Andrew Ahn on directing Lily Gladstone & Bowen Yang in The Wedding Banquet
Back in March, I had the pleasure of watching The Wedding Banquet at London’s BFI Flare film festival and director/co-writer Andrew Ahn came out afterwards for an onstage Q&A.
The Wedding Banquet, a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name, stars Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan as a lesbian couple (Lee and Angela) and a gay couple (Chris and Min) who are very close friends. Their friendship is tested when Tran agrees to marry Gi-chan so he can get a green card and she can receive money for IVF treatments. The concept may be a little wild, but I adored this hilarious and heartfelt romantic comedy.
Here are the highlights from his onstage Q&A during BFI Flare:
On his relationship with the original Ang Lee film
I love the Ang Lee film. It’s the first gay film I ever saw. I was an eight-year-old boy and my mum rented it from a video rental store, not realising that it was a queer film and we watched it as a family a little awkwardly. So the fact that it was the first gay film I ever saw that also happened to be Asian and is a story where it treats its characters with humanity, I think it put me on the right path and has really informed who I am as a person, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller. So I didn’t want to make this movie, you know, I didn’t want to do a reimagining but then I thought about how so much has changed for the queer community since 1993, one thing being now we can get married.
On assembling his cast and working with Yang again after Fire Island
I’m a little bit superstitious and I’m always scared to write specifically with someone in mind because it feels like you might ruin the possibility but of course, because I had worked with Bowen Yang before on Fire Island, there was something about Chris that I knew he could just nail. That kind of burden of choice and that millennial indecision. I was very excited to send him the script. (I) worked with our casting director Jenny Jue, who did such an incredible job. It really was kind of piece by piece, actor by actor. We never had an opportunity to do chemistry reads which is pretty wild for a rom-com but I, in my conversations with these actors, really felt strongly that there is a kind of spirit of generosity in each of them.
On creating the chemistry between the couples
In rehearsals, I had each of the couples create a secret that they would have just for each other – they would never tell me – and I think that immediately creates a sense of intimacy between two people. There’s a lot that I try to encourage but the actors really took it the next step.
On switching the location from Los Angeles to Seattle
The initial idea was to cheat Vancouver for Los Angeles. And then I went up there and it’s so beautiful and lush and green and I wanted to embrace the Pacific Northwest landscape. I felt like it should be American just because of some of the specificities, you know, the green card, so we set it in Seattle.
But that worked out really beautifully because Lily Gladstone is from Seattle, she grew up there. We went down to see her in her home neighbourhood and she took us for a tour around Seattle, giving us indigenous history and her own family history… I asked her, ‘What do drunk people eat in (Seattle)?’ and she said, ‘Dick’s. You should go to Dick’s.’ And so we put that into the movie. I took it not as an obstacle or an unfortunate change but as an opportunity to try and find more depth and specificity for our actors and everybody involved.
On keeping Min’s homophobic grandfather off-screen
We actually got a lot of feedback, James (Schamus, co-writer) and I, on the screenplay, like, you should show the grandad. We talked a lot about it and we understand that maybe from a dramatic point of view, that figure would be really helpful, but I ultimately really wanted to keep homophobia at the periphery and keep the conflict and the drama of the movie rooted in the fact that these characters care so much about each other.
The Wedding Banquet is in cinemas from Friday 9th May. You can read my review here.