Breaking Baz At TIFF: Lulu Wang Reveals How Nicole Kidman Persuaded Her To Make Mammoth Amazon TV Drama ‘Expats’

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Lulu Wang’s The Farewell had opened to acclaim at Sundance when Nicole Kidman got in touch and said, “I have this book that I optioned and you’re really the only director that I want to make this.” Wang was stunned. “I had just premiered The Farewell, which is a very small movie, and I wasn’t thinking that I wanted to go into television but that I really need to keep figuring  out what my voice is,” Wang recalls.

She laughed. “But when Nicole Kidman comes to you and says, ‘I’ll let you do whatever you want with it, you’re the only director — take one episode, take them all — let’s just talk’ [you listen].” Wang went away and read Janice Y.K.

Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates, which is about three women, primarily, with disparate experiences of living in Hong Kong, the the former British colony.  “I’ve always had a fascination with Hong Kong,” Wang told me,” because my parents and I left China in 1989 when I was six years old because of Tiananmen Square, and many of our friends and family left during that time.

Some of us went to western countries and some people went to Hong Kong.” Her father left first. A few months later Wang and her mother joined him in the U.S. “I said to Nicole the only way that I could make this show is if ‘I could do it completely my way, and that I would direct all of them and have total freedom. ‘And I doubt that, because it’s with — I doubt they’re going to let me do that, so, thank you for coming to me to directly, but I’m going to  have to pass because I just think it’s too complicated of a story and it’s also really scary.’ “I was really terrified of doing something in Hong Kong, and I was equally terrified of getting it wrong — and also getting it right — because Hong