Yahoo News Janice Y.K. Lee on ‘Expats’: ‘There Is Nothing Easy About What Lulu Wang Accomplished’
On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 13 creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, the event is a new edition of previous IndieWire Honors ceremonies, this time focused entirely on television. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles celebration.
Below, Janice Y.K. Lee — the author of “The Expatriates” and producer of its Prime Video adaptation, “Expats” — shares her admiration for writer, director, and showrunner Lulu Wang, who will receive the Crossover Award at IndieWire Honors.
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Do you know Lulu Wang? Have you met her? You’d remember if you had. She’s five feet of pure determination and artistry, barely a hundred pounds of steely-eyed chili crisp, a writer’s writer, a director’s director, and a fierce warrior deceptively encased in the frame of an elegant porcelain-faced gamine.
Lulu operates on a dizzying number of planes. She is a fantastic cook, a passionate gardener, an amateur beekeeper, an accomplished pianist. That’s on weekends. I haven’t even gotten to her day job.
It was impossible not to hear the advance buzz on Lulu’s 2019 film, “The Farewell,” and I went to see it opening day. I sat there, rapt, as an inter-continental, inter-generational story about a grandmother and granddaughter unfolded in a transporting tale about family and love. I noted her name and then, in that serendipitous way, our paths crossed when Nicole Kidman, who had optioned my second novel some years earlier, asked Lulu to write and direct a television series based on “The Expatriates.” While many directors opt to make their show without the novelist’s perspective, Lulu had the confidence and curiosity to invite me in. With Alice Bell, she assembled an all-female writer’s room, and we proceeded to go about the messy and laborious process of bringing to the screen what had previously existed only on the page.
My novel was simply the jumping off point for Lulu’s expansive vision. She created the six-episode “Expats” with the luminous Nicole Kidman (our North Star) and brought together an amazing cast including Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo, Brian Tee, Jack Huston, Ruby Ruiz, and Amelyn Pardenilla who brought their own lives and experiences and perspectives to create this nuanced, layered, and beautiful show.
Do you know how fierce and fearless you have to be to be the writer/director/showrunner of a six-and-a-half-hour international show in the middle of a global pandemic? You have to be mother, father, boss, whisperer, bodyguard, enforcer. You have to beg, scream, wheedle, shout, cry, plead. You have to let nothing get in your way and corral everything to work for you.
Yet within her fierceness there is an incredible delicacy. The gorgeousness of her vision comes from her ability to collaborate with brilliant colleagues like Anna Franquesa Solano, Alex Weston, and Yong Ok Lee, to name just a few, but she was the conductor leading this orchestra of disparate talents to its full and wondrous conclusion.
Lulu has written and directed beautiful films, and she crossed over to television with seeming ease, but there is nothing easy about what she accomplished. Like the swan who is paddling furiously underneath the surface but gliding elegantly across the water, she makes it seems effortless and graceful but it requires her unique and heady mix of talent, tenacity, and hard work.
Congratulations Lulu!
Read Lulu Wang’s IndieWire Honors interview here.
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