Lulu Wang almost didn’t get to make The Farewell, her sophomore feature that’s garnered rave reviews since its Sundance debut in January. It’s a family drama centering on a young Chinese-American woman named Billi (played, in a breakout performance, by rapper and actor Awkwafina) and her grandmother, whom she calls Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen). When Nai Nai is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and given only three months to live, the family — following Chinese tradition — chooses not to tell Nai Nai. Instead, they hatch a plan to hastily throw a wedding for Billi’s cousin in China, so that the family can gather to see Nai Nai one last time; they’re saying goodbye, but Nai Nai doesn’t know it.

Wang’s own Nai Nai was indeed diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, and the family gathered in a similar fashion, and Wang decided to make a movie about it. But finding the financial backing to tell a story like this — a quiet family drama about a Chinese American woman that’s set in China and is mostly in Chinese — proved complicated.

Related The Farewell is a stunning leading role debut for Awkwafina

I met Wang in New York to talk about why it was a struggle to get the film financed, how she stuck to her guns about telling the story she wanted to tell, and about families, memories we experience in specific places, and feeling like a fish out of water. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Note: Spoilers for some aspects of The Farewell, including the ending, follow in our conversation.

Alissa Wilkinson

The Farewell is a story about a family mixing truth and fiction, but it’s also a fictionalized version of a thing that really happened to you. What was it like taking that personal story and turning it into a movie?

Lulu Wang

I’m a filmmaker, so immediately I started to think that this could be a great story for a film when it happened to me in real life. But working in Hollywood has trained me to always think, “All right, what would I need to change in order to sell it, to make [producers] actually want to tell the story?”

I started pitching the movie around town and I always got the same question: “Is this an American film or a Chinese film?” Which is kind of like asking me, “Are you American or are you Chinese?” I would say, I’m American. I grew up in this country. I speak English, and my perspective is very American.

But then I would say, “I want to cast authentically, with Chinese and Chinese American actors.” I wanted people to speak the language that they actually speak, because those are the textures that form my very American life. My inability, sometimes, to communicate [with my Chinese family]. My distance from those family members.

But then people would say, “Well, then, it’s not an American film. It won’t work for the American market.” So then I would pitch it to Chinese investors. One investor said, “Yeah, I could see it as a Chinese film, but then the main character can’t be Billi. It has to be somebody more Chinese, because a Chinese audience won’t resonate with her perspective.” And I was like, “Well, I can’t make that movie, because I am Billi.”

So I just decided if I couldn’t make the film the way I wanted to make it, then it wasn’t worth it to make it at all. But maybe I could tell the story in some other way in the future. So I wrote the details down as a short story — just a very early draft.

Then I met a producer, Neil Drumming from This American Life. He saw a short film of mine at a film festival and said, “What other stories do you have that no one’s letting you tell? Bring it over to us.” So I gave him that draft of the short story. They immediately picked it up [for an episode of the show]. It took about a month and a half to write and record, and then it was on the air. We interviewed my family, and it was such a pure experience — I got to really dig into how I felt.

I thought, okay, so I was right. Hollywood is not the place for me, because these are the stories I want to tell. I should stop being a filmmaker. That’s not the medium through which I can tell these kinds of stories.

Of course, once the story aired, within 48 hours producers started calling saying that they did want to make it into a film. And at that point, I was much more empowered to say to the producers, well, I’m not going make it with you unless you agree to the terms in which I want to make the film. And both [producer] Chris Weitz, who approached me first, as well as [the production company] Big Beach, which financed the movie, said, “We are very auteur-driven, and we want you to have your vision.”

So they ultimately were all very supportive. They completely supported how I wanted to tell the story.

Alissa Wilkinson

I feel like a marker of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking is that it’s often very generic. Often producers are casting the net wide, hoping to make their money back through broad appeal, but the end result can feel like it’s not true to anyone’s experience at all. But it seems as if audiences really respond to specificity in storytelling.

Lulu Wang

Right. I set out to tell a story about a granddaughter, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a father — you know, a family. I wasn’t setting out to make an “Asian movie” any more than a white male director sets out to make a “white movie.” They’re just telling their own family story, their own perspective.

In many ways, it’s a very American thing to think about identity on a surface level — like that if you’re a person of color, you have to tell an identity story, and it has to be based on what you look like, because that’s what the mainstream sees in you. They only see the surface.

Whereas for me, yes, the movie’s about identity, but it’s more about what happens when you leave home. What are the values that you bring from the home that you left, and what are the values that you leave behind? What do you adopt? Those are questions about identity that go much, much deeper than the color of your skin and what you look like.

It’s also a fish-out-of-water story about somebody in an Asian country who isn’t blonde and blue-eyed but actually looks like everyone else. People expect you to be just like them, and you’re not. We’re living in a world now where I think everyone can relate to that, because who actually looks exactly the way that they feel on the inside, you know?

Alissa Wilkinson

And the film is very unapologetic about being the story of a fish out of water. Right from the start, you have two languages, even in the title cards. There are places in the movie where, for instance, people will comment on one another’s accents. I, of course, had no idea till anyone pointed the accents out, but other audience members certainly would have picked up on them. The movie just asks me to follow along and accept that I’ll sometimes be in the dark.

It’s a story about knowing you’re on the outside, and feeling that tension.

Lulu Wang

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to show that Billi, for the most part, is very comfortable before she finds out about her grandmother. She is a normal American girl in the city. She’s joking and laughing with her friends.

But we all go home. How many of us, when we go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, don’t feel entirely at home or even part of our family? Especially if it’s extended family beyond the people that you just know, where you’re like, “I’m told that person’s my aunt, but I’m not exactly sure how we’re related.” People who live in New York City — even if you’re Caucasian and you were born and raised in America — still have plenty of times where they feel out of place, you know? I think that’s very universal, that sense of not belonging.

I also just didn’t want to overly explain things throughout the movie for people. I wanted them to be immersed in the experience of it. So sometimes, in early test screenings, we’d ask, “Do you guys understand who this character is, and what her relationship in the family is?” And some people would say, “No, that’s confusing.” But then some would be like, “Yeah, it is confusing, but also it doesn’t matter.”

When I go to China, I don’t always know what’s going on. Half the time I go back and I don’t know who my relatives are. I’ll go to a Chinese wedding and be like, “It doesn’t look like a wedding that I’ve been to. So is this really the wedding? Is this a reception? Is this the ... Oh, okay, now we’re done. I guess that was the wedding.” You learn as you get thrown into it.

I wanted the audience to have that same experience. In fact, it’s more engaging if they’re asking these questions, and they’re not sure, and they’re trying to catch up and figure it out. It’s a much more immersive experience than if the audience is way ahead and knows everything.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think that’s part of what I so appreciate about it — it doesn’t feel like a film that’s trying to pander to me at all about what I do and don’t know. It respects me enough to trust that I’m smart enough to keep up.

But that’s interesting, too, because it’s clearly a movie set in China and about Chinese people, and yet it’s not really a movie that could be eligible for Best Foreign Feature [now called Best International Feature Film] at the Oscars. Which makes you think about what counts as a “foreign” movie.

Lulu Wang

Yeah. Much of the movie is in Chinese, but it’s 100 percent not a Chinese movie. It’s Billi’s perspective. And you know, everyone at [our distributors] A24 and our producers at Big Beach have been asking that question [about whether or not this is a “foreign” film]. Is that good for us or is it bad for us? I think that’s what’s so interesting with a film like this: We are breaking a lot of new ground.

That’s in contrast to Roma, which was a “foreign film.” It was very much a Mexican film. It was Alfonso [Cuarón] making a film as a Mexican man, from Mexico, going back to Mexico. This is not that.

So it was such a great statement when Sundance programmed The Farewell in the US dramatic competition, and not as a foreign film. So we’ll see what happens, and how people view it.

Alissa Wilkinson

Yeah. Ironically, the other big film that came out of Sundance was The Souvenir, which was in the foreign competition — it was made in England — but it’s all in English. That just challenges people’s notions about what foreignness even means.

Lulu Wang

Exactly. And what Americanness means.

Alissa Wilkinson

That’s right.

Another big thread in your movie is the passage of time. In Changchun, Billi is experiencing a place she remembers from her childhood. But it’s clearly changed a lot since then.

I know some of the places where you shot were actually part of your own life. Did you have the same experience as Billi when you returned to them, becoming conscious of the passage of time? Is that an experience that you had going back and filming as well?

Lulu Wang

Yeah. It’s sort of like when you look in the mirror — if you look at yourself every day, you may not necessarily see things that change. But people who don’t see you for a long time really see the difference. It’s the same, I think, with China. I go back every few years, but I didn’t go back that often before, and every time I went back, it would be completely unrecognizable.

I feel that way sometimes about New York City.

Alissa Wilkinson

Oh, me too.

Lulu Wang

You’re like, “Jeez, another gym, another Circle Fitness where there used to be that little ...”

Alissa Wilkinson

I think of that as ghosts — memories I have of other places and times and people that crop up when I walk past a corner or an old store, no longer as familiar as they once were to me. But the corner and the store have always changed, so the memories just haunt me.

Lulu Wang

Yes. Exactly. And then you’re just trying to find something familiar to hold on to. I passed by a restaurant recently that was like indoor-outdoor space. And I was like, “Did that used to be that bar?” I got very, very wasted one night there, it was a great night, and now I can’t find the bar!

My memories of China are just that much more extreme because my childhood was there. I was a kid there, so I have a lot of nostalgia for that. And so I’m always looking: Where was my grandma’s house? Where was that garden? Where was that apple tree? You know?

But I don’t know what actually existed and which parts of it grew in my imagination. In my memory, these giant sunflowers towered over me, bursting with sunflower seeds. I would eat out of them. But now, as an adult, even if that house existed and sunflowers existed, I would be like, “Oh, they’re really small.” It’s just because I was so tiny that they looked giant; they’re just normal-sized sunflowers. But I can’t reconcile the memory, because all of that is gone.

Alissa Wilkinson

Right, and your body remembers the place, but it isn’t there anymore, and so you feel displaced. How many of the places are actually from your real life?

Lulu Wang

Well, we shot it in my grandma’s actual neighborhood. Those orange buildings are actually from her neighborhood. And then there were two major coincidences.

One was that we scouted a bunch of cemeteries, because I didn’t want my [director of photography] to be limited by the facts. I said, “You know, we’ve got to find what’s best for the movie. No one’s going to know when they’re watching the film what’s real or not. We’re in Changchun and that’s good enough.”

But ultimately, we picked my grandfather’s cemetery to show, because logistically we couldn’t get permission to shoot at anyone else’s grave. We shot at his gravesite.

It was very emotional, very meaningful, to be like, “I’m on a tech scout with this entire crew at my grandfather’s grave” — my grandfather who I hadn’t seen since I was 6, because that’s when I left China. He wanted to be a writer. It was his dream, but it was never fulfilled. Some of his friends and other family members would tell me that I was continuing his dream. That’s ... it’s a lot.

Then also, the wedding banquet hall was where my cousin really got married. The actual wedding took place in the same hotel, in the same banquet hall, but just in a different room. He was in a smaller room. We had a bigger room for the movie, but it was the same banquet hall. It’s wild.

Alissa Wilkinson

So when you watch those scenes, then, you have a lot of extra layers of memory attached.

Lulu Wang

Yeah.

Alissa Wilkinson

Has your family seen the film?

Lulu Wang

My parents saw it at Sundance, and they’re really proud. When my dad read the script, he was like, “This is very authentic, but I don’t know why you would make this movie. Why would anyone care? Why are people giving you money to make this?” For him, it’s just everyday life.

And same with my great-aunt [Lu Hong, who is called Little Nai Nai in the film, and plays herself]. At first, she was like, “Yeah, I made this decision [to keep Nai Nai in the dark about her diagnosis]. It happened. Now it’s a movie, and you want me in it? I have a fat face. I’m just, like, a normal person with a normal face. Why? I’m going to ruin your movie, because I’m not a movie star.” So to be able to show her that she is a movie star, and that the family story is worthwhile, it’s really meaningful in terms of what they think of themselves and the value of our unique stories.

Alissa Wilkinson

Is Nai Nai still alive?

Lulu Wang

She is.

Alissa Wilkinson

And is she going to see the movie?

Lulu Wang

I don’t know. We got distribution in China. My great-aunt is here [in New York] for the premiere today, so I was asking her what we should do. She’s like, “We’ll just tell her that movies are fiction and none of it actually happened. You just made it up for the movie.”

The Farewell opened in theaters on July 12.