese, so when they first started it I thought: At some point, they’re going to learn about the Vietnam War. Is that going to be odd? So I went to the kindergarten teacher and asked, “What’s that like, how do you do that transition where the reason we’re here is because of a tragedy?” She was like, “You know, in my family we never talked about it. Growing up, we’d leave that in the past. We’re in America, this is all new…” I should have known how bad my assumptions are. I was thinking about things one way, but these people were thinking about it in a different way. So all of that to lead up to: What part of the movie is explaining to a non-Chinese audience the unique qualities that they might not know of a Chinese family?
Lulu Wang: I really did not want to explain to the audience. I didn’t make the film from that perspective, like, “How do I tell this story to my audience?” It was, in a way, more like, “How do I put them in Billi’s shoes and have them go on the journey that she goes on?” So anytime where things needed to be explained to Billi as an American is when the audience also gets an explanation. When there are times of confusion and chaos and Billi never got that explanation, then the audience doesn’t get that either. For example, this question of “Should we tell her? It feels wrong, I think we should tell her.” That, and then different family members give different answers to that. It’s a real question that I had, and that Billi has. It’s the driving force of the movie, is her trying to understand what’s the right thing to do here. But in terms of the wedding, for example, I didn’t want to explain that a Chinese wedding looks different than an American wedding. I just throw the audience into it, because that was my experience. I would go, “Oh, there’s a wedding,” and I’d show up and I was like, “Oh, this is it. It’s in the daytime, and some people are in t-shirts and some people are wearing gowns. Are there going to be speeches, what’s happening? Is there going to be an actual wedding? Oh, this is it! Okay, now we’re going home. That was it! That was the wedding!” I didn’t get an explanation of what to expect for the wedding, I was just thrown into it. You’re fully immersed, and then it’s over.
RM: So differences accounted for, I’m struck with the universality of some of the movie. Your grandmother seems very much of a piece with my own, even though they’re of different geographical backgrounds and otherwise. How did you think about that commonality between different cultures?
LW: For the movie? That’s the funny thing, I didn’t. I wasn’t trying to create a grandmother that was representative of all grandmothers all over the world. I was just trying to channel my own grandmother the best I could through this character. For me, my grandmother is as strong as she is warm. She’s a matriarch in every sense of the word; she’s a leader and she brings everyone together. But she’s also imperfect; she has her prejudices, she has her way of viewing the world. Sometimes we don’t see things the same way, but we find a funny way of dealing with it. So I think that’s what’s amazing with this film. I obviously made it in America, with American producers who are not Chinese or Chinese-American. They’re not Asian at all, and so they don’t necessarily understand a lot of stuff. There are times when we’d sit at a table and talk about the script, and they would say, “Are people going to get this? Should we explain it a little bit more?” I had to push back and say that I didn’t want to do that. So it’s been pretty amazing to see that, in fighting for the specificity of things and in not explaining all of these characters. Despite the fact that I wanted to make things as specific as possible to my specific family, not trying to represent all of China or anything, just: this is my family, this is my story. Through that, people see their own families.
RM: If your film is lucky enough to be involved in awards season, I absolutely would love to see Zhao Shuzhen up for supporting actress. Amazing. How well did she embody your real-life grandmother?
LW: She was so great, I love her so much. In the beginning of shooting, I would say that she knew that she was playing my real-life grandmother, and so she really wanted to do the part justice. So she was very precious with the role in the beginning, she was incredibly kind and warm and sweet. That is very much true to this actress’ nature on the project. They said on set, they called her “Kitty” because she is so mild-mannered. I actually had to pull her away from that and say that my grandmother is not that. She’s kind and she’s warm, but she’s not mild-mannered at all. You have to really be tough and be bossy and demand things and all of that. She had a hard time doing it. I’d say, “More.” She’d go, “More?!” But by the time we wrapped production, it was so natural to her. She completely understood the character by the end and she was sad to leave this role. She was like, “I embodied her spirit and her command, and I don’t want to leave that. I want to take a little bit of that with me into my own life.”
RM: That’s great. Final question, the internet tells me that you know Barry Jenkins.
LW: (Laughs) I do know him. [Ed. note: They are dating.]
RM: I think he is the absolute best at incorporating sound design in a film, and I felt a lot of that in your movie, as well. How did music affect what I call the “visceral feel” of the movie?
LW: I am classically trained as a pianist, so music’s always been a big part of my life. I think that music says so much about culture, the music that we grow up listening to. Sometimes, it can feel very limiting. If you’re making an Asian film, it’s got to have Asian music. Growing up in the States, I listened to everything; my influences are varied. When I’m writing, I always listen to a lot of music to inspire the tone. I was listening to Leonard Cohen; he died around this time and he became very religious and spiritual as he got older, and I always felt like he was the voice of God. So I listened to him a lot, and the spirituality of that really came across for me while writing the script. But I was also listening to anything that felt melodramatic, like the old Italian operas. I was very inspired by the idea of a Greek choir, so I wanted the music to be representative of the internal emotions of the characters. So you’d have these really quiet scenes where they’re not talking about their feelings, but then you cut and you hear music, and they’re just walking down a hallway, right? But that music almost screams what they’re feeling on the inside. It’s this juxtaposition of the quiet external/the inactive external with this very loud, emotive, internal music.
