Awkwafina is generally a comedic actor, but delivers a nuanced and heavy performance in the film. How do you coach an artist through shifting disciplines?

For me, it’s so much easier to go from comedy to drama than it is to go from drama to comedy. You can’t teach comedic timing, but drama comes from a place that’s real. Comedians are real people — they experience pain, grief, suffering, loneliness. and they turn to comedy as a way to survive. That was very much the case with Awkwafina where she discovered that her sense of humor was a superpower so she could dissipate tension in her family. Her mother died when she was four, so she used comedy to lighten things up.

For The Farewell, I had to train her not to dissipate tension — to actually channel and hold space for all of the discomfort that she felt, and channel it through the character. I think that was uncomfortable, because it’s like a muscle: if you’re always used to using your left arm and not your right, that’s what you’re always gonna lean towards. But once you train, it becomes second nature, and that was the case with [Awkwafina]. She recognized that, if she felt uncomfortable, she just had to hold the tension.

What was the process of making a film about Chinese culture, from the perspective of an American migrant?

It was just important for me to show that there’s no one way. Billi and her family identify as Americans — her father even says “I’m American, I have an American passport,” but his brother, who immigrated to Japan around the same time, still identifies as Chinese. I wanted to show that there’s a spectrum, because nationalism is a very arbitrary thing. It doesn’t necessarily reflect who you are as a person. The external world needs labels to make sense of things. Identity is more complicated than that. Even the grandma functions on these binaries, because in her mind, this is her family. How can she be a different nationality than her family?

The film is a mix of fiction and fact — your grandfather’s grave is in the film, for example. How did that affect the filmmaking process?

I was always aware of keeping it grounded. Including my grandfather’s grave was surreal, but it wasn’t intentional. I told my DP that we should pick what’s best for the story, and it was just a coincidence that she and I both chose the same cemetery. There’s a level of spirituality that’s really meaningful — I’m returning home, I’m at my grandfather’s grave, the last time I saw him I was six, we left China, and then he died. I had to think that there was some kind of force in the universe that was guiding this film, because there were so many weird coincidences. In the end, it was hard for me not to go, Did that happen in the movie, or in real life? As humans, memory, experience, stories — they all start to blend in our realities.

Non-white creators who make something about their own identity are sometimes tagged as artists who make art about identity. Do you worry about that happening with you?

No. I have the ability to always choose. I used to worry about it quite a lot. Because I came from a place of scarcity, I thought. There’s no opportunities for someone like me, so I have no power or freedom. But making The Farewell made me realize that, no matter what box other people chose to put me in, I can say no to them. I can always try to carve out my own path. I don’t need to go through gatekeepers or be afraid of being put in a box. I keep getting scripts that are Asian dramas — I just did that. I’m the writer of my own destiny, and I can choose what I do next.

