Director Andrew Ahn Makes 'The Wedding Banquet' His Own
With "Fire Island," director Andrew Ahn — working from a screenplay by star Joel Kim Booster — updated Jane Austen's classic novel "Pride and Prejudice," translating the social, sexual, and emotional politics from Georgian England to the contemporary gay scene. It feels apt, then, that Ahn would follow up by taking on a different classic: Ang Lee's 1993 queer classic "The Wedding Banquet."
In the original film, Lee, a Taiwanese filmmaker, electrified the queer community and charmed the straight one with the story of a Chinese businessman named Gao (Winston Chao), his American life partner, Simon (Mitchell Lichetenstein), and one of Gao's tenants, Wei-Wei, a painter in need of a green card. Gao's parents (Gua Ah-leh and Lung Shihung) are pressuring him to get married, so Gao flies them to New York to see him have a quick wedding at city hall. His simple plan spins out of control, though, when his parents insist on a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony, including a lavish banquet. The party's drunken traditions, including the newlyweds being chased to the nuptial bed by friends, leads to Gao and Wei-Wei consummating their marriage, and Wei-Wei becomes pregnant.
"When I was approached by our producers to consider reimagining it," Ahn, who broke out with queer crowd pleasers like "Spa Night" and "Driveways," tells EDGE of the new version, "I was having really difficult conversations with my boyfriend about getting married and about having kids." Making art from life, he adds, "felt really organic."
With marriage equality now a reality (at least for the moment), the storyline needed some adjustment. The need for a green card is still there, but now it's Min (Han Gi-Chan), a university student in Seattle and the scion of a major Korean clothing company, who needs it in order to avoid returning to Korea and taking over the family business. He has zero interest in running the company; he wants to make art. He also needs to placate his grandparents, who are demanding he settle down and marry respectably. His Chinese-American boyfriend, Chris (Bown Yang), meantime, hesitates at marriage, fearing that Min would be disinherited for marrying a man.
Enter the couple's long-time friends Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), a lesbian couple trying to become mothers through IVF. Lee has made more than one unsuccessful attempt at pregnancy, and the couple don't have the money to keep trying. This is a heartbreak, but also something of a relief for Angela, whose issues with her own mother, May (Joan Chen), have given her the heebie-jeebies around parenting. (May, trying to make things up to Angela, has made things worse by going overboard as a PFLAG mover and shaker.) Min's dilemma seemingly meshes perfectly with Lee and Angela's needs when the four hit on a plan for Min to pay for Lee's next round of IVF in exchange for Angela marrying him.
"In the original film, they accidentally have this baby, but what if we show a couple trying to have a baby, and the trials and tribulations of that?" Ahn muses. "I use those personal conversations with my boyfriend as creative North Stars to help me reimagine this film for a modern-day queer audience."
Ahn tells EDGE about his other North Stars: The story beats he and James Schamus (a co-writer on both films) chose to import to the new work, the brilliance of the movie's actors, and how the stars aligned to give him a dream cast of mostly queer people.
EDGE: What appealed to you about updating this classic and resetting it in the context of a Korean family?
Andrew Ahn: I love the original Ang Lee film so much that, in some ways, I couldn't help but be inspired and think about how that movie resonates with me. I saw the movie when I was eight years old. It's the first gay film I ever saw, and the fact that it was a gay and Asian film feels incredibly important and significant. It's set the bar high in many ways.
EDGE: Did you and James Schamus have a lot to talk about when you were working together to update the story?
Andrew Ahn: Oh, of course! In making the bride in the film also queer, now we had multiple queer characters, and then we had multiple matriarchs [Joan Chen's character as well as Min's grandmother, played by Youn Yuh-jung]. There was a little bit of screenplay plate-spinning that had to happen, as well as being able to take some very serious conversations and fit them into this genre of screwball comedy. There are so many priorities, and I could not have done it alone, especially having the experience that James has and brought to this process. I'm very thankful.
EDGE: How deliberately did you pace yourselves when it came to calling back to story beats in the original, or winking at fans of the 1993 film?
Andrew Ahn: We had to find ways to make this movie be its own movie. At the same time, it was fun to wink at the original film. We instinctually drew inspiration from scenes [in the original film] when it felt right, and then through the rewriting process, through the directing process, and through the edit we took some things out and we emphasized certain things. But it was always in the spirit of respect for the original, and how much I love the film, and how much it's a part of James's career and legacy.
EDGE: You're working here with Bowen Yang, with whom you worked on "Fire Island," as well as Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran — they are all queer actors. How important was authentic casting for you?
Andrew Ahn: I love working with queer people. I'm interested in allowing actors to bring themselves to the role; I think queerness can be so helpful, that background. I'll say, I think this question of queer casting is complicated and nuanced, especially because sometimes you don't know if an actor is queer, and I don't think that it's fair to ask them. I did not know that Kelly Marie Tran was queer; she came out to the public because of this movie, but in a way that she wanted to. Had I had a very hard line, like, "No, I don't want to cast non-queer people," we might not have talked to her at first, and then she would not have had the opportunity to play this role, which she does so incredibly.
It's an evolving topic. At the end of the day, I'm so glad that I got to work with so many queer actors in this film, and over my career, and will continue to do so.
EDGE Joan Chen is in the film as well. She also was in another great queer movie, "Saving Face," and she was in Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution," and so much other great stuff. She's iconic! It must have been a real get for her to come on as part of the cast.
Andrew Ahn: I was thrilled! I was nervous that she might not want to play this role because of "Saving Face" — that she might say, "I've already played the mother of a queer daughter." But I think she was really tickled by the update of this mother in our film being too supportive with her queer daughter.
And Joan so rarely gets to play her comedic side. I saw her most recently in "Dìdi," Sean Wang's beautiful film, and there's a scene where Joan Chen's character tries to swallow her own farts so that her son doesn't have to smell them. It was so silly, and so funny. I just knew that she could play this part and also nail the real intimacy and pain of the dramatic moments between her and her daughter in the film.
EDGE: Having worked now with Bowen Yang on two movies, is he someone you might want to, in a Ryan Murphy sort of way, create an ensemble of actors around that you work with again and again?
Andrew Ahn: Of course! I love Bowen. I find his ability to be vulnerable on camera so beautiful, and then to also be incredibly funny and dig jokes out of every little moment. It takes a real comic talent, and the fact that he can do both the drama and the comedy is so inspiring. I'd love to work with him again, over and over. I would be so honored to work with this entire cast in the future. This ensemble was so special, and they got along with each other so beautifully, that I could not have asked for a better group of people.
"The Wedding Banquet" opens in theaters April 18.