How ‘The Wedding Banquet’ is making traditional Asian spaces more inclusive

For Ahn, while he sees the significance of bringing a story like The Wedding Banquet to modern audiences—particularly in a time when queer rights are under attack in such violent ways—he hopes that his approach to this material inspires others to create from their own histories. “I'm not trying to push an aesthetic or a particular mandate for how films get made. If anything, I'm trying to push a process and my process is so personal and I hope that that process helps someone else make something really personal,” he shares.

Ahn, Tran, and Chen recently spoke with JoySauce about the challenge of telling a story of bad parenting when you’re a parent yourself, making space for queerness in heteronormative traditions, and the key to on-screen crying.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Zachary Lee: Andrew, you’ve cited that Ang Lee’s film was the first queer film you saw because your mom wanted to “see the Asian movie that white people are watching.” Reimagining any project that’s been so formative to someone must be daunting, so I’d love to hear about the challenges but also perhaps the unexpected joy of working on this “reimagining” of the film.
Andrew Ahn: I felt like so much has changed for the queer community and so there’s a reason to revisit the attitude and the philosophy of the original film. I wanted to dig into culture, sexuality, and family in the way that Ang Lee did so beautifully. I decided to make it as personal as possible, in a way, because then I could find real insight; it would give me a creative North Star so that I wasn't just copying the original film. A lot of that came down to my conversations with my boyfriend about marriage and about having kids. I mined that relationship for material. In many ways, doing that work though, made the process harder because now the film was so personal.

The greatest joy that I had in making this film was the collaborations and in some ways, offloading some of that personal connection to the other collaborators. I remember telling Bowen and Kelly “You two are manifestations of my boyfriend.”

ZL: No pressure.
AA: It’s funny because they both know my boyfriend. Yet at some point, they stopped becoming manifestations of my boyfriend and they became their characters. It was fun to share the authorship of this film with these incredible people, my cast and crew; that’s what made it more fun for me.

Kelly Marie Tran: On that note of collaboration, I was telling costume designer, Matthew Simonelli, that half of my character is just Angela’s clothes. Half of her identity is wearing these huge sweaters and basketball shoes. When you put those clothes on, you walk differently and hold yourself differently. I was able to attain so much of creating this character through people like Matthew.

I'm a big fan of everything that Angela wears in this and it’s funny: I was filming something else in Vancouver when The Wedding Banquet had their set sale, and I went to that sale and bought 90 percent of the stuff that I wore as Angela. It's just in my closet now and I wear it unironically. [Laughs.]

ZL: Joan, you have a special connection with the original film in that you were originally going to be in it, as the female lead! You’ve had the rare privilege of seeing the script then and Andrew’s script now. How has your relationship to this story and project changed?
Joan Chen: When I first received this email from James Schamus, the producer and writer of the original film, and who wrote the script for this new film, I said, “Finally! I have some closure.” Everything came back full circle. Now I play the mother to Kelly’s character, I think I’ve been able to better appreciate the importance of this story throughout the decades.

ZL: Andrew, from Dol to Spa Night, your films add nuance to longstanding Korean traditions, whether it is the ritual of going to the jimjibang or throwing a dol. Your films showcase how for queer people, these traditions aren’t built to encompass their traditions so I’d love to ask about your intentionality behind depicting these customs in a new, more inclusive light.
AA: I'm so fascinated by ritual. As a Korean American, so much of my identity is wrapped up in family. My parents have made it very important to still participate in rituals, whether it’s a New Year's celebration or a wedding. These things are important but also heteronormative in that they rely on the structures of a mother and a father and having children. And so for many years, I've wondered how being queer has kept me at an arm's length away from my Korean cultural identity. In all of those works you mentioned, I’m trying to find a way to have these rituals feel more inclusive or queered in a way.

Part of how I do that is by poking holes. I think of that scene where Min and Angela catch the jujube and the chestnuts at the wedding and the amount the catch is supposed to represent the children they’ll have. My parents were on set that day and they didn’t know which ones represented boys and which ones represented girls. I thought we could make that moment queer, which is where Bobo has that great line, “They’ll have 15 non-binary children."

If you’re trying to make these cultural rituals more inclusive, you have to make culture. For me, that's filmmaking. I remember when my brother got married 10 years ago and seeing him go through this pyebaek ceremony. I saw how it brought him closer to my parents, his wife, and his Korean family. I was so jealous of that and I wondered if as a gay man, I could ever have that. I remember even thinking, “Well in this pyebaek ceremony, where the wife piggybacks her husband, who does the piggybacking in a gay relationship? What colors do we wear?”

At every opportunity, I was trying to figure out a way to make it feel more inclusive. Our officiant in the wedding banquet is a woman, and that's not very common, but we really loved meeting her and she was so excited and so supportive of our film.

ZL: On the note of inviting your family in and creating culture, Joan, you’ve expressed in past interviews that as a parent, there’s a sense that you’ll be haunted by the unintended and intended mistakes you’ve made with your kids. I’m curious how you held that intention as you played a character like May since she’s a character who doesn’t hold much regrets about her parenting?
JC: May is very different from me in that sense. She’s not as introspective and is often clueless, but that’s the fun of playing a character like that. She subconsciously knows that she’s done wrong unto Angela, but she doesn’t dwell on it. Her response is to just make up for it and become this ultra enthusiast to support the queer community. She’s the capital “M” mother for all the gays in the world [Laughs.]. This overcompensation gives her a purpose in life. 

One thing in common, is that for me and for May, we don’t ever want to hurt our children. I love my children so much more than anything else in this world. But even with that, I inadvertently have hurt them with expectations.

As a parent, you have this sense of “these kids are mine, they belong to me” and that can get in the way of allowing them to be their people. I had such a deep learning curve to go through during my kids’ teen years. Our relationship has greatly improved, I think, through working on this film, but also through working on something like Dìdi, where I can talk to my kids about my roles and the mothers I’m playing. These films have been a healing process for me and my family and I am deeply grateful.

ZL: When these films bring to light the ways you as a parent may have hurt or harmed your children, what does it look like to offer grace to yourself?
JC:  Talking to filmmakers about their relationship with their mothers was an illuminating experience. In Saving Face, I played the unaccepting mother of a gay daughter. I know that The Wedding Banquet is not an autobiographical story, but it’s a personal story. In my first Zoom with Andrew, we only talked about his relationship with his mother and my relationship with my children. In all of those discussions, I realized that I wasn't the only bad mother. That was somewhat of a relief as I tried to bring grace to my very flawed life. Also, because of the interviews that I do, such as this one, my daughters look at them and that opens up more conversations between us. That is a beautiful process. In the beginning, I was unsure about how much I could talk about them in these interview contexts, but now I know they’re okay with it.

ZL: More on the technicalities of performance, Kelly, this is a role where you have to do a lot of crying. I’m just curious how you prepare for something like that. It’s very soulful crying.
KMT: Well, thank you for saying that [Laughs.]. Each moment is different. For example, in the last scene, which is the wordless moment Angela and Lee share, I did not plan to cry. It was just something that happened organically in the moment. That scene was also scripted and we filmed it with words and it was Andrew who, in the moment, said let’s try to do the scene without words. Lily does this amazing thing where she has her hands in her pockets and she sort of shrugs and gives me this little smile. I immediately was like, “I’m crying.” I’m getting emotional thinking about that now.

To be in a relationship with a person for that long and to recognize the gravity of their possible absence, just thinking about that made me well up. It’s interesting because I rarely go into a scene thinking, “I'm going to cry.” I'm going into a scene thinking, “What is happening to this person at this moment? What can I respond to from my scene partners?” It’s all reacting.

ZL: You’re coming in with a plan, but you’re open to shifting that based on what you get from another actor.
KMT: Another reason why that moment was so emotional was that it was the first time Lily’s character said “I love you, I love you, I love you.” The other times I’m the one saying it to her.

ZL: We see every tear on your face, Kelly. It’s made me think, Andrew, your framing of this film is quite intimate. You keep the camera close to your actors’ faces. Can you talk more about the decision for those close-ups and working with your cinematographer Ki Jin Kim?
AA: I’ve worked with Ki Jin on three features at this point: this film but also on Spa Night and Driveways. Our collaboration process goes way back because he also shot both of my short films in film school. Something that brings us together is our desire for honesty. We want the filmmaking and the visual language to feel honest. We have an aversion to gimmicks and don’t want filmmaking to over-announce itself.

We kept coming back to this idea of wanting to “witness” the characters. We talked a lot about director Yasujirō Ozu and his films Late Spring and Tokyo Story. There were a few scenes where we employed very honest, very close-to-the-eye line, medium closeups: Youn Yuh-jung and Joan Chen at dinner, Bowen and Youn Yuh-jung having a conversation outside, and then also the moment of Lily and Kelly in the garden. In those moments, there’s this sense that there's nowhere for these characters to hide. In the story and visuals, these characters had to contend with themselves.

ZL: Andrew, I feel like your films are helping shape not just what queer experience can be on-screen but specifically the queer Asian experience. I’m curious how you think about stewarding that influence. I can see very much that there's a young Andrew Ahn whose first encounter with your version of The Wedding Banquet is their first queer awakening.
AA: I think any artist knows that they've come from a history and a legacy of artists. At some point in your career, you have to take on the responsibility of paying that forward. I was inspired by Ang Lee, Alice Wu, and many others. I’m excited to see what happens now. I want there to be some queer Asian American filmmaker that knocks me off my feisty pedestal. I would love it if they were so different from me and were a little feisty. What I've tried to do is make personal films so that people understand that they make their films. I hope that makes Asian Americans feel spiky and deranged.