"The Farewell" Director Breaks Down the Movie’s Script

I'm Lulu Wang.

I'm the writer and director of The Farewell,

and today, we're gonna look

at a couple drafts of the script.

[whispers in foreign language]

The scene we're gonna look at today

is a scene that takes place in a wedding photography studio

between Billi and Nai Nai,

which is Chinese for grandmother.

And in the background, the bride and groom

are having their photograph taken.

[whispers in foreign language]

One of the main things we wanted to establish

was the relationship between Billi

and her grandmother Nai Nai.

And, you know, at the same time,

we wanted it to be really visual.

Even though it's a dialogue-heavy scene,

I wanted to make sure that we were always

looking at something interesting on-screen

and reminded that there is a wedding

that is supposed to be the focus of this story.

Even though for Billi, her mind is clearly

on the impending loss of her grandmother.

Here is a version of the Chinese script.

I speak both languages and I understand both languages,

but I don't write or read Chinese

so I don't really know what any of this says.

[laughs] But as you can tell,

the formatting is very different.

Instead of having this indented dialogue

that is traditional for American or Western scripts,

I guess, the dialogue here is written more, like, in prose.

This says Nai Nai, that I know.

And then here is her dialogue.

I'm seeing now that they've retained the brackets,

meaning that this is in Chinese.

I think that the biggest challenge

in writing a bilingual script,

for me, what I hear in my head

is not what I have the ability to write down on the page.

I hear it in my head in Chinese,

and I'm translating it and writing it down in English.

And then the translator would have to take this English

and then translate it into Chinese.

My mom, she did a lot of work with me on this

where she would read through the Chinese dialogue

and ask me, Is this what you heard in your head?

Or she would say, It sounds very formal.

This doesn't seem like the way that Nai Nai speaks to you.

We would make corrections that way.

I would tell her what I actually heard,

and then she would go into the document and change it.

We had professionals translators

and they had their versions,

and then I would have this side version from my mother.

I had no way of distinguishing between them.

I think that these bolded lines are the scene headings.

This says Billi here.

This says [speaks in foreign language].

That's in English.

It's phonetically spelled out.

I mean, you can see this was very challenging for me

because I don't read Chinese,

but this was given to the actors to read

so that we could cast them.

I couldn't correct it on the page,

I had to correct it once I heard them say it

at a table read or even on set.

So before we started developing the script,

I actually did an episode of This American Life.

So for a long time, I just called it

Untitled T-A-L, This American Life, Project.

I originally wrote all of the Chinese dialogue in italics.

You'll see in later drafts that

I actually changed it to brackets

because the italics are a little bit confusing.

I'm kind of OCD,

so I really like consistency throughout a script

so it just became easier to create brackets

around any dialogue that is meant to be spoken in Mandarin.

The name of the main character,

funny coincidence, was Nora.

And I don't remember why I named her Nora,

and this was way before I cast Awkwafina,

and that was a very weird coincidence.

I think that the main reason I changed the name to Billi

was because Nora is a difficult name

to pronounce in Chinese,

and so I wanted to have a name

that sounded the same in English as in Chinese.

[Woman] Billi!

[speaks in foreign language]

[Lulu] So this is the final shooting script.

In the earlier drafts,

a lot of these conversations happened in different scenes.

Nai Nai had multiple conversations with Billi.

You know, here you see it's Nai Nai's apartment,

and then another conversation happens in a car.

In the final film, I condensed all of the conversations

that Billi and Nai Nai have

into one scene at a wedding studio.

And this is the main scene

that you have the dialogue between Nai Nai and Billi.

This is Nai Nai complaining about the wife.

In this first draft, she says

What is wrong with this girl?

[speaks in foreign language]

There's a part of Billi that feels like

if she knew why this wedding was put together,

she might have a little bit more appreciation.

You know, even here Nora is defending Ami, the bride,

or Aiko, the bride, her name also changed at some point.

And then here, Billi says, She seems really sweet.

[whispers in foreign language]

So that was one thing that I kept the same

from the first draft to the final shooting script

was always Nai Nai's dissatisfaction.

In this first draft, Nai Nai tells Billi,

When you were little, you were so generous.

You haven't been yourself lately,

perhaps because of your breakup.

There's no longer a breakup in the final script,

but this stays the same.

Nai Nai says, When you see people,

You should say 'Hello auntie! Hello uncle!'

Don't be [in foreign language].

[speaks in foreign language]

So this says, Silly child, here,

but throughout the movie, Nai Nai refers to Billi,

Stupid child!

It was one of my producers who suggested

we translated it to silly child

because stupid child seemed very harsh.

In the context that Nai Nai is speaking to Billi,

she's saying the word dumb or stupid,

but she doesn't really mean it.

[speaks in foreign language]

And actually, [speaks in foreign language].

[speaks in foreign language]

She uses [speaks in foreign language] to refer to Aiko,

the Japanese bride.

[whispers in foreign language]

It's only for me within context

of how my grandmother is saying that word

do I not take offense to it.

I wanted to give the audience

that same moment of being a little jolted by it

but then relearning the word through the context.

[speaks in foreign language]

So this is a really big moment

that's been in every single draft

from the inception of the script,

where Nai Nai says...

[speaks in foreign language]

In other drafts of the script,

this line was sort of interspersed

in between other dialogue.

Here, in the final shooting script,

we end the scene with it.

And I didn't really write, you know,

the reaction because I knew that

I was gonna shoot the reaction of Billi

and that we were really gonna linger on her face

for a significant beat as a reaction

to Nai Nai saying this.

Because, of course, she knows that that day may never come.