Crazy Rich Asians’ Adele Lim talks about new opportunities in Hollywood

Opportunities for Asian filmmakers are growing as Hollywood becomes more receptive to international talent, says Adele Lim, screenwriter of the animated film Crazy Rich Asians and Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon.

“(In Hollywood) I felt disadvantaged, coming from Malaysia. “It’s not the cultural connection,” said Lim, who had her childhood in Malaysia, before her family moved to the United States. “I later realized the advantages of multiculturalism in Asia.”

Lim, who recently directed her first film “Joy Ride,” was speaking at an on-stage event on Wednesday in Taipei as part of the Taiwan Creative Culture Festival (TCCF), an annual conference and marketplace for film, television and story content. Technology products.

“(When I arrived in Hollywood) ‘Flower Drum Song’ and ‘Joy Luck Club’ preceded me. But there were few Asian writers. Hollywood was very male. Very white (..) There was an idea in America that Asians didn’t They can be the hero of the story.

It has shown largely independent Asian audiences the structural differences between the film, television and independent sectors and how screenwriting, unlike in Asia, can be a lucrative career within the Hollywood studio system. “TV is the writer’s medium. Film is where the producer and director are,” she said, also explaining that Hollywood’s time-honored systems can also be restrictive.

Lim explained that a US executive wanted to delete the opening scene of Crazy Rich Asians in which a Singaporean family is ignored in a London hotel, arguing that it was not part of the main story. “In this scene, young Henry Golding witnesses his mother using her power. However, the heroine of the story, Constance Wu’s character, Rachel, is not in this scene.

Lim has succeeded in preserving the unusual text movement that has been retained from the original novel. “I knew where he was coming from. It came from wanting to show the world that we (Asians) are a people who should be taken seriously. The significance and importance of the opening scene is that we also sympathize with these characters. It’s easy to dismiss rich characters because they have money.” But their struggle is our struggle too.”

The book contained too much exposition and dialogue to be adapted directly into a film script, so brief scenes had to be invented. One of them was about the game Mahjong. Another was a dumpling making scene which was used to show family bonding over food and also bring up conflict between Rachel and her would-be mother-in-law.

“We were asking (the studio) to take all kinds of risks. We were betting that our culture would work somewhere else,” Lim said.

These bets on the portrayal of Asian culture in Hollywood films and TV shows seem less bizarre today than they did even five years ago when Crazy Rich Asians was completed.

Asian faces and stories have entered the mainstream, softening stereotypes in the past five years thanks to films like “Searching,” “Parasite,” “Everything, Everywhere All at One” and TV shows like “Squid Game.” “

“The banners have flattened our world,” Lim said. “The industry is at an inflection point. It is no longer dominated by one or two countries (culture). There are pools of untapped stories. Asian stories have a cross-cultural appeal.”

“Everyone is watching Korean TV dramas now,” Lim said, due to their emotional resonance. “The more you care about cultural specificity, the more others will care.”

This may be why Lim is currently being sought to write American adaptations of several completed Asian indie films.