Wang already had one film under her belt - her 2014 debut Posthumous - which, by her own admission, hadn’t quite turned out the way she’d hoped.
The fairwell storyo n the radio movie#
“Like, a million times over! And that’s not the story I want to tell or the movie I want to make. “It’s like, I see the film you’re envisioning - because that film already exists!” Wang adds. But: What if the main character is the bride, she breaks up with her white boyfriend, they have to get married to keep this lie to Grandma going, and then guess who falls back in love, and….’ “‘Yeah, it’s great that you have this premise and that the grandmother is dying. “That was they wanted out of this,” she admits. When Wang first started pitching what would become The Farewell to producers, it was that type of film - what the director calls “ My Big Fat Chinese Family Wedding” - that they expected to sign on for. Not just limiting as a filmmaker - like limiting as a human being.” “And that feels very limiting, at least for me. “I do think that when you hear ‘Chinese family drama-comedy,’ you immediately get a sense of what that is supposed to be,” she says. Spend more than a few minutes in Wang’s company, and you realize that she has zero interest in anything even close to pandering. There’s a version of this movie in some alternate universe where the laughs are broad, your heartstrings are constantly under attack, everyone learns a life lesson, and you’re left with the recognizable taste of saccharine in your mouth. It’s already been dubbed a bona fide “indie blockbuster” success, and it doesn’t even go into national release until August 2nd.īut it’s the surprisingly unsentimental mix of personal storytelling and universal, culture-clash dynamics that’s made The Farewell stand out - the melding of the familiar and the specific, the accessible and the art-house aestheticized, that comes from a singular voice. And after opening in New York and Los Angeles last weekend, it had, according to Variety,the best per-screen average of 2019 to date. The breakout hit of this year’s Sundance festival - after a bidding war, it was picked up for a reported $7 million by A24 - the movie has left jaded press corps in tears and generated serious awards chatter for its star. The Farewell, Wang’s dramedy about her experience, turns her misadventure into a funny, bittersweet story about a Chinese-American woman named Billi ( Crazy Rich Asians‘ Awkwafina) caught between maintaining a shiny, happy deception and the painful process of saying goodbye to a loved one.
But I could just tell there was something really rich there.” The whole atmosphere of the trip, the wild way we were keeping this story up … I wasn’t sure how I was going to turn it into a film. “Even as I’m going through all of this shock and the sorrow, the grief and confusion,” the writer-director says, recalling the visit years later, “I had the feeling that: This is a movie. The only caveat: Nobody could tell Nai Nai the truth. Then Wang’s relatives fast-tracked a cousin’s planned wedding as an excuse for everyone to visit the elderly matriarch one last time. The family, however, told “Nai Nai” that she was just fine, that the doctor had given her a clean bill of health. Lulu Wang was in Berlin in 2013, editing her first film, when she got the call: Her grandmother in China, who’d briefly taken her in when her parents fled the country in 1989, was terminally ill.
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