This is part of the answer Lulu Wang gave when asked what her takeaway was from the success of her film The Farewell.
“People don’t have to go to the movie to see plot. It’s about connection. And the question that I ask myself for most of The Farewell was not about plot—like what are they going to do? Or who’s going to chase who? Do they tell her or not tell her? That’s not really what it’s about. What drove me to tell the story was how do you say goodbye to somebody that you love, whether they know or don’t know [that they’re dying]? It’s impossible to say goodbye, so what do you do? And I think that’s the way I always want to approach films. That no matter how big a concept it is, what’s the question that it’s exploring? Maybe it’s not important to find the answer, but people are clearly hungry for content that asks the question that they themselves are asking, or maybe they don’t even know they should be asking, right? But it satisfies this desire just to explore, to talk about things—talk about talk about the difficult things—and that’s what art does.”
Writer/Director Lulu Wang (The Farewell)
THR podcast interview with Scott Feinberg
Here’s a scene from The Farewell that shows the connection between Billi (Awkwafina) and her grandmother Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao):
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