Writer-Director Lulu Wang Talks The 8 Truths of 'THE FAREWELL', a Family Movie About One Big Lie

*The following interview contains spoilers for the movie ‘The Farewell’, as it is based on the real life story of Lulu Wang and, in a suiting intersection between art and artist, to speak about one is to speak about the other.

The single thought I had exiting A24’s The Farewell, a semi-autobiographical drama about writer-director Lulu Wang’s family’s choice to keep the family matriarch in the dark about her terminal cancer diagnosis, was “What does Nai Nai think of all this?” Wang’s film, a certifiable critical darling and indie box office stunner, reveals in the closing moments that, despite doctoral pessimism, her grandma is still alive and kicking today. The real shocker though came when Wang admitted that even though her Nai Nai is still with us, she still is completely in the dark when it comes to her health. Despite that fact that she visited the very film set where her granddaughter was making a movie about the whole, deeply personal experience.

I sat down with Lulu Wang and friend and fellow Seattle film critic and correspondent for the Seattle Gay News Sara Fetter and dug into the complex juggling act that is making a family movie about your family, all the while keeping a big secret, and all the angst and personal drama that comes attached with mixing family and filmmaking.

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1. On whether she’s concerned that the diagnosis, vis-a-vis the movie she’s made, will end up getting back to her Nei Nei:

Lulu Wang: Maybe, yeah. I mean I’m a little concerned. But my family’s sort of on top of it and she lives in a… she lives a very isolated life. But she has the internet, so yeah, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. And I just heard that the trailer is out in China. People have seen the trailer in China. Our crew told me that, so I’m like, fuck. I hope she hasn’t seen it. But it’s like a specialty movie trailer site where they saw it, so I don’t know. But she’s also not doing great health-wise, so it’s sort of… we’re just waiting to see.

2. On balancing truth and fiction:

LW: I just really asked myself what is the film about. It’s about how different members of a family grieve and their relationships to the impending death, and also this lie. So I just try to keep those relationships, like the relationship to grandma and their relationship to death and her impending death really authentic. And I tried to look at, well what do we need to know about these characters to understand why they feel the way they do. For example with dad and uncle, their guilt. Part of losing her is also to grapple with the guilt that they haven’t been around, that they left. And so that’s where I really tried to stay true. Whereas certain facts, like when they go to the hospital or the chronological sequence and all of that is not as important.

3. On lying for the greater good:

LW: I don’t know if lying for the greater good is right, and I don’t know if this lie was right, but I do know that I thought that it was really wrong before, but this lie has enabled me to make this movie. And not only that, but the lie has enabled me to go back to China and spend three months with my grandmother in her hometown, where she was able to meet all of my colleagues and come to the movie set where I’m directing. I mean, never in her life or mine did I ever think that she would actually be able to be on my movie set and watch me do what I… I didn’t even know if I would ever make movies, much less have my grandma there to witness it.

And so, I don’t think that when I was back in 2013 trying to stop the lie from happening, could’ve imagined what it would lead to. And so I think that says so much about how life works, is that we try to control things, but that sometimes the universe has other plans.

4. On the act of discovery how you feel about something by making art about it:

LW: I think that I stand where I kind of always have in many ways, where I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. I think that there’s a different… I think that every situation is different. Every family is different. And so I don’t think that I have a clearer answer now than I did even back then. In fact, I don’t even know if I would do it, or how I would want to deal with it in my own personal life. And if I was the one making those choices… and I don’t think that the movie is about that. I think so much of life is about the gray zone and trying to grapple with it, and trying to… and letting go of our need for answers and for sort of this concrete, black and white way of looking at things.

5. On her Nei Nei coming to visit the set for a movie that’s secretly all about her:

LW: [It was] just crazy. I mean it’s really surreal because I haven’t been back to China, like living there since I was six years old. And so, she would come to set with a bunch of fruit. Or sometimes when we were shooting in the neighborhood or scouting in the neighborhood, the closest bathroom would be just to go to her apartment, so I’d bring my crew and I’d be like, “Grandma, we’re here to use your bathroom.” And we’d all pee, and she’d hand us a bunch of bananas and chocolates. And I was like, “Grandma, we have enough food.” And she would not let us leave until we’d eaten the fruit or taken stuff back. And it’s just really wonderful and surreal, and just a real gift.

6. On distilling decades of family history into a 96-minute film:

LW: I think that it was challenging because there’s a lot about my family that I would have loved to include. I mean, there’s so many different sides. Like my father for example is a diplomat and he lived in the Soviet Union for many, many years before he met my mother, until he was entrapped by the KGB. None of that is in this movie. You’re like, that should be… but it just didn’t belong. Instead in this movie, he’s in his underwear and he’s drunk and he’s being rolled around on the bed. And so, how do I explain that to my father to say, “We’re not going to show these amazing life accomplishments, but we’re going to show the fact that you get drunk and wear red underwear.”

I think that in a way, I had to separate it from my family. That these are characters that serve a story. And so, I really focused on what the story is about, which is how people deal with grief differently. So the fact that he’s a diplomat doesn’t really come into play. But the fact that he left China when he was in his 30s or whatever, immigrated, hasn’t been around is important to how he’s dealing with this grief, because of the fact that he hasn’t been around and he has this guilt. And so I did that with all of the characters and figured out what was their relationship to grief and what was the information we needed to understand why this character was grieving in this particular way and kept it. Because I also had a bazillion characters in the movie. And I wanted to give everybody a little bit of texture.

7. On casting Awkwafina in the film as a “version” of herself:

LW: I knew it was Awkwafina as soon as she sent in a selfie. She and I met for coffee, and I felt like she was a very unconventional choice for the role. When my producers first brought her up, I was like, Awkwafina, first of all, it’s like a rapper name. Second of all, she hadn’t done Crazy Rich Asians or Ocean’s 8 and I hadn’t seen Dude or anything like that. So I knew of her from her music videos. So I was like, the girl who did My Vag? This is who you’re bringing as the dramatic lead of the movie? And they’re like, just meet with her. She loves the script, she feels very personally connected to it.

And when I saw her audition tape is when I knew because she just wasn’t even acting. She embodied the role in such a quiet way and had all of the emotions on her face. And it was actually in her moments of stillness and silence that I knew that she was the one for this role. Because throughout this movie, Billi isn’t able to speak her mind. And so often, it’s about seeing the conflict in her face, her internal conflict. And Awkwafina was able to do that so well.

8. On any overlap Lulu sees between herself and Awkwafina:

LW: I mean, I think that we’re actually very very different. I think that we’re more different than alike. So in casting her, I actually said to her, “You’re not playing me, so don’t try to mimic my behavior or the way I speak or anything like that.” Just because we are such different people, and I didn’t want Billi to feel like an impression, somebody doing an impression of somebody. I think that we’ve had some similar experiences, in the sense of growing up Asian American, female in this country. And we both studied abroad in Beijing. But aside from that, we’re quite different, and it was more about that I wrote this character based on my experience.

And that I asked Nora, which is Awkwafina’s real name, I asked Nora to bring Nora along. You know, Awkwafina, in many ways, is a character that she’s created, a stage name. So I said, “Forget about Awkwafina. Bring Nora along. Where you come from, losing your mother at four years old, being raised by your grandmother, the thought of potentially losing her one day, and put yourself in the shoes of this character and go on the journey with her.” And I think that’s how we were both able to bring our own experiences to the character.

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