As I was touring with The Farewell, so many people came up to me and said, “I’m from Egypt. I’m from the Middle East. I’m from South America. We did this to my grandmother, my grandfather.” I was pretty surprised, because I had no idea.
Beijing and Shanghai, I think are filled with a lot more Westerners. There are a lot more expats.. Chongqing was traditionally a more like a agricultural city. It has a huge population, so I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily small, but it’s very, very north of China and it’s not as Westernized as Beijing or Shanghai, and there’s not as much western business, so it’s just less visited by Westerners. I think there used to be a lot of car manufacturing, so I think the only people that would go there would be a lot of German car manufacturing companies, so it’s not a popular tourist destination basically.
In Chongqing, I think that like the rest of the country, there’s a lot of communist architecture. There’s also just a lot of new developments. There’s a ton of apartment buildings, very high apartment buildings, that are clustered together and there’s a uniformity to them. They’re all the same color, and much of it looks the same throughout the city and even throughout the country, a lot of this new development of condos. It’s also very cold there during the winter, so it’s covered in snow. During the summer it gets incredibly hot, so everyone in the film was sweating all the time.
LA: I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote I read from you in a recent interview you did with The Guardian where you said, “I’ve always created my whole life from a space of, nobody wants to see this, nobody cares.” What does it feel like now to be making work that is being seen, or do you feel like it’s being seen?
LW: It can be kind of scary, because you have to reorient yourself of, how do I know what to make? I barely even got used to the things that, Working from a place of small, hidden, nobody’s watching, I barely even got… And then having it work. I’m barely starting to even get used to that. Now, I don’t know, I think there is a sense of pressure. Before I think that my pressure was my family and myself, I give myself a lot of expectations. Now you feel like, “Oh gosh, there’s other expectations.” I think that it’s just this constant reminder to shut out the noise, even if the voices have gotten louder or there’s a larger group of them, and that you still have to continue to go back into your tiny space and create from a place of quiet.
LA: Lulu formed a tight-knit crew to make her indie feature The Farewell, and they were reunited for Amazon’s Expats.
LW: I think that if something works, you don’t change it. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I just love them. The Farewell wouldn’t exist. My career wouldn’t exist without them. It was such a true and wonderful collaboration that I wouldn’t be the filmmaker that I am without them truly. It’s not this myth of the auteur, filmmaking is the collaborative medium.
LA: Lulu, this has been such a great chat. Thank you so much. You can stream all six episodes of Expats on Amazon Now.
Next week, how we made the Power List. Where I chat with senior editor Megan Spirell about how we chose this year’s most powerful women shaping the travel space. I’m Lale Arikoglu, you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, Nick Pitman and James Yost. The show’s mixed by Amar Lal. Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast’s head of Global Audio. See you next week.
