Adele Lim, screenwriter of Crazy Rich Asians and writer-director of Joy Ride, talked about the realities of bringing Asian stories to mainstream global audiences in a panel, ‘Asian Rising Power in Hollywood’, on the second day of Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF).
Born in a small town in southern Malaysia, Lim explained that she studied in the U.S. and decided to work in Los Angeles after graduation as she wanted to be a writer and finally got a job as a writer’s assistant on a U.S. TV show.
“Growing up in Malaysia, I felt I was starting at a disadvantage, because I was nowhere near the cultural nexus of the world, which at that time was America and England, although that is all changing,” said Lim, who was also co-wrote Disney animation Raya And The Last Dragon.
“Then going over to the States, I realized that growing up in Asia had tremendous advantages, which first of all made me much more multicultural.”
Janice Chua, Vice President of Imagine International, who is now based in LA and was moderating the session, said she’d had a similar perception growing up in Singapore: “Whenever we think about film and TV we’re thinking, Hong Kong or Hollywood – we never realized we could make a living in filmmaking, screenwriting from our own countries.”
Lim said she was surprised when she started her career that there were not more Asian-Americans in writers rooms, especially as Joy Luck Club had already been successful, and found that most places were still only comfortable telling white, male stories. “There was this idea in America that Asians could not be the hero of the story.”
But she said that everything has started changing since films like Crazy Rich Asians, which was a worldwide success, and global streaming content like Netflix Korean series Squid Game, which has helped make global audiences more open and changed perceptions among executives in Hollywood.
“We’re at this interesting inflection point in our industry where it’s not about one or two major world cultures dictating entertainment for the rest of us – we have these troves of untapped stories, that have the potential to really have a lot of cross-cultural appeal,” Lim said.
“That’s something Hollywood is trying to crack and for a lot of us it’s a unique opportunity to be able to come up with these stories that are not locked in by having to shoot in the States or only tell stories from one point of view – we can really start to blow it wide open.”
Lim also talked about some of the scenes that she put into the script of Crazy Rich Asians that weren’t in Kevin Kwan’s original book, including the dumpling-making scene and Mahjong scene.
“The book was an amazing, incredibly entertaining read but a lot of it is expositional, with two characters talking to each other in a room, and filmmaking is a visual medium so we needed to put that in a different setting before we could put it on the screen,” Lim said.
She explained that the dumpling scene was a way to show the cultural conflict between Eleanor (played by Michelle Yeoh) and her potential daughter-in-law Rachel (played by Constance Wu), who she sees as not Chinese enough and too influenced by American values. The Mahjong scene was a chance for Rachel to prove the strength of her values to Eleanor.
Chua, who was a producer on the movie, said that an unnamed executive had wanted to kill the opening scene in which Eleanor is turned away by a hotel concierge when she arrives in London soaking wet during a rainstorm, only to later buy the hotel.
The exec had argued that the opening scene had nothing to do with the main story, but Chua said: “I had to fight for that opening because it has everything to do with the main story – it sets the tone as a young Nick (played by Henry Golding as an adult) gets to see his mother practising her power identity in a foreign country.”
Lim added that the opening scene helped establish sympathy for the main characters: “It came from a place of wanting to show the world that we are people to be taken seriously. It’s easy to dismiss rich characters, why do we need to care for them?, but it’s not just about people who have a ton of money and are acting in outlandish ways. The things that move these characters are the same things that move any of us.”
Lionsgate Films’ comedy adventure Joy Ride, about a young Asian American women searching for her birth mother in China with three friends, was a chance for Lim to tell a story for herself rather than other people: “As Asian Americans, we grow up with this portrayal of Asians in movies that is either very good girl or computer nerd, but you’re never the super hot guy or the girl who’s super fun, and we wanted that portrayal of us to be seen on screen.”
Originally, there were plans for the film to be shot in Taiwan or Korea, but when the pandemic hit it had be filmed in Vancouver.
Although Vancouver has a large Asian origin population, it doesn’t look anything like Asia, so Lim said the production got round that by hiring heads of department “who knew our culture backwards and forwards, so even if we couldn’t take the audience on an authentic journey, it would feel authentic, because the heart and soul of it was right.”
Lim also said she’s recently set up a production company with a friend who is a producer to give her the freedom to work on many different kinds of stories. “Of course there will be obstacles along the way but I’m really excited by the potential.”
