And there’s humor in that, too. It brings out the awkwardness of the whole situation, which is of course also a testament to your writing. There are so few films I can think of that you’re laughing one moment and then the next, you’re just a puddle of tears.
As I was writing the scenes, I didn’t necessarily put the humor into the script, because it’s difficult to describe the humor on the page. So much of it was found through directing, through the compositions and framing, through just the actors themselves. Many of the actors, when they saw the film at Sundance, they were like, “Oh my God, I had no idea the movie was so funny.” When they read the script, their role, what they’re going through, the experience, was not funny. The humor kind of comes, obviously, through my eyes. I always stepped back even during the experience. On the left side, it would be something really sad, and I would feel that. But then, I would look [elsewhere] and something hilarious or ridiculous would be happening. I myself didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I sought to capture that in the mise-en-scène of the scenes where multiple things are happening at once. It just depends on what you focus on.
Coming from a music background as a pianist, how closely involved were you in creating the score? I really loved that bittersweet, strings-forward and vocal composition.
Very, very closely. Alex Weston is a composer who works with Philip Glass. He’s on his team. I actually went out to seek a composer that had a classical background that could do a voice arrangement. My original idea was to not necessarily have a composer composer, but to have an arranger to just do vocal arrangements of [some] public domain classical pieces. Alex turned out to be such a wonderful composer that he wrote his own classical music instead of just doing an arrangement of existing pieces.
I was, through the music, also trying to find the right tone of lightness and pathos. Like when do we go lighter, and when do we go really deep with the pathos, but in a way that’s funny. Sometimes the music is melodramatic in the way that the people feel, and in the right moments, I found that to be quite funny. [The score] very much represents the internal emotions of a lot of the characters.
The cast is obviously amazing in creating those textures, and they really come across as an authentic family, through all the dinner scenes and beyond. I am wondering if you rehearsed with them as an ensemble, or give them certain exercises to establish that organic togetherness.
You know, I wanted to have a lot of rehearsal, because of some of my favorite directors, including Mike Leigh. I love him so much, and he’s such a big influence on my work, and I’ve always read that he spends 40 days with his actors living together. And then he turns on the camera after 40 days. He just goes, “Okay, now we start,” and goes right into it. Unfortunately, with American independent films, you don’t have that luxury. So, I have one dinner where I would say 75% of the cast was there. It wasn’t even 100% where I could sit them at the table and just work out some blocking with the camera, but that was it. Mostly, I told the actors, like Nai Nai, and little Nai Nai, “Go spend time together on your own.” They would go to the park, they would just talk.
Tzi Ma, who played my dad, spent some time with my real dad. Diana [Lin], who plays my mom, spent some time with my real mom, so they got to do their research through the real people. On top of that, in Chinese family culture, everyone has their role. The grandma is a typical grandma. They’ve all sat at that dinner table with their own families before, so they all understand. In many ways, it was easy to transplant their own memories, their own experiences into that family.
And we haven’t even talked about Awkwafina yet. She’s terrific in this dramatic turn. Was it, first of all, hard to trust someone with playing you? And how did she come on board?
I was very excited about her once I saw her audition tape. Before that, I didn’t know that she had acted. At that time she had done a couple of comedies like “Dude” and “Neighbors 2,” but mostly I knew her from her music videos. It was before “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Ocean’s Eight.” We met, and she told me that she was raised by her own Chinese grandmother and the script was so personal for her. She sent in an audition tape, and when I saw the audition tape, I immediately thought of those great comedians and how they can all do great drama; like Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg… They have actually quite a lot of pathos in them, and humor is the way that they deflect and in a way, distract from some of the pain.
I found that to be true of Awkwafina, that Awkwafina is a role that she created in order to do music and comedy. But for Nora Lum, her mother died when she was four. She was raised by her Chinese grandmother, who’s in her 80s now. It’s very much on her mind that she’s going to lose her one day. When I watched that tape, I knew immediately that she carried all of that within her, and if I could just get her to be present on screen, she didn’t have to act. If she could just feel the feelings, then I would completely have somebody who could carry the film.
Going back a little, I’m so glad you mentioned Mike Leigh earlier—I was going to get to him, mostly because of something you tweeted a while back, about your work usually being compared to that of Asian filmmakers. On that note, who else do you count as an influence on you?
I do have influences from Asian filmmakers as well, like Edward Yang. “Yi Yi” was a huge influence. And Ruben Östlund is a really big one for me. I love northern European filmmakers because of their dark sense of humor. There’s a very wry sense of humor that Ruben Östlund, Roy Andersson, Lukas Moodysson…those Swedish filmmakers all have. My DP and I talked a lot about Bergman as well.
Both as a female filmmaker and a filmmaker of color, what is the next step you want to see in the film industry moving forward, so films like yours or a film like “Crazy Rich Asians” doesn’t get perceived as a diversion from the norm?
I think we just need to make films that are a representation of what this country looks like; American films that represent what America looks like, you know? As opposed to putting everything into different boxes and saying, “This is an Asian film, this is a black film, or this is a white film.” Because then in some ways, everything that’s not white-male-mainstream becomes niche, which means that this country will always hold onto the narrative of who runs this country or what is mainstream. Instead, if we populate our media and our stories with a spectrum of representation and inclusion, then that becomes the norm that nobody all of the sudden goes, “Oh my gosh. We have a Muslim film.” We are all intersectional. None of us are just one thing. So often, we make these assumptions. We see somebody and we make a judgment about who they are based on how they look, and we’re wrong. You don’t know how many generations that person’s been in this country. Sometimes maybe you see a white person who doesn’t feel at home here because they actually grew up as a third culture kid. Their parent was a diplomat and they lived in Asia. So that’s interesting to me as well. I just want to see stories that represent all of it.
