‘Expats” director Lulu Wang on working with Ruby Ruiz, Amelyn Pardenilla

It is not every day that you get to work with Nicole Kidman and award-winning director Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”). But luck was on the side of Filipina actresses Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Pardenilla when both actresses got accepted by Wang to work in her hit debut TV series “Expats.”

Ruiz, who is known for “Iska” (2019), “The Bourne Legacy” (2012), and “The Bit Player” (2013), got her lucky break after sending audition tapes and then finally a Zoom audition with Wang and the producers.

She portrays Essie, the humble, selfless and very generous nanny of Nicole Kidman’s household. In the series, she becomes very close to the children of Kidman and treats them almost like her own.

Pardenilla, the Hong Kong-based Cebuana singer who does not have any prior acting experience, auditioned in person for Wang.

In the series she portrays Puri, the household help of Hilary Starr (Sarayu Blue) who is a good friend of Margaret Woo (Kidman).

The drama mini-series, “Expats,” follows the lives of three privileged American expats living in Hong Kong’s richest neighborhoods. It is based on the 2016 novel, “The Expatriates,” by Janice Y.K. Lee.

Other members of the cast include Ji Young Yoo (Mercy Cho), Brian Tee (Clarke Woo), Tiana Gowen (Daisy Woo), Bodhi del Rosario (Philip Woo) and Jack Huston (David Starr).

Wang, an Independent Spirit Award winner and a Project Involve Fellow, recently talked about working with the two Filipina actresses and the challenges she had to hurdle in the making of the hit TV series. We were able to talk to her in a recent Film Independent Directors Close-Up event, “Lulu Wang and Expats: Storytelling on a Large Canvas,” held at the Directors Guild of America. She also talked about the development process, working with a production team in Hong Kong, and building the world of “Expats.”

Below are excerpts of that conversation.

Hi Lulu, can you talk about how Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Pardenilla actually worked out on the set with Nicole Kidman and all the cast?

As soon as I saw Ruby, I knew she was the one immediately. If you’ve seen the show, she brought all of that warmth, all of the emotion and I felt like she was going to be the heart and soul of the expat community.

And then Amelyn Pardenilla was in Hong Kong. She auditioned in person. But we said we need to really be open and we’re not only looking for actors. Let’s look at singers. Let’s do like an open casting call to anybody who might be interested as a Filipina in Hong Kong because at that time we only had the budget to cast locally and didn’t want to fly another person in internationally. So Amelyn came in and sang and she’s like, “Well, I’ve never acted.” I don’t care, we’ll figure that out. I like your voice. It is so amazing.

Can you comment on the phenomenon of domestic workers in Hong Kong and your experience working with them?

We didn’t cast a lot of domestic workers, and that’s partly because domestic from overseas go to Hong Kong and other Asian countries on a particular work visa and they’re incredibly limited. They’re not allowed to do other things and it’s part of this abusive system.

They want to make extra money. They even have to go and do it secretly. So, we weren’t able to cast any real domestic workers. There were a few who used to be and then they were able to get a different visa and then they were able to work with us. But it was incredible. And what we did was we shot on a Sunday when they call it a picnic, was going on. It’s the day off for all of these workers and it’s like 99%, maybe a hundred percent women, hundreds, and thousands of women on the streets.

And so, we shot so that we could incorporate that as a background. And they were so excited to see, and then we had rain machines coming. And so, it was from a scale perspective, one of the bigger undertakings.

Can you talk about the inception of the show? How did you find the material, and what the process was of creating this series?

For episode five, it would be a feature of blank, basically a movie, you would barely be in it.

Can you describe that episode and how it works for those who haven’t seen the show, what that episode is focusing on, and can you discuss what its importance was for you?

The episode flips the perspective from the expats to the locals and the side characters and people who are domestic workers, because Hong Kong has this society of live-in and help, and a lot of the women are from different parts of Southeast Asia and so the helpers in this series are from the Philippines and so I said, we can’t do a show about women without this other perspective.

And then it puts into perspective and context these expats, and you get a different perspective of them. And so, I thought, there’s no way Amazon and Nicole are going to let me do a 90-something-minute episode where Nicole doesn’t even show up until halfway in. She’s a supporting character. And I said I want to go to festivals with this. I want this to be the first thing that people see, at least, a certain audience. So, all of these things, I just thought, okay, I’m just going to tell her these impossible things, and she’ll say, “OK, let’s do it. In the future, we’ll work together.” But instead, she called me back, like, 24 hours later, and said, “Ok, it’s yours.”

I’m curious to ask almost as a career transition question, from “The Farewell” to this project, did you feel there were any thematic or resource-oriented things that you based on “The Farewell,” that you were like, oh, now we get to try this out.

I think knowing that it was a Nicole Kidman project, we knew that the resources would be significantly different than “The Farewell.” And that was also what was exciting, is that having her create a platform that gave us these resources. And of course, at that point, it wasn’t anything specific, like, oh, let’s get this big thing. It wasn’t necessarily that specific.

But we just knew that we had this platform to both have creative control and resources. And it was important, the two things combined. Because often you go to a big superhero movie, you might not have your team, but you have the resources. Or you do a small, indie film, you have your team, but you don’t have the resources. So having that combination built a platform also for casting all of these other actors who are not at Nicole’s level.

So, you’ve got a writer’s room. You’re in the process of trying to mount the show. For those who haven’t seen it or seen all of it, it is incredibly vast in scope, in my opinion. It displays Hong Kong as an urban maze filled with so many stories, so many lives, so many secrets. And every production challenge that was on the page, the giant storm, the high-rise apartments, the clash of extreme wealth and not-so-extreme wealth, the protesters in the pro-democracy movement. All of those things, I’m imagining, were already on the page. And did you find, as you were trying to get to that green light, that there was any need to refine any of that in your thinking? Or were you able to sort of largely execute what you wanted to execute?

I think that we were able to largely execute it, despite a lot of production challenges. The time that we were shooting in during the pandemic and being an international production. So, despite those challenges, I feel like we all love the scripts so much and Amazon loved the scripts that that was our North Star. We would come back and just say this is how it has to be done. And of course, there are moments in which it’s like, well, this is so challenging, can we cut this? Can we do that? And that is so much of the process, to make sure that you hold on to what’s important.

Can you talk a little bit about the scouting process? I know it was really extensive. The scouting process, the desire to shoot on location, the reality that that wasn’t necessarily always the right decision, the decision to build certain spaces. Can you talk about that? Because it’s such an incredibly vast undertaking, if you watch all six episodes, to see how many worlds and looks you need to thread together?

I think that we have only done mostly practical locations, and there is a real loyalty to that, and as it is coming from independent film, because there’s just nothing more real than the real thing, and you don’t want to be that Western production that comes in and builds everything, and then there’s an artificiality.

So, we were really resistant to building. So, we started off by doing a lot of scouting and then found that, in particular for the expat community, the apartment complexes, everything that we looked at, even though were luxury apartments in real life, don’t necessarily read that way. And you have all of these restrictions because you’re in a building where people are actually living.

So, you can’t really move them out. And then a lot of stuff, even though it’s luxury, it’s because it’s by the beach, but it’s not as polished, so it wouldn’t necessarily read as lux. And so that’s when we said, okay, well, the idea of the expat’s world is that it’s a bubble. And there is an artificiality to it. And so maybe the fact that we make that the only build, the only set, will work for us.

But of course, we have to make sure that it looks as realistic as possible. And so, we ended up doing a ton of research. And we looked at a lot of references, and so often you can see the artificiality.

It’s a testament to the craft and the care that is on screen that I would not know that. I don’t think most viewers would even begin to pick up on those discrepancies. And so, what you’re bringing up are interesting challenges in that, of course, Hong Kong will provide easily different materials than what you would get here in the States. And that in some ways it mirrors some of what I think is the strength of the show thematically, in which it’s about expectations of every need being met by many of the lead characters, a sense of almost complete, un-interrogated entitlement. Was that always intrinsic in the material? Or were you pulling that out more as you were in the writer’s room?

There was some level of that for sure in the novel. And Janice Y.K. Lee, who wrote the novel, one of my requirements as well was that she had to be in the writer’s room with us. And so, with her blessing, we expanded on that because I wanted to even more – for example, Essie and Puri are characters in the book; they’re domestic workers, known as helpers in Asia, who live with them.

I wanted to really go deeper into their perspective, just to challenge this balance between both emphasizing – take Nicole’s character, Margaret, she’s the character who is the greatest victim, because she’s the one who has the tragedy happen to her. So, here’s a person, the worst thing in the world happens to this mother, but she’s also the most entitled and privileged. And being able to have that polarity in this one character was what grounded us. And then we would try to look for that polarity with every character. Not as extreme. I think Margaret’s the most extreme and challenging audience to see. Can you hold both to see? Can you hold both empathy and disdain?

I love that you took that material and then took Essie and Puri’s stories, the domestic caregivers of these families, and gave them a full humanity, gave them their families that they leave behind in order to work for these families and becoming intrinsically embedded in the emotional life of the expat families. I think it has this curious effect of being strangely a reflection of America, despite the fact that it is a show in Hong Kong and about this, as you say, very mixed, very diverse population that you’re exploring. It’s interesting to see the way that this dichotomy between what we would call the upper classes and the labor class, also coming up against the pro-democracy movement. I’m curious if that was something also that was intrinsic to the book and something you wanted to explore.

So that was not, there was no politics in the book. And that was important to me. That was another thing I said to Nicole; I can’t make this series without touching on politics. As somebody who is Chinese American, who left Beijing as a child, my silence would be incredibly loud. And I thought about that. A Western filmmaker might be able to make something in Hong Kong and not touch on politics. And they might get some criticism, or somebody might point that out. But to some degree, it’s not their world, right? So, it’s like, all right.

That could be the excuse.

Exactly, they themselves are expats. And of course, I am an expat in Hong Kong, but I’m also not. I’m also an immigrant from China. And the parallel of my experience leaving Beijing and what’s happening in Hong Kong, and so I can’t not address this. And that was a tricky thing because I didn’t want it to be a backdrop. But it’s also, we’re not making a political show.

You mentioned that you didn’t anticipate moving into TV after “The Farewell.” What was it like to be overseeing a writer’s room? How big was it? What were those conversations like? And to what degree did you find you would guide the process and be surprised by what was brought to you in the writer’s room?

I had never even been in a writer’s room, so I think in some ways that was good because I didn’t know how it’s supposed to be done. And I’ve also never collaborated with other writers before. So, my instinct was just like, we all went into a room, and they ordered us lunch. That was the best part. (laughter) Plenty of food around. It’s just a magical time really, because we were just like, okay, what do you love about the book? What are the elements? I love this line; I love this character. So, we just talked a lot from there and then I provided the structure. I went in knowing it was going to be six episodes, the fifth was a penultimate, let’s put another bottle episode in there somewhere. I also knew that the first episode should start a year later because that’s how the book is structured. You come in not knowing, it’s not linear like something has happened.

It plays a bit like a mystery.

Exactly, and I like the intrigue of that, as opposed to coming in and just going right into a narrative. And then the second episode is a year earlier, and we, in a very linear way, tell you exactly what happened then. So those two are kind of companion pieces, like here’s the question, and then here’s the answer. So, we had that structure and then we brought in Gursimran Sandhu because I knew that Hilary is written as white, I think British, in the book. And I wanted to tackle themes of colorism in Asia, in East Asia. Gursimran is Sikh American and was writing very specifically for that character.

So, a lot of times it was like therapy. We would just talk about our own lives and our own stories and see what would stick. And it wasn’t necessarily always like, we have to keep going, we have to break the story. It was a very loose structure. Some days we would come in and we would just talk about events in the world and how we were feeling and somehow that would shape and color what went in. And that’s what I’m most proud of. I think it’s very much like a series about the inner lives, the emotional lives of women in a way we don’t get to see very often.

I would love it if you could watch a few clips, and then talk about the performance, because there are actors in the cast who are as well-known and experienced as Nicole, and then some actors who had never really acted before. And I’d be so curious to hear sort of what that adjustment period was for you on set with your actors.

Yeah, it was just, we had a range of different types of actors. We had like obviously Nicole and then we had Amelyn Pardenilla, who plays Puri, she is a singer in Hong Kong and never acted before and she was incredibly nervous. Ruby Ruiz (Essie) is from Manila in the Philippines and she’s well-known in the Philippines. She’s incredible and everything she does is immediately real and lived in. And then Sarayu Blue (Hilary Starr) and Brian Tee (Clarke) were around, veteran actors, but have never done a role of this size and been this centered. Sarayu in particular does a lot of network comedy, and so she was like, “Oh, it’s a drama, like how big, what’s the size?” That was the biggest challenge; making sure everybody felt like they were in the same movie.

And what was it like for some of the actors who weren’t as experienced to be working among so many more experienced actors? Did you feel you had to care for them differently or create a different vibe on set?

I tried as much as I could to make them feel as valued as possible and tried to take the Hollywood-ness of it out and make them feel like equals as much as possible. Obviously, there’s a lot of nerves, but we were all so close because we were there for so many months and so we would go to dinners together, we all spent a lot of time together, and I think that helped.

Did you rehearse much?

No, we didn’t have time to rehearse but I just told which characters, which people to spend time with, and then which ones not to. Like I kept Ji Young Yoo, who plays Mercy, and Nicole separate from each other because when they were shooting their scene, they’re strangers, they meet a couple of times and that’s it, in the story, and yet they’re connected by this huge incident.

So, you were speaking about so many challenges. What was the greatest challenge that you faced?

We learned a lot. I’ve never worked on something of this size and the length of time meaning, and so to keep the stamina was challenging. And then having so many external factors threatened. And I think that the instinct I had was at the end of this, it doesn’t matter what happened. If I’m not proud of the work, if the final result doesn’t reflect my vision, it’s not going to matter. It’s still my name.

And so, the most important thing to me, like, I didn’t care about, like, I had to negotiate politics and relationships, and that’s always challenging in this industry, but I just kept saying to them, this is my name, and I can’t put out something that I don’t believe in. And so, when we finished, that was the thing that I was the proudest of, that we were all proud of the work, it reflected our vision, and it didn’t get diverted.

—MGP, GMA Integrated News