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In honor of International Women's Day, Lale chats with award-winning director Lulu Wang, who is featured on Condé Nast Traveler's 2024 Women Who Travel Power List, about creating the worlds of Expats and The Farewell, the importance of using filmmaking to highlight untold stories, and her journey to becoming an award-winning director—without making compromises.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu and I'm really excited that today I'm talking to film director Lulu Wang. She's featured in Condé Nast Traveler’s Women Who Travel Power List, published today. It's a celebration of the women who are shaping the way we travel in 2024 and beyond, including television hosts, chefs, designers, activists, and filmmakers. Lulu is the creator of Expats, an Amazon original drama series starring Nicole Kidman. It's shot on location in Hong Kong.
Expats Clip: Don't you ever miss it, home?
I like our life here. The help, the drivers, it makes everything easier.
Lulu Wang: Expats is an intersection of three American women and many other people around them who are all affected by one event, one life-changing tragedy that ripples throughout this community. Expats looks at issues of privilege and power dynamics, race, class, the intersection of so many different identities and how this tragedy affects all of them.
LA: The word expatriate suggests moving to a foreign country for well-paid work and choosing to live in a bubble of an expat community. Think lounging on recliners in self-segregated country clubs, but who gets to call themselves an expat. The differences in the word expat and the word immigrant are very telling.
LW: I wanted to explore the thorniness and the prejudices and the biases that we have.
LA: What's your relationship to the word expat?
LW: I think it's thorny in a way, in the same way as being American abroad sometimes. I think that there are connotations that come with it that invoke a carelessness, a non-integration or respect for the culture.
LA: You were born in China and then you moved to the states, what was that journey for you?
LW: My parents brought me to the US, to Miami specifically, when I was six years old. It was during a time where there was a lot of political turmoil in the country and there was a lot of uncertainty about the future of the country. We boarded a plane, my mother and I, to join my father who left a few months before us and didn't know if we were going to get our visas, and we were so lucky that we did and left and we had a connecting flight in Paris, in Charles de Gaulle. It was just terrifying. Now I travel all the time and I have no fears, and even if I don't speak French perfectly, I can get by.
LA: I know you said you travel lots now, but that's for work and out of choice and that journey was out of necessity.
LW: Yeah, absolutely. It is by choice and it's temporary. But more than that, and this is something I think about a lot, which is trying to really understand what it is to be traveling the world as an American in 2023, 2024, versus being Chinese and traveling in 1989. Where you've never left the country, there's not a ton of access to other cultures. It's not like now we see places and we could somehow have a sense of what it is that's out there. Back then it wasn't like that at all. I think there's also a confidence that we have as Westerners, that you can go anywhere in the world and be fine. You could be a little nervous, but oftentimes I think that's a false confidence, it's a naivety, it's an arrogance perhaps. But still you feel like you can land anywhere and land on your feet. My mom did not feel that way as a 36-year-old Chinese woman who had never left the country, didn't speak a word of English, and just suddenly put on a plane and didn't know anything.
Hong Kong being a central character in this series was essential for the series and also for me to be interested in making it. I think there's not just an intersection of east and west, old world, new world, but it's really an intersection of so many different identities, different classes, different races, genders. I wanted to explore that intersection, the conflicts that come with it, but the communities and friendships that are also built out of these intersections.
LA: The three lead roles of the show are all women and they're all different kinds of expats, and privilege is obviously explored within that.
LW: Margaret is just incredibly privileged, is mother of three kids. But she's struggling with her own sense of identity because she has given up her career to follow her husband because he makes more money, and to give this experience to her family.
Expats Clip: I just sometimes want to be alone, where I'm not somebody's wife, not somebody's mother, or I'm not defined by tragedy.
LA: Nicole Kidman plays American expat Margaret, married to an executive, Clark Wu. They live in a luxury condo with panoramic views of Hong Kong Harbor in the Ritzy Peak District. The springboard for the script is the best-selling novel, The Expatriates by Janice Kay Lee. LW added story elements and some significant changes.
LW: The character that we took the most liberties with from the book, is the character of Hillary, a white British woman. In the show we made her Indian American.
Expats Clip: I think my marriage is over.
Has David been home?
No, ma'am.
What am I still doing here?
LW: I think that they are each so specific and so different from each other, which is what I loved, and yet they're forced to be connected for various reasons. Like Mercy is an expat, but Korean-American, so she gets confused as being local even though she doesn't speak, not only Cantonese, she doesn't really even speak Korean. She's a New Yorker. She's also broke. She doesn't come from money. She's there on her own without family. She followed her rich friends that she went to school with at Columbia in New York, and she has to figure out now how to live here.
Expats Clip: Now a moment goes by where I'm not thinking about what I've done. People like me, did they ever move on?
LA: Janice K Lee's book was optioned by Nicole Kidman. From what I understand, when she approached you to direct it, you initially turned it down. What gave you that trepidation before finally accepting?
LW: I think the hesitation came from an internal question. For me, so often in the industry, somebody makes a film, a project, that's a hit, and then people want to snatch you up and put you in an environment where you're making a big studio movie and then you don't really get the full creative control there. If it works or it fails, you're not quite sure if it's because of you, if it was your voice, and I wasn't sure that we would have that on Expats. But after talking with Nicole about my hesitations and also my desires and what I would want to do with this novel as an adaptation, she was so supportive and felt like that was exactly the kind of vision, and having a visionary behind it was exactly what she wanted.
I think that I needed to make something that was truly mine and in my voice in order to know if I was cut out for the industry. That if I didn't make it was because I had given it everything that I had and it still didn't work. I had to make sure that Expats was done on my terms. The more that you are in your power, the more that you trust yourself and your voice and you go against the grain and you challenge the status quo, the more fearless you are, and that's really powerful. So it's something that I'm continuing to learn.
LA: After the break:, Lulu's remarkable fifth episode of Expats, where she shifts focus. In the remarkable fifth episode of Expats, the domestic workers who until this point are depicted in smaller roles, get to tell their stories.
LW: These women have left their own families to provide full-time work and send money back home. It's something that I as an immigrant recognize, because that's something that my parents did, and that's something so many people in California and New York and everywhere, right?
LA: Episode five, which is a feature length film essentially that sits within the show, is dedicated to the caretakers or service workers of Hong Kong. How did you go about making a feature length episode within the show? What were the challenges of doing that? Why did it feel important to give so much time to those stories in one episode?
LW: I think because I only got one episode to do that, and I wanted to make sure that even though it was one episode out of six, that it had the scope and the weight that it needed to have and the importance why it's called Central. They are central to this whole story. There's a population of workers that are women and they come from all over Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia. We focused on two Filipino women, but there is a larger population than just the Philippines.
Expats Clip: [foreign language 00:12:18]
LA: I've been thinking a lot about how so much of travel and hospitality is about invisible work. It's the person who cleans your room. It's the person who hangs your robe up when you are out. It's the person who leaves cold water on your nightstand. It never gets discussed really, or to have a light shone on it, or to tell the stories of the people who are doing that.
LW: I think that caretaking is something, domestic labor is something that is never is very rarely shown. I just knew that I couldn't make a show about women in Hong Kong without telling the story of at least some of the hundreds of thousands of women that are on the streets of Hong Kong every Sunday. Every Sunday.
LA: The title of this episode, “Central,” also refers to Hong Kong, Island's Central Business District filled with parks and public spaces where maids meet on their day off.
LW: It is known as Maid's Picnic, that's what they call it. It is the day that all of these women have off from work and they are expected to not be in the house because their employers want to have that day to be with their families and not have the help be there. It's a day where they get to be with their friends and they get to go out, but sometimes it's raining and there's a typhoon or there's storms, and they still have to find a way to not be in the house.
If you visit Hong Kong, you see these women on Sundays on cardboard boxes, under overpasses and bridges and footbridges if it's raining, and if it's not, then they're out in parks and they play cards and there's singing and there's dancing, and people bring boom boxes, and there's tents and umbrellas to hide from the elements. It feels in many ways like a big festival. It is just a breathtaking visual to take in, because it's so joyous and yet the circumstances are quite sad. I think I just wanted to capture that sense of community and friendship between women in that environment and their resilience as well.
LA: Do you think that filmmaking has a unique ability to allow someone to see themselves in a different way, to see that reverse perspective of their role in society?
LW: A hundred percent. I always feel that every frame is political. Who you center on a frame, the lens that you shoot someone with or something with, it's a statement, it's a point of view. How can it not be? You're constantly making these choices with every single frame. Often the writers in the writers room, we would identify with different perspectives and we would debate them. Then I would say, "Let's put these debates on the page. Let's give these perspectives to these three women or to even beyond that, the men, the other characters, to see tensions."
LA: The writers room was predominantly made up of women.
LW: I didn't set out to be like, "I want an all women's writers room." I set out to say, "What are the perspectives that are going to help enhance the story in perspectives that I'm not as familiar with?" I just started thinking about writers and meeting with different people. It just turned out that the women that I met with had so much to say about these characters, and they brought a perspective that was eye-opening that I had never seen before represented on screen, so it was just clear that these were the people that were best for the job.
LA: Coming up. Making a film, The Farewell, that became a runaway success. And traveling to Lulu's Grandmother's home in China. Lulu Wang's, The Farewell is based on her family's decision in 2013 to shield her grandmother from tragic news and devise an elaborate ruse that's both poignant and darkly comic. Lulu and her crew flew to her grandmother's hometown Changchun in Northeast China.
LW: It felt surreal. In what world would I come back to China 30 years later and come back as an American film director and have my grandma gets to witness that.
The Farewell is about a young American woman who returns to China when she learns that her grandmother has a terminal cancer, and her family tells her that they are not going to reveal this diagnosis to her grandmother, even though the doctors have given her only three months to live. Instead, they're going to put on a wedding for her cousin, a faux wedding as an excuse to all gather to unite so that they can all say goodbye to her grandmother without her grandmother knowing. Her grandmother just thinks everyone's there for a wedding.
LA: I loved The Farewell. It was so lauded and ended up with a Golden Globe win for Awkwafina. What did making The Farewell mean to you and to those who worked on it?
LW: It was a feeling that I've always hoped for and dreamed of, which is to bring together all of my different worlds. Rather than stepping into my parents' world, which I'll never be able to fully do authentically, or stepping into the world of my Western friends. That I wanted to be in a world where there was an intersection of both, of my own passions that came fully from me, friends and collaborators that I love, and my family
LA: Funding for The Farewell, which features an all-Asian cast was a struggle. Then Lulu told her story in an episode of This American Life called, What You Don't Know. The podcast drew the attention of a producer who helped secure the finance. 70% of the film is in Mandarin.
LW: I think growing up as an immigrant, I've always felt that these were separate worlds, and with The Farewell I got to bring them all together. It felt very whole making that film and having these people who've never even been to China, be in my grandmother's house, having dinner with her and then creating that space on our set. My production designer was in my grandmother's house and we were all having dinner in her little apartment, and she was just going from room to room collecting things. We were like, "Yong, come eat. What are you doing?" She was like, "This is perfect. I need all these props." My grandma was like, "What is she doing?"
LA: I was going to say, how did your grandma feel about that?
LW: She was like, "Of course, anything for you." But then later she was like, "She's going to bring it back. I only have one copy of that picture and it means a lot to me. Is she going to bring it back?" Photos of my dad and my uncles as kids that were framed and just all kinds of things. There's just a lot of funny things like that, that it's just ridiculous.
As I was touring with The Farewell, so many people came up to me and said, "I'm from Egypt. I'm from the Middle East. I'm from South America. We did this to my grandmother, my grandfather." I was pretty surprised, because I had no idea.
Beijing and Shanghai, I think are filled with a lot more Westerners. There are a lot more expats.. Chongqing was traditionally a more like a agricultural city. It has a huge population, so I wouldn't say that it's necessarily small, but it's very, very north of China and it's not as Westernized as Beijing or Shanghai, and there's not as much western business, so it's just less visited by Westerners. I think there used to be a lot of car manufacturing, so I think the only people that would go there would be a lot of German car manufacturing companies, so it's not a popular tourist destination basically.
In Chongqing, I think that like the rest of the country, there's a lot of communist architecture. There's also just a lot of new developments. There's a ton of apartment buildings, very high apartment buildings, that are clustered together and there's a uniformity to them. They're all the same color, and much of it looks the same throughout the city and even throughout the country, a lot of this new development of condos. It's also very cold there during the winter, so it's covered in snow. During the summer it gets incredibly hot, so everyone in the film was sweating all the time.
LA: I've been thinking a lot about this quote I read from you in a recent interview you did with The Guardian where you said, "I've always created my whole life from a space of, nobody wants to see this, nobody cares." What does it feel like now to be making work that is being seen, or do you feel like it's being seen?
LW: It can be kind of scary, because you have to reorient yourself of, how do I know what to make? I barely even got used to the things that, Working from a place of small, hidden, nobody's watching, I barely even got... And then having it work. I'm barely starting to even get used to that. Now, I don't know, I think there is a sense of pressure. Before I think that my pressure was my family and myself, I give myself a lot of expectations. Now you feel like, "Oh gosh, there's other expectations." I think that it's just this constant reminder to shut out the noise, even if the voices have gotten louder or there's a larger group of them, and that you still have to continue to go back into your tiny space and create from a place of quiet.
LA: Lulu formed a tight-knit crew to make her indie feature The Farewell, and they were reunited for Amazon's Expats.
LW: I think that if something works, you don't change it. If it's not broke, don't fix it. I just love them. The Farewell wouldn't exist. My career wouldn't exist without them. It was such a true and wonderful collaboration that I wouldn't be the filmmaker that I am without them truly. It's not this myth of the auteur, filmmaking is the collaborative medium.
LA: Lulu, this has been such a great chat. Thank you so much. You can stream all six episodes of Expats on Amazon Now.
Next week, how we made the Power List. Where I chat with senior editor Megan Spirell about how we chose this year's most powerful women shaping the travel space. I'm Lale Arikoglu, you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, Nick Pitman and James Yost. The show's mixed by Amar Lal. Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of Global Audio. See you next week.