🎧 Inside ‘The Wedding Banquet’ Romcom Redux
I talk to Andrew Ahn and James Schamus about their reinvention of Ang Lee's 1993 classic. Plus: Karina Longworth on Hollywood's 'old man' problem
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Andrew Ahn wasn’t so sure at first that he could make a career out of gay and Asian films. Sure, his 2016 debut feature Spa Night — a coming-of-age drama about a closeted Korean-American teenager — was a Sundance success and a Spirit Award winner. But Ahn was breaking into independent film just as it was starting to feel harder to get anything made, particularly the kind of stories he wanted to tell.
“ I thought about Justin Lin's career and Better Luck Tomorrow,” Ahn says of Lin’s 2002 breakthrough centered on a group of Asian-American teens. “Then I think his next feature was Annapolis — he made a commercial studio film with white people. I was like, ‘Is that what I have to do to make a living?’”
It was Marielle Heller, the director of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Nightbitch, who told Ahn he could still stick with what he knew best. “I kind of didn’t believe it,” Ahn admits. “But I’ll say there’s something about the slow and steady kind of progress in this industry and this art form.”
For his next feature, Driveways, Ahn pitched the producers on rewriting the script to make the central family Asian instead of white. “ It was this thing that I had tried many times in my career prior, and it had never worked,” Ahn says. But this time one of the producers was James Schamus, the former head of Focus Features and a longtime collaborator with Ang Lee. Schamus said yes, Ahn made the film, and the two began a collaboration that has now gone in another entirely unexpected direction: working together on a remake of one of Schamus and Lee’s earliest films together, The Wedding Banquet.
Schamus, who refuses to call the first film “the original” and insists on “the old one,” co-wrote the 1993 version of The Wedding Banquet with Lee, the second of 11 films they worked on together. Made well before gay marriage was legal, The Wedding Banquet is a comedy of manners about a bisexual Taiwanese man who agrees to a sham marriage with a woman in order to keep his parents happy. Both Ahn and Schamus knew the concept would need to be significantly updated for modern audiences.
“I only really came to it, along with Ang Lee, with one mandate,” says Schamus, who joins Ahn on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “That was to make sure that Andrew knew that whatever this movie was gonna be, the dead hand of the ‘original’ was not there to grab his ankle and drag him back. So to be lifted by Andrew into a process that was forward-thinking and moving into the future was just an incredible delight.”
Schamus and Ahn talked to me about how they worked together as writers, how the world of indie film has shifted around them throughout their careers, and how they shaped a new version of The Wedding Banquet around an excellent ensemble cast that includes Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan and the legends Joan Chen and Youn Yuh-jung.
The episode also includes a conversation between me and Karina Longworth, the host of the indispensable podcast You Must Remember This, about her new season titled “The Old Man Is Still Alive.” She has some insight on why directors like John Ford, John Huston and Vincente Minnelli struggled to keep up with changing times in the 1960s and 1970s — and what some of the old men currently running Hollywood can learn from those icons’ mistakes.