MOVIEMAKER.COM SUMMER 2019 29FAMILY MATTERS: THOUGH
ITS STORY IS ROOTED IN BILLI’S
(AWKWAFINA, C) PERSPECTIVE,
THE FAREWELL HAD TO
SHOWCASE ITS ENSEMBLE’S
MULTIDIMENSIONALITY, SAYS
WRITER-DIRECTOR LULU WANGences they’ll never have. Remember: Every
character is the lead of their own movie and
when your film is built upon an ensemble
cast, audiences must feel that the movie
belongs to each and every one of them.
Still, it’s just as crucial as a writer-director
to have a clear grasp on the dominant
perspective of your story. Even though
The Farewell is an ensemble film, Billi
is our protagonist who guides us through the
narrative, so I needed to create a multidi-
mensional ensemble while simultaneously
rooting the audience in Billi’s perspective.
Some of this exploration of perspective was
laid out on the page, but much of it was also
dictated by casting, cinematography, editing,
sound design, and music.LOADED LANGUAGE
Billi is a fish out of water who doesn’t see
things the same way her family does. While
the rest of the cast spoke native Chinese,
Awkwafina’s (aka Nora Lum) Chinese was
very broken. This is one of the areas where
I deviated from reality because my own
Chinese is quite fluent. In casting Nora,I knew her Chinese was limited, but it didn’t
detract from the story and in fact, ultimately
helped to support the idea of her being
a fully assimilated American who’s an out-
cast in her family.
With the rest of the cast, I found actors
who had language abilities similar to those of
my real family. That meant I would be mak-
ing an American film in 75 per-
cent Mandarin Chinese with
English subtitles. I did this not
just to remain stubbornly tied
to real life facts, but because
communication—or the lack
of communication—is a major
theme in any film about an
immigrant family.
In addition to the one truth everyone is
not allowed to communicate, there are other
gaps in communication due to language,
culture, and distance. There’s a scene in the
film where these language disparities actu-
ally play a vital role in how the family’s lie is
maintained: Billi asks an English-speaking
doctor some very revealing questions rightCOURTESY OF A24 in front of her grandmother, knowing she
won’t understand.
I also wanted to create an accurate
portrayal of the different accents non-native
speakers might have. Accents represent
a character’s level of assimilation or distance
from that culture. We’ve all seen films where
language abilities and accents are cheated
and this can be incredibly distracting for
people who understand those
languages. This is just one ex-
ample of how being authentic
actually makes the film more
accessible for a wider global
audience.
Making a bilingual film
often means having to write
a bilingual script. The challenge of this was
that while I speak Chinese, I don’t actually
read or write it.
When I first wrote the script, I heard
much of the dialogue in Chinese, but trans-
lated it to English in my head so I could
put the words on the page. [Dialogue that
would be spoken in Mandarin Chinese was
bracketed like this.]
In order to engage with the Chinese cast