How Lulu Wang’s ‘ridiculous’ real-life lie became The Farewell

Every family has their secrets, but Lulu Wang turned her family’s big, complex lie into a hit movie, one of the best this year.

Trust a filmmaker to turn what could be one of the most tragic moments in her own family’s history into a movie that became the hit of the Sundance Film Festival.

Asian-American filmmaker Lulu Wang did exactly that.

The Farewell was the big hit of Sundance this year, praised for its authentic and heartfelt story about Billi, played by Awkwafina, a Beijing-born New Yorker who is roped into her family’s lie to keep her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis a secret from the matriarch.

For Billi, not telling her grandmother, Nai Nai, that she only has months to live is wrong, but her family insists it’s the right thing to do, or not do.

It’s the exact same conundrum Wang faced six years ago.

For writer-director Wang, translating her experiences to film, and earlier as a segment on radio program This American Life, has brought her closer to her family.

RELATED: The Farewell is a highlight of 2019 movies

Lulu Wang at the Melbourne International Film Festival last month

“This entire journey has taught me a lot because when this happened, I felt like I needed to understand. I needed to figure out what was right,” Wang told news.com.au while she was in Australia for the Melbourne International Film Festival.

“Before This American Life, I was still pretty outraged that my family did this, and didn’t have a great understanding of why they did it.

“It wasn’t until the process of telling this story, and I interviewed my parents and my great aunt, that I actually got to learn about the intentions behind the lie.

“In the end, I learnt it was important just to ask the questions. Sometimes there is no simple answer and that’s OK.”

Awkwafina portrays Billi, a stand-in character for Wang

Wang with her real-life great aunt Lu Hong who plays herself in The Farewell Picture: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

Six years after her diagnosis and well past the three months she was given to live, Wang’s grandmother is still around and kicking.

Nai Nai still doesn’t know about her cancer, which proved challenging when Wang and her crew were filming The Farewell in Changchun, China last year. Nai Nai was told the movie was just about the family.

Wang doesn’t know if Nai Nai will ever get to see the movie made about her.

“I’m not sure if she will or not because it’s really up to Little Nai Nai (Wang’s great aunt),” Wang said. “The rest of us feels like at this point she should know and she should see it because the world knows about her and she has no idea the world knows about her.

“But I don’t want to take responsibility for it because Little Nai Nai doesn’t want to show her the movie, and wants to continue to keep her in the dark. And I have to continue to respect that.

“At some point, if she’s really not well, then we might show her. But, also, the movie is coming out in China next year so it’ll be a lot harder to hide.”

Wang during the production of The Farewell in China

Even as she was living through her family’s ruse and the pain of knowing her grandmother was dying, Wang knew her experiences would make a good story.

“At the time, I was working on a screwball romantic comedy and I thought this was such a screwball premise,” she said. “It’s ridiculous and absurd, right? And funny, but incredibly sad at the same time.

“So as a storyteller, the juxtaposition of the pathos and the absurdity is something I love in the stories I tell.”

Wang and her parents moved from China to Florida when she was six years old, though she now lives in LA with her partner Barry Jenkins, whose film Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture two years ago.

Wang’s debut feature was the 2014 comedy Posthumous, starring Brit Marling and Jack Huston. But The Farewell has been her breakout because she can bring to that story something most other filmmakers couldn’t, an authentic voice about a character, an immigrant, who feels the pull between two identities.

“Part of what it is to be human, particularly as an immigrant, is you come to understand that we can hold multiple truths,” she said.

Capturing those layers in the character of Billi, which Wang describes as not her but “a conduit for my experiences”, is why The Farewell has been so well-received, particularly by audiences.

Power couple: Wang with partner Barry Jenkins. Picture: Vivien Killilea/Getty

Wang is frequently approached by audience members at the end of screenings who tell her they want to call their grandmother or grandfather - one woman immediately booked a plane ticket to Vietnam to see her nan.

At a recent Q&A screening in Sydney, filmgoers swarmed the petite filmmaker after the session, lining up to talk to her or grab a photo, while others walked out with their emotions still etched on their faces.

But it’s not just Asian-Americans or Asian-Australians who have found themselves relating to Wang’s movie.

“I saw someone on Twitter say, ‘This is the most Jewish movie’ and someone replying underneath, ‘That’s funny because I had the same thought but it was the most black film I’ve ever seen’,” Wang said.

“That really makes me happy because it’s not as though that was something I set out to do intentionally but it goes to show that we have a lot more in common than sometimes we are told to believe.”

The Farewell is in cinemas now

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