‘The Wedding Banquet’ Director Andrew Ahn On The Joys And Struggles of Building Queer Families

It’s easier than you might think to take the idea of “family” for granted.

Even in the best-case scenarios – when you’re born into one filled with people who love and support you without fail – it takes work to build and maintain a family. It requires patience, understanding, emotional and financial commitment, and the likelihood that your expectations of your fellow members won’t match reality. The challenges for queer people in family building are especially pronounced, as society still struggles to adjust its definitions of family to consider templates outside of the Leave It to Beaver mold of the 1950s. (That the present “tradwife” social media phenomenon is born from such a mold doesn’t feel coincidental.) Like many conversations in the zeitgeist, queer families are abstracted for the sake of snap judgments and political posturing, rather than a genuine desire to understand and empathize with the struggles they face.

The Wedding Banquet is an effort to put real faces to the concept of queer families. The film, directed by Andrew Ahn, is a remake of the 1993 Oscar-nominated film of the same name by Ang Lee, about a queer man who marries a woman to get her a green card and satisfy his traditionalist parents’ wishes. Ahn’s film is built around two couples: Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), and Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan). Both couples have long-term, committed relationships, but emotional and financial considerations test their love. A green card marriage offers quick fixes: Angela and Lee can use Min’s substantial wealth to fund their grueling and expensive IVF journey, while Min can stay in the States with Chris. However, both pairs find that quick fixes can’t cure what ails them, specifically misaligned priorities and a lack of communication.

For Ahn, The Wedding Banquet was an opportunity to highlight the challenges and opportunities involved in queer family planning, spawned from conversations he’d had with his husband. “I realized that there was a lot of nuance to these conversations that didn’t have to do with homophobia,” Ahn shared in our interview. “One of my early conversations with Sean inspired a moment in the film. He said to me [in regards to having] kids, ‘If it happens, it happens, and I remember telling him that no, it doesn’t work that way for gay people. I realized in that moment that, because we don’t have the biology to make a baby by accident, we have to be extremely intentional. Any sort of hesitation can become a giant obstacle. That’s a nuance that I haven’t seen on screen.”

The process of queer couples having children is a driving force behind The Wedding Banquet. Angela and Lee are well into their IVF journey when we meet them in the film, and we see the physical, emotional, and financial costs up close. According to Ahn, exploring IVF through Angela and Lee – a unique storyline to this film and not carried over from the 1993 original – was a deliberate choice that tapped into cultural and scientific shifts in family planning, and how those shifts have deepened both the joys and challenges for expectant parents.

“It was something that I thought about when I trying to get a sense of how different the queer community is from 1993,” Ahn explained. “IVF is a more popular option now. I wanted to talk about the trickiness of biology. There’s a quick scene that is very meaningful to me, where Angela and Lee are in the car and Angela says, ‘I hope the baby has your nose.’ There’s something special about that.”

Angela and Lee’s IVF journey uncovers a significant divide between the two women over starting a family. Lee, who is undergoing treatment, wants to have children. Angela, however, is less enthusiastic about being a mother, fearing that she might experience the same challenges she faces with her mother, May (Joan Chen). One particularly heartbreaking fight between the two, which further complicates the plans for the green card marriage, demonstrates the deep importance of intention and communication when queer couples consider raising children.

Ahn continued, “To go through that process is so grueling. I talked to so many people and heard their stories, and there are people in my family who went through that process, and it’s a really emotional thing. It’s another tricky, complicated process, and I wanted to show the emotional layers of that.”

Ahn also explores the emotional layers of how queer and Asian-American identities intersect, compliment, and contrast each other. While the 1993 version of The Wedding Banquet spotlights Taiwanese culture, Ahn’s film is rooted in Korean cultural traditions. Ahn explained, “I think Korean wedding traditions are both incredibly beautiful and serious, but also silly, like with the throwing of the jujubes and the chestnuts and the piggyback ride. I find it incredibly cinematic.”

There was also a personal familial connection to how Ahn portrayed those traditions on screen. “I had seen my brother get married ten years ago, and I was really in awe of the proceedings and, in many ways, very jealous. I wondered, as a gay man, if I could ever participate in these rituals. So, from the very beginning, I knew that I wanted to write a Korean wedding into the film so that I could throw myself a Korean wedding.”

When balancing ethnic and sexual identities in the film, Ahn’s approach was to ground them in the characters and allow their humanity to guide the story. “The balancing act is just trying to create a three-dimensionality to these characters. I wanted them to be able to hold together their cultural identity, their sexuality, and their roles in the family. It’s all an effort to gift these characters their humanity so that they feel like they exist outside of the bounds of the film, and they can live as one being and not be compartmentalized.” 

Creating fully-formed queer characters and showing how they approach family planning and building is an imperative for Ahn. “I think it’s really important that we talk about how we can build queer families. Queer people are such wonderful caretakers of each other that it would be so fulfilling for some of us to take care of the next generation.”

What Ahn ultimately hopes that audiences take away from The Wedding Banquet is the effort that goes into building queer families, and the joy that comes from that effort. “Relationships are incredibly hard to cultivate and maintain, especially when you’re thinking about growing your family and preparing space for the next generation,” he said. “I hope people aren’t scared of that process and the growing pains. If they really believe in their love and are patient and generous with each other, once they get to the other side of [those growing pains], hopefully they can celebrate that they’ve achieved something, that they’ve grown and can care for each other even better.”

The Wedding Banquet is currently playing in theaters courtesy of Bleecker Street.