Bowen Yang Worked ‘The Wedding Banquet’ Around ‘SNL’ Because Its Queer Themes Were a ‘Beautiful Thing to Explore’ | Video
The cast of “The Wedding Banquet” had a blast filming the remake of the landmark 1993 dramedy by Ang Lee — all except for Joan Chen and writer-director Andrew Ahn.
Kelly Marie Tran, Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone and “Our Song” actor Han Gi-chan play the principal characters: Yang is Chris, a gay man whose boyfriend, Min (Han), agrees to marry their lesbian friend, Angela (Tran), for a green card in exchange for in vitro fertilization treatment. When word gets out to their older, more traditional family overseas, a larger wedding banquet is thrown together and Chris is in part responsible with planning the ruse.
“These four kids, I was so envious of them. They were always having fun,” recalled Chen, who plays Chris’ mom, at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt.
“You just wanted the gummies!,” Yang teased her, revealing that CBD gummies were available on the set, just not for Chen.
“There was a person who would bring us snacks and [one day] he brought gummies. And I said, ‘Oh, I would like to have some of that.’ He said, ‘Oh no, no, Joan, this is not for you.’ After two minutes, I hear giggling, laughing coming from the four of them. They all had that infused gummies. They were really having a lot of fun together,” Chen recalled.
“In many ways, I was jealous of the cast being able to laugh and have fun while I was setting up the next shot,” Ahn chimed in. “I was stressed!”
Read on for more of TheWrap’s conversation with Ahn and the cast. Watch the interview in full in the video above.
Andrew, what’s the origin story of this project? How did it begin
Andrew Ahn: It actually started here at Sundance, where our producer, Anita Gou, asked me, “Would you want to reimagine ‘The Wedding Banquet’ for the modern day?”
The 1993 Ang Lee movie is one of my favorite movies of all time. I watched it when I was eight years old. It was the first gay film I’d ever seen, and the fact that it was a gay Asian American character was kind of mind-blowing to my nascent gay brain.
I actually didn’t want to make it, because it’s so canon. And then I realized that so much has changed for the gay community since 1993. In the U.S. now, we can get married, so why would you do a fake straight wedding if you can get gay married? As a millennial, I think a lot about the burden of choice and having options and the question became, now that we can get married, do we want to? That was enough of a seed for me to latch on to and want to tell this story.
Bowen, because of your “SNL” schedule, you have to be kind of choosy about which films you pick. What made this the one?
Bowen Yang: Working with Andrew in the past certainly helped. The fact that there was this arc about what it says about an institution like marriage, the fact that it’s a story about gay male and lesbian interfacing: There’s the Venn diagram, straight marriage is nowhere in that overlap. What a beautiful thing to explore.
Kelly Marie Tran: My first reaction to reading the script was that it is such a beautiful story of found family and chosen family, and I felt like I related so much to so many of the characters. I’m really grateful that Andrew and [co-writer James Schamus] conceived of this incredible story. I was so emotionally moved by it.
It sounds like, in addition to the comedy, you really wanted to hit home on the dramatic beats, the emotional beats of the story.
A.A.: These are all incredible actors who balance the comedy and the drama so incredibly. I had conversations with each of them before filming and I just knew that there was a generosity of spirit that they all had that I really value as a director. I knew that they would all gel with each other. But it was a great time. I think that the film is about, as Kelly said, a chosen family, so I wanted to have that feeling as a part of the process.
Joan Chen: When I saw the movie, it brought me to tears. Their relationship is just so sincere.
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