yet respectful at the same time. The reality
is, those two things can’t always coexist.
It’s an impossible choice, but a choice
you must make nonetheless.
During moviemaking many things
are beyond your control, but the one thing
you have some semblance of control over
is your script. Your script is where you map
out what your film is about, and what it’s
not about, so that it serves as a blueprint
for every stage of the process afterward,
from prep to production.
As a writer choosing what to include
about each of your characters, you need
to consider what information audiences
would need in order to understand why each
of your characters would have the emotional
reactions they have. The Farewell explores
how Billi and different members of her fam-
ily deal with grief and their personal rela-
tionships to grandma’s impending death. For
the father and uncle, their grief is enveloped
by a sense of guilt over emigrating from
China and leaving their mother to grow old
on her own. For Billi, it’s about the time she’s
lost with “Nai Nai” and all the shared experi-HE WEEK BEFORE produc-
tion started on The Farewell—
my sophomore feature about
a young woman (Billi, played
by Awkwafina) and her fam-
ily’s attempts to keep their grandmother’s
cancer diagnosis hidden from her during
the final months of her life—I found myself
at my grandfather’s cemetery in China for
a tech scout with my crew.
My grandfather—“Ye Ye” in Chinese—
passed away a few years after my parents
and I immigrated to the States. I was six
when we left China and that was the last
time I saw him. Now I was going to be film-
ing a scene from my movie at his gravesite.
As storm clouds rolled in and we dis-
cussed the possibility of rain during the
shoot, I reflected on how meaningful this ex-
perience was and on the unique challenges
of making such a personal film.DEFINING WHAT’S PERSONAL
Popular advice for moviemakers is to
write what you know and make your work
personal. But does “personal” always mean
autobiographical? And does autobiographi-
cal automatically make it personal?
The key to making something personal is
specificity. Specificity doesn’t have to mean au-
tobiographical, but it does mean drawing from
real life, real characters, real experiences.
Specificity is not easy, especially if you
come from a multi-cultural background like28 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM
The Farewell writer-director Lulu Wang shares her secrets to turning
personal stories into cinematic experiencesBY LULU WANG mine. To give you some context, making
The Farewell as personal as possible meant
creating a co-production between the U.S.
and China, scouring actors from around the
world to cast an ensemble cast of 15 charac-
ters, writing the script and directing in two
languages, shooting on two different conti-
nents with very different styles of production,
and navigating cultural differences between
our American team and our Chinese team.
Still, it’s a worthwhile battle because stories
become universal through their specificity.EMOTIONAL HONESTY
IS THE BEST POLICY
In making a narrative memoir film,
you aren’t beholden to facts as one might
be with a documentary, but you want to tell
a story that feels truthful to your experience
and feelings. It’s not about factual accuracy,
but about emotional honesty.
I know what you’re thinking: “That
sounds like a nice idea, but what does the
process of striving for emotional honesty
look like, concretely? How do we decide
what to put in the script and what to leave
out? How do we choose our collaborators
and guide an entire cast and crew towards
that same emotional truth?”
There’s a quote from Mark Twain that says,
“The only difference between reality and fic-
tion is that fiction needs to be credible.”
When I first wrote and narrated a version
of this story for This American Life and be-
gan to navigate all of these decisions, I was
torn between my loyalty to the film and my
loyalty to my family—trying to be truthful, COURTESY OF A24LIVING
MEMORIES
T