EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Lulu Wang’s The Farewell had opened to acclaim at Sundance when Nicole Kidman got in touch and said, “I have this book that I optioned and you’re really the only director that I want to make this.”
Wang was stunned.
“I had just premiered The Farewell, which is a very small movie, and I wasn’t thinking that I wanted to go into television but that I really need to keep figuring out what my voice is,” Wang recalls.
She laughed. “But when Nicole Kidman comes to you and says, ‘I’ll let you do whatever you want with it, you’re the only director — take one episode, take them all — let’s just talk’ [you listen].”
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Wang went away and read Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates, which is about three women, primarily, with disparate experiences of living in Hong Kong, the the former British colony.
“I’ve always had a fascination with Hong Kong,” Wang told me,” because my parents and I left China in 1989 when I was six years old because of Tiananmen Square, and many of our friends and family left during that time. Some of us went to western countries and some people went to Hong Kong.”
Her father left first. A few months later Wang and her mother joined him in the U.S.
“I said to Nicole the only way that I could make this show is if ‘I could do it completely my way, and that I would direct all of them and have total freedom. ‘And I doubt that, because it’s with — I doubt they’re going to let me do that, so, thank you for coming to me to directly, but I’m going to have to pass because I just think it’s too complicated of a story and it’s also really scary.’
“I was really terrified of doing something in Hong Kong, and I was equally terrified of getting it wrong — and also getting it right — because Hong Kong is a very sensitive subject. These are all the reasons that I have to have full control. I can’t have any censorship. I can’t be limited in where I go and how I tackle it.”
Wang also insisted on bringing over the team she worked with on The Farewell, which she didn’t expect would be allowed.
She thought she was making it clear to Kidman that she was saying no to directing a six-part prestige drama. Twenty-four hours later Kidman called and said, ”Okay, it’s yours.”
The director was flabbergasted. Kidman told her to take the book, write anything she wanted and build whatever type pf writers room she needed. “However you want to do it, it’s yours,” the star told her. “So then I was like, ‘Oh no, now I’m in trouble!’,” laughs Wang.
I’ve discussed Expats with the director a few times and I was keen to understand the depth of her relationship with Kidman, who, I should note, I have known for over three decades.
“Nicole and I are from very different backgrounds,” Wang told me. “We are incredibly different people. I made a small film about my grandmother before this, so I think I was maybe intimidated by the scale and the nuance that this series would require, and I also felt a great sense of responsibility, and so Nicole and I had to have a few conversations early on, just about who we were as people, and where we were coming from, and our perspectives.
“She was so incredibly supportive. That’s the thing about Nicole: She so believes in strong creative vision. She was on board with supporting my vision from the beginning. That’s why I agreed to do it, ultimately, because I felt that we could see eye to eye.”
But the scale was daunting. “As I mentioned before, I felt this great sense of responsibility, as well as an awareness of my limitations as an outsider to Hong Kong and representing ‘expats,’ which is a very loaded term. And myself, even though I grew up in America as a Chinese immigrant, I would be going back to Hong Kong with this major American production. I felt very conflicted about that.”
A powerful, mouthwatering project
It’s not overstretching to declare the six-part Expats a masterpiece drama. It’s a powerful, mouthwatering project centred around Mercy, a young Korean American destined to be alone; Hilary, a rich housewife conflicted by her struggle to have a child; and Margaret, a landscape designer and mother of three whose happy life is upended by an unbearable tragedy. Those characters are given breathtaking life, respectively, by Ji-young Yoo, Sarayu Blue and Kidman.
Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Pardenilla play two of the many servants who are in Hong Kong to carry out the wishes of the wealthy. They’re treated as part of the family, but also with waspish disdain by their mistresses.
Episode five, titled ‘Central,’ will be shown Friday at TIFF. It runs at one hour 36 minutes and opens with what’s called the Maid’s Tea Party, where the servants have their day off and gather to drink bubble tea, a local drink that mixes tea fruit juice and tapioca, and talk trash about their employers.
I watched the episode over and over, each time marvelling at the detail Wang captures. I begged Amazon Studios reps to let me watch all the episodes, which, to their credit, they acquiesced (which is how I like it. It’s frustrating and infuriating when studios deny me!)
Expats is like six back-to-back movies — an enormous undertaking.
Shooting ‘Central’ was a key part of Wang’s deal. She used the episode to test the waters, she told me.
Wang told Amazon and Kidman that the ep would be feature-length, need the resources of a movie to achieve its scale, and that Kidman’s character would be peripheral. “Everyone thought I was joking but Nicole got it and was like, ‘That’s great, right?’ It was exciting for us to go against what they were expecting… I said, “She’s not even getting a closeup,” and Nicole’s like, ‘I love it. I love it.’” I’m joking, I tell them. She’s going to get closeups but I really wanted to shift the perspective in this episode.”
Collaboration was absolutely essential in getting Expats made. It started with the the writers room.
”I do think it was quite unusual the way that Amazon and Nicole allowed me to put together this writer’s room,” says Wang. “It ultimately ended up being a room full of women, some of whom may not have had the kind of room experience that normally a studio wants. For example, Janice, who wrote the novel, had never done television and had never been in a writer’s room.”
Wang was joined by Alice Bell, who had already been involved in development of the series, Lee, Vera Miao and Gursimran Sandhu.
Writing began for three months in person before the pandemic.
“The five of us were in Culver City,” says Wang. “It was a really magical time because it was just brainstorming sessions and storytelling and sharing. All of us described it as therapy, in a way, and it was really beautiful.
“We were writing about Hong Kong so we went out and got bubble tea. That was our afternoon treat. What was so wonderful about it was the fact that we all had these different experiences and backgrounds and were able to share our personal stories, and many of those stories made it onto the screen. It was such a collaborative and open space, where we just all talked. That was how we started. It wasn’t about breaking story or solving the story right away. It was just talking about our own experiences.”
Having the novel’s author in the room was a plus. “So often the studios might say, ‘Maybe we don’t need to bring the author of the novel on, because they might be precious about their writing or they don’t have the experience’” says Wang. “But in this situation, because Amazon was fully on board, and Janice was so not precious. She said, ‘I wrote this book many years ago. I want the series to be alive. It shouldn’t just be a replica of this thing that I created, and so much has happened in Hong Kong and in the world since the novel was written.’”
Lee was adamant that she did not want to just force the novel onto the series. “When the series was finished and she had watched all the episodes, she described the series as a distant cousin of the novel,” says Wang. “They’re related, but that they are also separate. Of course, Janice is an incredible writer and was so poetic in that description.”
Wang remarks that even that, though “we all had our names on specific episodes that we technically wrote, we all broke the story together.”
She decided to shift the timeframe of Lee’s novel to 2014 because that year “was a moment for Hong Kong where the city was on the precipice of enormous change. I felt that that was incredibly symbolic for where our characters were as well, on the precipice of change.”
‘If you fall now, I can’t catch you’
Wang’s own mother was scared about her taking on Expats. She told her daughter that “When you started to climb a ladder and I saw you were going too high, I got scared — even though I had been pushing you to climb that ladder your whole life.”
”I am terrified, because if you fall now, I can’t catch you.”
Wang recognised that she is not from Hong Kong. ”I’m somebody who left Beijing,” she says. “I am American and I have freedom and privileges that allow me to speak in ways that people who are there aren’t able to.
“I left China when I was six years old. There was a gun held to my head as we were going to my grandmother’s house, because the soldiers boarded the bus that we were on and asked to see everybody’s IDs. My father was a diplomat and my mother was the editor of a major magazine, and so they were part of ‘the intellectuals.’ Their friends had participated in Tiananmen Square, so it was a really scary moment. I still have that image.”
She continues through tears. “That’s why I didn’t want to do the show, because I felt like I was going to cry throughout the whole thing. And not to digress, but when I see what’s happening in Ukraine, and I see fathers leaving their children to go and fight, that image brought up the image of my father leaving for the U.S. before us. We were supposed to all go together but my mom said to him to go first, because we didn’t have our visas. ‘Somebody has to get out and if you do it first, it’ll be easier for us to join you.’
”So my father left, not knowing what was going to happen to us or if we were going to see each other again. It’s part of my life that is so in the past, but also so big in psychological space in my family.”
But she’s glad she didn’t turn down the opportunity of making Expats, though she admits to still being very scared. “It hasn’t been out in the world yet,” she says. “I believe you have to do things that scare you. With how wild and unexpected the journey on The Farewell was, I was really worried about being paralyzed by fear of how I was going to follow up and whether I was going to ultimately choose something safer or just be paralyzed and not be able to create for a really long time — so I was so incredibly grateful to be in a room with so many women.”
She’s particularly grateful to Bell, who became her partner in the writers room and when they were shooting in Hong Kong, where Bell had once lived.
“As soon as we met, we realized that we had the same vision, and an affinity for gin and tonics in the afternoon as well. We instantly fell in love,” she says, explaining that they bonded over Japanese Nikki gin.
Then there’s Kidman.
“Obviously, when you have someone like Nicole who backs your vision, it makes it all the more compelling to make a series of this size”, says Wang.
Wang had wanted her The Farewell team to join her on Expats. They included cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano, editor Matt Friedman, production designer Yong Ok Lee art director W. Hayley Ho and composer Alex Weston. Having an A-lister in her corner helped her get her way.
“You get yourself a Nicole Kidman to help you fight those battles,” she said with a broad smile.
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