Director Adele Lim’s film Joy Ride
Adele Lim is anxious to hear my recap of the previous night’s screening of Joy Ride when she pipes in from her home office in early June. Not only is it the screenwriter’s directorial debut, but it’s a bawdy R-rated buddy comedy — the type of flick that rarely inspires the same reaction in a sparsely populated room of journalists as it does in theaters filled with friends. So she’s heartened to learn about the contagious laughter from one attendee. “You just need one unhinged bitch,” she says, “then everybody’s like, ‘Greenlight the party!’”
Lim, once a journeywoman TV scribe, has segued into film in a way that has made her a sought-after voice and even an accidental firebrand. Before her new film, one notably featuring four Asian American leads (three of them female and one nonbinary), the Malaysia-born mother of two co-wrote Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon and co-penned the $239 million-grossing Crazy Rich Asians — and then famously turned down the latter’s yet-to-be-made sequel, a decision she made after being offered reportedly one-tenth the salary of her white male co-writer.
During a wide-ranging discussion, Lim talks full-frontal nudity, the tightrope of promoting a film during a strike and what she learned from going public with that lowball offer.
What was your relationship with raunch comedy going into this?
Love raunch comedy. That’s my happy place. I’d been on Raya, a dream come true, but it was two years of writing for family, four quadrants, the whole thing. My friends and co-writers on this, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, we hang out all the time and it’s just dick jokes. Being on Raya, all I wanted was a palate cleanser. So, for shits and giggles, we met up every Thursday to talk about the story we wish we had in our 20s. What would make us crack up?
Asian women are rarely shown in this light. Was there a touchstone, growing up, where you thought, “I want my version of that”?
Any underrepresented group, there’s certain ways you get depicted. It wasn’t something I necessarily set out to do early in my career, but as an Asian woman in this space, I was very aware of how I was perceived. Asian women onscreen, they think of you as something exotic. We were like the first subsect on Pornhub. That’s a whole yucky thing. But the reaction from the community has been, “OK, let’s disavow our sexuality altogether” — which is garbage, because that’s part of us. You’re giving in to terrorists when you do that.
In terms of depictions, did a producer actually tell you once, “I look at you and think, ‘Dragon lady with a nail salon who might be human trafficking?’”
That was verbatim, word for word, me in a room with a producer on a project. I was like, “Really, you found a way to cram all those stereotypes into one sentence? That’s impressive, man.”
Did you tell him that?
What? No! This was years ago, before Crazy Rich. I came up at a time when if you shut people down, you’d be booted so quickly. Your career would be stillborn. It was always navigating between standing up for what you believed and survival.
Can you tell me about the conversations or hoops that got you to show full-frontal female nudity in a feature comedy?
You can’t really do this now, but I remember once googling “genital tattoos and the people who get them” in a writers room. Heads up: You cannot unsee those images. When we were breaking story, the character of Kat [Stephanie Hsu] was inspired by a friend of ours — now the most prim, pearl-clutching woman but a full-on freak in college. That made us crack up, so we gave the character one and kept expecting somebody to tell us, “Fuck, no!” But when you work with Seth Rogen’s company, their reaction is, “Fuck, yes!”
For the past decade plus, nudity in comedy has been dominated by the unexpected penis reveal.
It’s a nice pivot. We’ve seen so much penis! I don’t know how you top Ken Jeong in The Hangover.
Has your mother seen the movie?
She thought it was entertaining, which, by the way, is a big concession. She’s a born-again Christian, a prayer group leader. I said she probably couldn’t take her church friends like she did for Crazy Rich, but she really wanted to watch the movie. I didn’t want to be in the room with her — but, during the moment of the tattoo reveal, I happened to pass by. It was like the power of God compelled her backward on the casters of the chair, and she made this high-pitched sound I’d never heard in my life. But she liked it.
The budget required that Lim shoot the Chinese road trip of Joy Ride in Vancouver.Courtesy of Ed Araquel/Lionsgate Source link
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