“We watched it as a family,” The Wedding Banquet director Andrew Ahn recalls when asked about the first time he saw Ang Lee’s 1993 version of the film. “As a nascent gay boy, it kind of blew my mind.”
Somewhat unexpectedly, Ahn says that his mom actually introduced him to Lee’s film. “My mother saw it at a video rental store and she was like, ‘This is that movie with Asian people that white people are watching. We should see what it’s about.’ And so she rented it not knowing that it was a queer film,” laughs Ahn. “I remember the opening scene because it’s just gym bodies, and I was like, ‘I enjoy this and I don’t know why.’”
The Wedding Banquet adapts Lee’s film about a gay couple in which one man stages a marriage of convenience with a woman to satisfy his parents. In Ahn’s adaptation, that transaction becomes a green card marriage when South Korean Min (Han Gi-Chan) surprises his boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang) with a suggestion to marry their friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) so that he can stay with Chris in America. In exchange, Min will pay for in-vitro for Angela’s partner Lee (Lily Gladstone) so that she can have the baby she desperately wants. Ahn’s film offers a contemporary reimagining of The Wedding Banquet’s expansive portrait of queer love and joy.
“I love that the [1993] film told this queer story with so much humanity and that it was about culture and family and sexuality and how they intersect,” says Ahn. “I realize in retrospect that it was the first gay film that I’d ever seen, and so it feels really meaningful to be able to have reimagined it as a part of my career.”
The Wedding Banquet marks another notable portrait of gay life for Ahn after his breakthrough drama Spa Night (2016) and the Pride & Prejudice spin Fire Island (2022). But his take on the contemporary classic also gives a multifaceted look at queer families in the many forms they take. Min and Chris have their own views about marriage and kids (gross!) while parenting offers a goal to which Angela and Lee aspire. Or, at least Lee, anyways. Angela struggles to reconcile her potential as a parent given her complicated relationship with her mother (Joan Chen). Further intergenerational conflict arises when Min’s grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) makes a surprise visit from South Korea to meet the “bride.”
Ahn says he appreciated the chance to explore these complicated if loving family dynamics, especially since his own mom inadvertently opened the gates to queer cinema. “What I love about the original film is that the character’s parents are so lovely. They love their sons so much, and that’s a love that I feel from my parents,” reflects Ahn. “In some ways, that makes conflict with them more obnoxious. It’s harder. If they were bad parents, I could just be like, ‘Screw you. I’m just going to do my own thing.’ But the fact that it’s a relationship of value to me, because they value me, is very meaningful. That’s something that I wanted to show in this re-imagining: this intergenerational conflict stems from love and care. There are no villains in this film, and I think that that makes for very human drama.”
That love triangle of compassion, conflict, and care arises early when Angela begrudgingly cheers on her mother as she accepts an award for her work with PFlag, relishing laurels as an ally after struggling to accept her daughter for years. Ahn says there’s a bit of an in-joke regarding the award when asked about what it was like adapting The Wedding Banquet with the original film’s co-writer, James Schamus (Brokeback Mountain).
“James is incredibly intelligent and insightful and really understood his role as the ally in the process,” says Ahn. “It’s actually a little bit of a joke that Joan Chen’s character, May, wins an ally award at the beginning of the film. There is a James Seamus Ally Award out there through Outfest.”
Ahn notes that Schamus produced his second feature, Driveways (2019), but that collaborating on the script used their respective experiences to open up the many relationships that The Wedding Banquet juggles. “I think we brought different perspectives to not just the characters, but also the craft, the structure,” says Ahn. “I had never written a film that was balancing so many different characters and storylines. To see him architect/engineer the movie was just a real learning experience.”
But the writers also know when good comedy and drama should stay silent. One highlight of Ahn’s direction lets a pivotal moment between Angela and Lee play out entirely through non-verbal communication. For such a talky film, the exchange runs the gamut of emotions that the partners experience with the fake wedding, pregnancy pressure, and parental woes with nary a word.
Ahn says the exchange was originally scripted with dialogue outside city hall after Angela and Min’s visit to register. The wedding inevitably strains both Angela and Lee’s relationship and Min and Chris’s relationship—we won’t spoil how—but Ahn says the bureaucratic vibe evoked by city hall didn’t seem right for a heartfelt moment. Instead, Ahn says he and Schamus transplanted the scene to the couple’s garden, Lee’s safe space, while he opted to go dialogue-free after Tran asked about the exchange of text messages between Angela and Lee that originally motivated the scene. It’s a great example of how The Wedding Banquet creates lived-in characters in a comedy with broad appeal.
“I realized that I had generic answers [about what they texted], but at the core of it, what James and I were going for was that it didn’t matter what was said. These two characters just had to witness each other and you knew that they were going to come back together,” Ahn says. “Knowing the core of what we wanted, it just made sense to delete those lines from the Final Draft file.”
That brief pause in the film works wonders, too, by contrasting the big wedding scenes that precede it. Ahn makes the titular wedding banquet one of humour, horror, and joy as Min and Angela juggle the charade of a straight wedding while navigating cross-cultural traditions. Meanwhile, Min’s grandmother favours the Korean rituals, which the Chinese-American Angela doesn’t understand, like riding the groom piggyback style.
Ahn says that staging the wedding scenes was obviously a highlight of remaking The Wedding Banquet, but the advantage of time also let contemporary resonance seep into the adaptation. If same-sex marriage wasn’t even a distant reality in 1993, the jokes assume a different meaning when Min, Chris, Angela, and Lee compromise their own relationships in service of the marriage of convenience.
“I saw my brother get married about a decade ago. He had a traditional Korean wedding, and I saw how this ritual brought him closer to my parents. It brought him closer to his wife, it brought him closer to his Korean identity,” says Ahn. “And as a gay man, I wondered if I could ever have that because it was so heteronormative. I wondered as a gay man, if I ever got married and tried to do these rituals, who would piggyback whom? And so in showing this ritual, I wanted to show that we could find ways to queer it.”
Ahn says that playing with intersections of culture and queerness really opened up the wedding scene, making it one full of awkward humour, which inevitably varies depending on the experience that respective audience member bring to the film. “There’s that moment with the jujubes and the chestnuts [in which the bride and groom catch the food items on a blanket to symbolize their future children] and people don’t know which ones represent the sons and which ones represent the daughters. My parents were on set that day when we shot that they didn’t know. We Googled it and it was the reverse!” Ahn laughs.
Ahn’s experience with his parents mirrors the joke in the film. Even the grandmother who insists on tradition can’t really say which items symbolize which genders. Everyone at the party shares a laugh when they realize that they’re celebrating tradition for tradition’s sake, equally caught in the humour of what’s lost and gained in the moment.
“For me, it’s a way to show how meaningful these rituals are, but then also to show that maybe they’re not written in stone and that we could find ways to make them more inclusive. There’s that joke from Kendall (Bobo Le), ‘They’ll have 15 non-binary children!’ I wanted to find a way to queer the Korean wedding. The only way to shift culture is by making culture. Through making this movie, I hope that we can leave some space for queerness.”
After all the time immersing himself amid brides, grooms, jujubes, and babies, Ahn admits that making The Wedding Banquet leaves him with warm feelings about family. But he’s also cognizant of the fact that The Wedding Banquet doesn’t ascribe to the heteronormative ideal of family. “There are different configurations of families, and I think when they’re so precious, why not have more help, more resources?” he asks. “I hope that people understand how difficult it is for queer people to make that leap and embrace parenthood, but I think it’s really exciting and I think there are so many queer people that they would be such great parents. Queer people are such wonderful caretakers of each other, and so I know it’s not for everybody.”
The director gets candid for a moment and appropriately ends the conversation with a heartfelt laugh. “It is, unfortunately, something that I want very badly. Every time I watch the movie and the babies cry, I just feel my ovaries throbbing. It’s very visceral. But I hope that people understand there are different ways that families can come together and that they’re all valuable.”
